Joe Rogan Experience #1739 - Philip Goff

1. 0:00 – 0:54

   Studio table clutter, gifts, and how conversations start

   1. PGPhilip Goff0:00

      (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (instrumental music) Yeah? Yeah. Well, it started out as a plain, clean table-

   3. PGPhilip Goff0:17

      Uh-huh.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:17

      ... because it was a new studio. And then along the line, people give you a bunch of shit.

   5. PGPhilip Goff0:21

      Uh-huh.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      And then it just starts piling up.

   7. PGPhilip Goff0:23

      (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:23

      And you have to figure out when, like, "When do I empty this ashtray?"

   9. PGPhilip Goff0:27

      Uh-huh.

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:27

       "When do I throw out some of these objects? When do I move them into storage?" And then when I move them into storage, there's always, there always seems to be new ones that show up.

   11. PGPhilip Goff0:36

       So these are things, these are all things people have bought? Brought?

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:39

       Yes.

   13. PGPhilip Goff0:40

       Right.

   14. JRJoe Rogan0:40

       Everything is something someone's given me.

   15. PGPhilip Goff0:42

       Oh, I should have brought something. I feel bad now.

   16. JRJoe Rogan0:43

       Uh, except the, the deer head. Oh, please don't give me anything.

   17. PGPhilip Goff0:46

       (laughs)

   18. JRJoe Rogan0:46

       We're good. Thank you. Just, just your-

   19. PGPhilip Goff0:48

       You're kidding.

   20. JRJoe Rogan0:48

       ... pretty self is fine.

   21. PGPhilip Goff0:49

       Aw. It's fine.

   22. JRJoe Rogan0:50

       Um, so, uh, thanks for doing this, man. Appreciate it.

   23. PGPhilip Goff0:53

       No worries. Thanks for having me.

2. 0:54 – 2:11

   Philip Goff’s panpsychism: consciousness as fundamental in physics

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:54

      It's a very fascinating subject 'cause I've always wondered. Um, let's, let's just expla- uh, tell everybody what you do and who you are.

   2. PGPhilip Goff1:02

      My name's Philip Goff. I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England. And I spend most of my time thinking about consciousness. And specifically, I guess, I defend this view, panpsychism, uh, which is roughly the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. So, so it doesn't, doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious necessarily. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience and then the, the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this very simple experience at the level of fundamental physics. So, sounds kinda wacky, but I think, uh, more and more philosophers and even some neuroscientists are thinking this might be our best hope for addressing the hard problem of consciousness and the, the, the scientific and philosophical challenges consciousness raises.

3. 2:11 – 7:16

   Plant intelligence vs. plant consciousness: what evidence can (and can’t) show

   1. JRJoe Rogan2:11

      Well, we are starting to challenge whether or not other things have something akin to consciousness, like plants, right?

   2. PGPhilip Goff2:18

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan2:19

      There's, uh, there's real evidence that plants-

   4. PGPhilip Goff2:22

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan2:22

      ... um, both, uh, feel something when they're being eaten and react to it. Um, the r- the real evidence that they react to it, they actually change their, the profile, the chemical profile, to make themselves, uh, taste disgusting so that animals will not eat them.

   6. PGPhilip Goff2:37

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JRJoe Rogan2:38

      And that could actually be replicated with noises of the leaves being chewed on, which is really fascinating.

   8. PGPhilip Goff2:44

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   9. JRJoe Rogan2:44

      They've played tape recordings of caterpillars eating leaves next to trees and those trees have triggered that response, this chemical response of, uh, whatever, whatever it is inside of them that makes them taste disgusting.

   10. PGPhilip Goff2:57

       Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the, the extent to which we've discovered how intelligent the kind of mental sophistication of plants is incredible. So they're... Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to conditioned learning. So, you know, the, the, the old Pavlov's dog idea that, um-

   11. JRJoe Rogan3:20

       Mm-hmm.

   12. PGPhilip Goff3:20

       ... you know, you rang the bell every time the, um, the dog gets food and then eventually the dog is so, starts salivating when the bell rings. But she's actually done this with pea plants. So she's, um, taught them to associate, um, the, the, the, the, the ultraviolet light with the, the hum of a computer fan.

   13. JRJoe Rogan3:40

       Hmm.

   14. PGPhilip Goff3:40

       And eventually they started growing towards the hum of the computer fan. So, there'd been some kind of conditioned association there.

   15. JRJoe Rogan3:47

       Hmm.

   16. PGPhilip Goff3:48

       Um, and also the people, you know, the, the, the, the, the sophistication of trees and the, the life of trees to the extent that they're hooked up under the ground, what some people have called the w- the wood wide web.

   17. JRJoe Rogan4:00

       Mm-hmm.

   18. PGPhilip Goff4:00

       And that even across species there's kind of a sort of quid pro quo that the, um, the, the, the, the evergreen, the deciduous trees giving nutrients to the, to the evo- t- sorry, the other way around, isn't it? The, the evergreen trees giving nutrients to the deciduous trees when they've lost their leaves and then this being reciprocated. And so there's, you know, much more sophistication in, i- in the plant kingdom than we previously realized. Now, but whether that's, I mean, whether that is consciousness is another question. I mean, there's, there's, there's a core difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness, which is that consciousness is not publicly observable, right?

   19. JRJoe Rogan4:46

       Hmm.

