What is Consciousness and Where is It (Panpsychism) with Philip Goff (Part 1)

Ilia Delio interviews philosopher and author Philip Goff on the big questions of consciousness. What is it? And how does modern panpsychism explain the relationship between consciousness and matter? Ilia and Philip also discuss how consciousness exposes where science and religion need to work in a more interdisciplinary manner to continue furthering our quest for human knowledge.

ABOUT PHILIP GOFF

“Here’s a prediction: In twenty years’ time, the idea that panpsychism can be quickly dismissed as ‘crazy’ will seem, well, crazy.”

Dr Philip Goff, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. His research focuses on consciousness and the ultimate nature of reality. Goff is best known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. Goff’s books include Why? The Purpose of the Universe, Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality, and Is Consciousness Everywhere? Essays on Panpsychism. Goff has published many academic articles as well as writing extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Aeon, and the Times Literary Supplement.

Transcript

A HUNGER FOR WHOLENESS TRANSCRIPT | S04E06

What is Consciousness and Where is It (Panpsychism) with Philip Goff (Part 1)

Robert: Welcome to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. Today, Ilia interviews philosopher Dr. Philip Goff about his work on the science of consciousness. They begin with the big question, what is consciousness, and survey different approaches taken between scientists and philosophers? They then ask what might be gained from working more collaboratively on this interdisciplinary question?

Ilia: Professor Philip Goff, we are thrilled actually that you're here. I have been a huge fan of yours for quite some time, so I'm really honored to be having this conversation with you. I'm a novice of consciousness, but it's an area I've been deeply interested in. I myself was trained in neuroscience and have a background in neuropharmacology. So I actually began with an interest in schizophrenia, the neuro components of schizophrenia, so I've never kind of veered too far away from the brain and you know, areas of consciousness and thought and things like this—mental functions. Well, let me begin. You know, the first book I read of yours, I see it on the bookshelf, there was Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. Can you tell our viewers a little bit of how you got into this area of consciousness studies and why it's so important to you and why do you think it's the most important area today?

Philip: Well, thanks very much Ilia. Thanks for the kind words and good to hear a bit about your background. I'm sure we've got a lot of commonality and

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things to talk about here. Yeah, I think I've been obsessed with the problem of consciousness for as long as I can remember. I think it is one of the deepest scientific and philosophical challenges of our time. Understanding how the kind of things neuroscientists like yourself talk about, the kind of complicated electrochemical

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signaling in the brain, how that fits together with thoughts and what we call consciousness. By which you mean your thoughts, your feelings, your experiences of color and sound and smell and taste. You know, these seem like very different things on the one hand; brain activity, on the other hand, feelings and experiences, they seem like chalk and cheese and yet we know they are intimately connected, the question is exactly how.

But what I've been keen to press is, that this isn't just a scientific problem. I think so many people think, oh, we just need to do more neuroscience, a few more brain scans and we'll crack it. And you know, the science is absolutely crucial. We're not going to make progress without the science. But what I've come to think we need to appreciate is that this is a philosophical as well as a scientific challenge. I think one of the reasons we're not making progress is, we fail to appreciate that. Just finally, I'm glad you read my hard book. I thought you were going to say Galileo's Error, which I...

Ilia: I really like that book actually, Galileo's Error.

Philip: Thank you very much. I don't often meet people other than people who have a PhD in philosophy who've read Consciousness and Fundamental Reality. That was really the academic technical book that worked out my view and my arguments, and then Galileo's Error was trying to present that in a more accessible form. But yeah, that's what I've been trying to really push, that we need to engage with the philosophy as well as the science.

Ilia: Yeah, I think this area, to me, is one of the most important areas of study today. And it's one of the most, if I use the word complex, it's not quite correct because as you indicate, science can—we can measure, we can observe, we can reduce everything to its component parts, the mechanisms that make those parts work. And yet, we can do all of that and have no idea what consciousness is. Because every observation is an act of consciousness, so you just simply can't get rid of consciousness to even find out what it might be. And that is as many people going back way back, I recognize is this kind of loop, the paradoxical loop of consciousness that we can't place our minds on the side and objectively look at them more to look at this thing called consciousness. What is

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consciousness? I mean, what in your view, I mean you've written books, but just for our listeners, in your very just day to day, someone runs into you in the hallway and says, Phil, what is consciousness?

