Theological Approaches to Consciousness

This summer, Prime V 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 Bela Air to Seattle. 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 L, a new original series only on Prime videoide. Watch now. Your summer weekends fill up fast, but Crocs has your back. Road trips, beach days, last minute getaways, whatever's on the agenda, swing by your local store and find your new goat too Try it, style it, make it yours. becausecause the right pair doesn't just show up It shows off Walk out ready for whatever's next. Visit your nearest crox store today Robert Lawrence Ke. thanks for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here nice to be on the other side. Yeah, I know. you've been prodroucing a show which I've been watching for years now, closest to truth. I see the clips on YouTube and they've been So helpful in preparing for my own podcast because it seems like any time I've got an interesting gueston, especially to talk about consciousness They've already done your show. So thanks for the work that you've been putting in and the content you've been putting out Great. well, as you, it's a life passion and I really appreciated the work you've done over the last few years. Ive followed it and I look forward to our interactions. Well, thank you. I'm excited about this. You have produced one of the most extraordinary pieces of media I think I've ever seen, which is the landscape of consonsciousness map I've spent a lot of time on this show now talking about All kinds of different views about consciousness and there are so many, it can be incredibly confusing. There's idealisms and pansychisms and materialisms and monism and dualism and all this stuff. And you have quite helpfully at least attempted and I think quite successfully, to take as many of these theories as you practically can and categorize them into a very neat sort of table or map. and so I thought that today it'd be interesting to have a bit of a sort of meta discussion about these different theories of consciousness and how exactly they differ from each other. This sort of prompts this. Why do you sit and think this needs to be put into categorized form? Well, it's a great question and consciousness to me has been a life passion truly when I was deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up as a teenager and planning for college. I wanted to understand ultimate reality, as you do as a small fraction of humanity may want to do, we're part of that passionate group. And I thought of physics and philosophy, maybe physics and philosophy And then one evening, I really remember this as I don't know, sixteen years old wherever. I had the realization that anything we can think about, physics, philosophy, whatever comes from our brain And maybe if I could understand the brain, then it would be kind of an orthogonal or different way to approach the nature of reality. And that started along quest in terms of did my doctorate in neuroscience, cerebr cortex, electrophysiology, et cetera, et cetera. And then doing closer to truth beginning in really thirty beginning thirty years ago, nineteen ninety six, but it didn't We didn't start broadcasting until nineteen ninety nine in two thousand Um I really began to focus on consciousness as one of the main themes. We had originally three themes cosmos, dealing with cosmology, physics, mathematics, consciousness, which is all mind body problem, free will, personal identity different kinds of intelligences. and then the third was meaning, basically philosophy of religion from a non sectarian philosophical point of view And this has been my passion and I have followed it with cllos to Truth. By the way I should say that the versions of Closer Tuth you've seen were co created by Peter Getellz, who was the producer and director during much of that time And I just loved exploring consciousness. and I did it with anybody I thought who had something interesting to say I didn't necessarily have to agree with it or not agree with it, but anybody who had an idea that I hadn't had. in one way or another, as long as it, you know had some rationality to it, I explored And we built up this large corpus of things, and I never thought of organizing it. And then one of the viewers who happened to be on the editorial board of the Journal of Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology said that they were going to do a special issue on quantum consciousness and that and asked me to write the introductory article. And I refused. I said, I can't do it. It's too complicated. And they were doing about five or eight thousand word basic introduction to consciousness And I said that because I knew that if I did that, it would it's an enormous burden. It's one thing you know, interview somebody un consonsciousness, you read their books, you explain it. We talk verbally, the words, we don't particularly care, but you put something in writing It's permanent and you worry about everyw word. It's a very, very different experience. And I knew what that would take And I said no, and he pursued me, makeake a long story short after about six months I realized that this is something I should do in my life. I want to do in my life. and if I'm not going to do it now, I'm never going to do it. So I took the challenge and honestly, it is not an exaggeration, the work that it included that it required. was at least I was very worried how much time it would take, but it was at least twenty fold, maybe fifty fold more than I had expected Um And in this process in g first gathering all the theories together I began to realize this was a jumble and I needed to have some sort of an organizational structure in order to make sense of it And I enjoy doing that. I've done that for other things like differentere kinds of cosmogenesis and cosmos and different levels of nothing, which I pursued on closer to truth U But I wanted to do that for conscious. And I thought the best way to do that would be to have a rough linear spectrum from the most physicalist materialist kinds of theories. to the most non physicalist kinds of theories, which would be pure non physical stuff, which we call idealism now And so that would be the basic spine of the organizational structure And then as I started categorizing theories within this, I realized a couple of things. First of all, the number of theories under materialism Um, which was the first category. were vastly more than any of the other categories. And in fact, in the end result Almost fifty percent of all the theories were materialistic theories. It's very interesting to explore why that's the case because I have a good idea why that is the case So I realized that under materialism, there' this vast collection And that needed to have subcategories So then I developed materialism and then a series of subcategories under that because there were so many And then we had this linear spectrum and the way I had it. And then this is this is not given by God or anything. It was just my way of doing it for my own kind of organizational structure. and it's changed a little bit over time. is to start with materialsm. again, this will have lots of subcategories And then what's the next thing? Well, non reuctive physicalism. It's still physicalism, one hundred percent physicalism, but it has a very different kind of feel. And then I developed it further. The next one would be quantum theories, which are physical in obviously as part of the physical world, people can take it beyond that, dimensional theories, these are kind of quasi physical went further. thenen the next one was information where information is fundamental Now complex making it a little more complicated information compomputational functionalism, computation is a subcategory under materialism And we can discuss that in depth. That's a very popular theory, obviously But when information becomes my fourth big category, it's information of a different kind. It's information where information is fundamental in some sense, independent. Then we went into psychism And then Monism, there's a lot of overlap between them, dualism and idealism. So that's eight And then I began to realize there were theories that I could put in those categories, but there was something odd about them that there were many theories that were founded on a different principle than the fundamental philosophy, the fundamental ontology They were founded on some some experiential idea. And examples are near death experiences, out of the body experiences, ESP, parapsychological motivations meditation Psychedelics All of these mechanisms are ways of they're not theories themselves, but they they inform these people's theories much more so than the philosophy So I built a ninth category called anomalous and altered states. Again, those are not theories. We had our linear approach from materialism to idealism, but this is a separate category. The theories and each of the modalities like psychedelics or, you know, meditative states or Near death experiences, I have particular theories that people who have those things then have theories beyond that And then finally, I saw there were some things that didn't fit in any of those categories basically challenges to the nature of the question or that the human brain is not evolved to even understand this question, or it doesn't make sense. or different kind of theoretical approaches to the whole subject. And then I had a final section called Challenge So that's the organizational structure materialism, non reductive physicalism, quantum and dimensional theories, information theories pan psychisms, modisms, dualisms then anomalous and altered states and then finally challenge idedalisms as well. You thought about idealisms. Okay. C can't forget idealism. So pan psychisms, dualisms, idealisms altered states anomalies and altered states and then challenges. So that's the ten. Then again, under materialism we can talk, I now have twelve separate subcs categories under materialism We'll put this in the description and just now I'll show on screen it's not just that I mean, it would be Helpful enough if you'd produced a map. categorize all these different ideas. And as you can see, many of the sort of individual entries are names of people, peopleople like Dennet or Chomsky or put them or Roger Penrose and that's because particular theories are associated with particular people, but if you click on any one of these, gives you an entire overview of the theory of consonsciousness. This isn't just a map. eachach of those individual members has all of the information about that particular theory of consonsciousness. As I think this is an absolutely extraordinary resource. Yeah, thank you. And what we did was after the paper was published U many people said I should write a book and I spent almost a week putting a proposal together And I realized as soon as I did that, I had a lot of feedback to so many people that the paper after a week was almost almost then a bit archaic because new people were giving me critique and I forgot this and forgot that, you should include this And I realized that doing a book would just be, you know, by the time it would be published, it would be so obsolete, it would be embarrassing and take a huge amount of time. And so we converted it to a website, which is interactive, which is current. We spent a long time, almost a year developing it, and now it's launched and that's what is now really clickable and a very strong way and the number of theories how you may count it, but has increased greatly. I should give some credit in some sense. First of all, the beautiful map that was done was created by Alex Gomez Marein, who when he saw we were friends and I sent him some early drafts of the whole paper with the organizational structure, and he put it into this one nice map, which was great. Um And another point I really should make, you know, how do I how did I know all the The Original paper had maybe two hundred and twenty five theories. The website now was I did account last night. I knew we were going to be talking. how many theories on the current website And the numbers is honestly what came out was four for four, four hundred and forty four. Now that's going to change because there's more And there's nothing magical about four, you know, I'm not gonna start a new religion based on getting four, four fours. But I realized that in Chinese Four is the worst number you can have because it's a homophone for death. s And so four four four was is death, death, death in Chinese. So I'm going to change and adding a few more, but I calculate is I have some backlogs because people write to me and tell me, you know what I forgot And most of the time it's You know, kind of over beyond the boundary of what I would consider a theory, but a lot of times it isn't When I did the original paper, this is a very interesting point I went through multiple versions, went through peer review. att peer review, it had fifty five thousand words. Remember originally, it was supposed to be like eight When Per review fifty five thousand eventually after three or four more peer reviews and increasing it I was just obsessed with it It was published at one hundred seventy five thousand words U And what happened was one of the earlier peer reviews when it passed, I think it was the third peer review. at when it was about, I don't know, one hundred and thirty thousand words published it immediately on Science Direct. I mean, that's their policy particularly in science as soon as it's peer reviewed. it immediately goes on the website, even if it won't be in the journal for another eight months or so And I absolutely panicked. I said, take it down because I I really wasn't finished yet. was It was incomplete. I had theories that were not there. They said they can't do that Anyway, I begged them and finally after two weeks, they said, Look, if we take it down, the only time we take it down is when we suspect plagiarism or some fraud I don't care, takeake it down. You can explain it later So they did. And then six months later, it was published in final form. But what happened was when it was published online for two or three weeks U I I got Dozens of emails from people I didn't know many of whom were professionals in the field or philosophers or devotees of different theories angry with me that I left out a certain theory. Uh and I realized that some of these some of these I hadn't heard of before And I real and I looked at them, these were good solid theories, not very well known, but they were good solid theories. And others I had rejected because I didn't past my level of acceptance But I saw then this this kind of groundwell of people saying, I want to hear that theory. I mean, some things like philosophy or Steiner's thinking things that I might have rejected. And so I included those as well. And I credit people when they tell me and this is continue to happen. So a lot of the theories that have come in have been sort of self generated in a positive a feedback virtuous circle where it's not me coming out with, you know my brilliance finding all these theories, but because we had this core people writing in. So it's really a wonderful collective effort and I sort of had the the vision of trying to be the repository of the best thinking of humanity at this time reflecting historical, a lot