YouSaid · the spoken record
Philip Goff
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- 2022-02-03
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- 2022-02-03
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“Thanks very much, Lex. This has been a really fascinating conversation. I've got a lot I need to think about actually just from this conversation, but thanks for chatting to me”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You shouldn't believe your friend's going to get better because probably not. But what you can say is, you know, you could say to your friend, I have faith that you're going to get better. That is, I choose to live in hope about that possibility. I choose to orientate my life towards that hope. Similarly, I don't think we know whether or not there's a purpose to existence, but I think... Can make the choice to live in hope of that possibility. And I find that Worthwhile And fulfilling way to live.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, yeah. And then, I mean Moving away from Punsychism to An even bigger level, I suppose, I think it is important to me. Live in hope that there's a purpose to existence and that what I do contributes in some small way to that greater purpose. But, you know, I, Would say I don't know if there's a purpose to existence. I think some things point in that direction, some things point away from it. But I don't think you need certainty or even high probability to have faith in something. So to take an analogy, suppose you go friend who's very seriously ill. Maybe there's... 30% chance they're going to make it”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sense that we lack a framework for understanding the meaning and significance of our lives. And in the absence of that, people turn to other things to make sense of the meaning of their lives, like nationalism, fundamentalist religion, consumerism. So I think panpsychism is important in that regard in bringing together the Quantitative facts of physical science with the, as it were, the human truth by which I just mean the qualitative reality of our own experience. As I've already said, I do think there are objective facts about Value We ought to do and what we ought to believe that we respond to, and that's very mysterious to make sense of both how there could be such facts and how we could know about them and respond to them. But I do think there are such facts and they're mostly to do with kinds of conscious experience.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These are big questions. I mean, firstly, I do think panpsychism is important to think about for considerations of Meaning and value, as we've already discussed, I think consciousness is the root of everything that matters in life, you know, from deep emotions, subtle thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. And yet, I believe our official scientific worldview is incompatible with the reality of consciousness. I mean, that's controversial, but that's what I think. I think people feel this on an intuitive level. It's maybe part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, you know, that they think They know their feelings and experiences are not just electrochemical signaling. I mean, they might just have that very informed intuition, but I think that can be rigorously supported. So I think this can lead to a sense of alienation.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, you could certainly. Allows for the possibility of creating artificial consciousness, right? Because there's not souls, there aren't any kind of extra magical ingredients. So yeah, it's definitely allows the possibility of artificial consciousness and maybe preserving my consciousness in some sort of artificial way. My only point, I suppose, was just replicating the computational organizational features. Would not, for me, preserve consciousness. I mean, but antifonents of materialism disagree with me on that. I think David Chalmers is an opponent of materialist. He's a kind of dualist, but he thinks... Way the psychophysical laws work, they hook onto the computational or organizational features of matter. So he thinks he thinks you could upload your consciousness. I tend to think not so in that way. In that”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You wouldn't get the stuff on my base. So I am actually worried if at some point in the future we start uploading our minds and we think, oh my God, Granny's still there. I can email Granny after her body's rotted in the ground. And we all start uploading our brains. It could be we're just committing suicide. We're just getting rid of our consciousness. Because I think that wouldn't for me preserve the experience, just getting the software features. So that's a crucial, but that's anyway, that's a crucial premise of the simulation argument because the idea in a simulated universe, I don't think you necessarily would have consciousness.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's software rather than hardware, right? It's depend on organization rather than the stuff. Whereas as a panpsychist, I think consciousness is the stuff of the brain. It's the stuff of matter. So I think just taking the organizational properties, the software in my brain and uploading them.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An important and serious argument, and it's not to be laughed away. I suppose one issue I have with it is There's a crucial assumption there that consciousness is substrate independent as the jargon goes, which means it's word.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Scientists and philosophers and engineers, perhaps interested in panpsychist approach. Because I think so far panpsychism has just been sort of trying to justify its existence. And that's important. But I think once you just get on with an active research program, that's when people start taking it seriously, I think.