YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Goff

lines on the record: 153
first: 2022-02-03
most recent: 2022-02-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“He thinks that show's, oh, in my view, consciousness doesn't do anything, it doesn't add anything, which is crazy. My consciousness impacts on the world, my conscious thoughts are causing me to say the words I'm saying now, my visual experience helps me navigate the world. But I mean, my response to Sean Carroll is on the panpsychist view, the relationship between... Physics and fundamental consciousness is a sort of like the relationship between software and hardware, right? Physics is sort of the software and consciousness is the hardware. So”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yeah, so he's a materialist of a pretty standard kind that consciousness is to be understood as a sort of emergent feature. Not adding anything, a weakly emergent feature. But I guess what we've been debating most about is whether My view can account for mental causation for the fact that consciousness is doing stuff. So he thinks the fact that Think zombies are logically coherent. It's logically coherent for there to be a world physically just like ours in which there's no consciousness.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sean Carroll and I also A debate on Clubhouse, a panpsychism debate together with Annika Harris and Own Flanagan. Anna Harris was there. It was a.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's many agreements. But, you know, we've had really constructive, interesting discussions in a lot of different contexts. And, you know, he's very clued up about philosophy, he's very respectful of philosophy. Certain physicists who shall remain nameless think, what's all this bullshit philosophy? We don't have to waste our time with that. And then go on to do pretty bad philosophy. The book co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Milodnov famously starts off saying, philosophy is dead. And then goes on in later chapters to do some pretty bad philosophy. So I think we have to do philosophy if only to get rid of bad philosophy. You can't escape.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mind chat. Yeah, so yeah, that's the idea, I guess, you know, polarized times. I mean, I love. Trying to get in the mindset of people I really disagree with. And I can't understand how on earth they're thinking that, you know, really trying to have respect and try and, you know, see where they're coming from. I love that. So that's what, yeah, Keith Frankish and I do of. Really trying to understand each other and interviewing scientists and philosophers of consciousness from those different perspectives. Although in a sense we have a very common starting point because we both think Fully account for consciousness, at least as philosophers normally think of it in conventional scientific terms. So we serve that starting point. We react to it in very different ways. He says, Well, it doesn't exist then. It's like furry dust. It's, you know.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cows will suffer when their calves are taken off them. They go for a few days of quite serious mourning. So they're still suffering, but it seems to me my thought is the principle of just not having factory farm stuff is something more people could get on board with and you might have greater harm minimization. So if people went into restaurants and said, oh, your animal products factory farmed, if not. I want the vegan option, or if people looked out for the label that said no factory farming ingredients, you know, I think maybe that could make a really big difference to the market and harm minimization. Anyway, so that's the. So it's very ethically tricky, but some people don't buy that. There's a very good philosopher, Jeff Lee, who thinks zombies should have equal rights, consciousness. Doesn't matter, you know.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole new dimension. Although it also makes things more complicated because people often think as a panpsychist, I'm going to be vegan, but it's tricky because if you think plants and trees are conscious as well, you've got to eat something. If you don't think plants and trees are conscious, then you've got a nice moral dividing line. You can say, I'm not going to eat things that aren't conscious. I'm not going to kill things that aren't conscious. But if you think plants and trees are conscious, then... Don't have that nice moral dividing line, I mean, so the principle I'm kind of working my way towards, I haven't kept it up in my trip to the US, but it's just not eating any animal products that are factory farmed My vegan friends say, Well, are still suffering there? And I think there is, even in the nicest farms.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's not. You know, if it doesn't have experience, it doesn't really suffer, it doesn't really have moral rights at all. So I'm inclined to think, you know, consciousness is the basis of moral value, moral concern. And conversely, as a panpsychist. This reason, I think it can transform your relationship with nature if you think of a tree as a conscious organism, albeit of a very unusual kind. Then a tree is a locus of Moral concern in its own right. Chopping down a tree is an act of immediate moral concern. If you see these, you know, horrible forest fires were all horrified. But if you think it's the burning of conscious organisms, that does add...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody's just kind of sombre. I suppose so, in a sense, illusionism, because if you were all zombies, and one reason to think about zombies is to think about the value of consciousness. So if there were a zombie, here's a question. Suppose we could, I mean, suppose we could make zombies by, let's say for the sake of discussion, things made of silicon aren't conscious. I don't know if that's true. It could turn out to be true. And suppose you built... Commander data out of silicon. You know, it's a bit of an old school reference to star trek next generation. So it behaves just like a human being, but you can have a sophisticated conversation. It will talk about its hopes and fears, but it has no consciousness. Does it have moral rights? Murder to turn off such a being. You know, I'm inclined to say.