Philip: Yeah, because I don't actually think the mystery is what consciousness is because I think actually it's kind of quite—I know a lot of people do put it that way, but I think it's quite straightforward what consciousness is, at least the standard way scientists and philosophers talk about it. It's just what it's like to be you, your pleasure, your pain. You know, right now you are seeing colors, hearing sounds, this is all part of what it's like to be you right now. And in a way to your consciousness is what it's like to be a human being. In a way if you want to understand what it is, probably the best place to look is literature or cinema; read James Joyce or something. But there's also scientific interests. I think as I see it, the scientific task is, what kinds of brain activity go along with that kind of conscious experience. That's the very important scientific task, but that leaves open the question of why, why does certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of conscious experience? And it's at that point, I think we have to turn to the philosophy because there are various hypotheses philosophers have offered for how consciousness and the physical world are tied together.

And the problem is, they are what we call empirically equivalent, which means you, you can't do an experiment to decide which is right, because for any scientific data, each of these theories just interprets that data in its own terms. They can all explain the data for any scientific data about how consciousness is correlated with brain activities. Each of these philosophical theories can explain it. They have a story to explain it, but these stories are very different. So, we end up with very different philosophical interpretations of the scientific data, and the only way we're going to be able to deal with that is just to do some philosophy. You know, I think we're in a period of history. We're in many ways, scientism is the religion of our times that we think all questions can be answered with an experiment. Sam Harris has taken us to extreme saying, ethics should be settled with experiments. You know, I think most people think that's going too far. You know, you can't decide the ethics

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of abortion with an experiment. And I think it's the same with consciousness too. The philosophy of consciousness can't be dealt with in that. It's as important as the science is. You know, I think really we need scientists and philosophers working together to make progress on this issue.

Ilia: You know, one of the quotes that I often use is from Max Planck, and he says I regard consciousness as fundamental and I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We can't get behind consciousness, he says. So this relationship between consciousness and matter or consciousness and materiality, I do think—I know you write about this in your works, but there's a kind of implicit, and this is among the hoi polloi, among those who are non-scientist, non-philosophers, that mind is something that's outside matter or just something we have. But you know, here as a theologian, I'm a Catholic theologian, where mind does not figure into reality in a significant way. Say the question of God, that we kind of leave mind out and then we have all these kind of ideas about God. And so—and very inter in the fundamental relationship between mind and matter. Can you say a little bit on what your position is here?

Philip: Good. Well, that's a really nice quote you had there from Max Planck was it—and I think that captures one of the major positions on consciousness. I mean, here were two big philosophical rivals, right? One view is that the physical world is what comes first, and consciousness emerges from processes in the brain. That's the physicalist position. My own preferred position, which sounds a bit closer to Max Planck from what you just said on psychism, puts it the other way round. It's consciousness that's fundamental. And in fact, physical reality emerges from underlying facts about consciousness. These are the two big rivals.

Of course, there's the third option that—well, they're both fundamental. Maybe consciousness is in the soul and the physical world is something separate. So, these are the big rivals. As I say, you can't distinguish between them with an experiment; you just have to look at how plausible and coherent the explanations they offer are. And I think the

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panpsychist explanation actually is pretty much more worked out. We've managed to make coherent sense of how it could be, maybe we could talk about this, how it could be that physical reality could emerge from consciousness. Whereas the more conventional proposal, at least conventional these days, that consciousness emerges from physical stuff. I think we've never had any success at making sense of that. And there are good arguments that it's not actually a coherent explanatory proposal. So that's why I prefer this panpsychist view that it's—so it's like, is it matter first or consciousness first? And I think the idea that consciousness is first has just proved much more fruitful and coherent and to have explanatory power.