of historical, not everything, but reflecting the theories currently that are best expressive of the totality of humanity. I mean, that's my goal is to really have that place to have it easily understandable and searchable. and that's what the website does. With the map, kinds of maps that we have, there's lists, there a lot of ways to discern each of these theories. Yeah. I'm impressed by it. and I think even if you are just a sort of compiler of these ideas, it also means that you're quite well placed to discuss them and how they interact and specifically, like I say, this sort of meta consideration of how they differ and how they can be categorized. And so I thought we could kind of go through this map and use sort of use this conversation as a bit of an introductory resource for people to get a feel for the current landscape of views about consciousness because as you say, there's a lot out there And the most interesting thing is that the majority or almost the majority, depending on how you count it as well. of the theories that you consider fall under this broad category of materialism. Now people have heard of materialism or physicalism the idea that the universe is made out of matter and in consciousness, this means that consciousness is somehow just made out of matter. How would you best define materialism with a philosophical hat on given that It surely requires some understanding of what matter is, if we knew more about our sleep What would we do differently Would we go to bed at a consistent time or take steps to reduce interruptions to our sleep with Sleep score Apple Watch measures your bedtime consistency, interruptions, and sleep duration And then, every morning it combines these factors into an easy to understand score, from one to one hundred. So you'll know how to take the quality of your sleep from okay to very high. Know your sleep score with Apple Watch iPhone eleven or later required. This summer, serve up the cookout classics, Oscar Meyer Hot doogs and Heinz mustard. Grill up a dog, add classic yellow mustard, or load it Chicago style We all know it's not a cookout without Oscar Meyer and Heines Let me go back to a kind of a foundational idea, which I feel strongly about, and I know you do too. And I think it's really important. And that is the nature of consciousness is the single most important clue or resource or window, whatever you want the metaphor to be to see ultimate reality Because if consciousness is entirely physical, in some sense that would be a very strong indication to me, not a proof and not one hundred percent, but a strong indicication that ultimate reality is ultimately only physical. On the other hand, if materialism has any sort, any sort of non physical aspect, component, property, whatever And we can go into all these subtle differences then that's a hint in the other direction that if we're looking at ultimate reality, there is there that the physical world does not exhaust ultimate reality. It doesn't prove God, it doesn't prove conscious. but it says in some sense. so So that's a fundamental idea that we start with And then the second choice is we really have two words. You mentioned the materialism and physicalism And they are, we use them synonymously and rightly so, but there is a subtle difference Materialism has a more of a historical context and deals with sort of the ontology, what is the stuff made of Physicalism is a broader concept, it's a sup sad, I think, of materialism in a slightly way that says that it can also deal with properties. It's also epistemological physicalism in terms of our methodologies. So physicalism is a broader term that is used. So I went with the materialism because The idea of this map of consciousness and this landscape of consciousness, which is the way I approach it is purely ontological. is what is it at its ultimate reality? It's not epistemological, it's not developmental. All those things are important and we deal with a lot of those things, but at the core, it's ontological what is consciousness. So therefore materialism. By the way, I should note that the word landscape I took from Leonard Suskin's a book, The Cosmic Landscape, I think he published in two thousand seven or eight Um, that talked about the string theory landscape and anthropic ways of thinking about the universe. So that's the concept to deal with the entirety of all possibilities that consciousness could be. Materialism is the word that people sort of reject now because we know things are not matter. They are quantum fields and and with all sorts of you know, weirdness with entanglements and superpositions and various things that people can misinterpret. Murigail Mann famously said that he called these quantum extrapolations, a flap doodle When people write all these things. So but nonetheless, there's other stuff there. But still materialism to me, you know, made this point stronger. and again, it has the historical context. So materialism I'm using in an ontological sense that there it's made of physical stuff And that can certainly be quantum fields with all its complexities or whatever lies below that. That's fine. We deal with a lot of those theories. The One of the most interesting observations and I start the paper, original paper with this idea, that when you're thinking about consciousness is so broad in it hierarchical positioning So there are theories from the most fundamental stuff below quantum physics Every level that you can think about. so below the quantum level, the quantum level, the cellular level, the neuronal cell, you know, the cellular components, microtubules in the Penrose Himarov version. And so it's within cells then It's the neuron itself, and then it's the connections between the neurons and then it's the broader connections in the brain and then it's the electromagnetic fields over the whole brain. And then some go to an extended brain theory. so consciousness is beyond the brain or in active where it has to involve the environment, and then you go all the way up, of course to pan psychisms and idealisms where where consciousness is you know, cosmos psychism where' the whole the universe is there as a division of pan psychism. and then pan proto psychism where you know, little protoconsciousness is then, you know, distributed widely. And so you have this vast a hierarchy of being of where the key moments and I try to plot that in later papers that I did where each aspect of these theories, where on that Hierarchical line is the key moment that is the critical for consciousness. Another point I really want to stress and that is building this map and building the theories and organizing it is the first big foundational idea I had. The second one And I really stress this is that all theories that have to do with sentience in any way whatsoever and the nature of free will, is their life after death? Is virtual immortality possible in a real sense? AI consciousness now, personal identity, alien intelligence, all these kinds of questions are directly related to your theory of consciousness. and very few people of any address that. Everybody has their own theory about free will or personal identity or AI consciousness now. but nobody talks about what theory is that based on becausecause based on any one of these theories, that is a major determinant of what the reality of that subject is. And I've tried to plot that because nothing's absolute, but you know between certainty and impossibility, I have six different categories in a paper I did, in which you go from certainty, almost certainty, likely, possible, unlikely, almost impossible and impossible And so if you take if you plot any of these big ideas, life after death, free will, AI consciousness against theories of consciousness, you can plot it as, you know unlikely or almost impossible or You know, likely, et ccetera. And so the importance of our map is not just some kind of intellectual exercise. but I think it directly affects a lot of the questions that we deal with in many other aspects of life, such as, you know the whole public policy issue of AI consciousness today And people don't realize that many people are assuming one theory of consciousness, computational functionalism, which is one theory under a subcategory, under material. So it's a third level theory in my landscape. And there are all these, almost five hundred other theories that are there. I'm not saying they're all weighted the same. I'm certainly not saying that But I am saying that people are not appreciative of the importance of the theory of consciousness to discuss these big issues We'll get back to the show in just a moment, but first, where do you get your information? If you're like me and most people, the majority of it comes from the internet, which is, of course, a wonderful resource but obviously not without its problems. And one of its biggest problems is media bias. It can be difficult these days to even know where your news is coming from Let alone the bias that might have influenced the way it's being presented to you, but that is exactly where today's sponsor, Ground News can help. Ground News is a news aggregation service, which brings together thousands of local and international news outlets all in one place, so you can compare reporting across the political spectrum. Did you see that due to Trump's funding cuts, the National Science Foundation is losing hundreds of climate monitoring systems. If you only typically read right leaning sources, you probably didn't because of all the sources reporting on this story, only eight percent of them lean to the right. Ground News tells me who's reporting on this story, their political leaning, it gives me a factuality rating for the sources and even tells me who owns them. There's even a dedicated blindsot tab, which specifically seeks out stories that you would otherwise miss based on the news that you normally read. So cut through the bias and get a better understanding of what's really going on in the world by going to ground. news forward slash AxOC 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, let's get back to the show So tell me what materialist theories have in common. There are a lot of them here Dand under one headline of materialism How in the simplest possible terms, would you determine what your parameters were for what counts as materialist Okay, u Two ways to approach the question. Let me start with a second because that's a little harder becausecause some of my categories, my big categ these ten big categories, some of the categories like non reuctive physicalism, quantum theories, even information, Uh can be thought of also as material U And even pansychism, Galen Strawson famously says that, you know the real materialism is basically pan psychism And that's not a frivolous point of view. I mean, it's v you It's a view that some people say that anything that's real is materialism or physicalism And if you want to bring something in that You didn't expect like you know protal consciousness or something. All right, that's the new materialism. You want to bring something else in? Quantum theory is dimensional, That's physicalism. U so you can get caught in that. trap, which would then put everything under materialism. I try not to do that. and I try to distinguish the category the big categories as something that are sufficiently different in the way of understanding. So non reductive physicalism says there is something that is non reductive. And to me, that's a huge difference a huge difference when So everything in materialism that I would have sorry, does what does non reductive mean for those listening non reductive means that it's impossible in principle to be able to explain behaviors or actions at a higher level of the physical world by by the activities of the lower level And so reduction says that ultimately we can describe everything the at the the fundamental levels of physics. A classical example is the wetness of water. You take an H twoO molecule It's not wet, you know, you can describe it, et cetera And you take a zillion of them and you have wetness. So where does wetness how does wetness develop And that seems so radically different. It's an emergent phenomenon when you have zillions of these molecules, but you can calculate why it feels wet by the bonding angles between the hydrogen and the oxygen and how these work together under different temperatures. And you can then predict hard and complicated that something like wetness could occur So that's reductive. That to me is not a non reductive That would be strictly part of materialism. sometometimes wed call that weak emergence But non reductive physicalism say it's impossible in principle, anotherother term is strong emergence that no matter how much we learn, it will be impossible in principle. to be able to ever explain mental states by the actions of the lower the most fundamental aspects of physics. Whatever they may be, string theory, quantum loop gravity, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it's impossible to ever go down to that Non reductive physicalism is still physicalism. It's not claiming anything other than something in the physical world that just has this impassable barrier in terms of explanations And so anything I have in materialism can ultimately be reduced to its lower level Now the theories themselves constitute activities on much higher levels Everything from subcellular to whole brains are extended beyond brains and it was a massive task to organize this and all these materialist theories. As I said, almost half of all the theories are materialist I reflected why that's the case And it's the case because if you have a non materialist theory or a non physical theory in some sense You can describe it, and we have, you know, hundreds of those. But you can't make much progress beyond that Because by saying it's non physical, it's then not subject in the same way or even at all, to the scientific method So you can't make much progress. On the other hand if your theory is materialistic, it's all physical then you can make progress. You may not be right But you can use the scientific method. And so therefore people have done that on various scales and therefore there's a proliferation of theories that are materialist because you can make progress. you can imagine how things can happen to get down to be able to reduce it But each one has the locus of where consciousness makes its big impact at different levels I can give you some of these categories that we worked on the first I call phhilosophical, which deals with kind of the basic ideas like emergence, identity theory, functionalism this really quickly. S secondcond category is eliminitative materialism or or illusionism, where in some sense, not in a comic book sense, that consciousness doesn't exist. That sounds self contradictory. People make fun of it. But you really understand it. it's it's a serious idea U and I give Dave Chalmas, I originally had usm luminited materialism as a subset under philosophical. And Dave, when he saw the paper, said, you know that would be better in its own subcategory. And so on the website, it's its own subcategory. that was a really important decision Then we go into neurobiological theories, which are, you know, biological naturalism, you know that John Sel had or Um, u Gerald Edelman's neeural circuitry and Dar