Is Everything Conscious? Within Reason #27

- VIDEO NOTES

Philip Goff is an Associate Professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. He is one of the world's most prominent proponents of "panpsychism", the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous property of the universe.

- LINKS

- TIMESTAMPS

0:00 Introduction
3:11 The "Problem" of Consciousness
11:12 Will Science Ever Explain Consciousness?
30:58 What is panpsychism?
49:48 Why believe panpsychism?
1:23:43 The toughest objection to panpsychism?
1:45:25 How our views on consciousness might change how we behave
2:07:08 Outro

- SPECIAL THANKS

As always, I would like to direct extra gratitude to my top-tier patrons:

Itamar Lev
Evan Allen
John Early
Dmitry C.
Seth Balodi
James Davis
g8speedy
James Davis
Mouthy Buddha

- CONNECT

SOCIAL LINKS:

Snapchat: cosmicskeptic

- CONTACT

Or send me something:

Alex O'Connor
Po Box 1610
OXFORD
OX4 9LL
ENGLAND

------------------------------------------

[turgidturbitity]

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.

[MyName-vgyu]

That shirt is youtube compression's worst nightmare

[KodyGolden-EO]

I've never heard of "panpsychism" or the word, but I've held this belief for some time. To answer the question "how does one come to this conclusion, " I'll share the line of reasoning that brought me to this.

Is a single cell organism conscious? They can hunt, flee danger, eat, work together, plan, and appear to change their minds in some situations. They dont have a brain, and yet they clearly have some form of consciousness. What about the cells in my body? Are they conscious? They don't make decisions, do they? When a white blood cell detects a threat, it attacks it. They detect the chemicals released from damaged tissues then swim toward that using paddles. I'm not telling them to do that, but they do it. They must have some form of consciousness that is different from my consciousness. Similar concept with nerve cells sending signals to one another. They receive a signal on one end, analyze that signal, then replicate it on the other to pass the message along. I'm not telling them to do it, but they do it. They must have some form of consciousness. So yes, your cells are conscious and they work together to make you. But your cells have components that they themselves are made up of. Are those components conscious? Mitochondria create ATP and have DNA separate from the rest of the cell, so they must have some kind of consciousness. When cells clean themselves, autophagosomes are formed from a seed, then engulf whatever is being cleaned out, then swim to lysosomes, who transport the cargo out of the cell. The cell has no way of communicating with the autophagosomes and lysosomes, yet they do their job anyway, displaying some from of understanding and thus consciousness. What about the enzymes which make up the components of the cell? During cell division, your DNA splits, then polymerase analyzes the split DNA and builds the other half to create 2 identical copies. Is your cell telling the polymerase to do that? It literally can't. They arent connected in any way. The cell might influence the polymerase by starting the the process of mitosis, but the polymerase ultimately copies the DNA independently. But how does the polymerase know what to do? It must have some form of understanding in order to analyze what there and build the correct nucleotide. If it builds the wrong nucleotide, it removes the error and fixes it. Polymerase will also pause after certain sequences, or to allow time for other enzymes to finish their jobs before moving on. They may also make an error, miss the error, then backtrack in order to fix it. They may also quit and simply not finish copying the sequence, with or without reason. The enzyme is clearly conscious in some way, separate from the cell components which is conscious separate from the cell, which is also conscious separate from you. Enzymes are made up of amino acids. Amino acids are simply molecules. Yet they can restructure themselves, move, and coordinate with one another during protein folding. So they seem to have some form of understanding and in turn have some form of consciousness. Amino acids are just molecules, no different from water molecules or plastics or any other matter, and we've been able to build them from raw elements.

Where does it end? I'm conscious. The cells that make up my body are conscious separate from me. The parts of the cell are conscious separate from the cell as a whole. Enzymes and proteins are conscious, separate from the cell components. Amino acids are conscious, separate from the enzyme. Why would we assume the atoms that make up amino acids arent conscious? There's no reason to assume consciousness stops there, and to do so simply doesnt make sense.

So, that's why I believe all matter has some form of consciousness. It may be different from my own and separate from my own, but its there.

