[Anne Strainchamps]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Once upon a time, a British children's book writer imagined a world of flying witches, armored bears, and portals to other worlds.
[Steve Paulson]: Children with soul companions who take the form of animals and religious authorities who think free will is evidence of original sin.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And this whole imaginary world is animated by a mysterious, elementary particle, a kind of shadow matter, a building block of the universe, inherently alive and conscious.
[Steve Paulson]: This fictional particle is called Dust, but it was inspired by a very real philosophy, panpsychism, the theory that everything in the world is made of consciousness, not just people and animals, but trees, amoebas, even electrons.
[Lord Asriel]: What is the most important question we can ask?
[Lyra]: Where dust comes from.
[Asriel]: There you are.
[Asriel]: You've seen dust pouring into this world from the Aurora.
[Asriel]: If light can cross that barrier between the universes, if dust can, if we can see that city up there in the sky, then we can build a bridge and we can cross.
[Lyra]: Across multiple worlds.
[Asriel]: Why not?
[Asriel]: Let's go to the source.
[Asriel]: Let's ask what dust is.
[Asriel]: How do you like the sound of that?
[Anne Strainchamps]: That's a clip from the HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman's classic fantasy series, His Dark Materials.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And no, the universe is not made of dust, but could it be made of consciousness?
[Steve Paulson]: Scientists and philosophers have been arguing about panpsychism for decades, and scientists generally say there is zero proof for it, but Philip Pullman says that doesn't mean it's not true.
[Steve Paulson]: That's what he told me when we talked a few years ago on our old show, TT Book.
[Philip Pullman]: Science is a good servant but a bad master in the old phrase.
[Philip Pullman]: If you only allow yourself to see things through the filter of science, you'll miss a great deal of what's there.
[Philip Pullman]: And what's there are the things that you can't measure, you can't be numerical about.
[Steve Paulson]: Like consciousness.
[Philip Pullman]: What panpsychism does, and this is what I like about it,
[Philip Pullman]: is to suggest that consciousness is a normal property of matter.
[Philip Pullman]: Everything is conscious.
[Philip Pullman]: That's not to say that the cup of tea from which I'm now drinking is conscious and saying to me, come on, hurry up, you haven't finished this yet.
[Philip Pullman]: No, but consciousness is something that pervades everything, although many philosophers find this hard to accept.
[Philip Pullman]: Poets don't find it hard to accept.
[Philip Pullman]: William Blake, the great Romantic English poet, was a panpsychist, I think, before the word existed.
[Philip Pullman]: I mean, he talks of every particle of dust breathing forth its joy.
[Philip Pullman]: So the notion of the world is alive, the world is conscious, is something that I find very convincing, very persuasive.
[Philip Pullman]: There's a sense that the people who run the world have up until now treated the world as a sort of dead thing that they can scavenge for whatever they like out of it.
[Philip Pullman]: They can pump oil, they can burn them as they will and hurl the smoke into the atmosphere and it's all dead and it doesn't matter.
[Philip Pullman]: Well, we're discovering now, to our great cost, that it's not all dead and it does matter.
[Philip Pullman]: Again, the idea of a Gaia, you know, the Gaia hypothesis, taps into the same feeling, I think.
[Steve Paulson]: I've been interested in panpsychism for years, so I was really excited to meet one of its foremost advocates, the philosopher who inspired Philip Pullman.
[Steve Paulson]: Let me just make sure everything sounds okay.
[Philip Goff]: Hello, looking forward to having a little chat today.
[Philip Goff]: My name is Philip Goff.
[Philip Goff]: I'm a philosophy professor at Durham University in the north of England.
[Philip Goff]: I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality.
[Steve Paulson]: Okay, well, that's simple.
[Steve Paulson]: That's a good place to start.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We're back at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany at a session on rational mysticism.
[Anne Strainchamps]: The rest of us are eating lunch, but Steve and Philip Goff have snuck off to chat about panpsychism.
[Philip Goff]: You could think of panpsychism as continuing a trend that's been going on for some time now.
[Philip Goff]: At the start of the Scientific Revolution, we thought that we were the only conscious ones and animals were unfeeling mechanisms.
[Philip Goff]: And then over time, we've attributed consciousness to more and more of the natural world, starting with higher primates, other mammals.
[Philip Goff]: Only fairly recently, birds and fish
[Philip Goff]: And then a year or two ago now, a couple of hundred scientists signed a letter saying they were taking insect and reptile consciousness as at least a serious possibility.
[Philip Goff]: So panpsychists take this to its logical conclusion, attributing consciousness not only to the simplest forms of cellular life, but also to the molecules, atoms, subatomic particles.
[Philip Goff]: that make up that life.
[Philip Goff]: So for panpsychists, we are conscious creatures in a conscious universe.
[Steve Paulson]: That's not exactly the logical conclusion, because when you said that there was this document manifesto saying that even insects might have consciousness, they're still animals.
[Steve Paulson]: And we at least tend to draw the line between animate and inanimate matter.
