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Philip Goff
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- 2022-02-03
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- 2022-02-03
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“Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I can tell you, I get very frustrated with philosophers not reaching out more. I mean, I think it might be partly that we're trained to get watertight arguments, you know, respond to all objections. And as you do that, eventually it gets more complicated and the jargon comes in. But then if so, to write a more accessible book or article, you have to loosen the argument a bit. And then we worry that other philosophers will think, oh, that's a really crap argument. So, I mean, the way I did it, I wrote my academic book first, just as some fundamental reality.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just remember in the breaker lady come up and said, I've decided to take Egyptology instead But that was my introduction to teaching. Anyway”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's terrible in so many ways. Yes, people should show more humility, but I can't see a viable alternative. I think Philosopher Bernard Williams had a really nice nuanced discussion of the problems of titles, but how they also function in a society. They do have some positive function. The very first time I lectured in philosophy before I got a professorship Was teaching at a continuing education college. So it's kind of kind of for retired people who want to. Learn some more things, and I just totally pitched it too high. And Gate talked about Bernard Williams on titles and hierarchies and these kind of people in the 70s and 80s just instantly started interrupting saying, what is philosophy? And it was a disaster.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I under how much we're disagreeing. I mean, these are totally valid issues. And of course expertise goes wrong in all sorts of ways. It's totally fallible. I suppose I would just say. What is the alternative? What do we just say All information is equal because as a voter, I've got to decide who to vote for and that, you know, I've got to evaluate and I can't look into all of the economics and all of the relevant science. And so I just think maybe it's like Churchill said about democracy, you know, it's the worst system of government apart from all the rest. I think about panpsychism as well. It's the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the rest. You know, I just think expertise, the peer review system, I think.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worry about unorthodox ideas is because they worry about how do we know we're just losing control, we're losing discipline. So I do think we need to somehow protect Academic institutions Sources of information that we can trust. And, you know, in philosophy, there's not much consensus on everything. But you can at least know what people who have put the time in to read all the stuff, what they think about these issues. I think that is important.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Who are the experts? We can trust the people who've spent a lot of time reading all the material that people have read, written, thinking about it, having their views torn apart by other people working in the field. I think that is very important. And also to protect that from conflicts of interest. There is a so-called think tank in the UK called the Institute of Economic Affairs, who are always on the BBC as experts on economic questions and they do not declare who funds them, right? So we don't know who's paying the piper. I think, you know, you shouldn't be allowed to call yourself a think tank if you're not totally transparent about who's funding you. So I think that's the, and I mean, this connects to panpsychism because I think the reason people”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To have some protection of sources of information, academic institutions that we can trust. And then that's difficult because, of course, there are non-academics who do know what they're talking about. But if I'm interested in knowing about biology, you know, you can't research everything. So I think we have to have some sense of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have no way of getting outside of ourselves to prove that our sensory experiences correspond to an external reality. We could be in the matrix. This could be a very vivid dream. You could say, oh, we do science, but a scientist only gets their data by experiencing the results of their experiments. And then the question arises again, how do you know that corresponds to a real world? He thinks there's a sort of double standard in saying It's okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but it's not okay for the person on DMT to trust those experiences. It's very philosophically difficult to say, why is it okay in the one case and not the other? So I think there's an interesting argument there, but I would like to just defend experts a little bit. I mean, I agree it's very difficult, but especially in an age, I guess where there's so much information, I do think it's important.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Affect that's fascinating. Still probably the best, one of the best works on mystical experience is the chapter in William James's Varieties of Religious Experiences. And most of it is just a psychological study of trying to define the characteristics of mystical experience as a psychological type. But at the end, he considers the question, if you have a mystical experience, is it rational to trust it, to trust that it's telling you something about reality? And he makes an interesting argument. He says, if you say no, you're kind of applying a double standard. Because we all think it's okay to trust our normal sensory experiences.