Winnian, which is an older neurobiological theory which I had heard of, but I hadn't studied. But when I did study it, I was actually pretty impressed with what that it did. So that to me, typifies a neurobiological theory. Then a new area that has been developing recently is electromagnetic field theories. And there are a very interesting group of theories that have developed. Mustin Jones, Tam Hunt and Jon Tan Schuller each they have general residance theory Earl Miller at MIT has kind of an analog brainwave theory, which I think is very strong as well. And there were a number of other theories, Susan Plucket, et cetera. McFadden, each one have their own electromagnetic theories. Then computational and functionalism was very famous Hillary Putnam started that uh, the, u u Lenore and Emmanuel and Avren Blum have a very elaborate explanation of this. There are many different kinds of computational functionalism in that category. Then quickly beyond that I have homeostatic and effective theories, which are basically emotion. Antonio DMazio famously has done that. where emotion is the generator of conscious. not something that is a product of consciousness There' maybe that too now, but it was in the original generator and cause of consciousness. So those are theories which put this homeostatic approach as a very strong one, Carl Fristen with a free energy and active interference are all in that category. nextext category is under still under materialism is embodied and in activism This is where you need a body in some sense. An activism, you need to have this interaction between the body and the environment. you can't have can't have conscious without that interaction with the environment. Neuro phenomenology, Varella's original posting, Evan Thompson has developed this well. And then some philosophical categories, relationalism where interesting people like Hofstadter's Strange Loops or a new Japanese researcher Neo Suchura has relations between Kualia. Nicholas Humphrey has his work. And then there's a first order representationalism where the representation of the initial sense is the the is the scene of conscious. and then higher order representationalism where you have to have a thought about the thought. So it's a second level, like a second derivative or something. The second level. So you have the tension there. And then the second to last category I had language and language is an interesting one. because I rejected language as a category in my original paper. didn't I knew about it and Tromsky and other people's work and how it would affect it, but it didn't seem to me to have any real cause of consciousness. You could have consciousness without language And so I didn't have it Per reviewer who iss anonymous, who is very helpful in terms of his analysis Um, or her person was obviously, said that I should have a language category U And so because I had rejected it mildly. I put it back and I'm happy I did and dealt with theories that people use the word language is really instrumental in the nature of consciousness, certainly human consciousness. It's a weaker category in terms the fundamental ontology of consciousness, but it is important and certainly important in human consciousness. The final category was phylogenetic or evolutionary where everything is evolutionary in some sense But the final category puts evolution where it is you can s of see it happening and the mechanisms are an evolutionary process So those are twelve subcategories under materialism and each one has you know, ten to twenty different individual theories in them And there's a lot of you know, there's a million interesting ways how you can analyze them together. One of my favorites, as I said, to plot where each works in the hierarchy of being at what level each one is making that critical point That's one way to kind of compare them So you answered my second question of how you decided roughly speaking like sort of what goes in there, but The first question remains, which is we've ve been talking about all these different categories and names and people, but is materialism? what actually is it? if you had to just define it in simple terms It is that there I can define it apathhetically as we say, in the negative. I can say it materialism is a worldview in which there is nothing non physical Now that sounds pological or circular but I think it's I think it's not U It says is there anything beyond the physical world? As we know it, as we can know it Um and it's it's there's a fuzzy boundary, as I said Pan psychism you can describe as materialist If you define materialism as anything that's real And a strict materialist or a philosophically committed materialist would say that, just like in alternative medicine, many you know kind of crackbusters say there is no such thing as alternative medicine. If something proves to have some legitimacy, say like acupuncture, then it's part of medicine There is no alternative medicine And so there is no alternative to materialism. It's whatever iss real That's not the definition I took, not the definition I take the definition that says the material world, as we know it today, down to the quantum field level or below, is the structure of the world. and that anything that requires something other than that in principle, are irrevocably No matter how advanced our science gets, say we can live a billion years and our science continues to improve, no matter how it does, it will never be able to Bridge that gap So anything that is of that nature would be outside of materialis. that could be explained within the scientific method, I would say is part of materialism So it's not it's not a simple answer. A simple answer would just say, you know, it's it's quantum fields and anything that explains a quantum field theory and however that that's generated and whatever the implications develop from that through evolution or whatever, that's materialism As I said, that's not quite the way I would do it. I would have this ofc excluding something that's non physical I always ask someone if they say that they're a materialist What is material Like what is the thing that you think the universe' made out of? Because it's fair enough to say something like, We don't really know, or you know I'm not sure, or I can kind of only answer that on like a surface level, like I can talk in terms of atoms and molecules and stuff. that's totally fine But if you're sort of positing a metaphysical theory of reality, and oftentimes I think quite confidently, no I'm quite sure that everything will ultimately be reducible to matter. I think probably need something a bit more than just telling me what matter is not. And you know I'm not saying that of you. I'm saying that of the materialist, which is to say that It's one of those weird things that everyone kind of just seems to kind of know what we're talking about and we start getting getting on with things, but realistically foundationally, like matter is an impossible thing to define. Even for a physicist who says, well, we don't know if it's strings or if it's, you know, uh, quantum wave or whatever Um Even then, it's not entirely clear what those things, even if one of them were correct, what they would be, what their essence would be. And so I kind of struggle to get off the ground with materialism. Now, sometimes when I say this, people say posositing consciousness doesn't really help there because you've still got the question of what is consciousness And I typically think, well, I know what consciousness is because I'm experiencing it directly. You know, One of the most important philosophical threads from Emmanuel Kant through Schopenhauer U until today, this idea is quite influential on me You know, you only know the world as it appears to you in your phenomenology. You only know the phenomena. you don't know the Nenen, you don't know the world as it is, the thing in itself as Count might have had it And so yeah, the world might be an illusion and whatnot, But the thing that I do know directly is the nature of experience. And so I actually do think you get off the ground by if you have some good reason to think that consciousness is foundational, you've kind of got a starting point because you have this direct access, you have this starting point, point to know the kind of thing we're talking about But with materialism, Because anything material will necessarily present itself to us through our phenomena we won't ever know the thing in itself When we posit that is like the basis of our metaphysics I find it really difficult to even know what we're like know what we're talking about, you know And that's why consciousness is so probative of ultimate reality because it forces you to think that way. And I think that's terrific It is explainable. I mean, we can take an evolutionary approach to the nature of our sense state and phenomenology. And people have used this and have used it you know against materialism because you know, our brains evolve to escape u jaguars and leopards or whatever on the plains of Africa not to solve differential equations or create string theory. and so our brains can be missing something. We have a lot of those theories under challenge in the landscape Um, but, um I'm I'm I'm not a, um an advocate of our brains are not able to understand. I think what we understand in terms of back to what the first ten to the minus thirty sixth or thirty ninth second before in the Big Bang or prior to the Big Bang with inflationary theory. we were able to understand certainly how heavy elements are made in stars, how the universe is struct. It's really remarkable how much that we know. So not I'm not so willing to push off what science can discern about materialism And that's a separate question from is materialism all there is? and can you explain consciousness with materialism? Because I skew no, Ike that there would be some kind of non physical element if you asked me my know ultimate thoughts myself, not that that's very important. I always say when people ask me, I said, what I think is really not important. It's to understand all of these theories and how they work. That's important this at this stage in human history. We shouldn't be excluding any access to reasonable theories about consciousnessces so It's so important to understand ourselves in reality So tell me what is the meaningful difference in your view as somebody who has spoken to all of these different people and had them sort of Throw their will to you them at you in the way that they best understand it Tell me what the difference is between say the physicalist or materialist who says, okay, I know there's a single consciousness But really, it's just the same thing as this physical matter swirling around in your brain and saying that the material is sort of primary versus the person who is a pan psychist or an idealist who are seen by materialists often as like woo woo, you know, crazy people who essentially say, yeah, there's this thing called consciousness. and look, it's essentially the same as what we call physical matter. You know what we call physical matter is just the same thing as this conscious stuff, at least the conscious stuff of the brain at the very least, it's kind of the same thing as the experiential states It seems to a lot of people, I think if you push particularly pansychism, which says that The smallest components of reality are essentially consciousness or conscious or made out of conscious consciousness. And you get pan psychists who talk about, as you mentioned earlier, proto consonscious properties. It's like, o, maybe an electron isn't conscious, but it has prrotoc consonscious properties, which if put together in the right way produces what we call conscious experience And I feel like the materialist begins to look at that and goes, well Yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying too, right? It's just that I think that's a physical property. As you say, Galen Strawson says, yeah, like I'm a physicalist, I just think that material and matter is sort of made out of consciousness, but begins to look a little bit like these different theories, so to speak, maybe just sort of semantic differences or kind of differences in like the imagery being used or the way someone's thinking about it rather than like anything about the ontological claim about the nature of reality Yeah, I look. I think that's entirely valid. and the conversation is extremely probative not just about consciousness and all these things that are derivative from consciousness, like is there life after death or is AI conscious but the nature of ultimate reality itself So I think it's extremely important. But the differenceces the difference to me though, is discernible And that is again, in the negative. Is there something that we would classify as non physical that needs to be part of the story? And something that's non physical I would define further, maybe this is not permanent or not right in some sense But I think it is. And that is anything non physical I define is something that's not a hundred percent subject to the scientific method. non physical things are subject to logic and ways of organization, etcera But they're not subject physical to the methodological approach of naturalism and physicalism, which is the scientific method of experimentation, observation, repetition, falsification, all the basic properties of the scientific method. So that's the distinction I would make that it does does the theory have any element that is ultimately not susceptible to the scientific method If it if it does, if it has elements that are not principleal subject of scientific method. It's outside of materialism If it says that all these weird things and that you but ultimately science can discern them through the scientific process, then it is materialism. So if somebody were to convince me or us that the pansycha's view that know the real m materialism is pansaychism because every element has, in addition to the four fundamental forces or whatever is below them, an element of protoc consciousness If that idea is subject to the scientific method in some ultimate science, then I would classify it under materialism frrankly, I don't think it is. It may be But therefore, I would keep pan psychism and others as a separate theory that's non materialist because there is an element to it that's not subject to the scientific method Can you tell me? I guess I have a number of questions which are often thrown at me and I feel like I can answer them to best of my ability, but I feel like you're so well placed to answer these is that I want to workshop them with you uh People have heard me talk about pan psychism People have heard me talk about idealism Both of them seem to be some kind of view that says that consciousness is metaphysically foundational or primary What's the difference between them I think there's overlap, and I'm always fascinated by the fights, the intellectual fights between theories that are closest to one another This is a human tendency. As I put it in geopolitics, Peru and Thailand never had a problem together because they're not close to each other If you look at the history of, I don't know, any religion, Christianity, you look at the different sects and how they fight with each other and you look at the different the ideological difference. I mean you can sometimes