   20. PGPhilip Goff4:46

       I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences. You know, we know about consciousness not from observation experiment, but just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. So, you know, and, so, you know, science is used to dealing with unobservables, fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other universes. None of these things are directly observable. But there's a, there's a really important difference in the case of consciousness, because in all these other cases, we're postulating things that are unobservable in order to explain what we can observe. That's ultimately what we're int- you know, the standard model of particle physics, it's all about explaining what is publicly observable. But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is not publicly observable.

   21. JRJoe Rogan5:43

       Hmm.

   22. PGPhilip Goff5:44

       And, and that is utterly unique and, and really constrains our capacity to investigate it experimentally. So it is... I mean, in the case of human beings, you, I can't directly o- observe your feelings, but I can ask you, right?

   23. JRJoe Rogan5:58

       Right.

   24. PGPhilip Goff5:59

       And, you know, I can scan your brain at the same time or maybe stimulate bits of your brain and ask you-... what you're feeling, what you're experiencing. And in this way, neuroscientists try to match up what kinds of brain activity are correlated with what kind of experience. And we can hopefully make some progress on that in the human case, but the f- you know, the further we get away from the human case, the harder it is to, to, to establish what things are or are not conscious. I mean, s- some people are now starting to think, um, there might just be real limits to our knowledge here because consciousness is not publicly observable. So there's, there's a real challenge there, I think.

   25. JRJoe Rogan6:40

       It is a fascinating thing in that it's agreed upon, right? Like, everybody knows that we have it, but then-

   26. PGPhilip Goff6:45

       Mm-hmm.

   27. JRJoe Rogan6:45

       ... trying to figure out what else has it, we, w- we must rely on their reactions and motion.

   28. PGPhilip Goff6:51

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan6:52

       Like, that's one of the things about plants, right? Like, the motion is so slow. Like, the motion of their growth-

   30. PGPhilip Goff6:58

       Yeah.
4. 7:16 – 11:42

   Neural correlates of consciousness: stalled consensus and competing theories

   1. PGPhilip Goff7:16

      So maybe there's just something going on in a, in a different, uh, frame of reference here. But, um, yeah. I mean, actually, the... So the neuroscientist, uh, Christof Koch had a bet with David Ch- the philosopher David Chalmers in, uh, the, uh, in the 1990s that in 25 years, we would have completely established the neural c- what, what is called the neural correlates of consciousness, you know, exactly what kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness. He bet him a case of wine, a case of fine wine.

   2. JRJoe Rogan7:49

      Did he pay up? (laughs)

   3. PGPhilip Goff7:50

      Well, I think he's probably about to lose that bet because, you know, it's pretty much 25 years later-

   4. JRJoe Rogan7:56

      Yeah.

   5. PGPhilip Goff7:57

      ... and there's just no consensus. There are different theories, and there is just no consensus. And actually, I mean, it's exactly what you said, right? B- because we can't observe it, we have to establish, to do the science... We're not, you know, we're not even talking about the philosophy, the hard problem of consciousness yet. Just, just this scientific project of trying to map up, map which kinds of brain activity go with experience. To do that, we have to set up what we can call detection procedures, kind of rules for mapping behavior to experience. So one of these might be, i- if someone is having an experience, they can report it, right? That's... Some people, some neuroscientists adopt that rule. If someone's having an experience, you can report it. So if you, if you adopt that rule, then you can start to test whether someone's having an experience. But they're controversial, so other people doubt those rules. So some people who accept what's sometimes called the overflow thesis think that there's more experience than we can actually think or attend to. So if you think about your experience of, um, your clothes on your body right now. So now I've said it, you, you might be attending to it and, and aware of it. But before I mentioned it, you weren't thinking about it, you weren't attending to it. It's, it's an open debated question whether you are actually experiencing that, whether you can have an experience that you're not aware of, that you're not attending to. And different... Wha- what stance you take on that philosophical question leads to different scientific predictions. So people who think there's a close connection between attention and consciousness tend to think consciousness is in the prefo- prefrontal cortex because that's where th- things like cognition, like working memory is. But people who think there's m- there can be more experience than we can attend to, they tend to think it's in the back of the brain.

   6. JRJoe Rogan9:55

      Hmm.

   7. PGPhilip Goff9:55

      And it's just, you know, wildly different predictions, and so, you know, it's a real mess.

   8. JRJoe Rogan10:00

      Mm-hmm. And then there's subconsciousness, the concept of your unconscious and subconscious thoughts, which are really just consciousness in different layers. It's not really unconscious or subconscious.

   9. PGPhilip Goff10:11

      Yeah. That's controversial. Okay. So, so I mean, the e- the extreme version of... So some people think if you're, if you're not aware of it, you're not really experiencing it.

   10. JRJoe Rogan10:23

       Right.

   11. PGPhilip Goff10:24

       So, I mean, you know, to take, you know, all of your experience right now, you know, all of these beautiful, s- slightly odd objects and-

   12. JRJoe Rogan10:33

       (laughs)

   13. PGPhilip Goff10:33

       ... you know, your experience with the clothes on your body and the sound of my voice... So we know... What we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that, right?

   14. JRJoe Rogan10:43

       Mm-hmm.

   15. PGPhilip Goff10:43

       There are real limits to what you can attend to. So the question is, those things you're not attending to, are they part of your experience that you're just not aware of? Some people think that makes no sense. If you're not aware of it, you're not experiencing it. Um, or the case, you know, where you're kinda driving along and you've... You know, you're lost in thought, you're just on autopilot. Were you actually experiencing the road, or were you just on total unconscious autopilot? So, so there's a real debate just there. But I suppose for those people who think awareness and consciousness can come apart, some people think there could be all kinds of really vivid experiences that we're just totally unaware of, um, and then... You know, so I mean, I think we're just... In a way, we're not at first base with the... We're not even at the kind of hard problem of consciousness yet. Just in the scientific questions, we're really not in, uh, first base in how to think about them properly.

