1 00:00:00,600 --> 00:00:02,121 [Anne Strainchamps]: Welcome to Wonder Cabinet. 2 00:00:03,841 --> 00:00:04,801 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps. 3 00:00:05,142 --> 00:00:06,062 [Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson. 4 00:00:06,542 --> 00:00:15,445 [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. 5 00:00:15,785 --> 00:00:23,508 [Steve Paulson]: Children with soul companions who take the form of animals and religious authorities who think free will is evidence of original sin. 6 00:00:24,067 --> 00:00:36,875 [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. 7 00:00:37,535 --> 00:00:53,345 [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. 8 00:00:54,358 --> 00:00:57,481 [Lord Asriel]: What is the most important question we can ask? 9 00:00:59,542 --> 00:01:00,783 [Lyra]: Where dust comes from. 10 00:01:02,445 --> 00:01:03,105 [Asriel]: There you are. 11 00:01:04,126 --> 00:01:07,709 [Asriel]: You've seen dust pouring into this world from the Aurora. 12 00:01:08,570 --> 00:01:17,698 [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. 13 00:01:18,517 --> 00:01:19,660 [Lyra]: Across multiple worlds. 14 00:01:19,720 --> 00:01:20,141 [Asriel]: Why not? 15 00:01:20,481 --> 00:01:21,444 [Asriel]: Let's go to the source. 16 00:01:21,484 --> 00:01:23,007 [Asriel]: Let's ask what dust is. 17 00:01:23,027 --> 00:01:24,570 [Asriel]: How do you like the sound of that? 18 00:01:25,492 --> 00:01:31,415 [Anne Strainchamps]: That's a clip from the HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman's classic fantasy series, His Dark Materials. 19 00:01:32,076 --> 00:01:36,738 [Anne Strainchamps]: And no, the universe is not made of dust, but could it be made of consciousness? 20 00:01:37,199 --> 00:01:47,865 [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. 21 00:01:48,405 --> 00:01:52,047 [Steve Paulson]: That's what he told me when we talked a few years ago on our old show, TT Book. 22 00:01:52,673 --> 00:01:57,097 [Philip Pullman]: Science is a good servant but a bad master in the old phrase. 23 00:01:57,697 --> 00:02:03,783 [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. 24 00:02:04,543 --> 00:02:09,167 [Philip Pullman]: And what's there are the things that you can't measure, you can't be numerical about. 25 00:02:09,548 --> 00:02:10,428 [Steve Paulson]: Like consciousness. 26 00:02:11,569 --> 00:02:14,191 [Philip Pullman]: What panpsychism does, and this is what I like about it, 27 00:02:15,120 --> 00:02:19,524 [Philip Pullman]: is to suggest that consciousness is a normal property of matter. 28 00:02:20,044 --> 00:02:20,885 [Philip Pullman]: Everything is conscious. 29 00:02:21,345 --> 00:02:27,731 [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. 30 00:02:28,611 --> 00:02:35,617 [Philip Pullman]: No, but consciousness is something that pervades everything, although many philosophers find this hard to accept. 31 00:02:36,538 --> 00:02:38,158 [Philip Pullman]: Poets don't find it hard to accept. 32 00:02:38,419 --> 00:02:43,760 [Philip Pullman]: William Blake, the great Romantic English poet, was a panpsychist, I think, before the word existed. 33 00:02:44,360 --> 00:02:48,441 [Philip Pullman]: I mean, he talks of every particle of dust breathing forth its joy. 34 00:02:49,382 --> 00:02:56,564 [Philip Pullman]: So the notion of the world is alive, the world is conscious, is something that I find very convincing, very persuasive. 35 00:02:57,024 --> 00:03:05,106 [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. 36 00:03:05,526 --> 00:03:11,854 [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. 37 00:03:12,334 --> 00:03:17,180 [Philip Pullman]: Well, we're discovering now, to our great cost, that it's not all dead and it does matter. 38 00:03:17,681 --> 00:03:23,228 [Philip Pullman]: Again, the idea of a Gaia, you know, the Gaia hypothesis, taps into the same feeling, I think. 39 00:03:23,590 --> 00:03:31,353 [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. 40 00:03:31,993 --> 00:03:36,495 [Steve Paulson]: Let me just make sure everything sounds okay. 41 00:03:36,915 --> 00:03:39,156 [Philip Goff]: Hello, looking forward to having a little chat today. 42 00:03:39,176 --> 00:03:40,616 [Philip Goff]: My name is Philip Goff. 43 00:03:40,736 --> 00:03:44,758 [Philip Goff]: I'm a philosophy professor at Durham University in the north of England. 44 00:03:45,283 --> 00:03:49,788 [Philip Goff]: I spend most of my time trying to work out the ultimate nature of reality. 45 00:03:50,449 --> 00:03:51,550 [Steve Paulson]: Okay, well, that's simple. 46 00:03:53,172 --> 00:03:54,833 [Steve Paulson]: That's a good place to start. 47 00:03:55,394 --> 00:04:01,240 [Anne Strainchamps]: We're back at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany at a session on rational mysticism. 48 00:04:01,761 --> 00:04:07,707 [Anne Strainchamps]: The rest of us are eating lunch, but Steve and Philip Goff have snuck off to chat about panpsychism. 49 00:04:08,218 --> 00:04:13,562 [Philip Goff]: You could think of panpsychism as continuing a trend that's been going on for some time now. 50 00:04:13,582 --> 00:04:22,429 [Philip Goff]: At the start of the Scientific Revolution, we thought that we were the only conscious ones and animals were unfeeling mechanisms. 51 00:04:23,670 --> 00:04:31,716 [Philip Goff]: And then over time, we've attributed consciousness to more and more of the natural world, starting with higher primates, other mammals. 52 00:04:32,597 --> 00:04:35,038 [Philip Goff]: Only fairly recently, birds and fish 53 00:04:35,959 --> 00:04:45,847 [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. 54 00:04:46,687 --> 00:05:00,377 [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. 55 00:05:01,178 --> 00:05:02,299 [Philip Goff]: that make up that life. 56 00:05:02,499 --> 00:05:06,804 [Philip Goff]: So for panpsychists, we are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. 57 00:05:07,224 --> 00:05:17,254 [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. 58 00:05:17,734 --> 00:05:22,136 [Steve Paulson]: And we at least tend to draw the line between animate and inanimate matter. 59 00:05:22,336 --> 00:05:27,058 [Steve Paulson]: And it's the non-life that most people assume that can't possibly be conscious. 60 00:05:27,578 --> 00:05:29,739 [Steve Paulson]: Why extend it so far down? 61 00:05:29,859 --> 00:05:32,060 [Steve Paulson]: I'm not sure if down is the right direction here, but... 62 00:05:32,883 --> 00:05:42,356 [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. 63 00:05:42,576 --> 00:05:49,926 [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. 