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mechanism said up to Beadress like us. Now, there's lots of, no one believes in these. I think there's one philosopher who believes in everyone is a zombie except him. But anyway.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How we should think about morality in the light of that. It's become a big topic actually thinking about the connection between consciousness and morality. David Chalmers, the philosopher is most associated with this concept of a philosophical zombie. So a philosophical zombie is very different from a Hollywood zombie. Hollywood zombies, you know. Know what they're like, but philosophical zombies are sort of a really good Korean zombie movie on Halloween this year. Anyway, philosophical zombies behave just like us because the physical workings of their body and brain are the same as ours, but they have no conscious experience. There's nothing that it's like to be a zombie. So you stick a knife in it, it screams and run away, but runs away, but it doesn't actually feel pain. It's just a complicated...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consciousness doesn't exist. We don't need to explain it. Job done. Although we might still have to explain why we seem to be conscious, why it's so hard to get out of the idea that we're conscious, but the reason I connect this to what you're saying is actually my co-host, Keith Frankish, is a little bit ambivalent on the word pain. He says, oh, in some, you know, in some sense, I believe in pain and in some sense I don't. But another illusionist, Francois Camera. Has a paper discussing how we think about morality given his view that pain in the way we normally think about it just does not exist. He thinks it's an illusion. The brain tricks us into thinking we feel pain, but we don't.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to be conscious to suffer. Actually, so there. As well as people taking more unusual views of consciousness seriously now, panpsychism is one radical approach. Another one is what's become known as illusionism, the view that consciousness, at least in the sense that philosophers think about it, doesn't really exist at all. So my podcast MindChat, I host with a committed illusionist. So the gimmick is I think consciousness is everywhere he thinks it's nowhere. And so that's one very simple way of avoiding all these problems, right?”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, physical pain, I'm not sure. But I mean, there are kinds of experiences animals have that we don't. Bats echolocate around the world. The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously pointed out that no matter how much you understand of the neurophysiology of bats, you'll still know what it's like to. Squeal and find your way around by listening to the echoes bounce off. So. Yeah, I mean, I guess I feel the intuition that there's. Emotional suffering is, I want to say deeper than physical suffering. I don't know how to make that statement precise though.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess I definitely think there's kinds of suffering that are. You have the joy of Possible for you that aren't available to a hamster, I don't think. Well, can a hamster suffer heartbreak? I don't know, can a cockroach suffer heartbreak? But certainly there's, I mean, there's kinds of fear of your own death, concern about whether there's a purpose to existence. These are forms of suffering that aren't available to certain, to most non-human animals. Whether there's an overall scale that we could put physical and emotional suffering on and identify where you are on that scale, I'm not so sure.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Structure of experience, maybe, but I just find it hard to make sense of the idea of how much experience do you have. I've got five units of experience. I've got one unit of experience. I don't know. I find that. A bit hard to make sense, but maybe I'm being just pedantic.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It heavily constrains its past and future states. And so that's the idea of information they have. And then the second idea is how much that information is dependent on integration. So in a computer where you have transistors, you take out a few transistors, you might not lose that much information. It's not dependent on interconnections, whereas you take a tiny bit of the brain out, you lose a lot of information because the way it stores information is dependent on the interconnections of the system. So, yeah, so that's one proposal for how to measure one gradable characteristic which might correspond to some gradable characteristic in qualitative consciousness. And maybe I'm being very pedantic, which is, you know, philosophers, professional pedants. Sort of don't think that is a quantity of experience. It's a quantity of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. So there are features, characteristics here that we can grade, the complexity of the experience. And on the integrated information theory, they correlate that in terms of mathematically identifiable structure with integrated information. So roughly, it's a quite unusual notion of information. It's perhaps not the standard way one thinks about information. It's to do with constraining past and future possibilities of the system. So the idea is in the retina of the eye, there's a huge amount of possible states, the retina my eye could be in at the next moment, depending on what light goes into it. Whereas the possible next state of the brain are much more constrained, obviously it responds to the environment.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Claim that that's the basis of consciousness at the macro level. Now, so I don't, I mean, I like some features of this theory, but they do talk about degrees of consciousness. They do want to say there is gradations. I'm not sure conceptually I can kind of make sense of that. I mean, we can, there are things to do with consciousness that are graded like complexity or levels of information, but I'm not sure whether experience itself admits of degree. I sort of think. Something either has experience or it doesn't, it might have very simple experience, it might have very complex experience. Experience itself, I don't think, admits of degree in that sense. It's not more experience, less experience. I sort of find that conceptually hard to make sense of. But I'm kind of open-minded on it.