5. 11:42 – 16:08

   Instincts, animals, and the leap from behavior to inner life

   1. JRJoe Rogan11:42

      Well, what... Uh, the way we interface with the world as a, as a life form is, uh, based essentially on instincts and, uh, on genetics that have all been hammered into our system in order to keep us alive, right? I mean, that's... You could only concentrate on so many things at so many-

   2. PGPhilip Goff11:59

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:00

      Like, y- you have to have a certain amount of concentration on your environment and the world around you. If you didn't have it, you didn't survive. That passed on to where we are today. The concept of unconscious thoughts and of memories and things, th- this is all supposed to be, like, things that you can r- rely upon for certain instincts that you have to avoid certain areas because this is, this is problematic. This could cause you to lose your life. This could, uh, k- keep you from passing on your genes. Like, there's a reason for all this stuff, right? When you get down to objects, though, like a thing having consciousness or some kind of consciousness, that's where we, we have to, like... Do we, do we have to parse what it means to be a human being?

   4. PGPhilip Goff12:40

      Mm-hmm.

   5. JRJoe Rogan12:40

      And w- why do we have all these hammered-in instincts and thoughts? And there's, there's certain instincts that animals have. Like, I have a golden retriever. Uh, he has not been around a lot of dogs to learn certain behavior.

   6. PGPhilip Goff12:56

      Mm-hmm.

   7. JRJoe Rogan12:56

      But there's certain things that he does that are baked into his DNA. Like, one of them-

   8. PGPhilip Goff13:01

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan13:01

      ... unfortunately, he likes to roll around in fox shit.

   10. PGPhilip Goff13:05

       Nice.

   11. JRJoe Rogan13:05

       So if he f- and it's a-

   12. PGPhilip Goff13:06

       I've got a friend who, uh, does that as well. I just... Sorry, go on.

   13. JRJoe Rogan13:08

       A human?

   14. PGPhilip Goff13:09

       Yeah. No, I was just-

   15. JRJoe Rogan13:10

       Joking?

   16. PGPhilip Goff13:11

       (laughs)

   17. JRJoe Rogan13:12

       If you talk to anybody that has a dog, they'll tell you that their dog, if they find wild animal shit sometimes in the woods, they will roll around in it for whatever reason. I don't know what that is.

   18. PGPhilip Goff13:22

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan13:22

       But it's clearly baked into what it means-

   20. PGPhilip Goff13:24

       Yeah, yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan13:24

       ... to be a dog.

   22. PGPhilip Goff13:25

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan13:26

       Right? There's certain things that are baked into what it means to be a person.

   24. PGPhilip Goff13:30

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan13:30

       Now, are those... What are those? Are those-

   26. PGPhilip Goff13:33

       Hmm.

   27. JRJoe Rogan13:33

       Is, is that your DNA? Is that a part of your memories? Is that your consciousness? And is that the only thing that encompasses consciousness? Like, does this-

   28. PGPhilip Goff13:40

       Mm-hmm.

   29. JRJoe Rogan13:41

       ... table have a certain amount of consciousness? I've always felt like these tables, there's one of them that I have in LA that's like this. And I redid this one. And while, while we're, we're doing a new studio, it's like-

   30. PGPhilip Goff13:51

       Hmm.
6. 16:08 – 19:02

   Defining consciousness: experience, not human-like thought

   1. JRJoe Rogan16:08

      Right, but we're, we're detecting those with senses, right?

   2. PGPhilip Goff16:10

      We-

   3. JRJoe Rogan16:10

      So if you have something that you, you say has consciousness, like this coffee pot. Let's imagine this coffee pot-

   4. PGPhilip Goff16:16

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan16:16

      ... has some sort of a consciousness. What is it, w- what is it based on?

   6. PGPhilip Goff16:20

      So I think, yeah, there's a tendency to... So w- whenever people hear about panpsychism, there's a tendency to think, "Oh, it's the kind of consciousness a human being has." So we're thinking like-

   7. JRJoe Rogan16:31

      Right.

   8. PGPhilip Goff16:31

      ... particles are feeling existential angst or-

   9. JRJoe Rogan16:35

      Mm-hmm.

   10. PGPhilip Goff16:35

       ... wondering if it's Tuesday or something. But-

   11. JRJoe Rogan16:37

       Yeah.

   12. PGPhilip Goff16:38

       ... you know, what... I mean, it's, maybe to g- it's good to get clear on what we mean by consciousness, because it is a bit of an ambiguous word. And often people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, like awareness of one's own existence or something. And, you know, that's-

   13. JRJoe Rogan16:52

       Right.

   14. PGPhilip Goff16:52

       ... that's something I'm not sure a sheep has, never mind a particle.

   15. JRJoe Rogan16:55

       Is consciousness-

   16. PGPhilip Goff16:56

       But-

   17. JRJoe Rogan16:56

       ... and sentient thoughts, are they linked?