64 00:05:51,027 --> 00:05:59,932 [Philip Goff]: Actually, the panpsychist claim is that at the base of reality, all there is is consciousness of very simple forms. 65 00:06:00,933 --> 00:06:08,977 [Philip Goff]: And that what we call physical reality emerges from that more fundamental story of very simple forms of consciousness. 66 00:06:09,178 --> 00:06:12,259 [Philip Goff]: So in a way, it's turning the problem of consciousness upside down. 67 00:06:12,780 --> 00:06:20,164 [Philip Goff]: The normal way we think about this is, you know, we start with what physical science talks about, physics, chemistry, neuroscience. 68 00:06:20,464 --> 00:06:22,105 [Philip Goff]: And then try and get consciousness out of that. 69 00:06:22,885 --> 00:06:24,585 [Philip Goff]: That hasn't been going incredibly well. 70 00:06:25,226 --> 00:06:26,206 [Philip Goff]: It's sort of gone nowhere. 71 00:06:26,306 --> 00:06:27,987 [Steve Paulson]: It's gone nowhere. 72 00:06:28,067 --> 00:06:28,647 [Steve Paulson]: For years. 73 00:06:28,687 --> 00:06:37,850 [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. 74 00:06:37,990 --> 00:06:38,471 [Philip Goff]: That's right. 75 00:06:38,511 --> 00:06:45,697 [Philip Goff]: We've learned more about which kinds of brain activity go along with which kinds of conscious experience. 76 00:06:45,717 --> 00:06:51,563 [Philip Goff]: That question of correlation, although even there, there's very little consensus and lots of disagreement. 77 00:06:52,203 --> 00:07:00,271 [Philip Goff]: But how do patterns of neural firings generate a feeling, an experience, a first-person perspective? 78 00:07:00,531 --> 00:07:01,772 [Philip Goff]: I think most people agree that 79 00:07:02,713 --> 00:07:05,876 [Philip Goff]: we haven't really got even the beginnings of an explanation of that. 80 00:07:05,996 --> 00:07:07,778 [Philip Goff]: So the panpsychists turn it upside down. 81 00:07:08,518 --> 00:07:20,730 [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. 82 00:07:21,110 --> 00:07:22,971 [Philip Goff]: that's a bit easier to do, surprisingly. 83 00:07:23,411 --> 00:07:28,393 [Steve Paulson]: So when you talk about consciousness, you're talking about subjective feeling, you're talking about awareness? 84 00:07:28,873 --> 00:07:31,314 [Steve Paulson]: This is where it seems to defy common sense. 85 00:07:31,334 --> 00:07:35,856 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, you say consciousness goes down to atoms, to subatomic particles. 86 00:07:36,497 --> 00:07:37,137 [Steve Paulson]: They have feelings? 87 00:07:38,591 --> 00:07:39,732 [Philip Goff]: Yeah, so it's important. 88 00:07:40,552 --> 00:07:49,916 [Philip Goff]: When people think of consciousness, they sometimes think of something very cognitively sophisticated, like self-consciousness, awareness of your own existence. 89 00:07:49,957 --> 00:07:58,481 [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. 90 00:07:59,421 --> 00:08:03,622 [Philip Goff]: As you say, what we're talking about is just subjective experience. 91 00:08:03,822 --> 00:08:06,463 [Philip Goff]: Your consciousness is what it's like to be you. 92 00:08:07,143 --> 00:08:14,904 [Philip Goff]: So feeling tired, seeing colour, hearing sound, these are all parts of what it's like to be you. 93 00:08:14,984 --> 00:08:21,526 [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. 94 00:08:22,730 --> 00:08:24,811 [Philip Goff]: But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes. 95 00:08:24,831 --> 00:08:27,212 [Philip Goff]: What it's like to be a sheep is much simpler. 96 00:08:27,812 --> 00:08:30,833 [Philip Goff]: What it's like to be a snail, simpler still. 97 00:08:31,753 --> 00:08:33,574 [Philip Goff]: Is there something that it's like to be a bed bug? 98 00:08:34,034 --> 00:08:37,575 [Philip Goff]: If so, it's much, much, almost unimaginably simpler. 99 00:08:38,116 --> 00:08:44,278 [Philip Goff]: So there doesn't seem to be any conceptual limit to how simple subjective experience can be. 100 00:08:44,478 --> 00:08:46,639 [Steve Paulson]: Well, except for when you get beyond the animal realm. 101 00:08:46,679 --> 00:08:50,340 [Steve Paulson]: Then conceptually, it seems like there might be some limits there. 102 00:08:50,859 --> 00:08:52,042 [Philip Goff]: So there's two questions. 103 00:08:52,423 --> 00:08:54,507 [Philip Goff]: One question is, is this a plausible view? 104 00:08:54,567 --> 00:08:55,549 [Philip Goff]: Is it ridiculous? 105 00:08:55,609 --> 00:08:57,192 [Philip Goff]: Is it something we should be taking seriously? 106 00:08:57,733 --> 00:08:59,457 [Philip Goff]: Put that on one side for a moment. 107 00:08:59,978 --> 00:09:01,401 [Philip Goff]: But is it coherent? 108 00:09:02,544 --> 00:09:03,325 [Philip Goff]: I would say yes. 109 00:09:03,365 --> 00:09:13,396 [Philip Goff]: I don't think there's any contradiction in the idea that an electron has some very, very simple form of experience. 110 00:09:13,416 --> 00:09:15,318 [Philip Goff]: There's something that it's like to be an electron. 111 00:09:15,999 --> 00:09:19,303 [Philip Goff]: Very simple corresponding to its very simple physical nature. 112 00:09:19,963 --> 00:09:21,225 [Steve Paulson]: What about machines? 113 00:09:21,325 --> 00:09:23,527 [Steve Paulson]: And then, of course, the other question is what about AI? 114 00:09:24,360 --> 00:09:27,182 [Philip Goff]: Yeah, so it's an open question for a panpsychist. 115 00:09:27,422 --> 00:09:31,124 [Philip Goff]: They don't necessarily think tables and chairs are conscious. 116 00:09:31,144 --> 00:09:41,511 [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. 117 00:09:41,551 --> 00:09:42,732 [Philip Goff]: In fact, it probably doesn't. 118 00:09:43,372 --> 00:09:50,497 [Philip Goff]: Panpsychists are probably more likely to think consciousness is biological rather than computational. 119 00:09:50,717 --> 00:09:52,818 [Philip Goff]: This is the big debate at the present moment. 120 00:09:53,318 --> 00:09:58,762 [Philip Goff]: But as a panpsychist, consciousness isn't about abstract information processing. 121 00:09:58,822 --> 00:10:01,564 [Philip Goff]: It's the flesh and blood of the world. 122 00:10:01,984 --> 00:10:03,525 [Philip Goff]: So you're less likely to think... 123 00:10:04,728 --> 00:10:08,649 [Philip Goff]: large language models are conscious or anything remotely like that. 124 00:10:09,349 --> 00:10:16,870 [Philip Goff]: At the same time, panpsychists don't think consciousness is magical, supernatural, added by God at the moment of conception or something. 125 00:10:17,311 --> 00:10:28,553 [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, 126 00:10:29,473 --> 00:10:33,055 [Philip Goff]: maybe in 5,000 years something with the complexity of a human being. 