Ilia: A number of years ago, because I've been teaching broadly in this area for a while, Michio Kaku, the Japanese physicist, had this idea of—one of his theories was that consciousness, we can begin to think of it in terms of quantum reality or the way quantum physics holds out this kind of wave particle duality. And in his view, he spoke about consciousness sort of as he likened it to sort of a wave-wave overlap as if waves are overlapping and there's an exchange of information in this overlapping wave-wave particle duality or wave particle duality field or quantum field. And I thought that was just kind of maybe metaphorically speaking, I thought that was quite interesting because I do think there is something, and I think you're right, the coherency of consciousness and matter panpsychism that all matter—if I can just kind of clarify that, would you say all matter is a form of consciousness, kind of like the way Max Planck speaks about kind of a type of consciousness being matter itself? Or how would you see that relationship between consciousness and matters?

Philip: I would say panpsychist don't necessarily think literally everything is conscious. The idea would be at the fundamental level of the physical universe, whether it's particles or fields or as you say, waves, whatever we have at the fundamental level is really to be understood as forms of consciousness. And you might think that sounds a bit weird because that doesn't sound like what physicists are telling us. But this was the genius of Bertrand Russell in the 1920s that contemporary panpsychist draw on, Russell pointed

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out, well actually, physics is just a load of mathematical equations. It doesn't really tell us what matter is. Stephen Hawking famously said, physics doesn't tell us what breeds fire into the equations. So the panpsychist proposal is what underlies that mathematical structure. What breeds fire into the equations is these very rudimentary forms of consciousness. And then in the human or animal brain, they combine, fuse, unify into more complex forms of consciousness. But it doesn't mean rocks and tables and chairs are conscious. So the panpsychist needn't think this cup is conscious, but they might think the smallest particles or fields it's made up of have some kind of conscious experience.

Robert: What breathes fire into the equations? For all the groundbreaking advancements in scientific knowledge, the quantum dynamics of matter still raise deep and challenging questions, which cut across academic disciplines. Next, Ilia asks more about panpsychism and how it connects to more contemporary theological or philosophical visions. And later, does consciousness have anything to do with evolution? Support for a Hunger for Wholeness comes from the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society's toughest problems. Consider getting involved at fetzer.org.

Ilia: One of the people I study is the Jesuit, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He was a evolutionary biologist, paleontologist, a colleague of Julian Huxley and they both in dialogue, posited this idea that there's a kind of—well, Teilhard in particular, our within- ness, he called it—our within-ness and our without-ness, sort of a mental side and a matter side. And he spoke of matter, having these kind of, what he called bifacial dimensions, mind and matter consciousness and matter within-ness without-ness. I thought it was really clever. It's really interesting because what he says is sort of what you're saying, that mine doesn't kind of just sort of erupt out of inner matter. Like we're just kind of moving along through evolution and then voila there comes the mind. It's that quarks, leptons, single cells, bacteria have some kind of proto consciousness. By consciousness I think, awareness experience, whether that's an exchange of information or whatever is going on there in the environment. So it's environmentally contextualized for one thing, I think, it's not

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existing as a single isolated monad, but it's kind of in relationship to everything else that is in a sense part and parcel of its functioning. So that as evolution proceeds, he says consciousness increases with material complexity, which is very, very interesting. So is that as matter begins to draw together through the mechanisms of material evolution that we move from single cellular life to multicellular life to organs and plants—consciousness he says is rising.

So in that respect, I think even though it seems outrageous to think that like my cell phone might have a conscious, you know, my case might, or the desk that I'm writing on can have any kind of consciousness. But I also think we find it outrageous because we still think, I think on an operative level, certainly on the macro level in terms of, we're kind of Newtonian, we're kind of animistic at the macro level and we're sort of quantum on the micro level. And I think we don't have an ethics yet, or we don't have a sufficient context to think how a pancosmic reality could indeed be consistently and coherently the basis of all life from the quantum level upwards. And why I think it's important because I think it better situates the human person within the ecological whole, within the wholeness of life. I think a consistent panpsychism is a better explanation for wholeness.