[Steve Paulson]: And it's the non-life that most people assume that can't possibly be conscious.
[Steve Paulson]: Why extend it so far down?
[Steve Paulson]: I'm not sure if down is the right direction here, but...
[Philip Goff]: Well, one thing to say is panpsychists aren't just kind of adding consciousness to the story we get from science of particles and fields.
[Philip Goff]: So it's not that they have the kinds of properties physicists talk about, mass, spin, and charge, and then we're adding this funny consciousness stuff.
[Philip Goff]: Actually, the panpsychist claim is that at the base of reality, all there is is consciousness of very simple forms.
[Philip Goff]: And that what we call physical reality emerges from that more fundamental story of very simple forms of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: So in a way, it's turning the problem of consciousness upside down.
[Philip Goff]: The normal way we think about this is, you know, we start with what physical science talks about, physics, chemistry, neuroscience.
[Philip Goff]: And then try and get consciousness out of that.
[Philip Goff]: That hasn't been going incredibly well.
[Philip Goff]: It's sort of gone nowhere.
[Steve Paulson]: It's gone nowhere.
[Steve Paulson]: For years.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, we learn more about the brain, but how consciousness somehow is generated by the brain, that seems to be a project that's hit a dead end.
[Philip Goff]: That's right.
[Philip Goff]: We've learned more about which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience.
[Philip Goff]: That question of correlation, although even there, there's very little consensus and lots of disagreement.
[Philip Goff]: But how do patterns of neural firings generate a feeling, an experience, a first-person perspective?
[Philip Goff]: I think most people agree that
[Philip Goff]: we haven't really got even the beginnings of an explanation of that.
[Philip Goff]: So the panpsychists turn it upside down.
[Philip Goff]: Instead of starting with physical stuff and trying to get consciousness out of that, we start with consciousness of very simple forms and try and get physical reality out of that story about consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: that's a bit easier to do, surprisingly.
[Steve Paulson]: So when you talk about consciousness, you're talking about subjective feeling, you're talking about awareness?
[Steve Paulson]: This is where it seems to defy common sense.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, you say consciousness goes down to atoms, to subatomic particles.
[Steve Paulson]: They have feelings?
[Philip Goff]: Yeah, so it's important.
[Philip Goff]: When people think of consciousness, they sometimes think of something very cognitively sophisticated, like self-consciousness, awareness of your own existence.
[Philip Goff]: Nobody thinks that electrons are aware of their own existence or they're sitting there feeling existential angst or wondering if it's Tuesday or something.
[Philip Goff]: As you say, what we're talking about is just subjective experience.
[Philip Goff]: Your consciousness is what it's like to be you.
[Philip Goff]: So feeling tired, seeing colour, hearing sound, these are all parts of what it's like to be you.
[Philip Goff]: Now what it's like to be a human being is very rich and complex, the result of millions of years of evolution.
[Philip Goff]: But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes.
[Philip Goff]: What it's like to be a sheep is much simpler.
[Philip Goff]: What it's like to be a snail, simpler still.
[Philip Goff]: Is there something that it's like to be a bed bug?
[Philip Goff]: If so, it's much, much, almost unimaginably simpler.
[Philip Goff]: So there doesn't seem to be any conceptual limit to how simple subjective experience can be.
[Steve Paulson]: Well, except for when you get beyond the animal realm.
[Steve Paulson]: Then conceptually, it seems like there might be some limits there.
[Philip Goff]: So there's two questions.
[Philip Goff]: One question is, is this a plausible view?
[Philip Goff]: Is it ridiculous?
[Philip Goff]: Is it something we should be taking seriously?
[Philip Goff]: Put that on one side for a moment.
[Philip Goff]: But is it coherent?
[Philip Goff]: I would say yes.
[Philip Goff]: I don't think there's any contradiction in the idea that an electron has some very, very simple form of experience.
[Philip Goff]: There's something that it's like to be an electron.
[Philip Goff]: Very simple corresponding to its very simple physical nature.
[Steve Paulson]: What about machines?
[Steve Paulson]: And then, of course, the other question is what about AI?
[Philip Goff]: Yeah, so it's an open question for a panpsychist.
[Philip Goff]: They don't necessarily think tables and chairs are conscious.
[Philip Goff]: They think maybe tables are made out of things that have very simple forms of consciousness, but the table as a whole doesn't necessarily have its own form of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: In fact, it probably doesn't.
[Philip Goff]: Panpsychists are probably more likely to think consciousness is biological rather than computational.
[Philip Goff]: This is the big debate at the present moment.
[Philip Goff]: But as a panpsychist, consciousness isn't about abstract information processing.
[Philip Goff]: It's the flesh and blood of the world.
[Philip Goff]: So you're less likely to think...
[Philip Goff]: large language models are conscious or anything remotely like that.
[Philip Goff]: At the same time, panpsychists don't think consciousness is magical, supernatural, added by God at the moment of conception or something.