   18. PGPhilip Goff16:58

       I think I would just say consciousness is... The way it's standardly used in the science and philosophy of consciousness is just subjective experience. Uh, pleasure, pain, seeing color, hearing sound. Consciousness is what it's like to be you, right? And, you know, in con- and this comes in all shapes and sizes. You know, in human beings, it's incredibly rich and complex. A sheep's consciousness is a bit simpler. Consciousness of a mouse, simpler again. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. So for the panpsychist, this just continues right down to the, the basic building blocks of matter, which have incredibly simple forms of experience to reflect their in- their incredibly simple nature. So, so that's, I mean, that's one clarification, that it's, this is, we're talking about just very simple kinds of experience. But also, I mean, you say, is the coffee pot conscious? I, I think most panpsychists would not think the coffee pot is conscious. The idea is that the, the fundamental-... particles, perhaps, are conscious, but maybe not every random aggregation of them is conscious in its own right. Although, although some people, although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious. Lo- Luke Roelof is a very good, very rigorous panpsychist philosopher and, um, he does think literally everything, including the coffee pot, is conscious. But even then, you know, it's, it's not gonna be like sitting there wanting us to drink it.

   19. JRJoe Rogan18:33

       Right.

   20. PGPhilip Goff18:33

       You know, that's the kind of consciousness you get after millions of years of-

   21. JRJoe Rogan18:36

       Right.

   22. PGPhilip Goff18:36

       ... evolution. Its consciousness is gonna be s- just some kind of meaningless mess.

   23. JRJoe Rogan18:41

       Like the difference between the consciousness of a dog and a human, even though a dog's clearly a conscious animal-

   24. PGPhilip Goff18:46

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan18:46

       ... it's not having in-depth conversations about its past-

   26. PGPhilip Goff18:49

       Yeah. So-

   27. JRJoe Rogan18:49

       ... and talking about what it wants for the future, and-

   28. PGPhilip Goff18:52

       Yes. So the panpsychists, it's kind of like a, a, a Copernican revolution where you stop thinking about consciousness rooted in the idea of human consciousness, but it's-

   29. JRJoe Rogan19:01

       Can I ask-

   30. PGPhilip Goff19:01

       Mm. Sorry. Go for it.

7. 19:02 – 24:56

   Where panpsychism came from: Russell, Eddington, and “physics is math”

   1. JRJoe Rogan19:02

      How, when did this start? Whe- where did this, uh, line of thinking, when did this, uh, become a serious point of discussion?

   2. PGPhilip Goff19:11

      I mean, panpsychism goes back to the s- the start of philosophy and, you know, both East and West and major enlightenment thinkers were panpsychists like Leibniz, Spinoza. And in, in the 19th century, it was, um, kind of a heyday for panpsychism, but I suppose-

   3. JRJoe Rogan19:27

      How was it proposed?

   4. PGPhilip Goff19:29

      How was it pr- I mean, I suppose for the, uh, the t- the latter half of the 20th century, this view fell out of favor and it's, you know, up until 10 years ago, it's sort of hardly anybody took it seriously, at least in, in Western science and philosophy. It's, it's really just, I'd say, the last five or 10 years, it's really come back on the table as, as a s- people are taking it as a serious option. Um, um, one reason for this is i- i- in academic philosophy is the rediscovery of a really interesting approach to consciousness by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s, which was also developed by Arthur Eddington, who was, uh, incidentally, the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity, which made Einstein an overnight celebrity. So I sometimes-

   5. JRJoe Rogan20:20

      Well-

   6. PGPhilip Goff20:20

      Sorry, go on.

   7. JRJoe Rogan20:20

      So what was Bertrand Russell's take on it?

   8. PGPhilip Goff20:23

      So, so, so Russell's starting point was to focus on how the f- the, the mathematical nature of physics, that the story, the description of reality we're getting from physics is just pure math, right? Um, you know, and, and this was, uh, this was the, the choice of Galileo, right? Back in the 1620s, he made the expressed choice, "Right, from now on, the language of science is gonna be mathematics." Right? And, you know, the, the maths has changed a lot. It's, you know, we have now imaginary numbers and non-Euclidean geometry, but still, right, physics trades in equations. So, I mean, there's a... What Russell realized, right, so there's a, there's a couple of ways a philosopher can respond to the fact that physics is just purely mathematical, right? One, one approach is to follow someone like the physicist Max Tegmark and say, um, "Well, maybe at base, reality just is pure math," right? "Maybe we live in a mathematical universe."

   9. JRJoe Rogan21:26

      Mm.

   10. PGPhilip Goff21:27

       The other approach, and this is close to, to Russell's approach, was to think, "Well, maybe there's something underlying those mathematical structures. Maybe there's something that those mathematical structures are the mathematical structure of."

   11. JRJoe Rogan21:45

       Right.

   12. PGPhilip Goff21:45

       So, so for the panpsychist, in the, this kind of Bertrand Russell-style panpsychism, at the fundamental level of reality, what we have are networks of very simple conscious entities. And these very simple conscious entities behave... Because they have incredibly simple kinds of experience, they behave in very simple ways, pretty simple, predictable ways, and through their interactions, they, they, they realize certain mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures are the mathematical structures identified by physicists. So when we think about these conscious entities, in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, um, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass, spin, and charge, but all there is there, really, are these conscious entities. So, so what, so essentially, what Russell realized is we can take the, the traditional hard problem of consciousness and turn it on its head, right? So the, the, the t- the typical way people think about the problem of consciousness is you think, you start with matter and you think, "How do we get consciousness out of matter?" I think that problem is unsolvable and we could talk about why, but, uh, but what Russell did is, is turn it on its head, right? Instead, start with consciousness-

   13. JRJoe Rogan23:18

       Mm.