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of very hard for human beings to do that. I think we get stuck in some conception of how we think science ought to look. And, you know, people talk about religion as a crutch, but I think a certain kind of scientism, a certain conception of how science is supposed to be gets into people's identity and their sense of themselves and their security. Make things hard if you're a pun psychist.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Picks out a group of people but then implies certain negative characteristics. So people use this term to pick out a certain set of views like mystical conception reality and imply it's kind of fluffy thinking. But you read Muriel Bahari, you read Luke Roloff's This is serious, rigorous thought, whether you agree with it or not, obviously it's hugely controversial. And so, you know, the Enlightenment ideal is to follow the evidence and the arguments where they lead.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Providing expert testimony. So, you know, I think humans are causing climate breakdown. I have no idea if the science behind it. But I trust the experts or that the universe is 14 billion years old. Most of our knowledge is based on expert testimony. And she thinks we should think of experience meditators, these people who are telling us about this universal consciousness at the core of our being as a relevant kind of expert. And so she wants to defend the rational acceptability of this mystical conception of reality. So, you know, I think. Shouldn't be ashamed, you know, we shouldn't be worried about. Dealing with certain views as long as it's done with rigor and seriousness. You know, I think sometimes terms like, I don't know, new age or something can function a bit like racist terms. You know, a racist term.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are they just a construction of out of our minds and the fact that we interact in the standardly, scientifically accepted ways? Or is as someone like Rupert Sheldrake would think that there is some metaphysical reality? There are some fields beyond the scientifically understood ones that are somehow communicating this. I mean, I think that the view I was describing was that this element we're supposed to have in common is some sort of pure impersonal consciousness or something rather than so actually I mean an interesting figure is the Australian philosopher Miriel Bahari who defends a kind of mystical conceptional reality rooted in Advaita Vedanta mysticism. But like me she's from this tradition of analytic philosophy and so she defends this in this incredibly precise rigorous way. She defends the idea that we should think of experienced meditators as”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it's obviously certainly true in some sense that there are these phenomena that you're talking about of collective consciousness in some sense. I suppose the question is how ontologically serious do we want to be about those things, by which I mean”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would be this view that some experienced meditators claim becomes apparent to them that there is something at the core of my identity that is one and the same as the thing at the core of your identity, this universal consciousness.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Try to meditate to get rid of all the bad karma, to be absorbed into universal consciousness. It could be that if there's no karma, if there's no reverb, maybe everyone gets enlightened when they die. Maybe you just sink back into universal consciousness. So I also, coming back to morality, suggest this could provide some kind of basis for altruism or non-egotism because if you think Egotism implicitly assumes that we are utterly distinct individuals, whereas on this view, we overlap to an extent that something at the core of our being is even...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is a panpsychist, I think one is more open to that possibility. I don't see why it shouldn't be the case that. That is part of the nature of consciousness and maybe something that is apparent in certain deep states of meditation. And so what I explore in the experimental final chapter of my book is that could allow for a kind of impersonal life after death, because if that view is true, then even when the particular aspects of my conscious experience fall away, that Element of universal consciousness at the core of my identity would continue to exist. So I'd sort of be, as it were, absorbed into universal consciousness. So, I mean, Buddhists and Hindu mystics”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fundamental nature of reality is constituted of consciousness, it's not that much of a leap to think that this higher form of consciousness you seem to apprehend in the mystical experience is part of that underlying reality. And in many different cultures, experience meditators have claimed to have experiences in which it becomes apparent to them that there is an element of consciousness that is universal. So this is sometimes called universal consciousness. So on this view, your mind and my mind are not totally distinct. Each of our individual conscious minds is built upon the foundations of universal consciousness and universal consciousness as it exists in me is one and the same thing as universal consciousness as it exists in you. So I've never had one of these experiences.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. If you're a materialist, you've got to think that's a delusion. You know, there's just something in your brain making you think that it's not real. But if you're a panpsychist and you already think”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about meaning and talk about free will, and I talk about mystical experiences. So I always want to emphasize that Hans psychism is not necessarily connected to anything spiritual. You know, a lot of people defending this view, like David Sharma's or Luke Roloff's, are just total atheist secularists, right? They don't believe in any kind of transcendent reality. They just believe in feelings, you know, mundane consciousness and think that needs explaining in our conventional scientific approach can't cut it. Independent reasons, you are motivated to some spiritual picture of reality, then maybe a panpsychist's view is more consonant with that. So if you If you have a mystical experience where you It seems to you in this experience that there is this.