AI transcript
0:00:04 Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of
0:00:10 The Tim Ferriss Show. I would say that it is my hope with conversations like this
0:00:22 to reintroduce perhaps a degree of wonder and questioning and awareness in my listeners that
0:00:29 enriches their lives. Because the how-to stuff, the tactical, practical, sort of toaster instruction
0:00:39 type do this, do that is helpful. But sometimes the what-to-do question takes precedent over
0:00:45 everything else and you can end up operating as something like an ant in an ant colony.
0:00:53 And I, with these philosophical conversations, hope to open people to different perspectives
0:00:58 and ways of looking at their own lives and the world around them. And my guest today is
0:01:04 Philip Goff. Philip is a professor of philosophy at Durham University. His main research focus is
0:01:09 consciousness, big topic, but he’s interested in many questions about the nature of reality.
0:01:14 We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. He is best known for defending panpsychism,
0:01:18 the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
0:01:23 15 years ago, panpsychism was kind of a joke. It was laughed at if it was thought of at all.
0:01:28 Goff has led a movement that has made panpsychism a mainstream position, taught to undergraduates,
0:01:34 and widely discussed in academic journals. He is the author of Galileo’s Error, Foundations for a
0:01:40 New Science of Consciousness, and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. He’s published many,
0:01:45 many 50 or so academic articles and has written extensively for newspapers and magazines, including
0:01:49 Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many others. You can find him on
0:01:58 Twitter, that is x at Philip underscore Goff. That’s P-H-I-L-I-P underscore G-O-F-F. And you can find
0:02:03 all things Philip at philipgoffilosophy.com. We’re going to get right into the conversation,
0:02:06 but first, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
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0:06:29 Philip, let’s kick it off with a question about another interview, which I very rarely do.
0:06:36 But in this particular case, I think it will offer us perhaps a road into tying a few things together
0:06:43 for people who are listening. And this relates to an interview by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
0:06:49 Gareth Cook, which ended up being one of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020.
0:06:56 Philosophy can get very abstract. It can really get out there. It can become hard to grasp or,
0:07:03 in the minds of many, hard to apply. But let’s begin with what made that interview stick. What do you
0:07:11 think some of the concepts or ingredients or lines, anything was that made that resonate with so many
0:07:19 people? Rather than anything I’ve done, I think just consciousness and this strange view I built my
0:07:29 career defending, it’s a view that somehow resonates with people in all sorts of ways. It’s been an
0:07:37 incredible journey because it’s a view that 15 years ago was ridiculed insofar as it was thought about at
0:07:47 all, at least in my Western philosophical tradition. But in this short time period, it’s come to be a
0:07:53 mainstream academic position that is taught to undergraduates and is widely published on an
0:07:57 academic journal. So it’s been an astonishing transformation, really. And it’s really been
0:08:03 exciting to be part of that. Why does it resonate so much with people? One part of it is,
0:08:12 I think people who’ve had psychedelic experiences, many of them have this sense that consciousness
0:08:20 pervades the universe in a deeper sense than in the more familiar, ordinary scientific view of things.
0:08:25 In fact, on the questionnaire for mystical experiences, you know, the proper psychological
0:08:30 questionnaire, one of the boxes you tick is, do you have a sense that there is a living presence in all
0:08:36 things? And so I suppose, I mean, this has not been, from my academic starting point, this was not
0:08:43 the route I took to panpsychism. I think it solves a lot of the mysteries and paradoxes of consciousness.
0:08:50 There are cold-blooded intellectual reasons to go for it. But many people reading about my work who’ve
0:08:56 had psychedelic experiences, something about it makes sense. And, you know, and I’m open to thinking
0:08:57 about that too, very much.
0:09:05 Let’s define some terms, right? Because sometimes I think panpsychism gets a bad rap or maybe just
0:09:11 needs a rebrand, like Patagonian Toothfish being renamed Chilean Sea Bass. Maybe that’s what panpsychism
0:09:20 needs. I’m not sure. But I want to talk about the cold-hearted intellectual reasons or arguments for
0:09:25 panpsychism. But in simple terms, because I think some folks can maybe conflate it with something
0:09:33 akin to animism and add on a few layers that are perhaps unnecessary. What is, in simple terms,
0:09:35 for a lay audience, panpsychism?
0:09:40 That’s a good starting point. I mean, in terms of the rebrand, actually, my good friend,
0:09:46 Annika Harris, who’s very sympathetic to panpsychism, she’s always saying, this is a terrible name.
0:09:55 We need to rebrand it, but I kind of think it’s a bit late. It’s kind of stuck. But panpsychism is the
0:10:02 view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
0:10:09 Perhaps a way into that is, you know, if you start with human consciousness, that is incredibly rich and
0:10:17 complex the result of millions of years of evolution. But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes.