hardly discern the difference But they fight they have wars. We see the same thing in conscious of studies, where the human trait. Whenever we're close to something but slightly disagree, we have these intense b. I agree with you. I think that pansychism and idealism have a lot of similarities together. and even dualism in some ways have similarities to each of them, but yet they are, they have a distinction to them. I mean, a simple distinction, pan psychism basically has the physical world as equally real and that consciousness and as protoconscious is part of this physical of the of the I don't want to use physical in this sense, but is part of the of all reality So a protoc consciousness element is part of all reality as well as the fundamental forces, whatever they are, we know four fundamental forces today, but clearly it's not a final theory with particle physics, a standard model. There has to be something significantly below that. But that's still a physical theory U And so this is, you know, a critical distinction idedealism says that consciousness in some sense is everything and everything other than consciousness is either derivative of consciousness or an illusion. So a derivative of a conscious means somehow instead of conscious being the product of matter that matter is the product of consciousness. Now how that occurs you know, everybody has a different theory and we can talk about a lot of them, and they're all fun to listen to. As I put it one time, people asked me which is my favorite theories, and I said, you know, I'm in love with the last girl I kissed. So when I When I'm working on these theories, I totally immerse myself. I pretend and get to fool myself for a day or two that this is my theory and I want the world to know it.' really struggling to explain it and show how it works every in every sense. and and there'ss there's truth in that Um And so when you take that approach to idealism, then you see, as I said The physical world is secondary in some sense, illusion, if the physical is an illusion is, you know, Vedic and Hindu others have said, then that's a complete answer to your question. If it's illusion, it's illusion. But more interesting, if the physical world is real in some sense, but is derivative of consciousness, you know, how that occurs and what would that mean? And then there's subsets of what consciousness is. Is it a non personal cosmic consciousness that somehow is programmed or, you know, from time immemorial to generate consciousness or generate complexity is there a theory that there's this movement towards higher complexity that's built into reality? Or is there something like a go that would be kind of in one sense, a subset of consciousness or a sub theory? although people who believe in the Abrahamic God would have God as preeminent and independent in God's sort of creating consciousness. that's a separate kind of philosophical issue But the distinction is is that idealism would have the physical world as derivative or illusion pan psycheism would have the physical world at an equal level of ontological reality with consciousness. Introducing Taco Bell's new jalapeno citrus salsa with bright citrus, real red jalapenos, guailo chiles. Usually you add sauce to the food, but when the sauce is this good, the food is just there to get the sauce to your mouth. That rolled quesadilla, not a rolled quesadilla anymore. Now it's a sauce shovel. Taco Bell's jalapeno citrus salsa. Get it with any item on the canantina chicken menu while it's here. 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Whereas for the idealists, they sort of put the table and the chair together and then they put the room together and they put all of ourselves together and they put everything together and zoom out and there this one great big thing that you're left with is the big sort of conscious mind in which everything arises, whichich is why like idealism is more associated with religious ideas or spinotes or people like this because it's the sort of one great big mind whereereas the pan psychist retains the atomism of the scientific revolution and just sort of places consciousness down there. So I don't know how much you see this in your investigation into both worldviews, but to me They're often kind of getting at the same thing, but the key difference is do they as I sometimes say, do they account for the crumbs in terms of the cake or the cake in terms of the crumbs. Yeah, look, I think that's absolutely right. and it's very similar. But I think there is this distinction that in pansachism the elements of the crumbs would have the physical properties of that would have an equal ontological status as the protoc consonsciousness. So in the Krum, it would be that in idealism, you wouldn't need that at all because idealism is completely comprehensive and don use a quantum analogy, a wave function of the universe that you have this one big wave function Uh, and that's this. Now under pansychism you have, you know, cosmopsychism which sort of says the the main property is you know, so between cosmopsychism, which is sort of a subset of pan psychism and idealism, those are really, you know, ye challengge cosmos psychism Sorry,s it's a version of psyism right?'os psychism I' heard people talk about this, but I've always I've never quite been clear on what exactly it is Yeah, Well, that's because you understand it too well. You know. I mean, it sounds like idealism, surely. Yeah, it's very close to idealism U and again, we're putting linguistic categories on ideas. and so this's very Very natural. but this is one of the most interesting elements of really digging into consciousness to look at theories and compare them Cosmos icon versus idealism is one. Another one that I find fascinating is non reductive physicalism versus property dualism that's that's also a really interesting way to understand how one thinks these are kind of epistemological as more than ontological and we describe what that means. But you know it's a fascinating subject. yet there is a difference, whether it's you know a distinction without a difference or a distinction with a difference, I think it's a distinction with a difference, although it's challenging cosmossychism. It still has in cosmossychism it still has that the whole it has the whole universe as primary conscious elements. So it's not the protoc consonsciousness of the tiny thing. it's the consciousness of the big thing, but it still has the material world as qu ontological status And that's the key difference, I think Whereas idealism would not have the physical world it would have it as derivative or illusion cosmopsychism would have the physical world with equal ontological status. That's the difference Sometimes when I talk about consciousness, I say You've kind of got three options when you look at the fact that consciousness exists and the fact that there seems to be this world of stuff that isn't conscious And there thoses three options are this. First is to say There are two types of stuff And this is dualism There's mind stuff and there's body stuff or physical stuff. and they're just different kinds of things that somehow interact with each other. Option two is to say there's only one type of stuff And that stuff is the physical stuff And we call that materialism or physicalism Option three is to say there is one type of stuff but that the one type of stuff that there is is conscious or mental, and that is where you get idealism or pantychism And yet looking at your map, you've got the header of idedealism, for example, And idealism says that sort of everything is made out of mind or emerges in mind And as a separate category you've got moonism and moonism is the view that there's one type of thing. So I kind of want to say that like idealism is maybe a form of Monism And indeed materialism is a kind of Monism. So why does Monism have its own column here? Very, very good question. And I can give you feedback I've had from many theorists who see their classification and Everybody wants I'm exaggerating. everybody wants to be a mononist You're has it has sort of a characterism. there's a very large overlap between pansychism and Mism and the different kinds of monism, but R I made a category of Monism. highlight the point that you just made that there is the idea' one kind of stuff and it has two expressions. But I tried to be extremely strict on who I allowed into that category. And people you know Rusulian Monism is the classic one And then there are very particular theories that are based on it. Donald Davidson, that's a very interesting approach. he called his Um, or kind of uh, what was it um a not reflexive but anomalous monism So Donald Davisson called anomalous modotor. So he had he had three U a premises axiomatic ideas. Number one Mental events cause physical events, okay? That's a that's we give you that. U as a possibility. Second Causation requires laws. There has to be a process by which things And third, there are no psychophysical laws And that was those are his three premises. Now, you look at those That's contradictory. It seems like that's a null set. There's no way can you can articulate those together And he psychohysical laws, meaning like laws relating the the interaction between the physicalal. Right, Right. So it seems contradictory. You need the mental causes the physical on the first premise, second physical second principle, you need a causation law. It's not just going to happen a random thing And third, there are no such laws. And the only solution to that logically is that the mental and the physical are the same So it's a radical identity theory. David Paapenhau also has a radical identity theory where the mental and the physical are exactly the same in the strong sense that the morning star and the evening star are both Venus. You take away one, you automatically take away the other S Superman and Clark Kent or Marilyn Monroe and Normer Jean Mortonson, whatever her name was, original name, that you can separate one from the other. They are exactly the same expression. And to me, there is a strong logic to that whether it's satisfactory or not, that's a different story. To me, it's not satisfactory, but at least it has a logical coherence to it. So there are there are monisms that are super focused on that one point. And so I try to highlight that. But you know, the critique is valid. I mean, this is a two dimensional toy model, if you will, of what reality is supposed to be So there are many different facets. As I said, non reeductive physicalism versus property dualism. They both say that there are irreducible mental states can't be explained by anything in the physical world, but there is only one kind of stuff and that stuff is physical It's not a dual aspect. It's a pure physical stuff, the physical stuff that we know And so How are they different? Well, they're different in an epistemological sense in terms of property dualism, saying that the mental property itself is has ontological status that it's real whereereas non reuctive physicalism would take the process of emergence again, if it's in a strong sense, it can't be reduced but emergence is the way and it uses top down causation. So it, you know, by comparing different theories that we use, you begin to really You luxuriate in the problem of consciousness. You understand all of these aspects, which is why I love it and I'm not disturbed that I don't have an answer a final answer because I just love the process I've heard you say before that you attempted as best you could to respect what people said about their own views, like if If someone comes along and says, I'm a materialist, even if they sound very non materialist to you, you try to respect that count it in materialism, right? And so There must be some extent to which you are granting people divisions and distinctions that maybe you don't think are necessarily sensible but You're sort of going with what they say. I just wonder, you said there are, you know, four hundred and forty four Lve in as a conscious as of today. As of today. ye If you had to kind of take a guess at it, like in your view in the way that I think a lot of these views kind of collapse into each other. They're kind of saying the same thing, maybe just using different terminology. L do you suspect that there are really that many different theories of consciousness? Or like if we really were able to like nail down a precise dictionary Everyone was using the same terms and meant the same thing by them. How many theories of consciousness do you think they would actually be? Because yeah, I think there's a good argument to say that know there wouldd only be maybe three or five or ten, you know, but we have hundreds of them because people just can't agree on their terms Yeah look, I think that's entirely valid. I at it from a different perspective because I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm trying to unpack the problem and to tease it apart to see the workings of it. And each of these theories by emphasizing something different helps us. Certainly in the materialist theories that they are very different from each other, under the materialist rubric or category. And so they're very different, you know, ways of working. I mean is to take an example in quantum theories, you have the Penrose hammer off where it's the collapse of the wave function within microtubules And then Helmet Nevin has the view that it's the formation of the wave function So one has the clapass, one has the formation Now If that's the right theory One or the other is probably correct. I mean, I don't see how it you know, each one is making a different claim. They're both very you know, confident that it's a quantum process, which is obviously a minority view in general where it occurs And if you go through each one of these, it's really important. I mean, elect magnetic field theories make a very specific point that consciousness is this electromagnetic field in some sense. I mean, that's very different than a neurobiological theory that would have neuronal circuitry in Darwinian, as I said, Gerald Edelmans ro There are many other neurobiological theories or the theories that emotion is Antonio Di Masio and others have generated. So these are very different kinds of theories. So it depends you know the granularity by which we want to look at it. Certainly there are commonalities. I think we know between pansychis and idealism as is an excellent one to explore that, that you could probably reduce the number of theories. But again, I'm not looking at theories in some sense that these are mutually exclusive but are different ways of exposing the problem and of deeply understanding the problem. So it's an epistemological approach to understanding it. In terms of, you know, if I really had to go through these and then reduce it down to some different categories, Again, under materialism, there are very different explanations because they occur at different levels of the hierarchy or different expressions of how things work in the brain and they are very different from each other. So there is some mutual exclusivity, more mutual exclusivity. within materialism if that's what your view is versus pan psychism or modism or idealism, even dualisms, those have a lot of similarities. and that's natural because there's on each one some kind of