127 00:10:33,996 --> 00:10:41,220 [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. 128 00:10:41,300 --> 00:10:47,143 [Steve Paulson]: And really, as you say, over the last 10 or 15 years, I mean, there has been talk about panpsychism for centuries. 129 00:10:47,243 --> 00:10:49,865 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, this is, it's not a new idea, it goes way back. 130 00:10:50,525 --> 00:10:56,088 [Steve Paulson]: But for whatever reason, it's kind of taken off in the last decade or so. 131 00:10:56,208 --> 00:11:04,391 [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. 132 00:11:04,431 --> 00:11:05,072 [Steve Paulson]: So why? 133 00:11:05,132 --> 00:11:05,932 [Steve Paulson]: What has changed? 134 00:11:07,901 --> 00:11:10,043 [Philip Goff]: I guess maybe there's two sources. 135 00:11:10,583 --> 00:11:20,152 [Philip Goff]: In science, there is the integrated information theory, which is one prominent contender for the scientific theory of consciousness. 136 00:11:20,232 --> 00:11:23,955 [Philip Goff]: As I say, there's lots of disagreement there, but it's one contender. 137 00:11:24,396 --> 00:11:26,838 [Steve Paulson]: You have to very briefly explain what that theory is. 138 00:11:26,858 --> 00:11:31,181 [Philip Goff]: And the integrated information theory, very roughly, the claim is that 139 00:11:31,922 --> 00:11:39,968 [Philip Goff]: When a system has more integrated information in the whole than in any of the parts, you get consciousness. 140 00:11:40,529 --> 00:11:42,510 [Philip Goff]: Now, what is integrated information? 141 00:11:42,530 --> 00:11:57,382 [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. 142 00:11:57,502 --> 00:12:00,604 [Philip Goff]: So there's at least an affinity here with panpsychism. 143 00:12:01,425 --> 00:12:10,091 [Philip Goff]: In the philosophical context, it's really the rediscovery of certain important work in the 1920s by Bertrand Russell. 144 00:12:11,132 --> 00:12:20,038 [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. 145 00:12:21,554 --> 00:12:24,596 [Philip Goff]: I remember when I first heard that, I thought, that's ridiculous, what are you talking about? 146 00:12:24,636 --> 00:12:30,138 [Philip Goff]: We read a book of cosmology, we learn this wonderful story about space and time and matter. 147 00:12:31,099 --> 00:12:37,502 [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. 148 00:12:37,802 --> 00:12:38,162 [Philip Goff]: does. 149 00:12:38,903 --> 00:12:39,484 [Philip Goff]: Not what it is. 150 00:12:39,604 --> 00:12:42,106 [Philip Goff]: Not what it is, exactly what it does. 151 00:12:42,747 --> 00:12:44,468 [Philip Goff]: What does physics tell us about an electron? 152 00:12:44,528 --> 00:12:46,850 [Philip Goff]: It tells us it has mass and charge. 153 00:12:47,351 --> 00:12:54,197 [Philip Goff]: And these properties are completely characterized in terms of things like attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration. 154 00:12:54,477 --> 00:12:56,499 [Philip Goff]: It's all about what stuff does. 155 00:12:57,654 --> 00:13:01,778 [Philip Goff]: Doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. 156 00:13:01,798 --> 00:13:02,839 [Philip Goff]: You just want to play the game. 157 00:13:02,859 --> 00:13:03,840 [Philip Goff]: You just want to know what they do. 158 00:13:04,460 --> 00:13:11,086 [Philip Goff]: And of course, that's wonderful information because if you know what matter does, you can manipulate it. 159 00:13:11,127 --> 00:13:13,168 [Philip Goff]: We can produce incredible technology. 160 00:13:13,889 --> 00:13:18,313 [Philip Goff]: But at the end of the day, physics doesn't tell us what an electron is. 161 00:13:19,375 --> 00:13:24,298 [Philip Goff]: And in that sense, there's a huge hole in our standard scientific story of reality. 162 00:13:24,978 --> 00:13:27,460 [Philip Goff]: Okay, so we've got a hole in our scientific story. 163 00:13:28,240 --> 00:13:29,621 [Philip Goff]: We're looking for a place for consciousness. 164 00:13:30,382 --> 00:13:32,143 [Philip Goff]: Maybe we can put consciousness in the hole. 165 00:13:32,543 --> 00:13:33,404 [Steve Paulson]: So explain that. 166 00:13:34,044 --> 00:13:39,547 [Steve Paulson]: So if we don't know what matter is, or at least conventional science, physics, cannot explain what matter is. 167 00:13:40,288 --> 00:13:42,929 [Steve Paulson]: Are you suggesting matter is consciousness? 168 00:13:43,590 --> 00:13:44,670 [Philip Goff]: Well, that is the claim, yes. 169 00:13:44,710 --> 00:13:45,691 [Philip Goff]: So we're looking for it. 170 00:13:45,711 --> 00:13:47,212 [Philip Goff]: We know consciousness is real. 171 00:13:47,672 --> 00:13:48,473 [Philip Goff]: How do we know it's real? 172 00:13:49,233 --> 00:13:50,293 [Philip Goff]: by being conscious. 173 00:13:50,333 --> 00:13:53,814 [Philip Goff]: We're directly aware of our own feelings and experiences. 174 00:13:54,254 --> 00:13:55,255 [Philip Goff]: So we know it's real. 175 00:13:55,915 --> 00:13:59,436 [Philip Goff]: We have to fit it into the scientific story somehow. 176 00:14:00,256 --> 00:14:06,138 [Philip Goff]: And this hole in the scientific story Russell identified perhaps finds a place for it. 177 00:14:06,318 --> 00:14:14,740 [Philip Goff]: So the claim is there is just consciousness of very simple forms behaving in simple, predictable ways 178 00:14:15,873 --> 00:14:22,337 [Philip Goff]: And what physics is doing is tracking the behaviour of these very simple forms of consciousness. 179 00:14:22,497 --> 00:14:27,060 [Philip Goff]: So it's a way of bringing together two things we know to be real, 180 00:14:27,986 --> 00:14:35,772 [Philip Goff]: The stuff we know about the physical world from doing science and the stuff we know about consciousness by being conscious. 181 00:14:35,832 --> 00:14:42,597 [Philip Goff]: Panpsychism offers a way of drawing these two things together in a single, simple, elegant theory of reality. 182 00:14:43,038 --> 00:14:46,641 [Steve Paulson]: So you're saying consciousness is a fundamental force. 183 00:14:46,661 --> 00:14:54,127 [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? 184 00:14:54,847 --> 00:14:57,128 [Philip Goff]: Consciousness is everything for the panpsychist. 185 00:14:57,428 --> 00:14:59,709 [Philip Goff]: There is nothing but consciousness. 186 00:15:00,289 --> 00:15:04,610 [Philip Goff]: I like to put it, matter is what consciousness does for the panpsychist. 187 00:15:05,310 --> 00:15:13,273 [Philip Goff]: So what we call particles, what we call fields in this view, just are the most rudimentary forms of consciousness. 