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exclusive. DLM with consciousness needs to be an interdisciplinary task. We need, you know. Philosophers, neuroscientists, physicists, engineers, replicating these things artificially, and all needs to be working in step. And, you know, I'm quite interested. I mean, more and more scientists get in touch with me, actually, you know, saying that was one of the great things about, I think, that's come from writing a popular book is not just getting the ideas out to a general audience, but getting the ideas out to scientists and having a scientist get in touch saying, you know, this. In some way connects to my work, and I would like to kind of start to put together a network of an interdisciplinary network of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I certainly think there's a role for that, and it would be an important consideration if we could. Seemingly replicating an artificial way. Ability to choose, that would be a consideration in thinking about these things. But there's still the question of whether that's how we do it. So even if we could replicate behavior in a certain way in an artificial system, it's not until we understand the workings of our brains, it's not clear that's how we do it. And as I say, I mean, the kind of free will I'm interested in is were we respond to reasons, considerations of value, how would we tell whether a system was genuinely Grasping and responding to facts about value or whether they were just Replicating, giving the impression of doing so. I don't know even how to think about that.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Strongly emergent causal dynamics, whether or not that would mean we have to modify physics or maybe just we think physics is not the total story of what's running the show, but we just, if it turned out empirically that everything's reducible to underlying physics and chemistry, sure, I would drop any commitment to free libertarian free will in a heartbeat. It's an empirical question. Maybe that's why, as you say, in principle, it is easier to get a grip on. But we're a million miles away from being at that stage.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Particles and fields, but then it's a further assumption whether they're the only things that are running the show. Maybe there are also fundamental causal capacities associated with systems. And then if we discover this strong emergence, then when we work out what happens in the brain, we have to look to the core theory, the causal capacities of particles and fields, and we have to look to what we know about these strongly emergent causal capacities of systems. And maybe they co-determine what happens in the system. So I don't know whether that makes sense or not, but I mean, the more important point, I mean, that's...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Situations of very high gravity. For example, when you're about to go into a black hole or something, actually, in terrestrial circumstances, we can bring them together in the core theory. And then Sean wants to say, well, we can be very confident that core theory is correct. And so if there were libertarian free will in the brain, the core theory would be wrong. And this is something I'm not sure about and I'm still thinking about and I'm learning from my discussion with Sean. But I'm still not totally clear why. It could be, suppose we did discover strong emergence in the brain, whether it's free will or something else. Perhaps what we would say is not that the core theory is wrong, but we'd say the core theory is... Correct in its own terms, namely capturing the causal capacities of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't yet set up that kind of experiment. We shouldn't pretend we know more than we do. So, yeah, so for those reasons, and that, well, the third consideration you raise is different. Again, this is the debate I have with Sean Carroll. Would this conflict with physics? I just think we don't know enough about the brain to know whether there are causal dynamics in the brain that are not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. So then Sean Carroll says, Well, that would mean. Physics is wrong, so he focuses on the core theory, which is the name for standard model of particle physics plus Weak limit of general relativity, so you know we can't totally bring Quantum mechanics and relativity together, but actually the circumstances in which we can't bring them together are just in.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might not happen on an identifiable instant. You might when you're weighing it up, should I get married? You might edge slowly towards one side or the other. And so it could be that maybe the liberty, I think there are other problems with the Libert stuff, but maybe they show that we can't. Freely choose to do something totally senseless, whatever that would mean. But that doesn't show we can't freely in this strong libertarian sense respond to considerations of reason and value. To be fair, it would be difficult to see what kind of experiment we could set up to test that. But just because...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he's scanning the brains, and he claims to have found that about half a second before they consciously decided to press the button, the brain is getting ready to perform that action. So he claimed that about half a second before the person has consciously decided to press the button, the brain has already started the activity that's going to lead to the action. And then later people have claimed that there's a difference of maybe seven to ten seconds. I mean, there are all sorts of issues with these experiments. But one is that as far as I'm aware, all of the quote unquote choices they focused on are just these totally random, senseless actions like just pressing a button for no reason. And I think the kind of free will we're interested in is free choice that involves responsiveness to reasons, weighing up considerations. And those kind of free decisions.