   14. PGPhilip Goff23:19

       ... and get matter out of consciousness i- in the way I've just described. Because physics is purely mathematical, if we can have facts about these conscious entities that realize those mathematical structures, then we can essentially get physics out of consciousness. And that's much easier than getting consciousness out of physics.

   15. JRJoe Rogan23:40

       Mm.

   16. PGPhilip Goff23:41

       That's the basic idea. So, I mean, that sounds kind of weird 'cause you think that it means that when you're studying physics, you're learning about fundamental consciousness and, you know, that, that doesn't feel like what you're doing. But that's just because, as a physicist, you're just interested in the mathematical structures. You're not interested in what, if anything-

   17. JRJoe Rogan23:59

       Right.

   18. PGPhilip Goff23:59

       ... underlies that. That's more of a philosophical question.

   19. JRJoe Rogan24:02

       And then the concept of the mathematical structures below the mathematical structures, the mathematical structures of the mathematical structures, and that would be consciousness.

   20. PGPhilip Goff24:11

       Kind of. I mean, I would say I, I, I... Actually, I would say-... the, the mathematical structures identified by physics are the bottom level, right? In terms of mathematical structures. But there's something that fills out those mathematical structures.

   21. JRJoe Rogan24:28

       Right.

   22. PGPhilip Goff24:29

       So I disagree with Max Tegmark that there's- it's just pure math. It's- there's something... So I mean, the- the final page of The Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking famously said, "Even the final complete theory of physics will be just a set of equations. It won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe." So for the panpsychist, it's consciousness that breathes fire into the equations.

8. 24:56 – 28:40

   Evolution, zombies, and why consciousness is hard to explain functionally

   1. JRJoe Rogan24:56

      So the concept of consciousness, if you go back to the beginning of life, we have basically had a bunch of amino acids and chemicals and eventually, somehow, someway, through some process, it became a single-cell organism.

   2. PGPhilip Goff25:09

      Mm-hmm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan25:10

      When did consciousness emerge? Did- does- does it emerge then when you have this organism that's single celled? Did it emerge when there's multi-celled organisms where it started to split? Did it emerge when it started to move and did it emerge when it started to change environments? Like, if you really stopped and thought about what, what consciousness is, just from a traditional perspective, like if a light bulb went off-

   4. PGPhilip Goff25:33

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan25:33

      ... when it existed. Like, bing, there's one, there it is. Now we have one. Like, uh, there were- conceivably was a point in time where there was none, and then all of a sudden it came out of these chemical processes. Did it come out of it just because there's predators and prey and it had the need to survive and it had to recognize its environment and view its threats and then form communities in order to have more protection because of numbers? I mean, what is it, right?

   6. PGPhilip Goff26:00

      Yeah, I mean, actually I mean, the consciousness... There are difficulties get- apart from the hard problem of consciousness giving an evolutionary explanation of why consciousness emerged, because, um, it seems like what's important for survival is just behavior, right?

   7. JRJoe Rogan26:19

      Yeah.

   8. PGPhilip Goff26:20

      So if you could have, there's this- this notion of a philosophical zombie, right, uh, which David Chalmers popular- popularized, that's, you know, a, a behavioral duplicate of a human being that- that has no inner experience, so there's nothing that it's like to be a zombie. So they're not- so we need to distinguish these kind of philosophical zombies from Hollywood zombies, right? These are creatures that behave just like us in every way, uh, they, you know, you stick a knife in it, it screams and runs away, you, um, you know, it's navigating the world in- in all the ways we do, but there's- there's no visual or auditory experience, there's no feeling of pain. And there are a couple of different reasons we might think about these creatures, but one of them is in- when we're thinking about the evolutionary emergence of consciousness, a zombie would beha- would survive just as well as us, right?

   9. JRJoe Rogan27:15

      Mm-hmm.

   10. PGPhilip Goff27:15

       All that's important for, for survival is behavior. So if a creature without consciousness, a complicated mechanism that behaves just like us but doesn't have consciousness would survive just as well, why did consciousness evolve at all? So that is, that is a deep mystery. But for, you know, for the panpsychist, consciousness was always there at the fundamental level of reality. Um, the question is when did it- w- when did it arrive higher up? I mean, so, uh, in- I said panpsychism had something of a heyday in the 19th century. Pretty early after Darwin, many philosophers and scientists saw the connection between Darwinism and panpsychism. So William James, for example, thought, you know, on a panpsychist view, what natural selection does is take very simple forms of consciousness and molds them into more complex forms of consciousness, right? Whereas if you're not a panpsychist, you've got to have this story of, you know, you're getting more and more complex matter and then suddenly at some point a miracle happens and consciousness emerges, and you've got this mystery of, you know, w- why- why does that emerge if it- if behavior is all that's important to survival? We could do without it. So I think the panpsychist has a better- better story to tell on the hard problem of consciousness, but also on the evolution of consciousness.

9. 28:40 – 45:03

   Insect superorganisms, reductionism, and how much physics explains

   1. JRJoe Rogan28:40

      There's an also- there's a very interesting kind of consciousness amongst animals, amongst living creatures, and that's insect consciousness.

   2. PGPhilip Goff28:47

      Mm.

   3. JRJoe Rogan28:47

      Right? Like wa- insects have very bizarre and complex worlds. Like leaf-cutter ants. Have you ever seen when they've done those, uh, cement composures of leaf- like they fill a leaf-cutter ant colony up with cement and then they dig it out to try to find how it's constructed? Have you ever seen that?