non physical component, which is my favorite term to use because it's very, very neutral non physical aspect or component to it. And when you have that there are natural commonalities that kind of blend together So that's why this conversation is really so informative to understand because I, you know, one of my missions, if you will, is to make people realize that these big questions we ask AI consciousness, life after death and the nature of free will personersal identity are dependent upon your theory of consciousness. And if you don't think so, you're doing it anyway, you just don't know what you're doing. C you tell me I mean, I gave these sort of three options and we spent a long time talking about Mism. So we've spoken about what if everything's sort of made out of consciousness, what if everything's just made out of matter. But there is this third option which Weirdly, it feels like it doesn't get much philosophical attention because most philosophers and physicists kind of largely abandoned this view, but in popular understanding Dualism, the view that there are just these two different things that interact with each other is quite popular really, even just in common parlance, the way we talk about having a body, I would say, like, you know my body is hurting as if there's a me and there's a body and they're like separate or my brain, like there's a me and there's a brain, even though I'm kind of the same thing as my brain And Okay, so Descartes in the Western tradition, kicks this off by kind of saying like, you know, I can conceive of my mind without a body and my body without a mind. so they're probably two different kinds of substances. But you mentioned earlier this thing called property dualism, which is another kind of dualism that's a bit more specific. Could you just tell me What the difference between those two is there's a radical difference between property dualism and sub what they call substance dualism, which also has its different categories and it basically what you said dualism as two different kinds of stuff that is ontologically primitive U, that's dualism And should I should say that, you know, I've always had a soft spot in my brain for dualism Even though it's extremely unpopular in among physicists and certainly scientists, the interaction problem is a problem. Everybody has problems. Pan psychism has the combination problem. How do these little protocoles doesnt make a big conciousness? Idealism has the decombination problem. You have this giant you know, world consciousness, cosmic consciousness, how does some little piece kind of bubble off or squeeze off and I have my contact than you I have yours. and We don't find them, you know intermixing at all I've never had an intermixing with anybody, my, you know, closest family, wife, etcetera. I've never had this That feeling So you know, how does that happen? So every theory has its problem There's no question. and dualism has the interaction problem, which has to do with the closure of the physical world, at the physical world is has a closure, every effect has a cause, how do you get in there to at the joint, so to speak, to have a non physical response? So It's a valid point. You know, I'm not Totally I don't find that to be a knockout argument I think it's a strong argument, but just like the others. So as I said, I've had a a soft spot in dualism. I should tell you a story if you can give me two minutes that's kind of important to me Be people ask me all the time what I believe and I always say, it doesn't matter what I believe. I you know want each theory to live on its own and then say, oh, well you got to tell us what you believe anyway and what you think. So and this happened in the paper, the original paper and I didn't have my view and people when when it came out in accidentally, people said, we, you know, I looked through the whole paper and I didn't See what you believe? And I said, you didn't you didn't see it because I didn't put it. It doesn't matter what I believe and I don't want to what I believe as minimally confident that I am in it, I don't want that to color these theory. I really put my life into each theory as if it were my own. I want each theory to live on a itsan without cold by my view. they But people then said, Ohh yeah, but then it looks like you have a hidden agenda that you're just, you know utterly trying to maneuver it. So I, you know, rock in a hard place. So what I did in the paper, is I put in thirty three words of my own opinion And then a footnote that had another thirty nine words. So seventy two words out of one hundred seventy five thousand. And I said that's the confidence level I put in my own theory And it was basically the first level was some kind of a dualism that there is some non physical component u that you do need. But then I had the footnote where I said, if that's not true, I might go to some kind of quantum of theory, which I had for many years on Closer of trruth are rejected and not made fun of, but really thought was not right. But having studied all these different quantum theories, I actually changed my mind on that in writing the paper that I gave more credit to that. And then finally the third to be totally a c seemingly contradictory if non physical or dualism is not right and if quantum theory is not right, maybe I would go to some sort of illusionism with representational or neurobiological. You know, my schchmarg' board of ideas were very fluid, but here's the story I want to tell you becausecause when physicalists change their mind and become non physicalists. and there are very you know, some a lot of examples, some are well known, many individuals When I talk to them The reason in almost every case, maybe in every case that I can recall, is because they had some kind of experience. It might have been an out of body experience, which some very sophisticated scientists have told me they have had a near death experience and that changed their view Psychedelics have created that in some people U I certainly believe that psychedelics, you know, give you a different image, but You know, I don't put any ontological foundational reality into what comes out of that But other people do, and I respect that religious experience U, I've had very distinguished scientists tell me of their religious experiences, mainly and from the Christian perspective that they've had these experiences, and therefore that's their foundational belief. and I understand that Now, I too have had an experience But it's an experience that has moved me more towards materialism than towards dualism Now how is that possible? How can you have an experience then makes you more physicalist. I didn't say totally physical. I said just move me slightly And I'll tell you the story quickly And my daughter, Danieela has given me permission to tell the story She got married late at forty five. Her husband was significantly younger, tried to have a baby and they had pregnant, which was kind of a minor miracle, but it had severe genetic problems and had to have an abortion. so that was very traumatic and couldn't try again, but she had frozen her eggs when she was thirty four, you know roughly ten eleven years before And so they defrosted the eggs, They tested them, and two were what they call mosaics, in which that has a chance of being good, but they there a chance being been not sure. But it was their only choice Our husband they were in New York. My husband flew to New York, fertilized it in Vitro And it took and it grew to what they call a blastular, one hundred and twenty eight cells Uh and they tested it, didn't seem to have any defect at that point. So then they refroze the blastula For another two years, while my daughter wanted to carry the baby herself. she didn't want to surrogate for her body at age know forty eight at that time. to carry the baby herself And her body had to be prepared, you know my wife and I were not happy with that because of the hormonal treatments But she did that was her body and her decision And you know the bottom line of all of this is that six years later my grandson Louis u is bilingual plays a ping pong chess and and the piano and it's extremely social Now for all I know about biology and my doctorates in, you know, biology, neuroscience I am still flabbergasted I lived through that process literally every day for years and to see that happen. And it made me realize the latent strength in the physical world beyond we appreciate. It's an emotional it's an emotional thing. As I said, this has moved me a few percentage points, if you will. towards materialism because blated potential in the world. 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And although Materialism is very difficult to define. It's sometimes defined as something like All that exists is that which science can study or something like that. That which physics can make sensive. I like And so you've got this extremely scientific process and it's to do with the sort of genesis of a new consciousness. And so I can understand why that would be the case. But then at the same time, I mean it strikes me as just a sort of really slow version of what happens anyway, which the idealists or the pansychist will say that You know, during conception, no new consciousness is exactly created in the same way that a physicist will say that there's no new matter exactly or no new energy. It's sort of energy from energy and matter from the parents, from the mother once the baby is born, from the food that it eats and the sunlight that it gets and all that kind of stuff that all sort of sort of amalgamates into this new physical being And so the pansychist, for example, would say the same thing about consciousness. There's no new conscious matter. it's just a new complex arrangement And the fact that that those sort of conscious building blocks. frozen for some time and then Unfrozen, It' no more mysterious for idealism or pansychism as the fact that you could put me under general anesthesia and my sense of consciousness would disappear for a time. But the idealists would just say, yeah, that's because the thing that's disappeared is this particular arrangement of conscious activity or something like that. So what was it about this experience that And I know you said before that if it shifted, you end any way towards materialism is from like ninety eight percent to ninety two percent non physicalism. So you know, it's not like you've been washed over by this, but I'd say from you know, maybe U that's right, but I would have different numbers. I'd be maybe You know, sixty five percent to sixty one percent, something like that toward materialism. Look, the point I'm making it's entirely emotional It's entirely an emotional reaction, but it is no different in a sense than people who've had an emotional reaction the other direction withith a near death experience, out of body or psychedelics or whatever I don't you know, I would put them in the same category. That's not to dismiss it because I don't dismiss my own. I mean, I'm really telling you the truth I really had that that feeling that there's more in the physical world latent possibilities than I had appreciated. purely emotional U, But I certainly, you know, that certainly doesn't turn me over, I still believe that consciousness does have some non physical component and I'm not comfortable going more specific than that and that would suume dualism, pant psychism idealism for sure Mhm You said a second ago that you don't think in the opposite direction when people have other kinds of experiences When people take psychedelic drugs and they experience, you know, ego death and consciousness and being everywhere and all this kind of stuff. You said something like you don't give sort of any ontological significance to those experiences exactly. whereereas I I think I think that I do Um because I think at the very least it shows us that The way that we perceive the world is not the way that it has to be perceived. And so if we've mapped on a metaphysics based on how we perceive the world And maybe our metaphysics could be utterly wrong because that's not the only way to see the world U for many people, this is one of the most profound things and they don't just say it's emotional in the sense of like, You know, I just had such a powerful experience. I can't really put it into words. so I guess there's something weird going on. But quite specifically like, no, I like I felt like I was part of the universe. I felt like myself was an illusion and I began to really just experience that directly. Given that whyy not give it any significance? I say this because you know, Philip Goff recently said at the Royal Institution on a panel with William Lane Craig. he started talking about his recent experience taking a kind of towad venom derived psychedelic drug. and the look on William Main Craig's face was hysterical because he's talking about this experience he had and And the panel and the audience were all basically saying to him, Look man, the experiences that you had were under the influence of a psychedelic drug and Philipoff was like Okay, yeah, but The drug doesn't give my brain anything that isn't already there. If anything, it reduces particular activities that seem relevant to our present discussion. And if I can look at my hand right now, as GE Mord did and say, look, I can't prove that there's an external world or anything. But I just so strongly perceive my hand in front of me that I'm just going to believe that it's really there. And most people are totally fine doing that When I had this experience I experienceced consonsciousness is foundational, whatever it was the experience. So like Why can't I trust that? just because my brain is in a different state to what it normally is? A long winded question, but sort of inform the question. I wanted to ask you why it is that you said a second ago you don't give any sort of ontological credence to psychedelic experiences A very valid point and I have been criticized. you know, I most of the time politely by many people that for exactly this reason. I don't claim to be a consciousness practitioner Um I don't I've now taken psychedelics I've I don't meditate U I've not had a religious or out of body or or near de or any kind of experience U I joke that I said I play intense table tennis And that sort of gives me an emotional high, but my critics say that doesn't count Um So But in all seriousness Um, I I said in the paper when I have the section on psychedelics that I gave the arguments why I think that this is you know very important for treatment of PTSD or whatever different deression. I mean a lot of great research being done and I support that entirely. But I don't give it ontological status. I mean, what's the difference between getting you know, to be crwe to get hit you hit your eye in the refrigerator and you see stars. That's a physical insult to your optical system and psychedelics, which is doing something more complicated with the neurochemistry there I don't know that. Look, in doing the paper I in the past, I was ninety eight percent sure that there's no ontological status to psychedelics. Having done the paper and' read the people who believe that, very substantial people, you know, I put some comment that it has put a hairline fracture in my bone strength rejection of ontological status of of