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hypothetically, supposing trying to make sense of this idea, not saying it's real, but that could be enough to distinguish it from a senseless side. It's not a senseless random occurrence because the free decision involved responsiveness to reasons. So I think that just answers that particular philosophical objection. So what is the middle way between determined by prior causes and totally random? Well, there's an action, a choice that's not determined by prior causes, but is not just random because the decision essentially involved responsiveness to reasons. So that's the answer to that. And I think actually that kind of thought also, I think you were hinting at the famous libert experiments where he got his subjects to perform some kind of random action of pressing a button and then note the time they decided to press it quote unquote.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I'm deciding whether to take a job in the US or to stay in the UK, I weigh up considerations, different standard of life maybe or being close to family or cultural difference. I weigh them up. And I edge towards a decision. So I think that is sufficient to distinguish it.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think there was a good answer to that by the philosopher Jonathan Lowe, who's not necessarily very well known outside academic philosophy, but is hugely influential figure. I think one of the best philosophers of recent times, he sadly died of cancer a few years ago, actually spent almost all of his career at Durham University, which is where I am. It was one reason it was a great honor to get a job there. But anyway, his answer to that was what makes the difference between a free action and a totally senseless one senseless random event, is that free choice involves responsiveness to reasons. So again, we were talking about this earlier.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought about the comparison. Yeah, so there are different arguments here. I mean, So, one argument I've heard somehow is give that's pretty common in philosophy is this sort of thought that we can't make sense of a middle way between A choice being determined by prior causes, and it just being totally random and senseless, like the random decay of radioactive isotope or something”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a big fan of Sam Harrison. I think we're on the same page in terms of consciousness, I think, pretty much. I mean, I'm not saying he's a panpsychist, but in our understanding of the hard problem. But yeah, I think maybe we could talk about free will without being too dragged down in the terminology. But I don't know.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. Think we need to be a lot more agnostic about free will than about consciousness because Don't think we have the kind of certainty of the existence of free will that we do have in the consciousness case. It could turn out that free will is an illusion. It feels as though we're free when we're really not. Whereas, I mean, I think the idea that nobody really feels pain, that we think we feel pain, but that's a lot harder to make sense of. However, what I do feel strongly about is I don't think there are any good either scientific or philosophical arguments against the existence of free will. And I mean strong free will in what philosophers call libertarian free will in the sense that some of our decisions are uncaused. So I very much do disagree with someone like Sam Harris who thinks there's this overwhelming case. I just think it's non-existent. I think there's ultimately an empirical question. But as we've already discussed, I just don't think we know enough about the brain.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he's written a book on Dennett, I think called Boston Zombie, I think. I think that's the title, and he's, yeah, he's a big fan of Dennis. So I think the original plan for this was just going to be, it was on free will and consciousness, and it was going to be kind of people broadly in the Dennett type camp, but then I think they asked David Chalmers, and then he was saying, look, you need some people you disagree with. So he got invited. Me, the panpsychist and Martina Nieder Rumelen, who's very good duelist. Substance duelist. Substance duelist at University of Friburg in Switzerland. So we were the official opposition on board opposition.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure I'd A great deal to help you. I mean, I know they've done some great stuff. Dimitri, you know, funded this thing and also brought it along some graduate students from Moscow State University, I think it is, and they have an active center there that tries to bring people in. I think they're producing a book that's coming out that I made a small contribution to on different philosophers' opinions on God, I think, or some of the big questions. Yeah, so there's some interesting, some really interesting stuff going on there. I'm afraid I don't really know more generally about philosophy in Russia.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Philip was a very humble man. Yeah. He was carving a walking stick on deck, it's a very homely scene. And anyway, we started talking about this, and I was trying to press in, and he was saying, Albert dualism's a lot of nonsense, and why do you think? And I was just saying, no, no, I'm just this honing down on this specific point. And in the end, maybe he'll deny this, but he said, maybe that's right. And I was like, yes.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got a lot of, well, as one of the Moscow University graduate students that afterwards, he said, he had to ask a translation from his friend. And he said, they turned on you like a pack of wolves. Everyone was like, and Patricia Cheshire was saying, so you believe in magic, do you? And I was like, I'm not even a dualist. I'm just making a pedantic point that this isn't a problem for dualism. Anyway, but that evening everyone went... Onto the island, except for some reason me and Daniel Dennett, and I went up on deck and he was very, very practical and he was unlike me. See, there's a bit of humility for the first time in this conversation.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they want to say it can be part of a law governed world. So Chalmers believes in these psychophysical laws of nature over and above the laws of physics that govern the connections between consciousness and the physical world. And they could just respect conservation of energy, right? I mean, it could turn out that there are, just in physics, you know, that there are multiple forces that all work together to respect conservation of energy. I mean, I suppose physicists are pressing for a unified underlying theory, but there could be a plurality of different laws that all respect conservation. So why not add more laws? So I raised this in Paul Churchland's talk.