188 00:15:13,753 --> 00:15:18,575 [Philip Goff]: Through their equations, physics tracks them in terms of their behaviour. 189 00:15:19,485 --> 00:15:23,290 [Philip Goff]: but what they are in terms of their nature is forms of consciousness. 190 00:15:23,671 --> 00:15:26,114 [Steve Paulson]: Okay, so let's talk about human beings for a moment here. 191 00:15:26,775 --> 00:15:29,739 [Steve Paulson]: So where do brains fit into this? 192 00:15:29,939 --> 00:15:32,382 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, clearly we... Well, I shouldn't say. 193 00:15:32,562 --> 00:15:35,626 [Steve Paulson]: I was going to say clearly we need a brain to be conscious, but... 194 00:15:36,495 --> 00:15:36,795 [Steve Paulson]: I don't know. 195 00:15:37,156 --> 00:15:37,376 [Steve Paulson]: Do we? 196 00:15:37,916 --> 00:15:43,441 [Philip Goff]: I think we have to think very carefully about what the problem of consciousness is. 197 00:15:44,762 --> 00:15:47,124 [Philip Goff]: It's not just another scientific problem. 198 00:15:47,484 --> 00:15:49,386 [Philip Goff]: You know, we just haven't done enough experiments. 199 00:15:49,406 --> 00:15:51,687 [Philip Goff]: We just haven't done enough brain scans to crack it. 200 00:15:52,288 --> 00:15:54,690 [Philip Goff]: It's a very unique scientific problem. 201 00:15:55,591 --> 00:15:59,574 [Philip Goff]: Each of us is directly aware of our feelings and experiences. 202 00:16:00,194 --> 00:16:04,098 [Philip Goff]: And this direct access tells us something about its nature. 203 00:16:05,183 --> 00:16:08,308 [Philip Goff]: You know, a pain is essentially defined by how it feels. 204 00:16:08,849 --> 00:16:10,772 [Philip Goff]: And you know how it feels when you feel it. 205 00:16:12,108 --> 00:16:17,112 [Philip Goff]: So we know to a large extent at least what consciousness is because we're conscious. 206 00:16:17,372 --> 00:16:21,055 [Philip Goff]: And this is very different to any other phenomenon science tries to explain. 207 00:16:21,075 --> 00:16:22,476 [Philip Goff]: Think about lightning. 208 00:16:22,897 --> 00:16:25,319 [Philip Goff]: You know, you don't know what the hell lightning is before you do the science. 209 00:16:25,359 --> 00:16:26,780 [Philip Goff]: Is it the anger of the gods? 210 00:16:27,180 --> 00:16:27,581 [Philip Goff]: Who knows? 211 00:16:27,601 --> 00:16:30,023 [Philip Goff]: You have to do the science to find out it's electric discharge. 212 00:16:30,103 --> 00:16:31,544 [Philip Goff]: Or what is water? 213 00:16:31,604 --> 00:16:37,068 [Philip Goff]: Is it a fundamental element together with earth and fire and air as the ancient Greeks thought? 214 00:16:37,108 --> 00:16:37,929 [Philip Goff]: Or is it H2O? 215 00:16:37,969 --> 00:16:38,950 [Philip Goff]: You have to do the science. 216 00:16:39,630 --> 00:16:40,831 [Philip Goff]: But with consciousness, 217 00:16:41,592 --> 00:16:43,794 [Philip Goff]: we have some understanding of what it is. 218 00:16:44,335 --> 00:16:48,479 [Philip Goff]: And indeed, we have understanding that you couldn't get from experiments. 219 00:16:49,520 --> 00:16:58,689 [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, 220 00:16:59,881 --> 00:17:07,707 [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. 221 00:17:08,247 --> 00:17:11,910 [Philip Goff]: So there's information about consciousness you can only get from the inside. 222 00:17:12,510 --> 00:17:15,893 [Philip Goff]: So here's how you should think of the problem of consciousness. 223 00:17:17,254 --> 00:17:20,016 [Philip Goff]: It's not just, oh, we want science to tell us what's going on. 224 00:17:21,231 --> 00:17:25,334 [Philip Goff]: It's rather that we have two ways of knowing about reality. 225 00:17:26,015 --> 00:17:30,319 [Philip Goff]: And it's a philosophical question how these two things fit together. 226 00:17:30,899 --> 00:17:31,860 [Steve Paulson]: So I want to come back to you. 227 00:17:32,160 --> 00:17:34,202 [Steve Paulson]: So why did you get so interested in this? 228 00:17:34,222 --> 00:17:38,665 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, obviously you are fascinated by this question of consciousness. 229 00:17:38,685 --> 00:17:40,167 [Steve Paulson]: I mean, the paradox, what is it? 230 00:17:41,308 --> 00:17:43,189 [Steve Paulson]: Is it strictly an intellectual question? 231 00:17:43,409 --> 00:17:44,090 [Steve Paulson]: How did you get here? 232 00:17:45,899 --> 00:17:57,448 [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. 233 00:17:59,089 --> 00:18:03,353 [Philip Goff]: I was raised Catholic, and I remember hearing a church about Adam and Eve. 234 00:18:03,993 --> 00:18:07,796 [Philip Goff]: And then I was also obsessed with Big Bang and black holes. 235 00:18:08,257 --> 00:18:11,879 [Philip Goff]: And I was like, how do these two creation stories fit together? 236 00:18:12,720 --> 00:18:15,729 [Philip Goff]: The Big Bang story and the story of Adam and Eve. 237 00:18:16,231 --> 00:18:17,976 [Philip Goff]: There's the story we get from science. 238 00:18:18,903 --> 00:18:23,084 [Philip Goff]: But there's also the story of morality, good and bad, right and wrong. 239 00:18:23,304 --> 00:18:28,445 [Philip Goff]: There's the story about free agency, our choices, responsibility. 240 00:18:28,725 --> 00:18:34,186 [Philip Goff]: There's the story about the mind, consciousness, belief, desires, passions, hopes, dreams. 241 00:18:35,146 --> 00:18:43,068 [Philip Goff]: There's a story also about abstract objects, numbers, functions, sets that my colleagues in the mathematics department talk about. 242 00:18:43,728 --> 00:18:47,531 [Philip Goff]: How on earth do all these different stories fit together? 243 00:18:47,792 --> 00:18:49,633 [Philip Goff]: Is one of them the fundamental one? 244 00:18:50,194 --> 00:18:51,355 [Philip Goff]: Maybe the scientific one? 245 00:18:51,835 --> 00:18:56,399 [Philip Goff]: Or are there lots of different stories that somehow interact with each other? 246 00:18:57,180 --> 00:18:59,602 [Philip Goff]: Consciousness, though, I think is the most interesting part. 247 00:19:00,737 --> 00:19:10,665 [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. 248 00:19:11,145 --> 00:19:13,207 [Steve Paulson]: You said you grew up Catholic, is that right? 249 00:19:13,607 --> 00:19:13,927 [Steve Paulson]: Yes. 250 00:19:14,528 --> 00:19:28,718 [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... 251 00:19:29,659 --> 00:19:34,883 [Steve Paulson]: ultimate reality and some sort of presence that goes beyond our individual brains. 