[bobon]

This episode was super interesting because Alex was the proper level of confrontational, forcing the other side to explain better his point (and failing to really convince me, but that is a different point). You could really see the difference with respect to other episodes, like the one with WLC, where Alex was just a mouthpiece asking questions to WLC in the same order in which they are answered in his book. You could really see that Alex in this case was asking questions he was curious about, and in the WLC episode he was asking the questions WLC needed to complete the argument. As audience, this was much more interesting (even if the topic itself was not particularly interesting to me).

[DenysBuryi]

I feel like the question might approach my intellectual limit, because after watching the first 20 minutes my intuition is (to use their analogy) that "what chess pieces are made of" is not an interesting question since they can be made of anything and still be fundamentally just the chess pieces. The deep meaning behind what they are is only expressed through what they do. I'd like to hear pf. Goff give an example of what the answer could theoretically sound like to the question of "what "x" is?"
Edit: At 1:26:00 mark I've changed my perspective. I don't see how this view offers any explanatory power. The objection of "you can't smash together two consciousnesses and get one, so how particles can produce consciousness in us" is just one. But as I understood it, pf. Goff defined what electron is by saying "it's something conscious that plays a role of electron"... That's just defining a thing in terms of what it does and adding consciousness for no good reason.
I don't want to dismiss a view some smart people are clearly working on out of hand, so of course I assume there's more to it, but that's my perspective so far.

[EthoGrove]

I've had so many thoughts on this specific concept, so excited to listen rn.

[EzaleaGraves]

I've never liked the idea that properties somehow cannot come from parts that don't have that property.
There's a species of butterfly with blue wings, but there's no blue pigment in them at all. On the microscopic level there are structures that scatter incoming light and reflect only the blue light back. These structures are not themselves blue, and if the wings get wet they change colors since light scatters differently in liquid than air

So the blue property arises entirely from structures that are not blue.

[TheTroposa]

Thanks Alex. You've developed a great interview style. Most time I thought of a question you seemed to ask it. Most enjoyable. Getting me to listen to this much about panpsychism is an achievement in it's own!

[Drtobifox]

What you say at 1:15:05 is right. From the first person perspective, once you recognise non dual awareness, that is the explanation. Until you’ve experienced that directly it doesn’t make sense and people endless try to explain using science or other third person methods. You don’t need lsd or ‘meditation’ in the traditional sense, just a recognition of the listening presence of all things and tuning to that, and in doing so you are aware from space and objects, and the small self dissolves. The same ideas are spoke about - dzogchen, Sam Harris, the headless way, speaking circles, loch kelly effortfulness mindfulness - they all point to the same thing and it’s that there is something in this panpsychism approach which can be recognised through your own direct experience with the universe

[bellumthirio]

As one of Goff’s students I can assure you that we have just as many queries with panpsychism as this comment section does

[zenmite]

Loved this discussion. My father and I debated and discussed these issues thirty years ago. Great to see more and more scientists seriously examining panpsychism. David Chalmers has a lot to say on the subject, too.
Once a young zen student wanted to go on a pilgrimage. His zen teacher said; "Ok, you must first answer a question. Do you see the rock outside the window?" Student answers; "Yes." The teacher asks; "Is the rock inside your mind or outside?" The student replied: "According to Buddhism, all things are within mind. So, I say the rock is inside my mind." The teacher said; "Well then, you'd better get a good night's rest before your journey, it will be a difficult trip carrying that rock around in your head."
To realize the true mind is not an idea, belief, or philosophy...even panpsychism.

[emptycloud]

I decided to study Chalmers and Goff for Philosophy of Mind at university 5 years ago, which lead me to exploring the analytical argument for panpsychism. What was the most profound for me, was not accepting or rejecting panspsychism, it was finding serious challenges to the more materialist explanations for consciousness, that in my judgement, were more absurd than panpsychism. Positions like eliminativism, identity theory and functionalism. While my journey on this topic ended on the combination problem, I have had amusement watching leading neurobiologists and theoretical physicists trying to explain consciousness through equations and correlations, never actually reaching a conclusion on how something like qualia is even possible from the standard model view.

[TheOldHippiebilly]

I think this is the best episode of WR I've heard. Really fascinating stuff, presented and discussed well.

[njdarda]

incredible questions Alex. I watched a couple of interviews with Philip, and this was by far the best.

[zugabdu]

Pan-psychism comes off to me as anthropocentrism run amok. The steps to get to it feel very self-focused. "I'm unsatisfied with an explanation of a fundamental particle that only describes what it does, so I'm going to provide that explanation in terms of what I personally can understand." Given how the workings of the universe routinely defy our expectations, intuitions, and desires, it's a mode of thinking that has a high probability of ending in disappointment.