   4. PGPhilip Goff29:06

      I don't think I have actually, no. That sounds-

   5. JRJoe Rogan29:07

      Oh my God, you gotta see it.

   6. PGPhilip Goff29:09

      ... interesting. Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan29:09

      Well, I'll have Jamie pull something up.

   8. PGPhilip Goff29:11

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan29:11

      It's insanely complex to the point where they have parts in their colonies in this, uh, village that they've established that are there to ferment leaves.

   10. PGPhilip Goff29:21

       Mm.

   11. JRJoe Rogan29:22

       So they have vents that go up through the ceiling and then below that they have this like compost pile of leaves. Um, this is good, but I'd like to see it. There's uh, there's some images of ones that they've taken. That's it. So that is amazing. Look at that. Subterranean portion of a giant leaf-cutter ant nest in Brazil.

   12. PGPhilip Goff29:45

       Oh my God.

   13. JRJoe Rogan29:46

       So what they did is they took this leaf-cutter ant nest and this is a- we're looking at something that's enormous. It's like a small house in terms of the, uh, amount of, uh, coverage that this colony has. And these scientists, uh, filled it with cement. So I don't know how they did it, I don't know how long it took, but essentially when they dig it out slowly and excavate the site, you get to see the actual structure of the leaf-cutter ant colony and where they lived. And it is unbelievably complex and amazing, and somehow or another they-

   14. PGPhilip Goff30:22

       Wow.

   15. JRJoe Rogan30:22

       ... they know how to do this.

   16. PGPhilip Goff30:24

       Mm-hmm.

   17. JRJoe Rogan30:24

       And it's, it's not just that they know how to do this, but that all leafcutter ants know how to do this. This is not unique to this one, individual colony that's figured something out that other ones haven't. And there's a series of complex, little pods and, and holes and tunnels. And again, they, they actually have vents. They have like an area where the leaves they bring in are fermenting-

   18. PGPhilip Goff30:48

       Mm-hmm.

   19. JRJoe Rogan30:49

       ... and they go through this process. And, uh, when you're looking at this, and for the folks that are just listening, these folks are, you know, 8, 9, 10 feet down in the ground-

   20. PGPhilip Goff30:58

       Yeah. Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan30:58

       ... digging out these incredibly complex, it looks like tunnels that lead into these large pods. And it's just wild. It's wild-

   22. PGPhilip Goff31:09

       Wow.

   23. JRJoe Rogan31:09

       ... to see like what causes this incredibly complex construction? Like, what is it?

   24. PGPhilip Goff31:17

       Mm-hmm.

   25. JRJoe Rogan31:17

       What, how are they communicating? If they're just communicating through pheromones and odd signals that they're giving off, like how do they know how to do this? Like, what, what is this? Right? What is-

   26. PGPhilip Goff31:30

       (sighs)

   27. JRJoe Rogan31:30

       What causes bees to make beehives all over the world? Why are they doing that? Like, what, why is it such an immense structure? Why do they have ... why have they figured out the correct way of making these geometric patterns that form the, the, the hive itself? It's wild.

   28. PGPhilip Goff31:52

       Yeah. I mean, so look, these are really difficult scientific questions. So I mean, I, I mean, I guess this, this, the orthodox view would be in some sense this is just reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. Um, but I mean, there, there are experimental scientists who deviate from that norm. Um, I'm friends with a Daniel Picard at Columbia University who's got the, uh, the psycho-biology mitochondria lab at Columbia University. And he's experimentally exploring the hypothesis that, uh, mitochondria in the brain, their activity should be understood as irreducible social networks rather than reducible to underlying chemistry, underlying physics. So I think, I mean, I think there's ... this is an on- ongoing argument I'm having with the physicist Sean Carroll at the moment. (laughs)

   29. JRJoe Rogan32:47

       Oh, really?

   30. PGPhilip Goff32:48

       I, I think, um ... he was on my podcast, uh, last week. We, we had a three-hour debate on-
10. 45:03 – 1:12:04

    Galileo’s ‘exclusion’ of consciousness and the quantitative–qualitative gap

    1. PGPhilip Goff45:03

       Um, and, you know, I think we shouldn't be surprised that physical science has this difficulty with consciousness be- because the scientific paradigm we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by Galileo to exclude consciousness. Um, should I talk a bit about that?

    2. JRJoe Rogan45:25

       Yes.