[Philip Goff]: So it has to be possible in principle to create artificial consciousness, but I think for a panpsychist you're probably more likely looking at something like an artificial living system, maybe in the first instance a bacterium,
[Philip Goff]: maybe in 5,000 years something with the complexity of a human being.
[Steve Paulson]: So I want to come back to this question of why panpsychism has sort of this, there's a lot of interest in it right now.
[Steve Paulson]: And really, as you say, over the last 10 or 15 years, I mean, there has been talk about panpsychism for centuries.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, this is, it's not a new idea, it goes way back.
[Steve Paulson]: But for whatever reason, it's kind of taken off in the last decade or so.
[Steve Paulson]: And there are a number of people, a number of prominent scientists, prominent philosophers who've, if not embraced the idea, at least sort of take it seriously.
[Steve Paulson]: So why?
[Steve Paulson]: What has changed?
[Philip Goff]: I guess maybe there's two sources.
[Philip Goff]: In science, there is the integrated information theory, which is one prominent contender for the scientific theory of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: As I say, there's lots of disagreement there, but it's one contender.
[Steve Paulson]: You have to very briefly explain what that theory is.
[Philip Goff]: And the integrated information theory, very roughly, the claim is that
[Philip Goff]: When a system has more integrated information in the whole than in any of the parts, you get consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: Now, what is integrated information?
[Philip Goff]: They try to give a very precise mathematical definition of that, but actually this implies that consciousness goes into the inanimate realm, that everywhere there's some kind of consciousness, whether it's in the parts or the wholes.
[Philip Goff]: So there's at least an affinity here with panpsychism.
[Philip Goff]: In the philosophical context, it's really the rediscovery of certain important work in the 1920s by Bertrand Russell.
[Philip Goff]: And I think Russell's core insight here was that physical science for all its wonders isn't really telling us what matter is.
[Philip Goff]: I remember when I first heard that, I thought, that's ridiculous, what are you talking about?
[Philip Goff]: We read a book of cosmology, we learn this wonderful story about space and time and matter.
[Philip Goff]: But his point was, yes, we get a lot of information from physics, of course, but it's all about what stuff does.
[Philip Goff]: does.
[Philip Goff]: Not what it is.
[Philip Goff]: Not what it is, exactly what it does.
[Philip Goff]: What does physics tell us about an electron?
[Philip Goff]: It tells us it has mass and charge.
[Philip Goff]: And these properties are completely characterized in terms of things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration.
[Philip Goff]: It's all about what stuff does.
[Philip Goff]: Doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of.
[Philip Goff]: You just want to play the game.
[Philip Goff]: You just want to know what they do.
[Philip Goff]: And of course, that's wonderful information because if you know what matter does, you can manipulate it.
[Philip Goff]: We can produce incredible technology.
[Philip Goff]: But at the end of the day, physics doesn't tell us what an electron is.
[Philip Goff]: And in that sense, there's a huge hole in our standard scientific story of reality.
[Philip Goff]: Okay, so we've got a hole in our scientific story.
[Philip Goff]: We're looking for a place for consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: Maybe we can put consciousness in the hole.
[Steve Paulson]: So explain that.
[Steve Paulson]: So if we don't know what matter is, or at least conventional science, physics, cannot explain what matter is.
[Steve Paulson]: Are you suggesting matter is consciousness?
[Philip Goff]: Well, that is the claim, yes.
[Philip Goff]: So we're looking for it.
[Philip Goff]: We know consciousness is real.
[Philip Goff]: How do we know it's real?
[Philip Goff]: by being conscious.
[Philip Goff]: We're directly aware of our own feelings and experiences.
[Philip Goff]: So we know it's real.
[Philip Goff]: We have to fit it into the scientific story somehow.
[Philip Goff]: And this hole in the scientific story Russell identified perhaps finds a place for it.
[Philip Goff]: So the claim is there is just consciousness of very simple forms behaving in simple, predictable ways
[Philip Goff]: And what physics is doing is tracking the behaviour of these very simple forms of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: So it's a way of bringing together two things we know to be real,
[Philip Goff]: The stuff we know about the physical world from doing science and the stuff we know about consciousness by being conscious.
[Philip Goff]: Panpsychism offers a way of drawing these two things together in a single, simple, elegant theory of reality.
[Steve Paulson]: So you're saying consciousness is a fundamental force.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, we tend to think of the laws of physics, but consciousness is apart from that and even more foundational than those laws of physics?
[Philip Goff]: Consciousness is everything for the panpsychist.
[Philip Goff]: There is nothing but consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: I like to put it, matter is what consciousness does for the panpsychist.
[Philip Goff]: So what we call particles, what we call fields in this view, just are the most rudimentary forms of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: Through their equations, physics tracks them in terms of their behaviour.
[Philip Goff]: but what they are in terms of their nature is forms of consciousness.
[Steve Paulson]: Okay, so let's talk about human beings for a moment here.
[Steve Paulson]: So where do brains fit into this?
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, clearly we... Well, I shouldn't say.
[Steve Paulson]: I was going to say clearly we need a brain to be conscious, but...
[Steve Paulson]: I don't know.