[Alexei_topalov]

Please get Rupert Spira on.

‘Everything is conscious’ seems incorrect to me. I would describe it as ‘everything is made of consciousness’ or ‘everything is a manifestation within consciousness’ similar to how a movie is a manifestation upon a screen but the screen is the fundamental underlying reality that remains constant.

Instead of accepting that consciousness, the one thing that we know for certain exists, is the fundamental substratum of reality, we posit the existence of a substance that exists outside of consciousness called matter and then posit that consciousness springs from this substance which has never been observed outside of consciousness, which seems odd to me.

Nothing has ever been observed or could ever be observed outside of the field of consciousness.

Again, please get Rupert Spira on

[aos]

Oh oh here comes the next Matt Walsh documentary “what is an electron” 😂😂

[EliotChildress]

This was a new one for me. I fully felt Alex saying that the first time hearing these ideas it all seems crazy. Will rewatch. But not sure if I’ll be convinced. Who knows. Maybe in 100 years people will be looking back on us just now grappling with these ideas when it all seems so simple to them.

[kaptainkassanis]

This has been what I’ve been looking for for years- it is so helpful for my thinking. It’s made a huge difference to my life. Thank you so much

[pesilaratnayake]

I have so many concerns about this form of panpsychism (and related points made in this video), many of which have been mentioned in this discussion.
1) I don't think consciousness is clearly defined in a useful way. It's presented as something like "how it feels to experience something" with references to redness or taste, emotions, etc. Then we are asked to consider animals with smaller brains, that we assume have simpler forms of consciousness if any at all, to then infer that even simpler things such as fundamental particles have even simpler consciousness, which is then said to be equivalent to their properties (mass, charge, etc.) in some way. This seems to be a distinction without a difference, at least mechanistically. Just ends up with a "solution" to how I am conscious at the cost of everything else also being kinda sorta conscious. I say "I" because, as they addressed, the only consciousness that we tend to be able to confirm on an evidentiary basis is our own, and we assume it for others (based on testimony traditionally, or behavioural similarities in neuroscience).
2) The "solution" comes off as a "just so" story. Comparing this to Maxwell is very poor, if I understand the reference. Maxwell's equations took information that was empirically understood about how electricity and magnetism interacted, and generated testable hypotheses about how they would behave more generally. But they did not try to present some form of ontological basis of what these were. Panpsychism gives no form of prediction about what we can expect, and requires not that materialism is false, but only that one aspect of reality (the apparent consciousness that some humans experiences) is unexplainable by whatever fundamental relations exist between whatever makes up physical reality. AND it also requires that fundamental objects have some form of consciousness (the central assertion of panpsychism as far as I can tell), which apparently is undetectable.
3) This seems to come down to (in part) being unsatisfied with not knowing what things are fundamentally. I like the chess analogy. Given the rules of chess (constructed), you can understand how it works by identifying the pieces and the state of the game. The other properties have no significance on anything we need to understand chess. In systems theory, we have inputs, outputs, and internal states. The internal states may be affected by inputs or by each other, and the outputs are determined by inputs or states. Some internal states can be determined (at least with some probability) by observing outputs over a period of time. Others may have no effect at all on the outputs. These can be disregarded since they provide no information about the system besides their own value. The information we would receive by knowing them is completely trivial. Analogous to knowing that the chess pieces are made out of oak, and carved by Ethyl Popolo in 1987. It has no impact on how anything we are discussing works, although it might satisfy some irrelevant curiosity you have.
4) How does this explain why some things seem more easily dismissed as being less conscious than others? Materialism would at least suggest something along the lines of "all observable things interact, either with themselves or others (basically tautological). Under some arrangements, these things can receive inputs, which affect internal states (some of which can be detected by the object itself), and this results in outputs. The exact mechanisms are not fully understood, but many objects have some way to detect and interact with their internal states, such as computers, robots and brains. At least we have an understanding of how physical systems interact to produce such outputs. And neural networks do an excellent job of mimicking how inputs can be combined to provide an evolutionarily advantageous internal model of surroundings that would have selection pressure due to its significant ability to handle more complicated decision-making or behaviour-altering processes.