0:10:23 You know, the consciousness of a sheep is simpler to the consciousness of a human being. What it’s like
0:10:30 to be a snail is simpler to what it’s like to be a sheep. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of
0:10:38 life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. For the panpsychist, this keeps going on
0:10:46 right down to the fundamental building blocks with perhaps fundamental particles like electrons and
0:10:55 quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect the incredibly simple nature.
0:10:59 There’s a common misunderstanding. People always think, oh, what are you saying? Electrons are
0:11:05 feeling existential angst or wondering if it’s Tuesday or something. But the idea is that’s human
0:11:10 consciousness, right? Don’t be anthropomorphic about this. You know, this is, for panpsychists,
0:11:18 human consciousness is a sort of weird, highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
0:11:25 So there’s so many different directions we could go here. We may get into some rather gnarly questions
0:11:35 quickly. So just to reiterate and to sort of clarify for myself or for listeners also. So from human to
0:11:41 sheep, but all the way down to, we can certainly go to quarks and so on with the way you described it,
0:11:49 but you would have a pool of water, maybe the water droplets, rocks, trees, the constituent parts of trees,
0:11:54 etc. And so on, sort of as you reduce down. How would you think about that?
0:12:01 Just one small qualification though. Yeah, it is a kind of common misunderstanding that panpsychists
0:12:07 think absolutely everything is conscious. And it’s understandable. That’s actually what the word
0:12:15 means, pan, everything, psyche, mind. But panpsychists don’t necessarily think literally everything is
0:12:24 conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks are conscious in some very simple way.
0:12:30 Maybe electrons and quarks, like the example I just gave, but maybe not. I mean, it’s a question for
0:12:37 physicists, not philosophers like me. What are the fundamental components of reality? These days,
0:12:45 many theoretical physicists are more inclined to think that our universe is made up of universe-wide
0:12:54 fields. And particles are just local excitations in those fields. So if you combine that with panpsychism,
0:13:02 you get the view that the fundamental forms of consciousness underlie these universe-wide fields.
0:13:09 This gets closer to a form of panpsychism known as cosmopsychism, that the universe itself is conscious.
0:13:14 Although again, we need to be careful. That doesn’t necessarily mean the universe is God or the
0:13:20 universe is… It could be just the universe is just kind of this messy, blobby, nonsense consciousness,
0:13:27 right? So that’s the idea that basic things are conscious and that many other things, of course,
0:13:34 are conscious. Humans and animals and our consciousness is somehow built up from these simpler forms of
0:13:41 consciousness. But it doesn’t mean every random combination of conscious particles makes something
0:13:47 that has its own unified consciousness. So it doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, rocks and socks
0:13:54 and tables and chairs. I remember teaching this to our undergraduates and I had a PowerPoint slide up
0:14:00 with socks on and saying, your socks might not be conscious. And one of the students obviously took a
0:14:06 photo of that, put it on social media. This is what we’re learning in my classes. But anyway, I think it was
0:14:15 lighthearted. But yeah, so although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious. I just
0:14:23 mentioned Annika. I think she thinks that. My friend Luke Roloff’s very good, very down-to-earth
0:14:28 scientific panpsychist philosopher. But he does think literally everything is conscious. But even
0:14:36 then, it’s not going to be a kind of consciousness a human being has. That is a very specific, highly
0:14:41 organized form of information processing. Whereas if a table is conscious, it’s going to be just some
0:14:47 meaningless, fragmented, disunified nonsense. But yeah, that’s the basic idea.
0:14:55 So first things first, I want to give a nod to Annika Harris. She has a very extensive audio
0:15:01 documentary that relates to consciousness. People want to do a deep dive into these subjects. But
0:15:07 this word consciousness may be bothering people at this point in the conversation, kind of like a pebble
0:15:14 in a shoe. Because for most people wandering about going to Starbucks and watching Netflix and so on,
0:15:21 consciousness, they may have not taken the time to define it precisely. But the intuited sense is
0:15:27 something along the lines of awareness. Maybe it’s awareness that you are aware of, but there’s some
0:15:33 degree of awareness. So when you talk about a table or socks or rocks, I understand that you didn’t imply
0:15:40 that everything has its own consciousness. But how should they think of this word when applied to what
0:15:46 people would consider inanimate objects, for instance?
0:15:53 It’s a really important question, because it is a little bit of an ambiguous word. And I agree
0:16:01 with you when I’m talking to the public. People often think that it means something quite sophisticated,
0:16:06 like self-consciousness or awareness of one’s own existence.
0:16:08 And Philip, could I interrupt you for one second?