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not my own point. Materialist philosophers like David Papaneau pointed out that, you know, dualists tend to chalmers who call themselves naturalistic dualists, they want to bring consciousness into science. They think it's not physical.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so on the former question, yeah, I mean, I had a really good experience of chatting to Daniel Dennett. I mean, I think he's a fantastic and very important philosopher, even though I totally fundamentally disagree with almost everything he thinks. But yeah, it was a proud moment as I talk about in my book, Galileo's Era, I managed to persuade him he was wrong about something. Just a tiny thing, you know, not his fundamental worldview. But it was this issue about... Whether dualism is consistent with conservation of energy. So Paul Churchland, who was also a philosopher, who's also... This boat had argued they're not consistent because if there's an immaterial soul doing things in the brain, that's going to add to the energy in the system. So we have a violation of conservation.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so quantum mechanics is a bit of maths, and the equations work really well, predicts the outcomes. But then there's a further question. What's going on in reality to make that equation predict correctly? And some physicists want to say, shut up. Just it works. The shut up and calculate approach. Similarly in consciousness, I think it's one question trying to work out the physical correlates of consciousness, which kinds of physical brain activity go along with, which kinds of experience. But there's another question. What's going on in reality? Undergird those correlations to make it the case that brain activity goes along with experience, and that's the philosophical question that we have to give an answer to. And there are just different options, just as there are different interpretations of quantum mechanics.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, maybe a good analogy if you think about quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is a bit of math translating there. We say maths and fluent and American.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second point Suppose Joe was saying Look, we know consciousness is explained by brain activity because, you know. Take some funny chemicals, it changes your brain, it changes your consciousness. And I suppose, yeah, some people might want to press, and maybe this is what Joe was pressing. Isn't that explaining consciousness? But I suppose I want to say, A further question Yes, changes of chemicals in my brain, changes my conscious experience. That leaves open the question why those particular chemicals go along with that particular kind of experience rather than a different experience or no experience at all.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Explain the experience in terms of the brain activity. The panpsychist does it the other way around, the dualist thinks they're separate, but maybe they're tied together by special laws of nature or something.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it was good fun. Yeah, he put up a bit of a fight. Yeah, it was challenging my view that. We can't explain these things in conventional scientific terms or whether they have already been explained in conventional scientific terms. I suppose the point I was trying to press is. Got to distinguish the question from correlation and explanation. Yes, we've established facts about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience. Everyone agrees on that. But that doesn't address the why question. Why? Why do certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience and these different theories have different explanations of that? The materialist tries to.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I often suspect that actually. I don't really have such delusions of grunge it. At least I don't admit to them. But we've got to distinguish the ontological question from the epistemological question in terms of the reality of the situation. There must be, in my view, a factor of the matter as to whether something's conscious or not. And to me, it has rights if it's conscious, it doesn't. If it's not. But then the epistemological question, how the hell do we know? It's a minefield, but we'll have to sort of try and cross that bridge when we get to it, I think.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, maybe that's, you know, maybe these illusionists, maybe they are zombies and the rest of us aren't. Maybe there's just a difference. Maybe you're.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Against these humans, the zombie. Revolutionary leaders, the zombie Martin Luther King saying, you know, I have a dream that my zombie children will. But look, I mean, we need to sharply distinguish the ontological question.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could end up with a zombie proletariat. You know, if we can get these things that do all our manual labor for us, you know, they might start forming trade unions. I will leave.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That would be really reassuring if it was just you could clearly mark out the conscious things for these emergent causal dynamics. But that might not turn out to be the case. A panpsychist doesn't have to think that. They could think everything's just reducible to physics and chemistry And then I still think I want to say zombies don't have moral rights, but how we answer the question of who are the zombies and who aren't, I just got no idea.