[Steve Paulson]: Do we?
[Philip Goff]: I think we have to think very carefully about what the problem of consciousness is.
[Philip Goff]: It's not just another scientific problem.
[Philip Goff]: You know, we just haven't done enough experiments.
[Philip Goff]: We just haven't done enough brain scans to crack it.
[Philip Goff]: It's a very unique scientific problem.
[Philip Goff]: Each of us is directly aware of our feelings and experiences.
[Philip Goff]: And this direct access tells us something about its nature.
[Philip Goff]: You know, a pain is essentially defined by how it feels.
[Philip Goff]: And you know how it feels when you feel it.
[Philip Goff]: So we know to a large extent at least what consciousness is because we're conscious.
[Philip Goff]: And this is very different to any other phenomenon science tries to explain.
[Philip Goff]: Think about lightning.
[Philip Goff]: You know, you don't know what the hell lightning is before you do the science.
[Philip Goff]: Is it the anger of the gods?
[Philip Goff]: Who knows?
[Philip Goff]: You have to do the science to find out it's electric discharge.
[Philip Goff]: Or what is water?
[Philip Goff]: Is it a fundamental element together with earth and fire and air as the ancient Greeks thought?
[Philip Goff]: Or is it H2O?
[Philip Goff]: You have to do the science.
[Philip Goff]: But with consciousness,
[Philip Goff]: we have some understanding of what it is.
[Philip Goff]: And indeed, we have understanding that you couldn't get from experiments.
[Philip Goff]: So, for example, if we have a blind from birth neuroscientist, no matter what they learn about the physical processes associated with color experience,
[Philip Goff]: That blind from birth neuroscientist is never going to know what it's like to see red, the qualitative character of a red experience.
[Philip Goff]: So there's information about consciousness you can only get from the inside.
[Philip Goff]: So here's how you should think of the problem of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: It's not just, oh, we want science to tell us what's going on.
[Philip Goff]: It's rather that we have two ways of knowing about reality.
[Philip Goff]: And it's a philosophical question how these two things fit together.
[Steve Paulson]: So I want to come back to you.
[Steve Paulson]: So why did you get so interested in this?
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, obviously you are fascinated by this question of consciousness.
[Steve Paulson]: I mean, the paradox, what is it?
[Steve Paulson]: Is it strictly an intellectual question?
[Steve Paulson]: How did you get here?
[Philip Goff]: As far back as I can remember, I've always been obsessed, captivated by how the different stories we tell about reality fit together.
[Philip Goff]: I was raised Catholic, and I remember hearing a church about Adam and Eve.
[Philip Goff]: And then I was also obsessed with Big Bang and black holes.
[Philip Goff]: And I was like, how do these two creation stories fit together?
[Philip Goff]: The Big Bang story and the story of Adam and Eve.
[Philip Goff]: There's the story we get from science.
[Philip Goff]: But there's also the story of morality, good and bad, right and wrong.
[Philip Goff]: There's the story about free agency, our choices, responsibility.
[Philip Goff]: There's the story about the mind, consciousness, belief, desires, passions, hopes, dreams.
[Philip Goff]: There's a story also about abstract objects, numbers, functions, sets that my colleagues in the mathematics department talk about.
[Philip Goff]: How on earth do all these different stories fit together?
[Philip Goff]: Is one of them the fundamental one?
[Philip Goff]: Maybe the scientific one?
[Philip Goff]: Or are there lots of different stories that somehow interact with each other?
[Philip Goff]: Consciousness, though, I think is the most interesting part.
[Philip Goff]: Because it's so hard to deny it's real, but it's also so hard to fit it in to our standard scientific story of the universe, and that's why it's always captivated me.
[Steve Paulson]: You said you grew up Catholic, is that right?
[Steve Paulson]: Yes.
[Steve Paulson]: And so it would seem, intuitively, that if you embrace panpsychism as sort of a framework for understanding reality, that fits more neatly with religious belief or belief in some sort of...
[Steve Paulson]: ultimate reality and some sort of presence that goes beyond our individual brains.
[Steve Paulson]: Is that fair to say?
[Philip Goff]: Actually, there's a bit of a divide in the panpsychist research community over this.
[Philip Goff]: Some philosophers, and I guess I'm more in this camp, see a certain consonance with certain spiritual convictions and panpsychism.
[Philip Goff]: I think if you're a panpsychist,
[Philip Goff]: it's easier to take seriously certain kinds of mystical experience.
[Philip Goff]: For example, people have mystical experiences in which they seem to be in direct contact with ultimate reality.
[Philip Goff]: I think if you're a physicalist, that's very hard to make sense of because for a physicalist, ultimate reality is the kinds of things science talks about, particles and fields, and you have to do science to find out about them.
[Philip Goff]: But if you're a panpsychist and you think ultimate reality is made of consciousness and we are conscious and we have direct access to our consciousness, it's maybe a little bit easier to take seriously that in certain states of mind, we might be directly in touch with ultimate reality.