0:16:08 Yeah.
0:16:15 I thought what I might do is just kind of line up some support before we go too far into this.
0:16:25 And are there any physicists, because some people might think of them as the most refined plumbers of
0:16:29 reality. Sorry, guys, if that’s insulting. I just came up with that on the fly. But architects,
0:16:35 maybe decipherers, detectives, there we go, choose your label. Are there any physicists,
0:16:43 credible physicists, who would more or less agree with some of the positions and theories that you
0:16:45 are describing related to panpsychism?
0:16:54 One person that stands out here is Roger Penrose, who’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Fascinating,
0:16:59 very interesting thinker. I was lucky enough to have one-to-one lunch with Roger Penrose once,
0:17:02 kind of by chance at a big consciousness conference.
0:17:04 That’s lucky. He’s getting up there in age.
0:17:11 One of the organizers sat him down, and we just sat together, and we had a lovely chat about our
0:17:19 different views. But he’s defended a view that’s very close to panpsychism. The quantum collapse
0:17:24 is connected to the generation of consciousness. One thing, I don’t know how much you want to get
0:17:25 into his view.
0:17:25 Let’s get into it.
0:17:32 He’s influenced by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which, not getting into too much detail,
0:17:39 roughly proves that for any finite set of axioms, you’re not going to be able to generate
0:17:45 algorithmically all of the truths of mathematics. This was the fascinating thing Gödel proved.
0:17:52 And so that leads Penrose to think, well, there must be something non-computational
0:17:59 about human mathematical thought. Because if it was just algorithmic and computational,
0:18:04 we wouldn’t get all those truths of arithmetic that we are able to comprehend.
0:18:11 And then where that leads him is he thinks, well, it must be at the quantum level rather than at the
0:18:18 level where we have classical physics. And this led him in combination with scientist Stuart
0:18:25 Hamerov to explore the less common position that consciousness is connected to quantum
0:18:30 stuff in the brain in what we call the microtubules. So yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating
0:18:35 position that Roger has got into. I mean, another question that might be more pertinent is what
0:18:40 about neuroscientists? Because I suppose, you know, consciousness is in the purview of the
0:18:44 neuroscience. The science of consciousness, I think, is part of neuroscience.
0:18:51 So let’s hop to that. But I want to give you just a bit of trivium related to Penrose. So I followed
0:18:59 Penrose’s work and Hamerov, very deeply interested. And I ended up, by a number of lucky coincidences,
0:19:08 doing a week at Wadham College, where I believe he is a fellow. And his book was in my room where I stayed.
0:19:15 And I asked someone about him. And I feel like I just missed him by a week. And I was very sad about
0:19:16 this.
0:19:22 He’s so open minded. He’s such so many areas of thought. Just a really fascinating figure.
0:19:25 So neuroscientists, let’s hop into that arena.
0:19:31 I mean, the first thing you should know about the science of consciousness is there is no consensus.
0:19:38 There is famously, I don’t know whether you’ve heard this, the 25 years ago, the neuroscientist,
0:19:44 Christophe Koch, bet the philosopher, David Shalmers, that this would all be wrapped up by now.
0:19:50 We would attract, we would attract what we call the neural correlates of consciousness, those
0:19:57 aspects of brain activity that perfectly correspond to consciousness. And he bet him a crate of fine wine.
0:20:04 And it was a public bet. Well, was it last summer or the summer before he publicly conceded defeat on
0:20:11 that? Because there is no consensus. But one of the major possibilities, one of the major views that is
0:20:19 disputed and debated is the integrated information theory. And that gets us very close to panpsychism or
0:20:27 or is even itself a form of panpsychism because it entails that consciousness is more widespread than
0:20:33 we ordinarily take it to be. And it certainly goes into the inanimate realm. There’s two reasons this
0:20:38 is getting thought about. I mean, maybe psychedelics is a third reason, but there’s two reasons. One is
0:20:43 the newfound philosophical interest, but also this interest in the integrated information theory.
0:20:47 But also just finally, I mean, I think from what we’ve already said,
0:20:55 it becomes clear with consciousness, it is not just a scientific issue. The science is absolutely
0:21:01 crucial and the experimental work. But with consciousness, there are so many philosophical
0:21:09 questions we need to address. And I think actually what we’ve found is that’s part of the reason we haven’t
0:21:15 achieved consensus. Because actually, forget the big philosophical questions. How you interpret the
0:21:22 scientific data on the brain and consciousness depends on your philosophical assumptions. There’s
0:21:27 a dispute among scientists about whether consciousness is at the front or the back of the brain. And
0:21:32 actually, I think the splits on that is something to do with the philosophical assumptions. So we need
0:21:34 scientists and philosophers working together.