Philip: Yeah, absolutely. Nice quote from Russell. Was it Russell or was it Arthur Edington who was the first person to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity, which made Einstein an overnight celebrity. Arthur Edington was also working on these ideas inspired by Bertrand Russell in the 1920s. And I can't remember which of them said modern science isn't this Victorian idea of billiard balls bouncing around. He said it's more like what we'd find in a seance with all this very peculiar world we find in modern physics as it was then. But actually, Teilhard de Chardin is very interesting figure. My father as a young freethinking Catholic, was very inspired I think by Teilhard de Chardin, and I talk about him a little bit in my recent book, Why: The Purpose of the Universe, and how Teilhard de Chardin was inspired by evolution, but inspired to think of sort of cosmic evolution, new forms of life and consciousness emerging. Some people think he in a sense predicted the internet because he thought the next stage of cosmic evolution would

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involve us becoming informationally connected up and new forms of life and consciousness emerging.

And I agree with you actually that pretty early on, early after Darwin, people like William James for example, saw a natural affinity between evolution and panpsychism. The alternative is, okay, we've just got totally experiential matter evolving more and more, more and more complex. Then suddenly, a miracle happens and consciousness pops up this brand new thing. Whereas, it seems perhaps more natural to think, well no, before evolution, we've got these very simple or rudimentary forms of consciousness and evolution molds them into more complex forms of consciousness and self-consciousness and conscious understanding of the reality around us. So yeah, I agree it's a theory that helps solve this challenge of how consciousness fits into the physical world, but also fits with a lot of what we find in science and philosophy more generally.

Ilia: You know, you're a more recent interest in cosmic purpose, you know, why are we here at all? I think kind of, I mean if I think of Teilhard's notion of this notion of Omega, we're moving. So what's interesting is, there does seem to be direction in evolution. You know, it doesn't seem to be, I mean, up till very recently evolution just seemed to be a blind random chance of the way natural selection works and adaptation and gene selection where the fitness of life, but there seems to be much more going on. And here I do think new understandings of panpsychism as well as cultural evolution are giving us new understandings that we're oriented towards something. And that's what's really interesting, toward what? Not only like why do we exist, but for what do we exist? And one of the things that Teilhard really speculated on was, and I'll put it in my words—in a sense it is not matter driving mind, it's mind driving matter, like consciousness is driving materiality. And that's a very, very interesting idea. Do you have thoughts on that or you've probably written on this, consciousness driving evolution?

Philip: Absolutely. I think this does very much fit with the new book modestly titled Why: The Purpose of the Universe. And actually, I can say I agree with a lot of what you've said

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now, but I think five years ago, if you'd told me I'd be arguing, there's a purpose to the universe, I wouldn't have believed you. This has been something of a journey, really. I think two things. You know, people think, oh look, surely science has proved we live in a meaningless purposeless universe, especially post Darwin. But I think two things really have nagged at me and ultimately resulted in this book. Two things that I think point to cosmic purpose. One is the fine tuning of physics for life. The surprising discovery of recent decades that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to be, like Goldilocks porridge, just right not too big, not too strong, just right. I think we're kind of in denial about this as a society.

It's not very controversial physics and yet—a, I find not many people know about it unless you're really interested in this stuff. And I think it's, it's in our normal ways of thinking about evidence shaped by what we call bays theorem. This looks to be evidence for some kind of cosmic goal directedness towards life. I think people are just thinking, well no, that's not how science is. And they're just really stuck in—they're letting cultural assumptions drive the theorizing rather than the evidence. But the other thing is thinking about the evolution of consciousness. If we were just complicated mechanisms, well that's really the question. Why aren't we just complicated mechanisms? Natural selection just cares about behavior. That's all that matters for survival, how things behave. And I think with the rise of ai, which you say we might get onto, and robotics, we now know you can have very complicated behavior and information processing without any kind of inner conscious life. So why aren't we complicated survival mechanisms?