[Philip Goff]: So certainly panpsychism doesn't entail anything spiritual, but it's less of a leap, maybe, to get from panpsychism to something spiritual.
[Philip Goff]: However, other panpsychists think, no, no, this is all superstitious nonsense.
[Philip Goff]: We don't believe in any sort of transcendent spiritual reality.
[Philip Goff]: We're just trying to make sense of mundane consciousness, feeling pain, seeing colour, and we just need a kind of new scientific paradigm to make sense of that.
[Steve Paulson]: But it's interesting you say that because it sounds like you're saying that by coming around to this view, I mean, this intellectual view of the nature of consciousness, that it goes all the way down, this is what is real, that is comforting in some way.
[Steve Paulson]: And I don't want to just say this is a new religion, but it sounds like it gives you personally some comfort or solace, something like that.
[Philip Goff]: In a way, we go back to where we started.
[Philip Goff]: I think philosophy is all about fitting together the different stories one tells about reality, the different things we take ourselves to know.
[Philip Goff]: Well, quite recently, I have come to some kind of religious faith.
[Philip Goff]: I self-identify as a heretical Christian.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, this is really the new book I'm working to now, tentatively titled Heresy, is, yes, exploring whether it is rational to trust a mystical experience.
[Philip Goff]: When people have a mystical experience, certain things seem to them to be true.
[Philip Goff]: Perhaps it seems to them that they are in contact with ultimate reality.
[Philip Goff]: Perhaps it even seems to them that they are, in some sense, one with or unified with ultimate reality.
[Philip Goff]: Now, we could just enjoy those experiences and see what benefits come from them.
[Philip Goff]: But as a philosopher, I want to ask, well, is it rational to trust that seeming?
[Philip Goff]: To believe on the basis of the mystical experience that things really are as they seem to be?
[Philip Goff]: And I guess I would like to argue that if you're a physicalist...
[Philip Goff]: No, you should think this is a delusion.
[Philip Goff]: If you have a mystical experience and you're Daniel Dennett, you should think it was something funny going on in your brain, like hallucinating you're riding on a dragon or something, because it just doesn't fit with your worldview.
[Philip Goff]: But if I'm a panpsychist who has a mystical experience,
[Philip Goff]: I think there's nothing in my worldview to rule that out or to really cast doubt on it.
[Philip Goff]: So as a panpsychist, it's open to me to trust what that experience seems to be telling me about reality and to maybe form the basis of a spirituality on that foundation.
[Steve Paulson]: So I have to come back to how you identified yourself spiritually as a, what did you say, heretical Christian?
[Steve Paulson]: Yes.
[Steve Paulson]: Do you want to explain what that means?
[Philip Goff]: I found my spiritual home in the combination of the mysticism of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the liberal flexibility of the Anglican Church.
[Philip Goff]: So the core of Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox Church is nothing to do with religion.
[Philip Goff]: Jesus being punished for our sins, you know, that idea, people might be surprised to know, really came out of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago.
[Philip Goff]: It's not something that goes all the way back to the start of Christianity.
[Philip Goff]: And that is no part of how the Eastern Church thinks about things.
[Philip Goff]: For them, the core of it is, it's all about God and the universe becoming one together.
[Philip Goff]: They think God shared in our form of existence so that we can share in God's form of existence.
[Philip Goff]: They even say we are becoming gods, maybe with a small g. So we won't actually become God, we won't become identical with God, but they think what it is like to be us will be exactly the same as what it is like to be God.
[Philip Goff]: We will fully share in God's form of existence.
[Philip Goff]: So that idea at the core of the Eastern Orthodox Church very much resonates with me.
[Philip Goff]: On the other hand, I don't agree with everything the Eastern Orthodox Church thinks.
[Philip Goff]: I don't like that they don't have women priests.
[Philip Goff]: Strictly speaking, I think they take gay sex to be sinful, which I think is manifestly false and harmful.
[Philip Goff]: For that reason, I choose to be part of the Anglican Church.
[Philip Goff]: There's more, in general, more flexibility in how you interpret Christianity.
[Philip Goff]: So that's really the core of my faith.
[Philip Goff]: I'm a practicing Anglican, but the core of my faith is how Eastern Orthodox Christianity understands the heart of its religion.
[Steve Paulson]: So one thing that's striking to me is that this idea of panpsychism has kind of filtered into popular culture.
[Steve Paulson]: And there are a few notable figures out there who have embraced these ideas.
[Steve Paulson]: One is Philip Pullman, your British compatriot, author of His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass, and all those books.
[Steve Paulson]: And he's come out and kind of cited your work, right?
[Philip Goff]: Yeah, we've had a couple of public conversations and I've learned so much talking to Philip Pullman and I guess he's someone who's always been influenced by contemporary science and philosophy, ideas of the multiverse as well as ideas of panpsychism.
[Philip Goff]: So I think the panpsychist element has always been there.
[Philip Goff]: But then I think since we've had our conversations and then the more recent final three volumes in the His Dark Material series have deepened the panpsychism.