0:21:42 I want to get back to that because that’s a very meta examination of science and the scientific method
0:21:47 that I want to get into. But since I’m a stickler for terms, the integrated information theory,
0:21:52 can you speak to that for one moment? And I funded a fair amount of science also at Johns Hopkins and
0:21:57 other places where I believe they developed the mystical experience questionnaire, at least in part.
0:22:04 The integrated information theory, could you define that for us before we get back to the sort of,
0:22:08 And for people listening, don’t worry, I keep good notes and I have a good memory. We’re going to get
0:22:14 to the definition of consciousness outside of the broadly layperson interpretation of, say, awareness.
0:22:18 Haven’t forgotten about it, but just because that might take us down a bunch of side alleys, I want
0:22:22 to stick where we are for a second. The integrated information theory, what is that?
0:22:29 So this is one of the proposals. I mean, we can maybe distinguish the sort of scientific task of
0:22:36 consciousness from the philosophical task that, as I say it, the scientific task is which brain activity
0:22:42 goes along with which kinds of conscious experience. And more generally, in general, what is required
0:22:48 from a physical system to get consciousness? And integrated information theory is one proposal.
0:22:56 And roughly, it says that consciousness corresponds to integration. You get a conscious system when the way
0:23:03 information is stored in the system depends upon the integration between the parts of the system.
0:23:09 They have a mathematically precise way of defining this. They represent it with the letter phi.
0:23:17 And the proposal is that at the exact moment when a system has more integrated information in the whole
0:23:22 than in the parts, that’s when the lights come on. That’s when you get consciousness.
0:23:28 So, I mean, that is what is so striking about the brain. In fact, the parts of the brain that are
0:23:34 associated with consciousness are not necessarily the parts that have the most neurons, but they do
0:23:41 seem to be the parts that involve deep, deep integration. Each neuron being connected to hundreds
0:23:46 and thousands of others yielding trillions of connections. I mean, maybe to connect to how computers
0:23:53 work. If the integrated information theory turns out to be true, computers that are anything like what
0:23:58 we currently have are actually not going to be conscious. Because the way in which information
0:24:03 is stored in a computer is less dependent on integration. If you take out a bit of, you know,
0:24:09 a few transistors, you won’t necessarily lose that much information. But if you take out a small part of
0:24:15 the brain, at least comparatively, you lose a hell of a lot of information because the way in which
0:24:22 information is stored is so much more holistic and to do with integration. And so the theory basically says
0:24:25 that is the hallmark of consciousness. That’s what it’s all about.
0:24:35 So let’s perhaps make a contrast of styles. And then, because I don’t want to hold out and tease people
0:24:40 for too long, we’ll try to take a stab, or I will, I’m using the royal we, I will ask you to take a stab,
0:24:46 just giving us a working definition of consciousness that doesn’t depend on a table asking itself,
0:24:52 why am I here? What’s going on? And before we get to that, though, contrast and styles, perhaps,
0:24:59 the integrated information theory seems to imply, and this is something I have zero familiarity with,
0:25:06 so I could get this wrong, on consciousness as an emergent property. So things are simple,
0:25:13 they get more complex, and when they reach a requisite level of complexity, where the sum of
0:25:19 the parts is greater than the whole, as you would expect it, the lights turn on. And maybe I’m
0:25:25 misinterpreting that. But I’m wondering if that is accurate, if you, as someone who has looked at this
0:25:32 very deeply through philosophical lenses, would agree with that? Or does it start from the very
0:25:37 beginning with the smallest constituent parts? Does that make any sense?
0:25:44 It does make a lot of sense. And here you’re focusing on a key big question here, you know,
0:25:51 chicken or egg, which comes first? The physical world or consciousness? And you know, the standards,
0:25:56 scientific assumption is, well, it’s the physical universe that’s first, you know,
0:26:05 particles forming complex systems, brains, and then in some of the complex electrochemical signaling
0:26:11 in brains, consciousness pops up, it’s emergent, as you say. Whereas the panpsychist actually
0:26:19 turns that on its head and says, no, no, no, consciousness, some story about very simple
0:26:27 conscious entities is the foundational story. And in fact, physical reality emerges from that more
0:26:32 basic story about consciousness. Now you asked about integrated information theory, or they call it IIT
0:26:41 for short. And I’ve always been a little bit unsure. You know, the key figures here are Giulio Tononi and
0:26:47 Christoph Koch, who I mentioned earlier. We had a conference recently in Sweden bringing together
0:26:53 philosophers working on panpsychism and leading proponents of integrated information theory.