psych psychedelic experiences. So You know, I've been moved a little off a kind of a hardcore physicalist approach to psychedelics. Not much Um There are some studies that show there's a preliminary that under neo death experperience, for example, there there's a flowing of extra flowing of serotonin in a neurotransmitter that very high percentage. I don't know how scientifically reproducible that has been because you can't do that in humans, obviously, but in animals U, you know, it's it's a neurochemical reaction. and When people tell me to take psychedelics or I should have an religious experience My reaction is If I did and if I would, I wouldn't trust it. Why would I trust that you know, in my present state, I wouldn't that so many people do and have and have made the comments similar to what you've said. I deeply respect. And again, I kind of you know shifted my view from being, you know, really hard nosed about it to being a little bit softer nosed Um, that No it's not impossible, but, you know, I'm still I'm still not a I'm still not a fan that psychedelics gives us gives us a window into a deeper reality Yeah, I think, you know, I never really like to I speak to people about consciousness and a lot of them say, like, I've never taken psychedelics and I don't like to say things like, well, do you think you have a word or maybe you should because you know it's like it's an intense thing, not everybody wants to do it. fair enough. And so I never like to say that. same time when I he say If I were to do it, I wouldn't trust it. I understand that, but at the same time, I think people might want to say like, Well, try saying that afterwards. onlyly because you know, I have a vivid dream, right? And after I wake up Even though during the dream I was totally swept up by it. afterfterwards, I'm quite aware that what I just experienced was hallucination, essentially. it did not really happen that it is not a part of the reality I'm currently inhabiting Wh I think with the psychedelic experience It's not so much that reality changes in front of you, but rather that reality just begins to reveal itself how it really is. And to me, it's profoundly interesting that after years of philosophizing and being led down this sort of path of like, ye maybe we just have to accept in a way that I can't quite understand or see that consciousness is foundational. I don't know what that would mean. electron consciert I have no but philosophically I've just I've just been led there And then you take this psychedelic drug And suddenly it's like Oh You know, it like fills in that experiential gap. It's like Mary stepping outside the room for the first time and seeing Blue L as a moment ago when you said You know, it's just a neural chemical sort of process That's how a materialist sometimes describes consciousness. They say, you know, it's just like neurons firing. and the idealist or someone goes, ye, but isn't that like weird? So for me, I think I see it as like In the way that Ald as Huxley did, that the brain is a is a tool for focusing the mind, a kind of like valve that organizes consciousness in a particular way. it might be artificial the way that you can change the way that that valve works. But if I If I had like some water that was slowly dripping in a pipe And that's all I knew of the nature of water. So all I knew of water was that it was sort of unified into droplets and that it was quite weak and quite small and didn't have very much all that kind of stuff. And then I could artificially just grab like some pliers and rip open a hole and suddenly this torrent of water starts pouring and suddenly water is strong and intense and And and I experience it. L I see it in front of me. I'm like, wow, this is a property of water I didn't know existed the gap And somebody said, Yeahah, but you know you only think that about water because you've like artificially changed the structure of how you're interacting with it. And I'm like Yeah, but even though that's true I've experienced something undeniable about the nature of the thing. You know what I mean? I think that's how I've experienced psychedelics in my view. I'm not sure if that's sort of common across psychedelic experiences that people have had, but it's It's something a bit like that. It does seem At least let me put it this way, at least as informative about the nature of reality as current experience of the world I haven't had to take a drug to experience, but I have had to eat food and get sunlight and you know manoeuver about the world in a particular way and I'm not sure if I have any more reason to trust her, you know? Look, it was a very valid points. Many people make it. I appreciate it. As I said, I appreciate it more now than maybe I did originally my same daughter just told me that she did a psychedelics the first time in her life recently and had some similar things and she's giving me advice that maybe I should do it too U and so I appreciate it. I appreciate the view. you know, I still I still, you know really don't put a lot of foundational value in it. And again, even if I did it myself, U you know, it would be kind of a fun experience, but I don't see it as given G it anything, mayaybe I'll do it. M maybe I'll come back and tell you, you know, Alex, you were right. I have a whole new view of the world and you know, throw out all this material. takeake out the whole first category, you know No more materialists. getet rid of half the theories I don't know, maybe You know, it's funny though because at the same time, like Most of the time I spend talking about psychedelics is with people in this context. But like, you know, when I was at university, I know people who took psychedelics essentially as party drugs and I don't think I don't think these guys like have have ever like sort of been even interested in the nature of fundamental reality or metaphysics or whatever, they just took this drug, went to a club and were like, well, you know the colors are kind of cool and then just got on with their lives, right? So there is a sense in which also we might be like you know imposing our own expectations of an experience onto the experience. that the reason why psychedelics are so profound for these consciousness researchers is because they go in almost like expecting to find it there. Whereas if you just If you feelre like the Beatles who were first given psychedelics, they were spiked, they were given tea without being told and they just sort of got in the elevator and thought that it was on fire. There's this really funny story of them having no clue what wass happening to them. And for them it was just like, well, this is pretty cool and they wrote some great music. I'm not sure if they maybe George Harrison did, but you know, I don't know if they suddenly were like Wow, what a profound insight into the fundamental nature of what electrons are made out of. you know So I also sort of share your skepticism that it necessarily has to be this window into the nature of reality. I just think it can provide it, and I think perhaps validably so. But you know I'm interested in You mentioned at the beginning we're going through these categories. We've sort of taken a look at materialism and idealism and monism and psychism this one at the end, challenge. You mentioned it earlier, but what does that mean? What is that category This is a category that classifies approaches to consciousness that take a radically different and orthogonal view to this linear this linearity between materialism to idealism, these eight categories that we had. And and the it it could start with Colin McGin's famous mysterianism where it is fundamentally I think he wrote in the nineteen eighties very early that said, you know, isn't it a time we give up trying to solve consciousness because we're never going to be able to do it and that approach said that For some reason, we're not we're not capable of doing it, Not that there isn't an answer He wasn't advocating some non physical stuff at all. That's not his worldview at all But it said, you're just not capable. Now many have told me that perhaps the human brain did not evolve in order to understand consciousness h it evolved to, you know, u survive on the plains of Africa, escape, making you know group tribes to hunt animals, whatever it did That's what drove the nature of our brains. And just like we have a craving for sweets and fats today which are built because of prior pressures during ice ages or whatever that today maybe is counterproductive in terms of our health, but then was absolutely necessary for survival So We have different pressures on us that in our brain was made in a certain kind of pressure by these evolutionary factors. that's the view that says we're, you know, we're not capable of doing that. You know, I am not in favor of that view. I mean, it's possible, but it would have to be a pretty fine line where we can understand quantum field theory and what happened in the at the you, ten to the minus thirty six thirty ninth second as they've said at the Big Bang and, all of these things with pretty high confidence levels some of this and yet not able to understand a conscious. It's possible. posossibly could be that, you know part of the Venn diagram, where we can understand everything, all these things, but not conscious this way. becausecause if consciousness is indeed part of the physical world then it should be susceptible to these same sort of methods. And that's why you know, I classify the distinction of this non physical aspect that is something not susceptible to the scientific method. If that's the case then science will never be able to understand consciousness and therefore it has to be some other kind of element, some non physical component of some of some kind. you know, that's the that's as far as I can really feel confident in going. in terms of the distinction So it's that these are not so much u likeike theories of consciousness They're more sort of U ideas pertaining to the unintelligibility of consciousness or its nature or its relation to that that's Yeah that there is it's a recognition that all of the approaches that we took The materialism, the idealist, the pant, all of that is just not satisfatisfactory and all of them have problems And so what's the answer to that? The answer to that is maybe there's something systemic that we're not we're just not capable in our ont brain development through evolution of understanding that piece of reality. whatever it may be. We're just not. That's one part of the challenge. And there are different lots of different expressions of that. U David Eglman has possibililityism where where, you know each possibility has its own own kind of ontological status and we can't make a distinction between between them. So I mean, there are different approaches here that that are that look at the problem in different ways. Let me tell you one interesting one that I really like and it And it reflects two of my intellectual heroes actually that are Raymond Tallas and Peter Van Ininwagen Uh Raymond Tallas is, you know, starters a neurologist and great participant in the health system and became a, you know, humanist, philosopher, just wonderful thinker And really one of my favorite thinkers, Peter Venenwagen is a Christian philosopher pererhaps the leading metaphysician in the world under some classifications and a Christian philosopher. And let me tell you each one's theory and why I have Rayman classified under in challenge. Ray is a absolute atheist does not believe in God in any sense whatsoever, in firm atheist But yet he is a non reductionist about consciousness He calls reductionist theories of consciousness, a neuromania , as opposed to neural philosophy that, you know, Pat Chischland would , you know, coin U but Ray is neuromania that an attempt to reduce consciousness to material, is just impossible So Ray is an atheist about the nature of reality, No God. But a realist about consciousness in terms of being non non material non reuctive Peter Van Inenwagen is a Christian philosopher so deeply believes in God, a very specific kind of God Um But he is a materialist about consciousness So he believes that consciousness is entirely physical. U you know, then he has a different problem because he believes in God. He believes in a resurrection. So if the person is physical, how do you get a resurrection? It's a completely separate issue which was an interesting one, which I have factified under non reductive physicalism because there are Christian philosophers like Peter Banenwagen or Nancy Murphy, who believe in a purely physicalist explanation for the for the person for consciousness, but yet believe in non physical realities So you know, this is the kind of nuances we see with very sophisticated people take, you know contradictory eyes on both sides. If you compare Ray, an atheist, but a non reductionist materialist. Peter Bandwagen, a strong theist Who's a materialist about the body And the arguments of each one are deeply probative. and I just love them Um, and yet it shows different ways of thinking. That's why Ray is classified under challenge theory because he's he's he's very clear that he's not saying what consciousness is, but he's saying what consciousness is not and it's not reducible to to the physical world cannot be explained neurologic with in neurobiologically Um, you, um uh famously, u u u Ralph u Ralph, u Nads Nagel's view, Tom Nagl's view of consciousness is, you know, famously, what is it like to be a bat? but He has taken that further that there is something The world and Tom is equally a very strong atheist. I think His famous quote is is not that I don't believe in God is that I hope there is no God. a world where a God would be a terrible place And yet he is a non materialist about the nature of consciousness U And so we have the and so those are the kinds of people who are thoughtful within the challenge category or challenging are either our capacity through the kind of brains that we have or that there is something that we can't even know what it is, but I'm very confident in my feeling that, you know, there is The reductionist approach is not going to work, but I have no confidence in what it actually is And then there are teological explanations Paul Davies famously and he's also one of my intellectual heroes in terms of his approach where, you know, his approach is that that's explaining the universe by some externality like God is, you know, doesn't work. but claiming consciousness is all material, and is kind of a late accidental development is also wrong. that he takes consciousness seriously. And the way he develops this is that through quantum histories of the universe in some sense, sounds like retro caausation, but it's not. It deals with quantum histies based on John Wheeler that because consciousness will emerge at some point, it then can back choose the quantum histories in some sense that have brought about the consciousness Paul again, theist an anti an atheist but believes that consciousness is fundamental and is somehow brought about by a selection of quantum histories by what will happen at a later development. And so these are unclassifiable ideas and therefore they're in. challenge category. That's the second time and perhaps lastly, this is that's the second time that you've mentioned quantum. You've mentioned