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't think, unfortunately, panpsychism helps particularly with life after death, because, you know, for the panpsychist. There's nothing supernatural, there's nothing beyond the physical. All there is really is ultimately particles and fields. It's just that we think the ultimate nature of particles and fields is consciousness. But I guess when... when the matter in my brain ceases to be ordered in a way that sustains the particular kind of consciousness I enjoy in waking life, then in some sense I will cease to be. Although I do, the final chapter of my book, Galileo's Error, is more experimental. So the first four chapters are the cold-blooded case for the panpsychist view as the best solution to the hard problem of consciousness.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so it sounds like you reject the David Hume type picture anyway because you're saying just because you have it as a goal. That's what it is to be worthwhile. But you're saying, no, it's because it's engaging the life, riding the roller coaster. So that does sound like in some sense there are facts independent of our personal goal choices about what it means to live a good life. And I mean, coming back full circle to the start of this was what makes us different to animals. I don't think at the end of a hamster's life, it thinks, did I ride the roller coaster? Did I really live life to the full? That is not a mode of reflection that's available to non-human animals.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now you're ruining these up because you imagine someone enjoying it. I'm imagining someone who doesn't enjoy it. We don't want a life that's. Just full of pleasure, like we just sit there, you know, having a big sugar high all the time. We want a life where we do things that are worthwhile if for something to be worthwhile just is for it to be a basic life goal then. That mode of reflection doesn't really make sense. We can't really think, did I do things worthwhile? On the David Hume type picture All it is for something to be worthwhile is it was a basic goal of yours or derived from a basic goal. And yeah.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that's kind of pointless. It's something I feel the urge to do, but it's pointless. Whereas other things I choose to do, I think it's worth doing. And it's hard to make sense of metaphysically what could possibly ground that. How could we know about these facts? The starting point for me”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We take this David Hume view seriously, it ought to be a totally possible life goal. Whereas, I mean, yeah, I guess I just find it hard to shake the idea that some ways of some life goals are more worthwhile than others. And it doesn't mean, you know, that there's one single way you should lead your life, but pursuing knowledge, helping people pursuing your own pleasure to an extent are a worthwhile things to do in a way that, you know, for example, I have, I'm a little bit OCD. I still feel inclined to walk on cracks in the pavement or do it symmetrically like if I step on a crack with my left foot, I feel the need to do it in my right foot.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I suppose, I mean, Way, you might think it's just hard to imagine someone who would spend their lives doing that, but then maybe that's just because it's so evident that that is a pointless task.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you think about the blades of Grass case? What do you think about someone who spends their life counting blades of grass and doesn't enjoy it?”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well I mean, you know, people sacrifice their lives, atheists may sacrifice their lives for the sake of someone else or for the sake of something important enough. And clearly in that case, they're not doing it for the sake of their own pleasure. That's a rather dramatic example, but they can be just trivial examples where I choose to be honest rather than lie about something and I lose out a bit and I have a bit less pleasure. But I thought it was worth doing the honest thing or something. I mean, I just think, so that's a, I mean, maybe you can use the word pleasure so broadly that you're just essentially meaning something worthwhile. But then I think the word pleasure maybe loses its meaning.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it may or may not be true that it's possible to find pleasure in everything, but I think it's also true that people don't act solely for pleasure. And they certainly don't act solely for their own pleasure. People will suffer for things they think are worthwhile. I might suffer for some scientific cause for finding out a cure for the pandemic. And in terms of my own pleasure, I might have less pleasure in doing that, but I think it's worthwhile. It's a worthwhile thing to do. I just don't think it's the case that Everything we do is rooted in maximizing our own pleasure. I don't think that's even psychologically plausible.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to say that that is objectively stupid. That is objectively pointless. I shouldn't say stupid. It's objectively pointless in a way that... Pleasure or pursuing someone else's pleasure or pursuing scientific inquiry is not pointless. As soon as you make that admission, you're not a follower of David Hume anymore. You think there are objective facts about what goals are worth pursuing?”