0:26:59 And we really wrestled it out. And I actually was pleasantly surprised to realize we’re actually on the
0:27:05 complete same page as this. I think at least the leading proponents of integrated information theory,
0:27:13 those neuroscientists are like us philosophers of the view that it’s consciousness that’s fundamental
0:27:17 actually, and everything else flows from there. Everything else comes out of consciousness.
0:27:28 Is that a close cousin or does it rhyme with what Max Planck, icon, German physicist, said so long ago?
0:27:34 I have never had the full context of this quote. And this is as good a time as any after you answer this
0:27:39 just to give us a working definition of consciousness that can be applied in the way you would like to
0:27:44 apply it. So Max Planck, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from
0:27:49 consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we
0:27:55 regard as existing postulates consciousness. So Max Planck, 1852 to 1947, Nobel Prize winning German
0:28:04 physicist and the father of quantum theory. Was he referring to more or less what you are discussing,
0:28:07 or did he say this in a different context?
0:28:14 It’s fascinating what you point to there. And it’s not just Max Planck. It was a fairly widespread view
0:28:20 among many physicists at the time. A colleague of mine who works in the history of philosophy tweeted
0:28:27 something recently that was a quote from a physicist from the 1930s. Oh God, I can’t remember now who it was
0:28:33 saying, of course, all physicists think consciousness is fundamental now. It’s just like, what? I think, you know,
0:28:42 something happened in the post-war years where this all went out the window and we moved to dominance of
0:28:48 what we call materialism. Roughly that the physical world is fundamental. We can leave it to the historians
0:28:53 perhaps to work out what was going on there. But what was the interest of Max Planck? I mean, I should
0:29:00 say I’m not an expert on Max Planck, but I suspect it might be something to do with quantum mechanics and
0:29:05 some of the mysteries that have emerged since those early days of quantum mechanics. I mean,
0:29:11 the weird thing about quantum mechanics is that if we just take the core bit of mathematics,
0:29:19 what we call the Schrodinger equation, it seems to describe this weird world of what we call
0:29:24 superpositions. And don’t ask me what a superposition is because nobody knows, but it’s something to do with,
0:29:30 you know, the particle is not in this location and not in that location, but sort of in both and
0:29:35 neither at the same time or, you know, captured with the famous Schrodinger cat thought experiment
0:29:42 were. If you just apply the Schrodinger equation, you’ll find that the cat, before we open the box,
0:29:47 the cat is living and dead. And there’s many cats or some of them living, some of them dead. But of
0:29:53 course, that’s not what we ever observe. Whenever we actually observe the particle, it’s in a definite
0:29:58 location. Whenever we actually open the box and look at the cat, if we were cruel enough to
0:30:04 actually do the Schrodinger’s cat experiment, we’d see a definitely living cat or a definitely dead cat.
0:30:08 What on earth is going on there? And what the early pioneers of quantum mechanics said is,
0:30:15 well, when you make an observation, things change. And a different bit of mathematics, what we call
0:30:22 the Born rule, comes in and tells you what you’re going to observe, or at least the probability of what
0:30:26 you’re going to observe. So it’s a sort of bridging principle that takes you from this weird world of
0:30:32 superpositions to the definite reality you’re actually going to observe. And, you know, the early pioneers of
0:30:40 quantum mechanics, like Niles Bohr, they didn’t want you to ask questions about that. In fact, they hated Niles
0:30:47 Bohr. You know, people talk about him, the people who knew him, just say he was this incredibly charismatic
0:30:55 figure. People compared him to Jesus or Socrates. But he also ruled like a communist dictator in crushing
0:31:01 opposition. If you ask questions about what is going on in reality to make quantum mechanics make
0:31:06 sense, your career would be over, right? They didn’t want you asking those questions. But, you know,
0:31:12 one answer that some people reached in the 1960s Nobel Prize winning quantum pioneer Wigner,
0:31:19 well, maybe it’s consciousness that’s making the difference, right? Maybe that’s what’s the difference
0:31:24 between before you’re observing the particle, and it’s in many locations and when you observe it, or before you
0:31:32 open the box to see what’s going on with the cat. It’s the interaction of consciousness that changes reality
0:31:38 from this wacky world of superpositions to a definite reality. And that’s been somewhat neglected over the years,
0:31:44 But actually, some friends of mine, David Chalmers, who I mentioned, and Kelvin McQueen, have actually
0:31:50 taken that view and explored it in rigorous detail. They don’t necessarily think it’s true,
0:31:58 but there’s value in just analytically exploring this position, laying it out rigorously, looking at
0:32:03 the pros and cons. So maybe that natural connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics was
0:32:06 something to do with it. But I’m not totally sure.
0:32:13 Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors, and we’ll be right back to the show.