    3. PGPhilip Goff45:26

       So, yeah. So this is why, why I defend in my book, Galileo's Error. So really, the most important... Well, I shouldn't say that. A key moment in the scientific revolution, right, is 1623, Galileo's decision that mathematics was gonna be the language of science, right? Uh, this was the start of mathematical physics. What is not discussed much is the philosophical work Galileo had to do to get there, right? Because the problem was, before Galileo, people thought the world, the physical world was filled with qualities, right? So you have colors on the surfaces of objects, smells floating through the air, tastes inside food. And this was a problem for Galileo because you can't capture these qualities in, in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. You know, an equation can't capture the, the redness of a red experience. Um, so Galileo got around this 'cause... So Galileo, you know, he wanted to describe it all in math. Um, so Galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality. So we think of Galileo as a great experimental scientist, which he was, but he was also a great philosopher. So he proposed this new philosophical theory of reality and according to this theory, the qualities aren't really out there in the physical world, right? They're in the consciousness of the observer, right? So if you're looking at this, uh... Is that black? You're looking at the... You know, the blackness isn't really on the surface of the pen, it's in the consciousness of the person looking at it. Or if you're eating a spicy curry, the spiciness isn't really in the curry, it's in the consciousness of the person eating it. So Galileo strips the physical world of its qualities and after he's done that, all that's left are the purely quantitative properties, size, shape, location, motion, properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry. So, so in Galileo, Galileo's worldview, there's this m- radical division in nature between two domains, the quantitative domain of science, sci-... You know, the physical world with its mathematical quantitative properties, and the qualitative domain of consciousness. You know, consciousness with its colors, sounds, smells, tastes, which he took to be outside of the domain of science. So this is the start of mathematical physics, which has gone incredibly well. But I think what we've forgotten is that it's gone so well because Galileo gave science this narrow, specific focus. Galileo essentially said, you know, "Just put consciousness on one side. Just focus on what you can capture in mathematics." So this is so important. So I think people... We're now living in a strange period of history where people like Sean Carroll, for example, think, "Oh, materialism has to be true 'cause, you know, look how well physical science has done. You know, it's explained so much. Surely, it's gonna explain consciousness."... the irony is, it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. So I think if we, if we wanna bring consciousness fully into science, we need a new worldview. We need to find a way to bring together what Galileo separated, to bring together the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of human consciousness. And that's what panpsychism does, it gives us a way of bringing these together.

    4. JRJoe Rogan49:08

       I still am not getting how Galileo excluded consciousness.

    5. PGPhilip Goff49:12

       Mm-hmm.

    6. JRJoe Rogan49:12

       That doesn't, it doesn't make any sense. I, I do understand that mathematics are what he felt was the underlying building blocks of all things. But even if you're talking about how like spicy curry, for example-

    7. PGPhilip Goff49:24

       Mm-hmm.

    8. JRJoe Rogan49:24

       ... spicy curry doesn't exist in the curry, it exists in the consciousness of someone-

    9. PGPhilip Goff49:28

       Yeah.

    10. JRJoe Rogan49:28

        ... who eats the curry. But it's not really true 'cause there's a chemical reaction. There's, there, we know what the ingredients are in the curry that causes it to have a spicy reaction to the human being that's taking it in. It's a very distinct, very definable-

    11. PGPhilip Goff49:45

        Yeah.

    12. JRJoe Rogan49:45

        ... chemical reaction that we know that these plants have, uh, excreted these chemicals to discourage predation. That's why they're so spicy in the first place. We know, we know all these things. Like this is, in a way, mathematics. It's mathematics engaging with consciousness.

    13. PGPhilip Goff50:03

        Yeah, so look, there's, there's definitely a lot we can, we can do mathematically with the tools of mathematical science. Yeah, you can capture the chemical composition of the curry. You can capture-

    14. JRJoe Rogan50:16

        Yeah.

    15. PGPhilip Goff50:16

        ... the changes it makes in your brain.

    16. JRJoe Rogan50:18

        Right.

    17. PGPhilip Goff50:19

        But then at some point, uh, the resulting brain activity goes along with the sensation of spiciness.

    18. JRJoe Rogan50:28

        Well, you recognize it.

    19. PGPhilip Goff50:29

        That, that's where the miracle happens.

    20. JRJoe Rogan50:30

        But how is it a sen- but, but you're recognizing, 'cause your pain sensors and your tongue and the, the, the sensations of taste, they're all... This is mathematics, right? Like there's, there's certain compounds that cause certain reactions. We even attribute genes to those compounds, like the genes for, with some people, cilantro tastes like soap, and some people, it tastes delicious. Like that, those-

    21. PGPhilip Goff50:53

        Yeah.

    22. JRJoe Rogan50:53

        ... those are, there's a genetic... We, we, we know for sure that there's a genetic component to that. We, we can actually isolate the very, very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction.

    23. PGPhilip Goff51:04

        So I think, I think the, the chemical story can, the physical story can explain how people react to the, the taste, how people store information about it, how that impacts on their later behavior.

    24. JRJoe Rogan51:18

        Right.

    25. PGPhilip Goff51:19

        But all of that story could, in principle, go on in a, in, in what we call a zombie, in s- w- without any kind of inner life, any kind of experience of spiciness. You, you know, it's conceivable that you could have a mechanism that had all those reactions, um, and all those responses, but there was no feeling of spiciness. Um, I mean, he's, I mean, it's, it's sometimes, it's sometimes a bit more, more vivid with color if you think about... So I mean, he- here's another way of putting it, right? Suppose, suppose I wanted to explain in neuro, in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience, right?

    26. JRJoe Rogan52:01

        Okay.

    27. PGPhilip Goff52:02

        Why red experiences have that red quality. So the first issue is, I don't think you can... and this is essentially Galileo's insight. You can't capture the redness of a red experience in the language of neuroscience. And the way to see that, you, you know, you couldn't convey to a, a blind neuroscientist what it's like to see red by sh- you know, getting him to read your theory in Braille, right? You couldn't convey that to him. So that's a descriptive limitation, right? That the language of neuroscience, this purely quantitative language can't express the redness of a red experience. So that's just a descriptive limitation, but I think it entails an explanatory limitation, because if I wanted to present my neuris- my brilliant neuroscientific theory that explained the redness of a red experience, my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes. But if the theory can't even describe it, then it can't explain it. So I think, in principle, a neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience. Galileo, 500 years ago, realized that and he said, "If we want science to be mathematical, we have to take consciousness out of the story." And that was a good move, but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did. So now we're in a weird period of history where people think, "Oh, it's gone so well," but yeah, it's gone so well because we took consciousness out of the story, because you can't capture those qualities in a purely quantitative language.