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The integrated information theory according to which we find consciousness. At the level at which there is most integrated information, and they try to give them a mathematically precise definition of that. So on that view, probably This cup of tea isn't conscious because there's probably more integrated information in the molecules making up the tea than there is in the liquid as a whole. But in the brain... What is distinctive about the brain is that there's a huge amount of integrated, there's more integrated information in the system than there is in individual neurons. So that's why they”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a difficult question. I mean, I do see consciousness as a Dealing with consciousness and interdisciplinary task between something more experimental, which is to do with the ongoing project of trying to work out. People call the neural correlates of consciousness, what kinds of physical brain activity correspond to conscious experience. That's one part of it, but I think essentially there's also a theoretical question of... Mother, why question? Why do those kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of conscious experience? I don't think you can answer that because consciousness is not publicly observable. I don't think you can answer that why question with an experiment. But they have to go hand in hand. And I mean, one of the theories I'm attracted to is the...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That might explain behavior, but it doesn't explain the redness of a red experience. But still, I mean, still ultimately the hope is that we will have some kind of hierarchical story. So we take the causal dynamics of physics. We hypothesize that that's filled out with certain forms of consciousness. And then at higher levels, we get... More complex causal dynamics filled out by more complex forms of consciousness. And ultimately, we get to us, hopefully. So yeah, so there's still a sort of hierarchical explanatory framework there.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a radically different explanatory task here. And so, I mean, the neuroscientist Anil Seth, who I've heard lots of intense but friendly discussions with, you know, wants to compare consciousness to life. But I think there's this radical difference that in the case of life, We come back to public observation. All of the data are publicly observable data. We're basically trying to explain complex behavior. And the way you do that is identify mechanisms, simpler mechanisms that explicate that behavior. That's the task in physics, chemistry, neurobiology. But in the case of consciousness, that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to account for these subjective qualities and you postulate a mechanism.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All that we're doing in the case of consciousness, there are these subjective qualities that were immediately aware of, that the redness of a red experience, the itchiness of an itch, and we're trying to account for them. We're trying to bring them into our theory of reality and postulating some mechanism does not deal with that. So I think we've got to realize dealing with consciousness is a radically different explanatory task from other tasks of science. Other tasks of science, we're trying to explain behavior in terms of simpler forms of behavior. In the case of consciousness, we're trying to explain these invisible subjective qualities that you can't see from the outside, but that you're immediately aware of. The reason materialism perhaps continues to dominate is people think, look at the success of science is incredible. Look at all the, you know, it's explained all this. Surely it's going to explain consciousness. But I think we have to appreciate...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah in every case apart from consciousness I would say what we're interested in is behavior We're interested in explaining behavioral functions at the level of fundamental physics. We're interested in capturing the equations that describe the behavior there. And when we get to higher levels, we're interested in explicating the behavior, perhaps in terms of behavior at simpler levels. And with life as well, that's what we're interested in the various observable functions of life explaining them in terms of more simple mechanisms. But in the case of consciousness Don't think that's what we're doing, or at least not.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Force fail in the end. Yeah, so yeah, you're totally right. Ultimately, what we want to explain is how. Consciousness and the consciousness of other animals comes out of this. If we can't do that, then it's game over. I think it maybe makes more sense on the identity claim that if matter at the fundamental level just is forms of consciousness, then we can perhaps make sense of how those simple forms of consciousness in some way combine in some way to make the consciousness we know and love. That's the dream.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's interesting. I mean, I guess it's supposed to be a kind of identity claim here that physics tells us what matter does consciousness is what matter is. So matter is sort of what consciousness does. So at the bottom level, there is just consciousness and conscious things. There are just these simple things with their experiences. And that is their total nature. So in that sense, it's not another player. It's just all there is really. And then we describe, in physics, we describe that at a certain level of abstraction. We capture what Bertrand Russell, who is the inspiration for a lot of this, calls the causal skeleton of the world. So, you know, physics is just interesting, the causal skeleton of the world. It's not interesting to sort of flesh and blood, although that's maybe suggesting separation again too much.