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0:33:22 We go down a number of different paths from here, of course. What is a good placeholder definition of
0:33:30 consciousness for the purposes of how you’ve been using it in the context of panpsychism?
0:33:36 The way the word consciousness is standardly used, I think in both science and philosophy,
0:33:45 it just means subjective experience. Your consciousness is just what it’s like to be you.
0:33:52 So, you know, right now you’re having an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you,
0:33:58 visual experience of the room around you. You know, if you pay attention, you’ll notice the
0:34:05 subtle tactile sensations of the chair beneath your body. This is just all part of what it’s like to be you.
0:34:12 And that’s all we mean by consciousness. So now we can start to see that it make a little bit more
0:34:17 sense that this could exist in very simple forms, because we’re not necessarily talking about
0:34:23 conceptual understanding or awareness of your own existence. We’re just talking about experience.
0:34:28 And, you know, maybe bedbugs could have experience. Maybe something even simpler could have
0:34:30 very, very simple forms of experience.
0:34:37 Thank you. And if people want to impress or confuse their friends at the next cocktail party,
0:34:40 could they call those things qualia? Would that be a word they should throw around,
0:34:43 perhaps? Or qualia, a different thing entirely?
0:34:51 No, no, that’s the philosopher’s lingo, I suppose, to mean, I guess, the qualities we encounter in
0:34:58 conscious experience. And some people think that’s really at the heart of the challenge here, the colors,
0:35:05 the sounds, the smells, the taste. Consciousness seems to involve rich qualities, you know, the smell
0:35:15 of coffee, the taste of mint, the deep red of a sunset. And maybe it’s that that physical science struggles
0:35:22 with so much. Because physical science, since Galileo, has aimed to be purely quantitative,
0:35:30 purely mathematical, purely objective and personal. And so it’s hard to see how you can bridge the
0:35:37 explanatory gap between that purely quantitative world of physics and physical science and this
0:35:45 subjective, qualitative world of consciousness. And in fact, one final thing, physical science kicked off.
0:35:52 With Galileo taking consciousness outside of the domain of science for this precise reason,
0:35:57 because he thought, correctly, I think, you can’t capture those qualities in purely mathematical
0:36:02 language. If we want mathematical science, we’ve got to take consciousness out. And I think that’s
0:36:07 really, I mean, this is my book, Galileo’s Era. I think that’s really at the root of our current
0:36:12 predicaments of consciousness. We need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated 400
0:36:22 years ago. This may be a naive question, but if we can explore quantum mechanics in mathematical form,
0:36:33 and if we move from kind of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum mechanics, if quantum mechanical effects,
0:36:40 at least in part, explain consciousness, it’s a big if, I suppose, but if, couldn’t we then
0:36:45 reincorporate it into mathematics? Or do you think that’s a fool’s errand?
0:36:51 I mean, you’re making the case, I suppose, that the materialist will want to make the person who
0:36:58 thinks, no, no, we can do this. I mean, I suppose everyone agrees we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t
0:37:06 got even the beginnings. We haven’t got even the beginnings of an explanation of how electrochemical
0:37:15 signaling can somehow make a feeling. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people inspired by the success of
0:37:20 physical science think, come on, let’s, we can get there in the end. We just need to keep pushing at
0:37:28 this. But I suppose that’s why I think we do need to reflect maybe on the intellectual, philosophical
0:37:36 starting points of science with Galileo. This moment when Galileo kicked things off by taking consciousness
0:37:37 out.
0:37:46 How did Galileo strip consciousness out? Was it incidental? Was it very deliberate? Because it was
0:37:50 just like, okay, this is the misbehaving kid in the classroom. We need to put him in the corner.
0:37:53 How was that done? What was the error, so to speak?
0:38:01 Galileo wanted, and this was such a revolutionary innovation, wanted science to be just purely
0:38:07 mathematical. That had never been done before. But he understood that the problem is the qualities we
0:38:13 seem to encounter in our experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells, and the tastes. So he said,
0:38:16 you know, how do we get rid of them? You can’t capture them in mathematics. You can’t,
0:38:21 I mean, you can capture a lot, right? You can capture with color experience. You can divide
0:38:27 up color into the dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness, right? And you can map out a
0:38:36 three-dimensional space there. But you can never convey to a blind from birth neuroscientist
0:38:43 with that sort of information, the redness of red, right? You know, what it’s like to see red.
0:38:48 Actually, there’s a great neuroscientist, Nut Norby, the late Nut Norby, he’s passed away now,
0:38:55 who was an expert color scientist who had cones missing from his eyes, so he could only see black
0:39:00 and white and shades of gray. And he talked in wonder, he was interested in the philosophy, talked in
0:39:07 wonderful, rich ways about how he understood the structure of color experience, but he couldn’t
0:39:14 quite get at the colors, the qualities themselves. So Galileo said, right, well, we need that to be
0:39:19 outside of the scientific domain. So what he said, he stripped the physical world of its qualities.