it in the context there of a challenge category You also mentioned earlier when we were talking about materialism and saying, well, you know different people have different ideas of what counts as material, some say it's a a quantum wave function or something and , okay, that makes sense. but then you also have this category of like quantum Well quantum and dimensions, but let's isolate the quantum bit Famously Roger Penrose, who I saw walking down the street of Oxford the other day. You wouldd think he was twenty years younger. sort of walking along with his coffee and I was able to shake his hand and Oh I've heard him once say that I heard him once at some point say I'm sure he did something like about how once he started talking about consciousness, it's all anybody wanted to ask about and he almost regretted it. So I held my tongue.ag I managed not to ask him anything about it. But you famously has this idea that consonsciousness resides in the quantum. Um o fold question here. One is that Why is it its own category? Isn't quantum just a theory of what matter is fundamentally And secondly, you said a moment ago that you used to kind of Not take it seriously, almost ridicule it and then you change your mind What accounted for that Okay, well as to the first question that quantum certainly can't be considered materialism in its sense because it is part of the material world. Likewise non reuctive physicalism and pan psychism, all these kind information theories, which we haven't talked about, where information is fundamental, integrate information theory, Julio Tononei, Chrisop Koch very important theories that that that put some foundational ontology into the nature of information. Now that also can be part of the physical world But I separated them out non physical reductionism quantum theories and information. because they are dealing with each in such a sufficiently different way than the traditional materialism theories that we're used to, which are both neurobiological or electromagnetic or philosophical approaches to theories There, I, you know, I'd be totally happy with different organizational structures But I broke those out, even though they can be considered materialism in some larger superide because they are sufficiently different and sufficiently strong in terms of the feelings of its advocates sufficiently different than the traditional materialistic theory. So it's just a kind of an organizational approach. And if we dig down, yeah, I mean I could say their materialism in some sense if you say everything that is real is material And so this is just giving Gope. to a set of theories that are based on quantum theories in radically different ways. And I don't know how many I have under quantum theories, but at least twenty or twenty five and they're radically different of where the quantum effect occurs, you know, as I said in the microtuble, the formation of the wave structures, some people say in the cell, some people say in a larger kind of entanglement in the brain. all different theories of Pantum. So when we say that, I think it's important to recognize within that quantum world, there is lots of different kinds of theories that are largely seeming mutually exclusive in terms of where it works. There's also a dimensionality that there are different dimensions of conscious. Bernard Carr has some theories along those lines built on some some some theories and some some u credibility of parapsychological things. So there are these are physicalist could be physicalists in some sense, but so different than the traditional materialism, I wanted to have them in a separate category. As to why I gave it more credibility, as I looked at each of these theories and just began to understand that in terms of the quantum field aspect to it, there's sufficiently interesting possibilities there in terms of And as quantum computing has developed and we see the quantum supremacy being able to uncertain kinds of questions, factoring of large numbers where you can achieve in minutes or hours something that would take regular computers, lifetime of the universe or more to do, that there are certain capabilities quantum that are radically different than the neuronal impulses or the philosophical maneuvers in the brain with representationalism or relationalism or something else sufficiently radically different that it deserved its own category. And as I said, I as opposed to, you know, I hope I never ridiculed it, but taking it much less seriously, I would take it more seriously today than before I started the study. Did you know Sam's Club isn't a stork? It's actually a club with cool finds and like a whole community. It's a club. Of course, Jason, it's in the name, Sam's Club Yeah. Come join us Sam's Club Chronic migraine, fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more, can make me feel like a spectator in my own life In Botox, onabacha linum tooxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those with fourteen or fewer headache days a month. It's the number one prescribed branded chronic migraine preventive treatment Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, astma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lugaric's disease, myasthenia Gravis or Lambd Eaten syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit Botoxpronicmigraine. com or call one eight hundred four four Botox to learn more U I know I said finally, but just because you mentioned it under information is one of the most I think like maybe one of the most commonly cited ideas about consciousness in recent years, which is I IT or Integrated information theory U What is that and why is it suddenly so popular? So this is a very probative question into the current status of consciousness studies because integrated information theory originally formulated by Julia Tononei, who is a sleep researcher, neuroscientist are very good in sleep research and psychiatry, et cetera, and supported strongly by Christopher Koch famously developed the neuronal correlative consciousness assisting Francis Crick, nineteen ninety, which really open the whole field. So these are you know very strong people. And it's a radically different approach. It takes consciousness fundamental I shouldn't say fundament. I take it in a serious way. starting with consciousness and then explaining it. And basically it It is a a structural analysis of consciousness that is not based on specific neurobiology, but it's based on conceptual ideas about consciousness. And it becomes and they have a test called phi, which is the amount of consciousness and then a kind of a structural approach. It's a little vague. They're often accused of being pan psychic an psychism, which which they reject Um, but they're they're criticisms say that they're a pansychist theory Famously one hundred and twenty four philosophers scientists called IIT a pseudo science, this was a A scandal in the field, some say, because it's to call it pseudoscience is the worst thing I can say about something somebody. I mean, there's nothing worse. I can say you're ugly and you're stupid to say pseudocience is worse than that U so why did they think it was suicide? Be as you said, I mean that's quite a big deal. like over a hundred professionals notot just that they thought that, but that they felt the need to like publicly affirm it, right? And we can de with we can tease this apart very well. Why they felt the need was because IIT was getting such very substantial prominence and there was a so called adversarial collaboration between different theories of conscious.' famously IIT versus global workspace theory, which me it's kind of a neurobiological theory that competed against each other with a very well funded program with independent testing, you know extremely interestnteresting process and results. and it's you know some things favored one, some things favored the other. IIT predicts that the conscious would come because of integrated information in the back of the brain, global workspace isues should occur in the front of the brain. And so this was tested. It seemed to favor IIT a little bit, but not totally. There were some that favor global workspace. But anyway, this became a public matter, and it was covered nature, science, I mean, the major publications We're looking at this And a group of people, you know felt this was a I wouldn't say a publicity stunt. It wasn't a stunt, but it was excessive publicity and gave the impression that IIT was the leading theory and then they were, you know, others that were strong, two or three others. when there was this huge number of other theories and many people had different theories, particularly higher order representationalism under materialism. and people were felt that the public was being misled because of the prominence of this theory. becausecause of the prominence of this adversarial collaboration and the prominence of the individuals, it was giving a misleading view of the field So that was the approach. My approach to it was It was different. I did not like the the label of pseudo science. I've seen this very similar kind of accusations against string theory, against the multiverse, which are either twenty orders of magnitude with string theory able to be subject to experimental testing or impossible in theory in the multiverse to even get accessible there are some possibilities of interacting brains You know, those also have been accused of pseudos science and I think that's unfair that science because of the nature of it is dealing with so many different orders of magnitude of level that if things have a coherence to them that have explanatory powers to it, we should listen to all that. Certainly I'm one who, you know accepts a lot of different possible theories to include. So I was against the pseudoscience accusation. However I also made the point that if you compared IIT with Global Workspace theory, each had a prediction that the prediction of IIT was again the the back of the brain and well wor front of the brain But from my point of view, that that prediction was not an indication of its fundamental ontology of each theory In global workspace theory, it was sort of as Dennet might put it, fame in the brain. and which circuitry becomes the most prominent and that recruits others to be part of it whereereas IIT has conscious as some sort of a a structural element, maybe in some sort of end dimensional space, some kind of a equivalent of Hilbert's space for quantum mechany, mayaybe there's some kind of a consciousness space where there' these different structures that occur in some dimensional sense that are part of the IT. That's the fundamental ontology of each theory. One is a brain circuitry and the other is an ontological structure and where it predicts something, you could reverse them and say, oh, the global Wpace theory predicts the front the back of the brain and IIT predicts the front of the brain. And it wouldn't change the fundamental ontology of each one. I didn't feel comfortable that that adversarial collaboration would no matter what it said would yield a fundamental result. Maybe a fundamental result is in principle not possible through scientific explanations, but you would think with These two could be subject to the scientific methodos eeither one opposing anything directly non physical, although IIT may be on the fuszsy border between something non physical and physical Yeah, I find it funny that in the u onn the Wikipedia page for IIT under the criticism section. It says that John Searl has criticized, has given a critique of the theory saying the theory implies pan psychism. And it's like I can kind of understand where that's coming from. A lot of people will think that it sort of implies this sort of crazy view about consciousness. but as someone who's quite comfortable with pansychism, it just doesn't sound like much of a critique. But it seems like the main criticism was that it was either It was sort of outside of the proper remit of science, rather than being like false, it just wasn't properly scientific U thing is for me The reason why I don't have a problem with IIT, but I kind of don't find it very interesting began when I realized that it's not so much a theory of consciousness and that it doesn't try to explain where experience comes from or something like that. begins with a certain set of axiomatic assumptions and like the zerooth assumption is that experience exists. It assumes that experience consciousness exists and then tries to talk about it like structure, I suppose. And that's great. that's interesting, that's cool For me it's always been a little bit outside of what I'm interested in because I'm interested in what consciousness is, where it comes from, what accounts for it, and so to what extent do you think that IIT can be cool at theory of consciousness if it begins with the assumption that consonsciousness is just a thing that exists ood Well, I like the structure where they have their premises and then they have deductions and scientific. but I want to tease apart two elements of it One is the scientific approach to the the exist the presence of consciousness where they use this phi test And that's a very innovative and important idea. It has clinical applications in terms of coma patients. I mean, I mean, there are serious elements to it and they've been developing that. So as part of IIT, the phi explanation of the presence of consciousness, how do you judge it in terms of the integration and how you assess it through brain waves, et ceter. That's very scientific and very, very useful The other part about what consciousness is has this I said, this this different dimensional structure to it. So and that's that's they're very very cautious about that or cagey U because it's that's sort of not part of the physical world. So they do have an explanation But by blending those together I think does each each part a disservice. I think the work on phi in terms of the presence of consciousness, using the idea of integrated information and how that works is a very legitimate scientific approach to the nature of consciousnesses, again, with great clinical applications. But as to what consciousness is as a result of it, this ure a way where every conscious precept, maybe some kind of a unique in this other kind of reality. that's a that is what they say is is is a an inference from their from their basic axioms. But I radically distinguish that between their work on phi which is scientifically from their concept of this structure, which can look like a pan' psychism it can look that waythough that they would reject that. I guess the assumption of consciousness is a starting point for many like It kind of depends what we mean in that like I could say that, well, idealism or pansychism starts with the assumption that Consciousness exists Be you have to, L it's there. It's real. And then the next question is well, what's it made out of, what's its structure? So I think I sort of always saw IIT as unduly beginning with the assumption that it seemingly would be interesting to try and improve. but I guess it's quite valid to just begin with of consciousness and then start looking at its nature. But I've also just found it so difficult to understand, I guess because I'm I'm not as perhaps scientifically minded as I'd like to be or something like that. I've never