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be a way of responding to Sabina to say, Well, there could be properties of particles that don't show up in the specific circumstances in which physicist investigate particles. My colleague, the philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright, has got this book, How the Laws of Physics Lie, where she says, you know, physicists explore things in very specific circumstances and then in an unwarranted way generalize that. But I mean, I guess I was thinking Sabina's criticism actually just misses the mark in a more basic way. Her point is we shouldn't think there are any more properties to particles other than those the standard model attributes to them. Panpsychus will say, yeah, sure, there aren't. There are just the properties, the physical properties like mass spin and charge that the standard model attributes to them. It's just that”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the idea is mass in its nature is a very simple form of consciousness. So, yeah, physics in a sense is complete, I think, because it tells us what everything at the fundamental level does. It describes its causal capacities. But For the panpsychist, at least, physics doesn't tell us what matter is, it tells us what it does, but not what it is.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not that there are two kinds of property that mass spin and charge are forms of consciousness. How do we make sense of that? Because actually when you look at what physics tells us, it's really just telling us about behavior, about what stuff does. I sometimes put it by saying doing physics is like playing chess when you don't care what the pieces are made of. You're just interested in what moves you can make. So physics tells us what mass spin and charge do. But it doesn't tell us what they are. So”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And these other funny consciousness properties so that the physicists have been Hossenfelder had a blog post critiquing panpsychism maybe a couple of years ago now that got a fair bit of traction. And she was interpreting panpsychism in this way. And then her thought was, well, look, if particles had these funny consciousness properties, then it would show up in our physics, like the standard model of particle physics would make false predictions because its predictions are based wholly on the physical properties if there were also these consciousness properties, we'd get different predictions. But that's a misunderstanding of the view. The view is...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so maybe the way I phrased it made it sound like these things are more separate than they are. What I was trying to. Was a common Misunderstanding of panpsychism that it's a sort of dualistic theory. The idea is that”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Networks of very simple conscious entities, but these conscious entities, because they have very simple kinds of experience, they behave in predictable ways through their interactions, they realize certain mathematical structures. And then the idea is those mathematical structures just are the structures identified by physics. So when we think about these simple conscious entities in terms of the mathematical structures they realize, we call them particles, we call them fields, we call their properties mass bin and charge. But really there's just these very simple conscious entities and their experiences. So in this way, we get physics out of consciousness. I don't think you can get consciousness out of physics, but I think it's pretty easy to get physics out of consciousness.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We start with matter and we think how do we get consciousness out of matter? So I don't think that problem can be solved for reasons I've kind of hinted out we could maybe go into more detail. But the panpsychist does it the other way around. They start with consciousness and try to get matter out of consciousness. So the idea is basically at the fundamental level of reality, there are just”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in the simplest form of it, the fundamental building blocks of reality, perhaps electrons and quarks, have incredibly simple forms of experience and the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from these very simple forms of experience at the level of basic physics. But I mean, maybe the crucial bit about the kind of panpsychism I defend, what it does is it takes the standard approach to the problem of consciousness and turns it on its head, right? So the standard approach is to think”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, in its broadest definition, it's the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think materialism kind of, you know, we try, science is about trying to find the simplest theory that accounts for the data. I don't think materialism can account for the data. Maybe dualism can account for the data. Panpsychism is simpler. It can account for the data and it's simpler.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is ultimately an empirical question whether dualism is true. I'm less convinced that we know the answer to that question at this stage I think still, as scientists and philosophers, we want to try and find the simplest, most parsimonious theory of reality. Dualism is still a pretty inelegant, unparsimonious theory. Reality is divided up into the purely physical properties and these consciousness properties and they're radically different kinds of things. Whereas the panpsychist offers a much more simple unified picture reality. So I think it's still the view to be preferred to put it very simply. Why believe in two kinds of thing when you can just get away with one?”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only 70% of the way through constructing a connect dome for the maggot brain, which has, is it 10,000 or 100,000 neurons, but the brain has 86 billion neurons. So I think we'd have to know a lot more about how the brain works, how these functions are realized. Before we could assess whether the dynamics of the brain can be completely explicated in terms of underlying chemistry or physics. So we'd have to do more engineering before we could figure that out. And there are people with other proposals. Someone I got to know, Martin Picard at Columbia University, who has the psychobiology mitochondrial lab there and is experimentally exploring the hypothesis that mitochondria in the brain should be under sort of sort of social networks. Perhaps as an alternative to reducing it to underlying chemistry and physics. So I'm less.