[Philip Goff]: And yes, Philip Pullman has kindly credited me for helping influence some of those ideas.
[Philip Goff]: But he's influenced me as well.
[Philip Goff]: He said to me,
[Philip Goff]: That we should think of panpsychism as very Copernican.
[Philip Goff]: That we don't think of our consciousness, human consciousness, as the sort of prototype, the model of what consciousness is.
[Philip Goff]: Our consciousness is something a bit weird, really.
[Philip Goff]: It's resulted from millions of years of evolution.
[Philip Goff]: Our consciousness is just some highly developed form of what exists throughout the universe in very simple forms.
[Steve Paulson]: So I want to bring the notion of wonder in here, because the podcast that Anne and I do is called Wonder Cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: And it seems like kind of what you're talking about, it seems pretty wondrous to me.
[Steve Paulson]: Of course, we're playing off of the idea of the old cabinet of wonders from a few centuries ago.
[Steve Paulson]: And as an imaginative exercise, if you wanted to put something in an imaginary wonder cabinet, it could be an experience, it could be an idea, it could be a thought experiment, it could be anything in your imaginary wonder cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: What would you want to put in it?
[Philip Goff]: I guess as a philosopher, I'm quite boring and I come back to certain classic figures in Western philosophy.
[Philip Goff]: I think Plato got onto something correct with his idea that
[Philip Goff]: What we know through reason, about mathematics, logic, morality, is real.
[Philip Goff]: It's in some sense as real as the physical universe we can touch and see.
[Philip Goff]: And we have to somehow make sense of that.
[Philip Goff]: I'm not sure he got it completely right, but it's somehow real.
[Philip Goff]: ancient rationalism and of course he expressed this so well with his allegory of the cave.
[Philip Goff]: My wife Emma illustrates my books and she's done a wonderful illustration of Plato's cave for my forthcoming book Heresy.
[Philip Goff]: I hadn't realised, because there's so much going on in this story, it's quite hard to portray it all in one image, but the climax of the story, the philosopher comes out of the cave where everyone else is tied up, staring at shadows on the wall, and comes out into the bright sunshine outside and sees...
[Philip Goff]: upfront things in the real world, this wonderful way of representing philosophical enlightenment.
[Philip Goff]: So maybe Plato's cave and all it represents would go in my wonder cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: That was my first conversation with Philip Goff.
[Steve Paulson]: But then something very surprising happened that led to another follow-up conversation.
[Steve Paulson]: We'll be back with that right after the break.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Hi, it's Anne.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I am so glad you're joining us.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm really excited about them.
[Anne Strainchamps]: And here's a tip.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Maybe you know this already, but if you follow Wonder Cabinet on Apple Podcasts, those new episodes will show up automatically, like a little weekly gift in your podcast feed.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I hope you like it.
[Steve Paulson]: This is Wonder Cabinet.
[Steve Paulson]: I'm Steve Paulson.
[Steve Paulson]: After the conversation you just heard, I discovered that shortly after we spoke, Philip had a profound mystical experience induced by a powerful psychedelic.
[Steve Paulson]: I was really curious to know whether it confirmed or changed any of his views on panpsychism.
[Steve Paulson]: So a couple of months later, I called him at his home in Durham, England.
[Steve Paulson]: So, Philip, it is great to talk with you again.
[Steve Paulson]: And since the last time we talked, you did something quite surprising.
[Steve Paulson]: You took 5-MeO-DMT, which is this very powerful psychedelic.
[Steve Paulson]: Why did you want to have this experience?
[Philip Goff]: Well, it's an interesting substance maybe to go for if you're a truth-seeking philosopher because it is, in a sense, a very pure ego dissolution experience.
[Philip Goff]: There's nothing...
[Philip Goff]: There are no visuals.
[Philip Goff]: You don't meet elves.
[Philip Goff]: It doesn't connect with repressed memories or anything.
[Philip Goff]: It is just kind of pure, instant ego dissolution.
[Philip Goff]: And then it's very brief.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, from the outside, it lasts 10 minutes.
[Philip Goff]: It's a bit difficult to describe the time on the inside, as we'll maybe get into.
[Philip Goff]: Although, I mean, just having said that, it sounds like a recommendation.
[Philip Goff]: I would just like to say...
[Philip Goff]: I would strongly recommend people in a way not to do this or just be very, very bloody, very careful.
[Philip Goff]: I was able to do it in very controlled circumstances under the supervision of a professional therapist.
[Philip Goff]: But I think it's not emphasized enough.
[Philip Goff]: that there are dangers to psychedelics.
[Philip Goff]: They're not generally thought to be physically dangerous or addictive.
[Philip Goff]: And so it's wild that they're connected with sort of heroin or something.
[Philip Goff]: But they are psychologically dangerous.
[Philip Goff]: They do tear apart our ordinary ways of thinking.
[Philip Goff]: And those ordinary ways of thinking are often important for psychological stability.
[Steve Paulson]: So there are dangers.
[Steve Paulson]: So had you ever had a psychedelic experience before this?