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was David Hume's view, yeah? I mean, yeah, do you want to know my problem with Hume's? I had a radical conversion. It's not connected to Pan Psychism, but I don't. I had a radical conversion. I used to have a more humane view when I was a graduate student, but I was persuaded by some professors at the University of Reading where I was that if you have the humane view, you have to say, Any basic life goals are equal, equally valid. So, for example, let's take someone whose basic goal in life is counting blades of grass, right? And crucially, they don't enjoy it, right? This is the crucial point. They get no pleasure from it. That's just their basic goal, to spend their life counting as many blades of grass as possible. Not for some greater goal. That's just their basic goal.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe not, but I think it depends what you think about value if you have a more Humane picture of value by which I mean relating to the philosopher David Hume who said reason is the slave of the passions. Really we just have motivations and what we have reason to do arises from our motivations. I'm not a humane. I think there are objective facts about what we have a reason to do and I think we have access to them. I don't think any non-human animal Has access to objective facts about what they have reason to do, what they have reason to believe. They don't weigh up evidence.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And humans have access to them and can respond to them. That's a controversial claim. Many of my panpsychus brethren might not.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're responding to what philosophers call normative considerations. If you're saying, should I take this job in the US, you weigh it up, you say, well, you know, I'll get more money. I'll have maybe a better quality of life. But if I stay in the UK, I'll be closer to family and you weigh up these considerations. I'm not sure Any non human animals quite respond to considerations of value in that way? I mean, I might be reflecting here that I'm something of an objectivist about value. I think there are objective facts about what we have reason to do and what we have reason to believe.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A panpsychist, there is a great continuity between humans and the rest of the universe. There's nothing that special about human consciousness. It's just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe. So we're very much continuous with the rest of the physical universe. What is unique about human beings? I suppose the capacity to reflect on our conscious experience, plan for the future, the capacity I would say to respond to reasons as well. I mean, animals in some sense have motivations, but when a human being makes a decision”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, consciousness is just something. Nick, it's a very ambiguous word, but if we're just using it to mean some kind of experience, some kind of inner life, that is pretty widespread in the animal kingdom. A bit difficult to say where it stops, where it starts, but... You certainly don't need something as sophisticated as the capacity to self-consciously tell stories about yourself to just have experience.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People always give, I don't know, philosophers give these very violent examples to get the cross consciousness. And it's, yeah, I don't know why that's come and grabbed. But anyway.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theory of my identity over time, what makes me the same person in some sense today as I was twenty years ago weren't given that I've changed so much physically and psychologically. One running contender is something connected to the kind of stories we tell about ourselves or maybe some story about the psychological, the chains of psychological continuity. I'm not saying I accept such a theory, but it's plausible. I don't think these theories are good as theories of consciousness. At least if we're taking consciousness just to be subjective experience, pleasure, pain, seeing colour, hearing sound, I think a hamster has consciousness in that sense. There's something that it's like to be a hamster. It feels pain if you stand on it, if you're cruel enough to. Do I don't know why I gave that?”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You had a huge literature of people trying to address this and propos a new definition, but then someone else had come out with counter examples, and then you get a new definition of knowledge and counter examples and it just went on and on and never seemed to get anywhere. So I think the thought now is, let's work out how precise we need to be for what we're trying to do. And I think that's a healthier attitude. So precision is important, but you just need to work out how precise do we need to be for these purposes. Coming to Dennett and narrative theories. I mean, I think I think narrative theories are plausible contender for a theory of the self.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just on the question of terminology before I, yeah, so I think it used to be the fashion among philosophers that we had to come up with utterly precise, necessary and sufficient conditions for each word. And then I think this has gone out of fashion a bit, partly because it's just been such a failure. The word knowledge in particular, people used to define knowledge.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To talk shit with over some years. Well, I mean, it gets boring if you just start and end defining words, right? Think starting with defining words is good. Actually, the philosopher Derek Parfit said when he first was thinking about philosophy, he went to a talk in analytic philosophy and he went to a talk in continental philosophy and he decided that the problem with the continental philosophy, if it was really unrigorous, really unprecise, the problem with the analytic philosophy is it was just not about anything important. And he thought there was more chance of working within analytic philosophy and asking some more meaningful, some more profound questions than there was in working continental philosophy and making it more rigorous. Now they're both horrific stereotypes and I don't want to get nasty emails from”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contemporary panpsychists have come out of this tradition we call analytic philosophy, which is rooted in detailed, rigorous argumentation and it is defended in that manner.