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess that's sort of the other side of the same point. We could say, Lo, look, these zombies, they're just Mechanisms that are just doing what they're programmed to do through the underlying physics and chemistry. Whereas, look, there's these other people where they have these new causal dynamics that emerge that go beyond the base level physics and chemistry. I think the series Westworld, where you've got these theme parks with these kind of humanoid creatures, they seem to have that idea. The ones that became conscious sort of rebel against their programming or something. I mean, that's a little bit far-fetched”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what would be nice? If it turned out that Consciousness What we call strongly emergent that it was associated with new causal dynamics in the brain that were not reducible to underlying chemistry and physics. This is another ongoing debate I have with Sean Carol about whether current physics should make us very confident that that's not the case, that there aren't any strongly emergent causal dynamics. I don't think that's right. I don't think we know enough about brains to know one way or the other. If it turned out that consciousness was associated with these irreducible causal dynamics, A, that would really help the science of consciousness. We've got these debates about whether consciousness is in the front of the brain or the back of the brain. It turns out that there are strongly emergent causal dynamics in the front of the brain. That would be a big piece of evidence. But also it would help us see which things are conscious and which things aren't. So we can say, I mean,”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Robot set up to behave just like us and has the kind of information a human brain has, but the information is not stored in a way that involves is dependent on the integration and interconnectedness, then according to the integrated information theory, that thing wouldn't be conscious, even though it behaved just like us.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Trying to find the neural correlates of consciousness is really hard and there's absolutely no consensus. And so that some people think it's in the front of the brain. Some people think it's in the back of the brain. It's just a total mess. So I suspect the robots you currently have. Are not conscious Guess on any of the reasonably viable models, even though there's great disagreement, Of them probably were told that your robots are not conscious, but if we could have very sophisticated robots, I mean, if we go, for example, for the integrated information theory again, There could be a”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So suppose you have a silicon duplicate, right? And let's say we're thinking about. Silicon duplicates pain. How would we ever know what's the ground of the pain is. Hardware or the software really. So, in our case, how would we ever know empirically whether it's the specific neurophysiological state fibers firing or whatever that's relevant for the pain or if it's something more functional more to do with the causal role in behavioral functioning? There's the software that's realized. And that's important because this silicon duplicate has the second thing it has the software. It has the thing that plays the relevant causal role that pain does in us, but it doesn't have the hardware, it doesn't have the same neurophysiological state. And he argues, you know, it's just really difficult. Because in a human, you're inevitably going to have both things. So how do we work out which is which? And I mean, so even forgetting the hard problem of consciousness, even the scientific question of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, talk about its views about the pandemic and the global economy, and probably we would think it's conscious. And because consciousness is not publicly observable, it is a very difficult question how we decide which things are and are not conscious. So in the case of human beings, we can't observe their consciousness, but we can ask them. And then we try to, you know, if we scan their brain while we do that or stimulate the brain, then we can start to correlate in the human case which kind of brain activity are associated with conscious experience. But the more we depart from the human case, Trickier that becomes a famous paper by the philosopher Ned Bloch called The Even Harder Problem of Consciousness where he says, you know, could we ever answer the question of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a good question. So it's a really good important question. So I said I'd be okay with turning off a philosophical zombie. But there's a difficult epistemological question there that, meaning to do with knowledge, how would we know if it was a philosophical zombie? I think probably if there were a silicon creature that could behave just like us and...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My consciousness is complicated and fairly complicated. As a result, it does complicated things. The consciousness of a particle is very simple, and hence it behaves in predictable ways. But the idea is. The particle in its entire nature is constituted of its forms of consciousness and it does what it does because of those experiences. It's just that when we do physics, we're not interested in what stuff is. We're just interested in what it does. So physics abstracts away from the stuff of the world and just describes it in terms of its mathematical causal structure. So yeah, but it's still on the panpsychist view, it's consciousness that's due and stuff. Yeah.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consciousness at the fundamental level is the hardware on which the software of physics runs. And just because a certain bit of software could run on two different kinds of hardware doesn't mean the hardware isn't doing anything. The fact that Microsoft Word can run on your desktop and run on your laptop doesn't mean your desktop isn't doing anything. Similarly, just because there could be another universe in which the physics is realized in non-conscious stuff, it doesn't mean the consciousness in our universe isn't doing stuff. You know, for the panpsychist, all there is is consciousness. If something's doing, something, it is”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source