I mean, I suppose if you're a panpsychist you could say, well, sort of everything has consciousness, but even then we have consciousness that gives us understanding of what things are and what things mean. Why don't we just have messy, meaningless consciousness? If we behave the same, we'd survive just as well. So this is—it's more of a subtle argument. I think it's one of the more challenging chapters of the book, but this is another reason I think these two things, consciousness and fine tuning don't fit with our current scientific paradigm. And I really think we're just struggling to think "make it work"

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a bit like maybe when we started getting evidence that we weren't in the center of the universe.

And people thought, "No, that's not the picture we got used to and tried to make the evidence fit the theory we already have." I think something like that's going on now. Although I just say one more thing. It's interesting that the very influential philosopher Thomas Nagle wrote a book that in some ways was similar to mine 10 years ago, 11 years ago, Mind and Cosmos, and he got a very unfair hostile reception—people saying, "Oh, he has lost the plot, lost his mind." And my book has not got anything like that reception. I don't think it's because it's a better book or I'm a better philosopher, I don't think I am. But I just think we can see there's more openness to these ideas.

Ilia: I was a science major for years, so I understand and science has its own kind of, its own world. And it's the idea, science will tell all, it's the way to truth, it's the way to all knowledge. Science is the queen of everything. And the fact is science has had to come down just a notch because of other disciplines like philosophy and cultural studies and the way consciousness studies itself has opened up just new areas of understanding. And I think several things. One, I think the scientific method is actually—I think in the face of quantum physics, I think the scientific method just needs to come down a notch. And I think we need new approaches to what science is about, what it can achieve. And so, I think scientists had to very slowly wake up to a bigger world. Like we're not the entire story here. And that's really hard because a hardcore scientific materialist will say, "Are you kidding? Science definitely is the way to all knowledge, to real true knowledge. And everything else is just, you know, it can help maybe a little or ridiculous, especially when it comes to religious ideas; these are just like farfetched, mythical stuff.

So, I think science itself is in a revision. I think it's undergoing a kind of a conversion. You might say it's in conversion therapy of some sort. The second is, when Nagel wrote his book, even 10 years, it doesn't seem like a long time, but a lot has happened in 10 years, even in terms of consciousness studies, the way philosophy itself has opened up, the way

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AI has challenged us to think anew about consciousness, so I do think your work comes at a very precipitous moment. You know, where panpsychism is gaining traction, it still has a lot of resistors. A lot of people still take this as not really science or not really scientific, it lacks rigor and all this kind of stuff. But then I think anyone with a left brain and a right brain will realize that panpsychism actually is a much more coherent explanation of why we're here.

I mean, our starting point for everything actually has to be us because we're the ones who are investigating, who study the universe, who study matter. We're the conscious beings itself. This is something that Teilhard recognized. We are the whole evolution now on the level of self thinking, on the level of thought. So, not to recognize that data point is a serious fallacy of misplaced concreteness, to use Whitehead's term. And the third thing is, I do think there is still resistance to incorporating panpsychism too deeply because it does come very close to questions of spirituality and questions of God. So when we start cut a hovering in that religion territory, I think that still becomes very kind of a neuralgic issue for hardcore materialists, and they don't want to go there. So they're going to put up the fences and the walls of resistance, but it's precisely those walls we want to keep challenging. Because I think what panpsychism does, it's inviting us to rethink what this word God might mean because we import a lot of baggage into that language, and religion seems to have a lot of ideas that seem all wrapped up in what we're about. And I don't think that it's at all. I think Panpsychism is calling both religion and science to step back and take a new look, a fresh new look at this one cosmos, this one world.

Robert: Next time, Ilia and Philip discuss more about the ineffable that is driving both religion and science. And Ilia asks Philip whether he thinks AI will ever become conscious. Be sure to tune in next week. I'm Robert Nicastro, thanks for listening.

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