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the difference being that this is Luke Roloff's view all of the drafts are conscious. So I guess for Dennett. There's sort of no fact of the matter about which of these drafts is the correct one. On Roloff's view, maybe there's no factor of the matter about which of these drafts is my consciousness, but nonetheless, all the drafts correspond to some consciousness. And I mean, I just sound kind of funny. I guess I think he calls it Danetian panpsychism. But Luke is one of the most rigorous and serious philosophers alive at the moment, I think. And I hate having Luke Roloffs in an audience if I'm giving a talk because he always cuts straight to the weakness in your position that you hadn't thought of. So it's nice, you know, panpsychism is sometimes associated with fluffy thinking, but...”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Theory of consciousness, yeah, he calls it the multiple drafts model. Incidentally, there's a very interesting paper just come out by very good philosopher Luke Roloffs defending a panpsychist version of Dennett's multiple drafts model.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's a theory that I would justify on the grounds that it can account for this datum of consciousness that we are immediately aware of in our experience in a way that I don't think other theories can. You asked me to contrast that to Daniel Dennett. I think he would just say there is no such datum. Dennett says the data for science of consciousness is what he calls heterophenomenology, which is specifically defined as what we can access from the third person perspective, including what people say. But crucially, we're not treating what they say. We're not relying on their testimony. As evidence for some unobservable realm of feelings and experiences, we're just treating what they say as a datum of public observation experiments that we can account for in terms of underlying mechanisms.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my view I defend the view known as panpsychism, which is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious despite the meaning of the word pan, everything psyche, mind. So literally that means everything has mind. But the typical commitment of the panpsychist is that the fundamental building blocks of reality may be fundamental particles like electrons and quarks have incredibly simple forms of experience and that the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow rooted in or derived from this much more simple consciousness at the level of”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Data of public observation experiment. If you religiously followed that. You would not postulate consciousness because it's not a datum that's known about in that way. And Daniel Dennett is really consistent on this. He thinks my consciousness cannot be empirically verified and therefore it doesn't exist. Dennett is consistent on this. I think I'm consistent on this, but I think a lot of people have a slightly confused middle way position on this. On the one hand, they think Business of science is just to account for public observation experiment. But on the other hand, They also believe in consciousness without appreciating, I think, that that implies that there is another datum over and above the data of public observation experiments, namely just the reality of feelings and experiences.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so it's, of course, it's not that we observe behavior and then we make an inference. We are hardwired to instinctively interpret smiles as happiness, crying as sadness. And as we get to know someone, we find it very easy to adopt their perspective, get into their shoes. Strictly speaking, all we have perceptual access to is someone's behavior. And if you were just, strictly speaking, if you were trying to explain someone's behavior, those aspects that are publicly observable, I don't think you'd ever have recourse to attribute consciousness. You could just postulate some kind of mechanism. If you were just trying to explain the behavior. So someone like Daniel Dennett is very consistent on this. So I think. For most people, What science is in the business of is explaining.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you can ask me, but you can't access my pain in the way that I can access my pain. So I think that's a distinction. It might be difficult to totally pin it down how we define those things, but I think there's a fairly clear and very important difference there.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's tricky to define, but I suppose. Data of physics are available to anybody if there were aliens who visited us from another planet. Maybe they'd have very different sense organs. Maybe they'd struggle to understand our art or our music. But if they were intelligent enough to do mathematics, they could understand our physics. They could look at the data of our experiments. They could run the experiments themselves. Whereas consciousness, is it observable? Is it not observable? In a sense, it's observable, as you say, we could say it's privately observable. I am directly aware of my own feelings and experiences. If I'm in pain, it's just right there for me. My pain is just totally directly evident to me. But you from the outside cannot directly access my pain. You can access my pain behavior.”
2022-02-03 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #261 – Philip Goff: Consciousness, Panpsychism, and the Philosophy of Mind · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source