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A strong and ever-growing inductive argument against dualism. But actually, you know, the more I talked to neuroscientists and read neuroscience and we have a Durham, my university, an interdisciplinary consciousness group, I don't think we know enough about the brain, about the workings of the brain to make that argument. I think we know a lot about the basic chemistry, how neurons fire neurotransmitters, action potentials, things like that. We know a fair bit about large-scale functions of the brain, what different bits of the brain do but what we're almost clueless on is how those large-scale functions are realized at the cellular level, how it works. People get quite excited about brain scans, but it's very low resolution. Every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 5.5 million neurons. We're only.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I've actually changed my mind a little bit on this since I wrote the book. So, I mean, I argued in the book that we have. Pretty good experimental grounds for doubting dualism. And roughly the idea was. If dualism were Things happening in the brain that had no physical explanation, it would be like a poltergeist was playing with the brain. But actually, and so the fact that we don't find that.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starting with materialism, it's a huge debate. But I think that the core of it is that physical science works with a purely quantitative description of the physical world, whereas consciousness essentially involves qualities. If you think about the smell of coffee or the taste of mint or the deep red you experience as you watch a sunset, I think these qualities can't be captured in the purely quantitative language of physical science. And so as long as your description of the brain is framed in the purely quantitative descriptive language of neuroscience, you'll just leave out these qualities and hence really leave out consciousness itself.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Away. It agrees with the materialist that there's just the physical world. Ultimately, there's just particles and fields. But the panpsychist thinks there's more to the physical than what physical science reveals, and that The ultimate nature of the physical world is constituted of consciousness. So consciousness is not outside of the physical as the dualist thinks, it's embedded in, underlies the kind of Description of the world we get from physics.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so you've basically laid out the different options. So, I guess probably still the dominant view is materialism, that roughly that we can explain consciousness in the terms of physical science, wholly explain it, just in terms of the electrochemical signaling in the brain. Dualism, the polar opposite view that consciousness is non-physical outside of the physical workings of the body and the brain, although closely connected. And, you know, when I studied philosophy, we were taught basically they were the two options you had to choose, right? Either you thought it were dualist and you thought it was separate from the physical, or you thought it was just electrochemical signaling. And yeah, I became very disillusioned because I think there are big problems with both of these options. So I think the attraction to panpsychism is kind of a middle.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is most important. I mean, groupthink can be a terrible thing in philosophy as well, but because you're not. The same extent behold unto evidence and refutation from the evidence that you are in a sciences. It's a more subtle process of evaluation and so more susceptible, I think, to groupthink. I agree. It's a danger.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you do because I think there's graduate students who want to find the objection to write their paper or make their mark. And yeah, I think everyone still gives talks or should give talks and people are wanting to. Work out if there are any weaknesses to your position Yeah, I think that generally works out.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who hasn't given a talk to other philosophers and had objections raised? I was going to say have it torn apart, but that's maybe thinking of it in a slightly the wrong way. But have the best objections raised to it, you know, and that's why... That is an important formative process that you go through as an academic, that the greatest minds starting a philosophy degree, for example, won't have gone through probably except in very rare cases, just won't have that the skills required.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Argument in philosophy journals that there's a fallacious line of reasoning going on there from the fine-tuning to the multiverse. Now, that argument is from 20, 30 years ago, and it's discussed in academic philosophy. Nobody knows about it. And there is huge interest in this fine-tuning stuff. Scientists wanting to argue for the multiverse, theists wanting to say this is evidence for God, and nobody knows about this argument, which tries to show that it's fallacious reasoning to go from the fine-tuning to the multiverse. So I wrote a piece for Scientific American explaining this argument to a more general audience. And, you know, it just really irritates me that it's just buried in these technical journal articles and nobody knows about it. But just a final thing on, you know, I look at... Find a good philosopher who hasn't had”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's cool. Well, I try now every time I write an academic article. I try to write a more accessible version. I mean, the thing I've been working on recently, just because... This argument So there's a certain argument from Cosmological fine tuning of the laws of physics for life to the multiverse that's quite popular physicists like Max Tegmark.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then a more accessible book, Galileo's Era, were the arguments not as rigorously worked out. So then I can say the proper arguments, you know, the fuller arguments. But I get very brilliant.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source