quite managed to fully wrap my head around exactly what was going on. So I was just interested in in your take and to what extent you see it as a theory of consciousness, you know? Yeah, again, distinguishing between their presence of consciousness, this phi element to it versus what consciousness is, which is a product of it. So you're absolutely right in terms of it starts with consciousness, just like Psychism and idealism would and then it takes a very different It looks at systems and the nature of information and how it's integrated and you know they're ridiculed like you know, can a thermometer then be conscious because it has some kind of information Oy way, John Searle's classic remark about pound psychism is that it's like a thin layer of jam over the whole universe. That was his metaphor that he liked to use. But why a thin layer of jam over the whole universe? That was just John's way of describing pan psychism because I think I literally don't understand what he means Well, I mean It's because you have consciousness being part of everything that it' that it's this adding something to the physical world, genism materialist, biological naturalism and You know, he was a realist about consciousness in terms of its ontological status. which to me, you know, never quite argue with that, but he was a a realist about consciousness, but a hardcore physicalist that biological naturalism, I mean, consonscious is the product of the brain, like urine is the product of the kidney is not something that he would eschew. I mean that would be something that he would use. It' obviously much would be much more complicated But his approach to pan psychism was that if every little part of the universe has consciousness to it, it would be like this thin layer of jam. over the over the universe because it's part of every little thing. so you have to have it and you know, it's a small part of everything. so it's quite thin and jam just makes it funny ye Yeah. I think perhaps a slightly unfair characterization, but I see what he was driving at. You know, we've we've done ve done so much here and it hasn't been in order exactly, but we've talked about materialism and all of the sort of almost ridiculous number of subcategories that exist within there. We did talk a bit about non reuctive physicalism, which you know, call it a kind of physicalism if you like, but it's importantly different in that it cannot be reduced to purely physical or at least it sort of seems that way We talked about the quantum stuff. We did a bit of information on IIT, pan psychism, Misms, dualisms idealisms Some of the altered state stuff with psychedelics and challenge, I think we have not covered everything, of course, but we've given some kind of overview of at least one of the important parts of every single one of the categories that you've put together on your map. And I think At the very least, people should be able to see from this It's a lot, you know, it's complicated. and to be honest, I When you said at the beginning of this, you said, you know when I started putting this together, I realized it was going to be a lot more work than I expected. I don't know what you were expecting, to be honest because this is always an infinitely deep and complex topic. So I can only say that I'm grateful that you didn't give up once you realized how complicated it was going to be Well it's the old story that if I knew ahead of time, what I would have to do, I never would have started But each step was one step at a time, one theory at a time and that I can do U so looking back, I'm happy I did it, but I, you know, I never would having done it andt recognizeed what it was. I mean, it was it's been a huge amount of work and mostly mostly at night because of other responsibilities. But it's look's it's been a great u personal gift to be able to explore these things. and I give credit to the people who've developed all these theories because that's the richness of what the human mind has developed you know, what we haven't touched on which I'll just mention is theological approaches to to consciousness, which which are very which were part of the human experience, maybe more historically than they are today, certainly believed by a lot of people today, but even historically by by very important thinkers. and they're very diverse And it was very important for me to include it. So I included Hinduism where consciousness is, you know very significant in the original Vedic scriptures and Buddhism, the Taoi Jing. And Hinduism has many, many different expressions. We have maybe five or six there. There were literally hundreds, but five or six very specific ones in Kashmirian and Chaism Sri Rbundo and Sri Ramana, These are all expressions of the core idea, but each one very different in their very interesting ways. And then the Abrahamic religions, Judaism of Christianity and Islam, each one has a different aspect to the nature of the soul in some sense U, and whether you believe these things or not, they're part of the human desire to know and to me were very important. And again, a short story when I submitted my first draft to the Journal of Progs of Biophysics and Molecular Biology. The reviewer, who again, I appreciate very much, made some very important suggestions that helped the paper enormously said that look, the scientific theories you have are great, We want to, you know, we accept it, We want to do it. But you have these, you know, philosophical, even theological theories You know, the readers of progress in biophysical mleical, I'm really not interested in that. So you know why don't you just take those out and add some of these other categories, I said, you suggested language that are important for our readers. And I wrote back and I said, appreciate everything that you've telling me and I agree, make changes. Thank you. And I said, if I were you, If I were in Yorkl, I would have already rejected the paper because it has these extraneous theories, pan protosychism to of, you know, immortal soul theories And I said, but As it happened, you know, I wasn't planning to do this. I've now put a lot of effort into it and I realized I'm gonna do this one time in my life And I have to do it where it satisfies my own sense of what the totality of human thought is on the nature of consciousness And so I have to include the philosophical and indeed theological theories. I have you know folk religion theies of consciousces from Africa and China, because that's part of the human experience. We may not agree with that. It may seem pretty scientific, but it's part of the human understanding and people today believe many of these things as well. And I said, so I have to do this And if you don't want to publish it, I completely understand. as I said, I would reject it if I were you in your position and asked to review it for that reason But I have to do this and if you don't want to publish it, I can understand how Try someplace else or worse case publish it myself in some way. Uh and to their credit, they they said, you know, we will'll allow any, you know, all of it in. So I really give them credit for allowing me to do that. And there are some very interesting theories like under dualism we haven't mentioned There's something called emergent dualism And and that's the theory that says that Um Everything is physical But when there's a certain level of complexity, like in brains, It's somehow due to some metapsychophysical laws of the universe produces a non physical element sort of pops out someome sort of a non physical pops out when you have a certain degree of complexity So that's a very different kind of dualism. Richard Swinburn, who's obviously a very well known Christian philosopher has dealt with this and has dealt with substance dualism independent of his religious views and is very was one of the major defenders of a classical substance dualism. would be you know, believes because of his religious training in the traditional soul or whatever But he said he would not if he were wrong, he would not be rejecting an emergent dualism. He believes strongly that even from a non religious point of view, dualism is a proper explanation for consciousness. but if it turned out to be an emergent kind where there was no immortal soul, no God, but it kind of emerged out of complexity, that would satisfy his non theological arguments for dualism And so that's a variant of dualism. And I think it's a very interesting category. We say dualism. we generally think very simple o interaction physical and non physical, rejected by the scientific community. I think, you know Certainly less than ten percent of philosophers would believe in dualism is probably five percent or less U the richness of the different kinds of theories of dualism, both theologically, philosophically U our To me one of the most interesting categories because it's not generally appreciated the sophistication and the different ways of thinking about dualism. It's usually characterized overly simplistically and either accepted or rejected on that when it has all this richness to it. The most memorable gifts aren't found, they're made. Zazil is a custom marketplace where you pick any product a mug, card, a tote, a phone case, and make it personal, a photo, a name, an inside joke. the kind of gift that actually fits the person. That's what thirty million customers have been coming back to Zazzle for over twenty years to find. Right now, save twenty five percent on your first order at zazzle d. comot That's Zazzle dot com Make it amazing At Zock Doc, we know being a healthy adult is like living in a video game. Every day has side questests, taxes, laundry, birthdays. And just when you're leveling up You have to book a doctor. The insurance portal crashes, they put you on hold. Your doctor doesn't take your plan Game over We see you. So we made booking a doctor easy. Download ZockDoc. search by specialty, insurance and availability. Book instantly. No cheat codes required. Find a doctor you love with ZockDooc. Mhm Yeah, and I appreciate you including those religious dimensions. I mean, like, A lot of the time the worldview that a religious system takes on as pertains one aspect of reality like consciousness can bepe defended independently. Like you say with Richard Twinburn, you can be a dualist and a Christian and be one because of the other, but sort of encompass one into the world through the other. But also there there are things that we call religious philosophies. Um You know, Advit of Vedanta is a tradition within Hinduism, which is a religion, but Adv of Vidanta is kind of a philosophical system rather than a religious one. You don't need to talk about the pantheon of gods and The scriptural tradition exactly, you know, it's sort of revealed through the Apanishads and whatnot. But in terms of like the narratives and the characters and stuff that's kind of not so relevant to the philosophical stream So it can all kind of be separated out and gets a little bit sort of complicated. But as you say, like worth a mention that for most of history Philosophizing has been predominantly done in the context of religious worldview, in the context of like filling in the understanding where faith kind of leaves off. And in the modern era especially since the scientific revolution, we've kind of separated those out Your map isn't an attempt to say, here are all of the views that I take seriously, or here are all of the views that I think are plausible, but just to say here are all of the views that I know of that people in fact believe and to leave those out, I think would have been have been quite the blind spot and quite the gaping hole, even if not everybody noticed it at first. I'm sure the religious would have noticed it, but maybe not every I completely agree with what you said. and I have grown to, as I said, appreciate the sophistication of the various religious communities over the years in dealing with a philosophical approaches to consciousness and its richness. I've learned a lot from that and I think there's some very very, very strong thinking. people make fun of the the philosophical approaches during the Middle Ages and in Christian philosophy or Islamic Judaism, It was really an interesting flourishing time when varies thinkers were dealing with consciousness and as the only thing that they could doci in the pre science world. and there are ideas that are worth contemplating Oh yeah, a great depth of thought. And as I say, if people want more information on these views visit the map. It's in the description. It's free. I should have mentioned that at the beginning. This sounds like, you know, we we're selling some super duper expensive crazy. you could probably charge hundreds of pounds of It's not. it It's just on the internet. It's free. Truth is the universal possession of mankind as whoever it was that said that said. And you can just click on it and check it out and at least use it as a springboard to go and find even if you already have a theory of consciousness that you like, that you're on board with, G on like the there's like One of the visualizations is like a kind of it's like a literal map where everything's kind of connected with different wires and stuff Like go and look at the different theories that are like in orbit around your present theory because you might discover something new, you might discover something that you like even better or sort of better reasons to stick with what you've got. So I'll leave it in the description and yeah, I can only thank you again so much for putting it together and of course for taking the time to Come on my show today and talk us through it It's been a pleasure. Landscape of consonsciousness. It's LOC. closet oftuth. com but landscape of consonsciousness is you can find it very quickly. and it's a collective project I said M a large percentage of the theories have come from people who have suggested theories of either their own or something I left out that they're very passionate about. So it's really trying to make a collective efforts not it's more than a personal one And of course to Alex Gohers Marin. Is it Marin? Is that how you say the last part of his last name? Yeah, yeah. Alex Comach He's great. I met him once and u, had a fascinating conversation with him a philosophy festival. It was amazing. I actually walked into his talk by mistake I think I was I was trying to find a different one and we went into this tent and I was sat with I think I was sat with Anal Seth. And some of my friends and Phil Halper, who's yeah, he's like a proper proper physicalist as well. And and and on comes Alex and he starts he gives this incredible talk about the weirdness of consciousness and altered psychedelic states and how consciousness is everywhere. And I was there the whole time just like that was absolutely fantastic. And I turned to my left to Annal and turn to my right in film and I don't think they were quite so convinced, but it was almost sort of comical the way that this room of people at a philosophy conference were kind of listen to him with this sort of sort of burrowed brows and raised eyebrows, but there was something about them all which they really enjoyed it. They were sort of like, yeah, okay, you know what, you know what? Fair enough. I thought he was great. So ag the role that he played in putting this together as well