252 00:19:35,044 --> 00:19:36,004 [Steve Paulson]: Is that fair to say? 253 00:19:37,265 --> 00:19:42,430 [Philip Goff]: Actually, there's a bit of a divide in the panpsychist research community over this. 254 00:19:43,170 --> 00:19:52,618 [Philip Goff]: Some philosophers, and I guess I'm more in this camp, see a certain consonance with certain spiritual convictions and panpsychism. 255 00:19:53,098 --> 00:19:54,559 [Philip Goff]: I think if you're a panpsychist, 256 00:19:55,480 --> 00:20:00,388 [Philip Goff]: it's easier to take seriously certain kinds of mystical experience. 257 00:20:00,788 --> 00:20:08,299 [Philip Goff]: For example, people have mystical experiences in which they seem to be in direct contact with ultimate reality. 258 00:20:08,824 --> 00:20:20,252 [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. 259 00:20:20,692 --> 00:20:37,944 [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. 260 00:20:38,644 --> 00:20:50,229 [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. 261 00:20:50,510 --> 00:20:54,872 [Philip Goff]: However, other panpsychists think, no, no, this is all superstitious nonsense. 262 00:20:55,412 --> 00:20:58,393 [Philip Goff]: We don't believe in any sort of transcendent spiritual reality. 263 00:20:58,433 --> 00:21:06,397 [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. 264 00:21:06,617 --> 00:21:22,550 [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. 265 00:21:22,810 --> 00:21:30,977 [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. 266 00:21:32,909 --> 00:21:34,751 [Philip Goff]: In a way, we go back to where we started. 267 00:21:34,771 --> 00:21:45,684 [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. 268 00:21:46,593 --> 00:21:50,634 [Philip Goff]: Well, quite recently, I have come to some kind of religious faith. 269 00:21:50,774 --> 00:21:53,995 [Philip Goff]: I self-identify as a heretical Christian. 270 00:21:55,035 --> 00:22:06,138 [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. 271 00:22:06,358 --> 00:22:11,640 [Philip Goff]: When people have a mystical experience, certain things seem to them to be true. 272 00:22:12,805 --> 00:22:17,248 [Philip Goff]: Perhaps it seems to them that they are in contact with ultimate reality. 273 00:22:17,488 --> 00:22:23,773 [Philip Goff]: Perhaps it even seems to them that they are, in some sense, one with or unified with ultimate reality. 274 00:22:25,096 --> 00:22:29,481 [Philip Goff]: Now, we could just enjoy those experiences and see what benefits come from them. 275 00:22:29,862 --> 00:22:34,107 [Philip Goff]: But as a philosopher, I want to ask, well, is it rational to trust that seeming? 276 00:22:34,627 --> 00:22:39,673 [Philip Goff]: To believe on the basis of the mystical experience that things really are as they seem to be? 277 00:22:40,294 --> 00:22:44,679 [Philip Goff]: And I guess I would like to argue that if you're a physicalist... 278 00:22:45,820 --> 00:22:47,401 [Philip Goff]: No, you should think this is a delusion. 279 00:22:47,461 --> 00:22:57,966 [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. 280 00:22:58,567 --> 00:23:02,649 [Philip Goff]: But if I'm a panpsychist who has a mystical experience, 281 00:23:03,872 --> 00:23:08,456 [Philip Goff]: I think there's nothing in my worldview to rule that out or to really cast doubt on it. 282 00:23:08,936 --> 00:23:20,145 [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. 283 00:23:20,465 --> 00:23:25,569 [Steve Paulson]: So I have to come back to how you identified yourself spiritually as a, what did you say, heretical Christian? 284 00:23:25,689 --> 00:23:25,969 [Steve Paulson]: Yes. 285 00:23:26,169 --> 00:23:27,831 [Steve Paulson]: Do you want to explain what that means? 286 00:23:29,812 --> 00:23:39,478 [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. 287 00:23:39,558 --> 00:23:45,062 [Philip Goff]: So the core of Christianity in the Eastern Orthodox Church is nothing to do with religion. 288 00:23:45,822 --> 00:23:53,890 [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. 289 00:23:53,910 --> 00:23:57,353 [Philip Goff]: It's not something that goes all the way back to the start of Christianity. 290 00:23:57,734 --> 00:24:00,636 [Philip Goff]: And that is no part of how the Eastern Church thinks about things. 291 00:24:01,157 --> 00:24:06,682 [Philip Goff]: For them, the core of it is, it's all about God and the universe becoming one together. 292 00:24:07,443 --> 00:24:14,045 [Philip Goff]: They think God shared in our form of existence so that we can share in God's form of existence. 293 00:24:14,365 --> 00:24:30,008 [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. 294 00:24:30,048 --> 00:24:32,349 [Philip Goff]: We will fully share in God's form of existence. 295 00:24:33,612 --> 00:24:38,136 [Philip Goff]: So that idea at the core of the Eastern Orthodox Church very much resonates with me. 296 00:24:38,537 --> 00:24:42,060 [Philip Goff]: On the other hand, I don't agree with everything the Eastern Orthodox Church thinks. 297 00:24:42,280 --> 00:24:44,102 [Philip Goff]: I don't like that they don't have women priests. 298 00:24:44,862 --> 00:24:50,627 [Philip Goff]: Strictly speaking, I think they take gay sex to be sinful, which I think is manifestly false and harmful. 299 00:24:51,408 --> 00:24:56,334 [Philip Goff]: For that reason, I choose to be part of the Anglican Church. 300 00:24:56,494 --> 00:25:01,580 [Philip Goff]: There's more, in general, more flexibility in how you interpret Christianity. 301 00:25:02,501 --> 00:25:04,143 [Philip Goff]: So that's really the core of my faith. 302 00:25:04,223 --> 00:25:12,192 [Philip Goff]: I'm a practicing Anglican, but the core of my faith is how Eastern Orthodox Christianity understands the heart of its religion. 303 00:25:13,627 --> 00:25:19,573 [Steve Paulson]: So one thing that's striking to me is that this idea of panpsychism has kind of filtered into popular culture. 304 00:25:19,814 --> 00:25:23,497 [Steve Paulson]: And there are a few notable figures out there who have embraced these ideas. 305 00:25:23,638 --> 00:25:31,346 [Steve Paulson]: One is Philip Pullman, your British compatriot, author of His Dark Materials, The Golden Compass, and all those books. 306 00:25:31,626 --> 00:25:35,250 [Steve Paulson]: And he's come out and kind of cited your work, right? 307 00:25:36,023 --> 00:25:52,153 [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. 308 00:25:53,194 --> 00:25:56,777 [Philip Goff]: So I think the panpsychist element has always been there. 309 00:25:57,458 --> 00:26:07,666 [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. 310 00:26:08,167 --> 00:26:14,252 [Philip Goff]: And yes, Philip Pullman has kindly credited me for helping influence some of those ideas. 