0:39:25 He said, you know, the colors, they’re not really in the objects. You know, this Batman mug I’ve got
0:39:30 here, you know, the blueness and the yellowness, that’s not really on the surface of the cup.
0:39:38 That’s in the conscious experience of the observer looking at it, or the spiciness isn’t really inside
0:39:43 the curry. It’s in the experience, the conscious experience of the person eating the curry. So he
0:39:49 strips the physical world of all these colors and sounds and smells, tastes. Where are they? They’re
0:39:55 in the soul, right? They’re in the soul. That’s outside of science. And once he’d stripped the qualities
0:40:01 away, you’ve free reign to capture everything else in mathematics. Now that was a good move because it
0:40:09 was the start of mathematical physics and it’s led to incredible technology and consensus on this body
0:40:15 of information. But I think we’re in a period of history where it’s gone so well. People now think
0:40:22 that’s everything. We found the way forward. But we need to remember it’s gone so well because it was
0:40:27 given a limited focus because consciousness was put outside of the domain of science.
0:40:32 So I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about these challenges of
0:40:36 explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, of course you can’t do that.
0:40:43 I designed physical science to exclude consciousness. If you want to bring consciousness back in the
0:40:49 scientific story, we need to rethink those foundations. We need to bring together what Galileo
0:40:53 separated. And I think that’s what panpsychism gives us a way of doing. It’s not telling us to
0:40:59 do science differently. It’s telling us to have a more expansive scientific method that brings
0:41:00 consciousness back into the story.
0:41:06 Ooh, I want to explore that last part. And I would just say, I mean, for folks listening,
0:41:11 and please excuse me, I’m operating way above my pay grade here, so I’m probably going to make
0:41:16 mistakes. But Newtonian physics, for instance, works fantastically well for so many things.
0:41:23 But once you have quantum mechanics introduced, it becomes very clear that it’s an excellent
0:41:30 toolkit, but it doesn’t have a complete range of applications, let’s just say. And if you talk
0:41:35 to any good doctor, I don’t know if this joke exists in, it’s not really a joke, I suppose,
0:41:40 but sort of a philosophical epistemological quip, which is, you know, 50% of what we know is wrong,
0:41:44 we just don’t know which 50%. If you talk to any really good doctor, they’ll tell you that.
0:41:49 So there’s no reason to believe that we have anything approaching complete understanding of
0:41:56 the physical world through the tools that we have available. How do you, you said expanding,
0:42:03 if I’m recalling correctly, sort of expanding the scope of science to include panpsychism. Do you have
0:42:05 any thoughts on how that might be done?
0:42:10 I think come back to this question of we just need to explore different explanatory projects.
0:42:18 For many decades now, we’ve been pursuing the following project, trying to explain conscious
0:42:26 experience in terms of utterly non-conscious processes in the brain. And that project, despite a lot of time
0:42:32 and energy and money, has gone precisely nowhere. Which is not to say the science of the brain has gone
0:42:39 nowhere. We’ve made incredible progress. But on that particular question of how electrochemical
0:42:44 signalling’s on the brain could make a feeling, you know, we haven’t even got the beginnings.
0:42:52 So the panpsychist says, well, let’s just try it upside down. Let’s try the reverse of that explanatory
0:43:00 project. You know, we start with consciousness. Can we get physical reality out of that? And I just think it’s
0:43:06 turned out that that’s a much more fruitful explanatory project. I think actually the mysteries have been
0:43:13 solved, essentially. And I think a lot of the resistance is, it just kind of feels weird.
0:43:18 It takes time to adjust to these things. But look, I would just say, just contrast these two explanatory
0:43:22 projects, right? Starting with physical science, trying to get consciousness out. Starting with
0:43:28 consciousness, trying to get physical reality out. Which works? And I think the latter, we’ve just made
0:43:29 much more progress on it.
0:43:35 You know, I was just doing a little bit of searching on perplexity for people who are
0:43:41 interested, which AI tool I am using, which tends to focus a lot on avoiding or minimizing hallucination.