[Philip Goff]: When I was a teenager, I did, kind of wild teenager, I took some psychedelics, some mushrooms, some LSD, and had some, yeah, some kind of mind-expanding experiences in some ways, some very bad trips, some very scary trips.
[Philip Goff]: But nothing quite like this, I don't think.
[Philip Goff]: It is something very different.
[Steve Paulson]: So what happened?
[Steve Paulson]: Can you walk me through what the experience was like?
[Philip Goff]: So I can tell you how things seemed.
[Philip Goff]: It seemed like I was instantly and completely annihilated.
[Philip Goff]: Philip Goff was wiped from existence.
[Philip Goff]: And what remained was an indescribable form of consciousness, one that was beyond space, beyond time, and that somehow belonged to nobody.
[Steve Paulson]: You had no sense of yourself anymore at that point.
[Philip Goff]: Yeah, it felt like being killed.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, interestingly, it didn't feel to me like I was seeing that the self was an illusion.
[Philip Goff]: It felt like there is a self, but it was being destroyed.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, here's a metaphor I came up with afterwards that's not perfect, but maybe captures something of this.
[Philip Goff]: Imagine my mind is a light bulb wrapped in cotton wool.
[Philip Goff]: And then the cotton wool is what's particular to me, Philip Goff, you know, and you've got your cotton wool and each person has their own particular cotton wool.
[Philip Goff]: Whereas the light bulb is this...
[Philip Goff]: timeless, spaceless form of consciousness at the core of our being that doesn't belong to anybody.
[Philip Goff]: And then what it felt like was very quickly, the cotton wool, what it is that's particular to me was ripped away.
[Philip Goff]: And this pure consciousness just kind of shines out.
[Steve Paulson]: So you said that you said this was terrifying.
[Steve Paulson]: It sounds also amazing.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Philip Goff]: In a sense, it was both.
[Philip Goff]: And, you know, as I say, what's nice about it is it is a very uniform experience.
[Philip Goff]: You can read Michael Pollan talking about his experience of it, the journalist, or the famous neuroscientist Christof Koch recently did this and has written about it, or Joe Rogan on YouTube.
[Philip Goff]: And it's very uniform.
[Philip Goff]: And it is pretty uniformly absolutely terrifying.
[Philip Goff]: Partly, it feels like you're being killed, okay?
[Philip Goff]: So that's not nice.
[Philip Goff]: And this form of consciousness is so overwhelming.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, I would describe it as sort of a raging storm.
[Philip Goff]: Maybe you kind of need some Old Testament language of kind of fear and trembling at beholding the divine or something.
[Philip Goff]: Actually, when I read Michael Pollan's description, I read this after my own experience, but it was almost like Michael Pollan didn't know what to do with this experience.
[Philip Goff]: It's like, oh, it's not very nice.
[Philip Goff]: Where are the elves?
[Philip Goff]: I don't know.
[Philip Goff]: So maybe the psychedelic friendly crowd that, you know, I quite like,
[Philip Goff]: Maybe they need to rediscover some kind of Old Testament vocabulary for this particular experience.
[Steve Paulson]: So the last time we talked, when we talked in Tuscany, you said at the very beginning of our conversation, I'm quoting here, I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality.
[Steve Paulson]: Did this experience get you any closer to understanding reality?
[Philip Goff]: I would say yes.
[Philip Goff]: I believe this has given me direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality.
[Philip Goff]: I don't believe this was a hallucination.
[Philip Goff]: We can maybe discuss why I think that.
[Steve Paulson]: Well, let's talk about that right now.
[Steve Paulson]: Why?
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah, that is the obvious, you know, the other explanation is, you know, this is...
[Steve Paulson]: the mind on drugs, on a very powerful hallucinogen, and you can feel totally transported, but you just jumbled up the neurochemistry in your brain, and this is what happens.
[Steve Paulson]: Why do you think that's not a good explanation?
[Philip Goff]: I like to come back to what the great William James says at the end of his famous discussion of mystical experiences in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
[Philip Goff]: So most of that is a sort of psychological study of different kinds of mystical experiences.
[Philip Goff]: But then he says, well, would it be rational for someone having a mystical experience to accept it as real, that things really are as they seem to be?
[Philip Goff]: And he gives an interesting answer.
[Philip Goff]: He says, well, if you say no, you have to say it's a hallucination.
[Philip Goff]: There seems to be a sort of double standard because we all think it's,
[Philip Goff]: rational to trust ordinary sensory experiences, but they could be delusions too, right?
[Philip Goff]: If you study a bit of philosophy, you realize we could be in the matrix.
[Philip Goff]: This could all be a delusion created in us by the evil computers.
[Philip Goff]: You can never get outside of your consciousness to check whether it's corresponding to reality.
[Philip Goff]: But we think it's okay to just trust that ordinary experiences are connecting us to reality.
[Philip Goff]: You wouldn't be able to get science doing unless you could make that commitment, that choice.
[Philip Goff]: So if it's okay in the case of ordinary experience, why is it not okay...