311 00:26:14,752 --> 00:26:16,073 [Philip Goff]: But he's influenced me as well. 312 00:26:16,714 --> 00:26:17,374 [Philip Goff]: He said to me, 313 00:26:18,355 --> 00:26:20,977 [Philip Goff]: That we should think of panpsychism as very Copernican. 314 00:26:21,837 --> 00:26:30,363 [Philip Goff]: That we don't think of our consciousness, human consciousness, as the sort of prototype, the model of what consciousness is. 315 00:26:31,965 --> 00:26:34,927 [Philip Goff]: Our consciousness is something a bit weird, really. 316 00:26:34,967 --> 00:26:37,309 [Philip Goff]: It's resulted from millions of years of evolution. 317 00:26:37,489 --> 00:26:45,654 [Philip Goff]: Our consciousness is just some highly developed form of what exists throughout the universe in very simple forms. 318 00:26:46,515 --> 00:26:53,300 [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. 319 00:26:53,380 --> 00:26:56,502 [Steve Paulson]: And it seems like kind of what you're talking about, it seems pretty wondrous to me. 320 00:26:57,428 --> 00:27:01,410 [Steve Paulson]: Of course, we're playing off of the idea of the old cabinet of wonders from a few centuries ago. 321 00:27:01,510 --> 00:27:16,497 [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. 322 00:27:17,538 --> 00:27:18,318 [Steve Paulson]: What would you want to put in it? 323 00:27:19,825 --> 00:27:28,540 [Philip Goff]: I guess as a philosopher, I'm quite boring and I come back to certain classic figures in Western philosophy. 324 00:27:28,560 --> 00:27:33,007 [Philip Goff]: I think Plato got onto something correct with his idea that 325 00:27:34,307 --> 00:27:40,670 [Philip Goff]: What we know through reason, about mathematics, logic, morality, is real. 326 00:27:41,470 --> 00:27:46,272 [Philip Goff]: It's in some sense as real as the physical universe we can touch and see. 327 00:27:47,133 --> 00:27:48,873 [Philip Goff]: And we have to somehow make sense of that. 328 00:27:48,893 --> 00:27:51,454 [Philip Goff]: I'm not sure he got it completely right, but it's somehow real. 329 00:27:52,895 --> 00:27:59,259 [Philip Goff]: ancient rationalism and of course he expressed this so well with his allegory of the cave. 330 00:27:59,719 --> 00:28:07,844 [Philip Goff]: My wife Emma illustrates my books and she's done a wonderful illustration of Plato's cave for my forthcoming book Heresy. 331 00:28:08,564 --> 00:28:29,781 [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... 332 00:28:30,762 --> 00:28:37,825 [Philip Goff]: upfront things in the real world, this wonderful way of representing philosophical enlightenment. 333 00:28:38,406 --> 00:28:43,228 [Philip Goff]: So maybe Plato's cave and all it represents would go in my wonder cabinet. 334 00:28:43,808 --> 00:28:46,289 [Steve Paulson]: That was my first conversation with Philip Goff. 335 00:28:46,810 --> 00:28:50,992 [Steve Paulson]: But then something very surprising happened that led to another follow-up conversation. 336 00:28:51,472 --> 00:28:53,133 [Steve Paulson]: We'll be back with that right after the break. 337 00:28:53,925 --> 00:28:55,166 [Anne Strainchamps]: Hi, it's Anne. 338 00:28:55,466 --> 00:28:57,028 [Anne Strainchamps]: I am so glad you're joining us. 339 00:28:57,428 --> 00:29:00,411 [Anne Strainchamps]: We have some amazing guests lined up for the weeks ahead. 340 00:29:00,571 --> 00:29:01,953 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm really excited about them. 341 00:29:02,373 --> 00:29:03,094 [Anne Strainchamps]: And here's a tip. 342 00:29:03,494 --> 00:29:13,605 [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. 343 00:29:14,105 --> 00:29:14,806 [Anne Strainchamps]: I hope you like it. 344 00:29:19,538 --> 00:29:20,539 [Steve Paulson]: This is Wonder Cabinet. 345 00:29:20,799 --> 00:29:21,620 [Steve Paulson]: I'm Steve Paulson. 346 00:29:22,261 --> 00:29:30,790 [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. 347 00:29:31,351 --> 00:29:36,196 [Steve Paulson]: I was really curious to know whether it confirmed or changed any of his views on panpsychism. 348 00:29:36,736 --> 00:29:39,880 [Steve Paulson]: So a couple of months later, I called him at his home in Durham, England. 349 00:29:40,898 --> 00:29:43,660 [Steve Paulson]: So, Philip, it is great to talk with you again. 350 00:29:43,700 --> 00:29:47,243 [Steve Paulson]: And since the last time we talked, you did something quite surprising. 351 00:29:47,323 --> 00:29:52,348 [Steve Paulson]: You took 5-MeO-DMT, which is this very powerful psychedelic. 352 00:29:53,148 --> 00:29:54,569 [Steve Paulson]: Why did you want to have this experience? 353 00:29:55,290 --> 00:30:08,021 [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. 354 00:30:08,141 --> 00:30:09,141 [Philip Goff]: There's nothing... 355 00:30:11,073 --> 00:30:12,374 [Philip Goff]: There are no visuals. 356 00:30:12,394 --> 00:30:13,715 [Philip Goff]: You don't meet elves. 357 00:30:13,915 --> 00:30:17,598 [Philip Goff]: It doesn't connect with repressed memories or anything. 358 00:30:18,379 --> 00:30:22,922 [Philip Goff]: It is just kind of pure, instant ego dissolution. 359 00:30:23,443 --> 00:30:24,363 [Philip Goff]: And then it's very brief. 360 00:30:24,443 --> 00:30:27,105 [Philip Goff]: I mean, from the outside, it lasts 10 minutes. 361 00:30:27,886 --> 00:30:32,229 [Philip Goff]: It's a bit difficult to describe the time on the inside, as we'll maybe get into. 362 00:30:32,570 --> 00:30:35,632 [Philip Goff]: Although, I mean, just having said that, it sounds like a recommendation. 363 00:30:35,752 --> 00:30:37,053 [Philip Goff]: I would just like to say... 364 00:30:38,293 --> 00:30:44,855 [Philip Goff]: I would strongly recommend people in a way not to do this or just be very, very bloody, very careful. 365 00:30:45,555 --> 00:30:51,297 [Philip Goff]: I was able to do it in very controlled circumstances under the supervision of a professional therapist. 366 00:30:51,717 --> 00:30:54,318 [Philip Goff]: But I think it's not emphasized enough. 367 00:30:54,918 --> 00:30:57,019 [Philip Goff]: that there are dangers to psychedelics. 368 00:30:57,119 --> 00:31:01,422 [Philip Goff]: They're not generally thought to be physically dangerous or addictive. 369 00:31:01,462 --> 00:31:04,664 [Philip Goff]: And so it's wild that they're connected with sort of heroin or something. 370 00:31:05,365 --> 00:31:07,586 [Philip Goff]: But they are psychologically dangerous. 371 00:31:07,646 --> 00:31:12,589 [Philip Goff]: They do tear apart our ordinary ways of thinking. 372 00:31:12,629 --> 00:31:18,333 [Philip Goff]: And those ordinary ways of thinking are often important for psychological stability. 