    28. JRJoe Rogan53:46

        But what if it's both? What if, what if it's both conscious and chemical? That seems more likely, right?

    29. PGPhilip Goff53:56

        Yeah, but that, I mean, that's essentially the panpsychist view, right? But the, look, the question is, what comes first? So both, both the panpsychist like myself and the materialist like Sean Carroll, for example, you know, many, many people are materialists, we both think, you know, in some sense, consciousness and chemicals go together. The question is, which is more fundamental? I think that we get physics and chemistry out of consciousness, we don't do it the other way around. It's, it's very easy to explain here.

    30. JRJoe Rogan54:30

        But why, but why do... I still don't understand why you think that.
11. 1:12:04 – 1:28:04

    Illusionism and other challenges: ‘consciousness is an illusion?’

    1. PGPhilip Goff1:12:04

       Well, I mean, it has in, in recent times and in philosophy as people are taking panpsychism much more seriously, but people are also taking a view that's become known as illusionism quite seriously, which is basically the idea that consciousness is an illusion, right? You know, the brain tricks us into thinking we have conscious experience, but we don't really exist-

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:12:29

       So what is, what's the replacement? If we don't have-

    3. PGPhilip Goff1:12:32

       Well-

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:12:32

       ... conscious experiences, what, what is happening?

    5. PGPhilip Goff1:12:33

       So I, I mean, so I, I, um, so I, I run a podcast with, with a guy who has this view, right? So the gimmick is, you know, I think consciousness is everywhere and he thinks it's nowhere. You know? (laughs)

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:12:44

       Oh, no-

    7. PGPhilip Goff1:12:44

       We're sort of-

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:12:45

       ... you're The Odd Couple. (laughs)

    9. PGPhilip Goff1:12:46

       Yeah, exactly. So we're, uh, mine and Chuck we're sort of, uh, you know, the-... in an age of polarization, you know, we're trying to bridge divides.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:12:54

        Yeah.

    11. PGPhilip Goff1:12:54

        But I guess, I guess, we, we, we start from a, a common starting point, which is that we both think that, um, convention- the conventional scientific approach can't deal with consciousness, at least consciousness as philosophers normally conceive of it. Um, and I think that's because Galileo designed science to ignore it. But we both agree with that, so then Keith Frankish, this, this illusionist guy, his response to it, to say, "Well, it doesn't really exist." You know, it's like magic, fairy dust, you know? It's... And then, you know, it's, it's a nice, elegant solution, because you don't have to explain something that's not there. So he thinks... I mean, he compares it to, like, telekinesis. He thinks, you know, when there seems to be telekinesis, there's, there's two, there's two responses you can make. You can either say it's there and radically rethink your science to accommodate it, or you can say it's not there and, and then a challenge remains, which is to explain why it seems to be there, you know, explain away apparent cases of telekinesis. And he wants to apply that to, uh, consciousness as well, you know, that what we should say is it's not there, and then the, then the problem that remains is not the hard problem but the, the illusion problem. Why does it, why does, why does it, why, why is it so hard to deny the reality of consciousness? Because, I mean, there are a lot of these troubling philosophical phenomena that philosophers worry about, like free will.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:14:21

        Mm-hmm.

    13. PGPhilip Goff1:14:22

        Uh, you know, does free will f- how does free will fit into our conventional scientific story? Or morality, you know, facts about right and wrong. But in all these other cases, it always seems like an option to deny the datum. You know, maybe, maybe we're not really free in the way we think we are. Maybe there aren't really facts about good and bad, right and wrong. Maybe that's just our kind of projecting our feelings onto the world. But with consciousness, it's, you know, it's so hard, how, to deny. You know, nobody's ever really felt pain. Nobody's ever really seen color. You just think you feel pain. Actually, so, I mean, Keith is here to do this podcast, and he's slightly ambiguous on it. He wants to say, "Well, in a sense, I believe in pain, in a sense I don't." But there's another illusionist, F- Francois Kammerer, who says, um, he just says there's, no one's ever felt pain. And he's got a really interesting article, uh, exploring h- how we should think about morality.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:15:17

        What does that mean, no one's ever felt pain?

    15. PGPhilip Goff1:15:18

        Yeah, I don't know. I-

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:15:19

        What if somebody kicks his ass? What if someone holds that guy down and punches him in the nose until he screams to stop?

    17. PGPhilip Goff1:15:24

        Do you know, actually, when I was-

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:15:25

        You think he's in pain?

    19. PGPhilip Goff1:15:26

        When I was a first year-

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:15:27

        This is an intellectual masturbation exercise.

    21. PGPhilip Goff1:15:29

        (laughs)

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:15:29

        Do you understand that?

    23. PGPhilip Goff1:15:30

        When I was-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:15:30

        Like, things to- go too far.

    25. PGPhilip Goff1:15:32

        When I was... When I was a first year philosopher, I wrote, um, when I was 18, I wrote an essay expressing these sentiments, saying, uh, you know, if, if I kind of stuck a rusty blade in one of these people, what-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:15:44

        Yeah.

    27. PGPhilip Goff1:15:44

        And I got a really bad mark. I got really, they, they said it was, like, violent. (laughs)

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:15:47

        Oh, because you were explaining something that would be physically painful?

    29. PGPhilip Goff1:15:51

        (laughs) Well, look, this, I think-

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:15:52

        You got a bad mark for that kind of thinking?

Episode duration: 2:14:01