[Philip Goff]: for the mystic to trust how things seem to be in their experience.
[Philip Goff]: Okay, it could be a delusion, but all experiences could be a delusion.
[Philip Goff]: I can't see what justifies that double standard.
[Philip Goff]: If it's rational for me to trust ordinary experience...
[Philip Goff]: You know, I'm not saying with certainty, but if it's rational for me to trust ordinary experience, it seems to me rational for me to trust that experience too.
[Steve Paulson]: And so, you were saying that you think this experience got you closer to, well, for want of a better word, ultimate reality or, you know, some deeper truth?
[Philip Goff]: What I experienced was a form of consciousness.
[Philip Goff]: It was a form of consciousness that was timeless, was spaceless.
[Philip Goff]: And the other characteristic, I would say, is that this was a region of reality in which there was no differentiation at all.
[Philip Goff]: There was no distinction between I and other, this and that.
[Philip Goff]: I mean, that was the sense really in which I wasn't there.
[Philip Goff]: This was a form of consciousness that...
[Philip Goff]: didn't belong to anybody.
[Philip Goff]: So I mean, I don't know, either we say I wasn't there, or maybe I was everywhere or something.
[Philip Goff]: So I am inclined to think this was what philosophers call veridical, that just means not a hallucination, a genuine insight into reality.
[Philip Goff]: And so I'm inclined to think there is this undifferentiated, timeless, spaceless form of consciousness underlying all things at the foundation of my mind, at the foundation of everything.
[Steve Paulson]: So you have spent years talking, writing, studying about panpsychism, you know, this philosophy that sort of says that consciousness is in pretty much everything, you know, going down to the level of electrons.
[Steve Paulson]: Did this change your thinking at all about it?
[Steve Paulson]: Did it challenge that view?
[Steve Paulson]: Did it affirm it in any way?
[Philip Goff]: Interestingly, I would say it was very consistent with the panpsychist view.
[Philip Goff]: And maybe that's why it was easy for me to not think of it as a hallucination.
[Philip Goff]: Maybe if Daniel Dennett
[Philip Goff]: had this same experience.
[Philip Goff]: If Daniel Dennett had smoked some toad venom and he had this experience, he would have reason to think he's hallucinating because it clashes with what he already takes himself to know.
[Steve Paulson]: He takes himself to know.
[Steve Paulson]: The hard physicalist or materialist who doesn't think there's anything that's beyond the brain in terms of conscious experience.
[Steve Paulson]: It's all just generated by the brain.
[Philip Goff]: But for me...
[Philip Goff]: As you say, I already believe there is consciousness at the fundamental level of reality.
[Philip Goff]: All this does is tell me a little bit more about what that consciousness is like.
[Steve Paulson]: Yeah.
[Steve Paulson]: So, Philip, one final question before I let you go.
[Steve Paulson]: At the very end of our last conversation, you talked about how much you liked reality.
[Steve Paulson]: plato's allegory of the cave it's as if we're all sort of chained inside the cave prisoners there and we mistake the shadows that we see for for reality but then someone gets out of the cave and you know suddenly sees the real thing do you feel like you escaped the cave if only for a brief time during this experience
[Philip Goff]: Wow, what a great question.
[Philip Goff]: Do you know, I haven't thought of it in those terms.
[Philip Goff]: I haven't connected my experience to Plato's cave.
[Philip Goff]: I do believe I experienced a deeper reality, something more real, more fundamental than the world of ordinary experience.
[Philip Goff]: Whether what I experienced is ultimate reality or not is a further question.
[Philip Goff]: Maybe what I should say is I experienced the world outside the cave, but not quite the form of the good.
[Philip Goff]: In Plato's analogy, the sun outside of the cave is the form of the good that gives life and energy to the living things outside the cave.
[Philip Goff]: And for me, that deeper part of divine reality is beyond what I experienced.
[Philip Goff]: But yeah, I definitely think I got closer to ultimate reality.
[Steve Paulson]: Okay.
[Steve Paulson]: I think that's a great place to leave it.
[Steve Paulson]: And we're going to go from the profound to the mundane, because I know you've got some kids to feed.
[Steve Paulson]: And it's dinner time where you are now.
[Philip Goff]: Absolutely.
[Philip Goff]: Although that's another part of the wonder of life that, you know, I do think the ordinary world is real and so full of value as well.
[Philip Goff]: Thanks, Steve.
[Steve Paulson]: Thank you so much, Philip.
[Steve Paulson]: That's Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University and the author of a number of books including Galileo's Error, Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, and Why the Purpose of the Universe.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Philip joined us at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, where scientists and philosophers come together to talk about some of the big ideas of our time.
[Anne Strainchamps]: We'll bring you more of those conversations in the coming months.
[Steve Paulson]: Support for Wonder Cabinet's Island of Knowledge episodes comes from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Wonder Cabinet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont.
[Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps.
[Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson.
[Steve Paulson]: We'd love to hear from you.
[Steve Paulson]: Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there.
[Anne Strainchamps]: Be well.
[Anne Strainchamps]: See you next time.