373 00:31:18,433 --> 00:31:19,494 [Steve Paulson]: So there are dangers. 374 00:31:19,734 --> 00:31:22,476 [Steve Paulson]: So had you ever had a psychedelic experience before this? 375 00:31:23,049 --> 00:31:39,757 [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. 376 00:31:40,377 --> 00:31:43,058 [Philip Goff]: But nothing quite like this, I don't think. 377 00:31:43,659 --> 00:31:44,939 [Philip Goff]: It is something very different. 378 00:31:45,699 --> 00:31:46,540 [Steve Paulson]: So what happened? 379 00:31:46,700 --> 00:31:49,041 [Steve Paulson]: Can you walk me through what the experience was like? 380 00:31:49,478 --> 00:31:51,878 [Philip Goff]: So I can tell you how things seemed. 381 00:31:52,959 --> 00:31:58,840 [Philip Goff]: It seemed like I was instantly and completely annihilated. 382 00:31:59,480 --> 00:32:02,140 [Philip Goff]: Philip Goff was wiped from existence. 383 00:32:03,401 --> 00:32:15,943 [Philip Goff]: And what remained was an indescribable form of consciousness, one that was beyond space, beyond time, and that somehow belonged to nobody. 384 00:32:16,820 --> 00:32:19,262 [Steve Paulson]: You had no sense of yourself anymore at that point. 385 00:32:20,603 --> 00:32:22,644 [Philip Goff]: Yeah, it felt like being killed. 386 00:32:22,664 --> 00:32:31,210 [Philip Goff]: I mean, interestingly, it didn't feel to me like I was seeing that the self was an illusion. 387 00:32:31,510 --> 00:32:35,854 [Philip Goff]: It felt like there is a self, but it was being destroyed. 388 00:32:36,074 --> 00:32:42,678 [Philip Goff]: I mean, here's a metaphor I came up with afterwards that's not perfect, but maybe captures something of this. 389 00:32:43,659 --> 00:32:47,584 [Philip Goff]: Imagine my mind is a light bulb wrapped in cotton wool. 390 00:32:48,385 --> 00:32:57,156 [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. 391 00:32:58,157 --> 00:32:59,779 [Philip Goff]: Whereas the light bulb is this... 392 00:33:00,620 --> 00:33:06,845 [Philip Goff]: timeless, spaceless form of consciousness at the core of our being that doesn't belong to anybody. 393 00:33:07,666 --> 00:33:15,472 [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. 394 00:33:15,492 --> 00:33:19,335 [Philip Goff]: And this pure consciousness just kind of shines out. 395 00:33:20,375 --> 00:33:22,397 [Steve Paulson]: So you said that you said this was terrifying. 396 00:33:22,717 --> 00:33:24,799 [Steve Paulson]: It sounds also amazing. 397 00:33:24,819 --> 00:33:25,039 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 398 00:33:26,534 --> 00:33:27,954 [Philip Goff]: In a sense, it was both. 399 00:33:28,014 --> 00:33:33,176 [Philip Goff]: And, you know, as I say, what's nice about it is it is a very uniform experience. 400 00:33:33,216 --> 00:33:45,560 [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. 401 00:33:45,600 --> 00:33:47,121 [Philip Goff]: And it's very uniform. 402 00:33:47,621 --> 00:33:50,902 [Philip Goff]: And it is pretty uniformly absolutely terrifying. 403 00:33:51,862 --> 00:33:55,207 [Philip Goff]: Partly, it feels like you're being killed, okay? 404 00:33:55,348 --> 00:33:56,950 [Philip Goff]: So that's not nice. 405 00:33:57,811 --> 00:34:02,018 [Philip Goff]: And this form of consciousness is so overwhelming. 406 00:34:02,098 --> 00:34:06,124 [Philip Goff]: I mean, I would describe it as sort of a raging storm. 407 00:34:06,925 --> 00:34:14,887 [Philip Goff]: Maybe you kind of need some Old Testament language of kind of fear and trembling at beholding the divine or something. 408 00:34:14,907 --> 00:34:25,309 [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. 409 00:34:25,349 --> 00:34:26,789 [Philip Goff]: It's like, oh, it's not very nice. 410 00:34:26,969 --> 00:34:27,729 [Philip Goff]: Where are the elves? 411 00:34:27,809 --> 00:34:28,609 [Philip Goff]: I don't know. 412 00:34:28,769 --> 00:34:32,630 [Philip Goff]: So maybe the psychedelic friendly crowd that, you know, I quite like, 413 00:34:33,270 --> 00:34:38,954 [Philip Goff]: Maybe they need to rediscover some kind of Old Testament vocabulary for this particular experience. 414 00:34:39,515 --> 00:34:52,165 [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. 415 00:34:53,366 --> 00:34:56,428 [Steve Paulson]: Did this experience get you any closer to understanding reality? 416 00:34:59,170 --> 00:35:00,010 [Philip Goff]: I would say yes. 417 00:35:00,751 --> 00:35:07,533 [Philip Goff]: I believe this has given me direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality. 418 00:35:07,573 --> 00:35:09,414 [Philip Goff]: I don't believe this was a hallucination. 419 00:35:09,454 --> 00:35:11,535 [Philip Goff]: We can maybe discuss why I think that. 420 00:35:12,495 --> 00:35:14,876 [Steve Paulson]: Well, let's talk about that right now. 421 00:35:14,956 --> 00:35:15,116 [Steve Paulson]: Why? 422 00:35:15,176 --> 00:35:19,218 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah, that is the obvious, you know, the other explanation is, you know, this is... 423 00:35:19,718 --> 00:35:29,828 [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. 424 00:35:29,888 --> 00:35:32,491 [Steve Paulson]: Why do you think that's not a good explanation? 425 00:35:33,288 --> 00:35:44,596 [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. 426 00:35:45,417 --> 00:35:49,880 [Philip Goff]: So most of that is a sort of psychological study of different kinds of mystical experiences. 427 00:35:50,320 --> 00:36:00,728 [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? 428 00:36:01,871 --> 00:36:03,033 [Philip Goff]: And he gives an interesting answer. 429 00:36:03,053 --> 00:36:07,219 [Philip Goff]: He says, well, if you say no, you have to say it's a hallucination. 430 00:36:07,960 --> 00:36:11,765 [Philip Goff]: There seems to be a sort of double standard because we all think it's, 431 00:36:12,880 --> 00:36:19,847 [Philip Goff]: rational to trust ordinary sensory experiences, but they could be delusions too, right? 432 00:36:20,428 --> 00:36:23,791 [Philip Goff]: If you study a bit of philosophy, you realize we could be in the matrix. 433 00:36:23,892 --> 00:36:27,896 [Philip Goff]: This could all be a delusion created in us by the evil computers. 434 00:36:28,276 --> 00:36:34,042 [Philip Goff]: You can never get outside of your consciousness to check whether it's corresponding to reality. 435 00:36:35,063 --> 00:36:40,510 [Philip Goff]: But we think it's okay to just trust that ordinary experiences are connecting us to reality. 436 00:36:40,530 --> 00:36:45,476 [Philip Goff]: You wouldn't be able to get science doing unless you could make that commitment, that choice. 437 00:36:46,317 --> 00:36:50,041 [Philip Goff]: So if it's okay in the case of ordinary experience, why is it not okay... 438 00:36:50,921 --> 00:36:54,463 [Philip Goff]: for the mystic to trust how things seem to be in their experience. 439 00:36:55,043 --> 00:36:58,925 [Philip Goff]: Okay, it could be a delusion, but all experiences could be a delusion. 440 00:36:59,305 --> 00:37:02,667 [Philip Goff]: I can't see what justifies that double standard. 441 00:37:03,267 --> 00:37:05,749 [Philip Goff]: If it's rational for me to trust ordinary experience... 442 00:37:06,489 --> 00:37:13,591 [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. 443 00:37:14,371 --> 00:37:23,114 [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? 444 00:37:24,294 --> 00:37:27,535 [Philip Goff]: What I experienced was a form of consciousness. 445 00:37:28,496 --> 00:37:32,837 [Philip Goff]: It was a form of consciousness that was timeless, was spaceless. 446 00:37:34,394 --> 00:37:43,324 [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. 447 00:37:43,765 --> 00:37:48,410 [Philip Goff]: There was no distinction between I and other, this and that. 448 00:37:48,430 --> 00:37:52,054 [Philip Goff]: I mean, that was the sense really in which I wasn't there. 449 00:37:52,275 --> 00:37:54,257 [Philip Goff]: This was a form of consciousness that... 450 00:37:55,673 --> 00:37:57,274 [Philip Goff]: didn't belong to anybody. 451 00:37:57,374 --> 00:38:02,458 [Philip Goff]: So I mean, I don't know, either we say I wasn't there, or maybe I was everywhere or something. 452 00:38:03,139 --> 00:38:11,945 [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. 453 00:38:12,346 --> 00:38:23,234 [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. 454 00:38:23,874 --> 00:38:36,741 [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. 455 00:38:37,161 --> 00:38:40,062 [Steve Paulson]: Did this change your thinking at all about it? 456 00:38:40,102 --> 00:38:41,903 [Steve Paulson]: Did it challenge that view? 457 00:38:41,963 --> 00:38:43,624 [Steve Paulson]: Did it affirm it in any way? 458 00:38:44,991 --> 00:38:49,739 [Philip Goff]: Interestingly, I would say it was very consistent with the panpsychist view. 459 00:38:49,759 --> 00:38:56,269 [Philip Goff]: And maybe that's why it was easy for me to not think of it as a hallucination. 460 00:38:56,910 --> 00:38:58,332 [Philip Goff]: Maybe if Daniel Dennett 461 00:38:59,668 --> 00:39:01,229 [Philip Goff]: had this same experience. 462 00:39:01,709 --> 00:39:13,654 [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. 463 00:39:14,074 --> 00:39:16,055 [Steve Paulson]: He takes himself to know. 464 00:39:16,115 --> 00:39:22,297 [Steve Paulson]: The hard physicalist or materialist who doesn't think there's anything that's beyond the brain in terms of conscious experience. 465 00:39:22,317 --> 00:39:23,778 [Steve Paulson]: It's all just generated by the brain. 466 00:39:24,218 --> 00:39:25,099 [Philip Goff]: But for me... 467 00:39:26,139 --> 00:39:32,544 [Philip Goff]: As you say, I already believe there is consciousness at the fundamental level of reality. 468 00:39:32,885 --> 00:39:38,689 [Philip Goff]: All this does is tell me a little bit more about what that consciousness is like. 469 00:39:39,090 --> 00:39:39,310 [Steve Paulson]: Yeah. 470 00:39:39,630 --> 00:39:42,392 [Steve Paulson]: So, Philip, one final question before I let you go. 471 00:39:42,712 --> 00:39:47,076 [Steve Paulson]: At the very end of our last conversation, you talked about how much you liked reality. 472 00:39:47,396 --> 00:40:08,036 [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 473 00:40:09,839 --> 00:40:11,260 [Philip Goff]: Wow, what a great question. 474 00:40:11,280 --> 00:40:14,223 [Philip Goff]: Do you know, I haven't thought of it in those terms. 475 00:40:14,263 --> 00:40:16,785 [Philip Goff]: I haven't connected my experience to Plato's cave. 476 00:40:18,246 --> 00:40:29,055 [Philip Goff]: I do believe I experienced a deeper reality, something more real, more fundamental than the world of ordinary experience. 477 00:40:30,656 --> 00:40:36,081 [Philip Goff]: Whether what I experienced is ultimate reality or not is a further question. 478 00:40:37,598 --> 00:40:43,799 [Philip Goff]: Maybe what I should say is I experienced the world outside the cave, but not quite the form of the good. 479 00:40:44,279 --> 00:40:53,261 [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. 480 00:40:53,921 --> 00:41:01,223 [Philip Goff]: And for me, that deeper part of divine reality is beyond what I experienced. 481 00:41:01,883 --> 00:41:06,524 [Philip Goff]: But yeah, I definitely think I got closer to ultimate reality. 482 00:41:07,748 --> 00:41:08,028 [Steve Paulson]: Okay. 483 00:41:08,388 --> 00:41:10,089 [Steve Paulson]: I think that's a great place to leave it. 484 00:41:10,249 --> 00:41:14,830 [Steve Paulson]: And we're going to go from the profound to the mundane, because I know you've got some kids to feed. 485 00:41:16,070 --> 00:41:17,991 [Steve Paulson]: And it's dinner time where you are now. 486 00:41:18,051 --> 00:41:18,791 [Philip Goff]: Absolutely. 487 00:41:19,651 --> 00:41:27,293 [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. 488 00:41:27,753 --> 00:41:28,313 [Philip Goff]: Thanks, Steve. 489 00:41:28,974 --> 00:41:30,094 [Steve Paulson]: Thank you so much, Philip. 490 00:41:31,133 --> 00:41:42,729 [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. 491 00:41:43,658 --> 00:41:51,727 [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. 492 00:41:52,208 --> 00:41:54,911 [Anne Strainchamps]: We'll bring you more of those conversations in the coming months. 493 00:41:55,372 --> 00:42:01,659 [Steve Paulson]: Support for Wonder Cabinet's Island of Knowledge episodes comes from Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. 494 00:42:01,994 --> 00:42:07,076 [Anne Strainchamps]: Thanks, as always, to our audio engineer, Steve Gotcher, and our digital producer, Mark Riechers. 495 00:42:07,637 --> 00:42:11,258 [Anne Strainchamps]: Wonder Cabinet is based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Vershire, Vermont. 496 00:42:11,698 --> 00:42:12,579 [Anne Strainchamps]: I'm Anne Strainchamps. 497 00:42:12,879 --> 00:42:13,739 [Steve Paulson]: And I'm Steve Paulson. 498 00:42:14,179 --> 00:42:15,120 [Steve Paulson]: We'd love to hear from you. 499 00:42:15,460 --> 00:42:21,643 [Steve Paulson]: Send questions or comments to us at wondercabinetproductions.com and sign up for the newsletter while you're there. 500 00:42:21,983 --> 00:42:22,423 [Anne Strainchamps]: Be well. 501 00:42:22,903 --> 00:42:23,584 [Anne Strainchamps]: See you next time.