0:43:48 I thought you were metaphorically referring to front and back of the brain when you were discussing
0:43:57 how your philosophical beliefs or what we would even call this sort of philosophical undergirding would
0:44:03 affect your scientific exploration or interpretation. But I put in a question, what do neuroscientists
0:44:10 believe is the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness? And the first thing that pops up, so IIT is here,
0:44:16 integrated information theory, but global neuronal workspace theory, man, they could use some branding on that,
0:44:23 but that’s okay. GNWT. This theory championed by Dr. Stanislas Dahin, I’m probably pronouncing that
0:44:27 incorrectly, suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of sensory information in the frontal
0:44:32 parts of the brain. The front of the brain acts as a sketch pad where sensory signals are combined with
0:44:37 memories and emotions, and this information is then broadcast across the brain. IIT posits that
0:44:41 consciousness emerges from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the brain.
0:44:46 And it goes on and on. And then there are many other theories. The thalamus and its interaction
0:44:52 with the cerebral cortex, thecipitotemporal area, the claustrum. That one has come up a bit with
0:44:57 neuroscientists I’ve spoken to at a few universities. Thin sheet of neurons connected to the neocortex.
0:45:04 Okay. Now, what do you think of the, let’s put IIT aside for a second, but just this general
0:45:11 pursuit, the pursuit of some neuroanatomical seat of consciousness, because the answers we get are only
0:45:18 going to be as good as our questions. And while science is excellent, the scientific method for
0:45:23 testing hypotheses, it doesn’t always give you a great set of tools for generating
0:45:31 the best or better questions. So do you feel like this is worth pursuing, or is there something that
0:45:38 scientists have as a blind spot that perhaps dooms this question from the very outset,
0:45:40 the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness?
0:45:47 Absolutely. You know, we need the science. We’re not going to make progress on consciousness
0:45:53 without science. And what you’ve pointed to is a really important debate. I mean, maybe just
0:46:00 touch on another way of saying, you know, why this is so hard to make progress on. And the reason is
0:46:08 consciousness is not publicly observable. I can’t look inside your brain and see your feelings and
0:46:15 experiences. I can’t look inside a fish and see, you know, does it have feelings? And this leads to all
0:46:22 sorts of ethical problems. I mean, what you can do if you’re dealing with a human being is you can ask
0:46:27 them, right? You can, while you’re scanning their brain, maybe you can stimulate a bit of the brain.
0:46:34 So what did that feel? And that’s really essentially the tool for doing the scientific task of trying to
0:46:42 mirror together the invisible world of consciousness and the visible world of the brain. It’s very hard,
0:46:49 but that’s what we try to do. But really, I think that’s where the limit is with science in regard to
0:46:55 consciousness. Because consciousness is not publicly observable, that is all you can do. It’s very
0:47:02 important, but that is all you can do. Try to get those correlations in the human case, and then try as best
0:47:13 you can to extrapolate to the non-human case. But that will always leave open the why question. Why does brain
0:47:19 activity go along with consciousness? Why should brain activity have anything to do with consciousness?
0:47:25 And I think at that point, you need to turn to the philosophy and just look at the various possibilities
0:47:31 that we’ve discussed. Well, maybe the physical world is fundamental and consciousness emerges. Maybe consciousness
0:47:37 is fundamental and physical reality emerges. Maybe they’re both radically different. This is what’s called
0:47:43 dualism. Maybe consciousness is in the soul, and that’s just separate from the body and the brain. And this is
0:47:50 actually, for what it’s worth, been the most popular theory in human history of consciousness,
0:47:55 that consciousness is somehow separate. But the scientific data on consciousness, important as it
0:48:00 is, is just neutral on all those possibilities. This is what I’m so passionate about getting across to
0:48:03 people. And I understand why people find that frustrating. And they think,
0:48:08 no, can’t we do an experiment? You know, can’t we? I mean, maybe you should say, well, we just don’t
0:48:15 know. All we know is the correlations. We just don’t know. Or we can try and do some philosophy. We can
0:48:21 try and see if, can we evaluate these different options? Maybe in terms of simplicity, Occam’s razor,
0:48:29 maybe that will get rid of the soul. Or how well their explanatory aims have gone. And I think when
0:48:35 we do that, panpsychism just looks more plausible. I’ve talked a bit longer. If I could say one more
0:48:41 thing about how we make progress. I think it might get to the point where what we need to do
0:48:50 is fragment the discipline a little bit into communities of scientists and philosophers. That is
0:48:57 to say, scientists doing experiments under certain philosophical assumptions. And that’s really actually
0:49:05 with IIT and global workspace theory, that is kind of already going on, but not explicit. But maybe we just
0:49:10 have to do that and see what bears fruit. You know, some neuroscientists I know don’t like that. And they think,
0:49:16 oh, we’re not going to be taken serious as credible science. We won’t get funding. I feel that. But
0:49:20 unfortunately, if you’re going to deal with consciousness, for all the reasons we’ve discussed,
0:49:26 it’s not publicly observable. Science was set up from taking it out the picture. You just need to do
0:49:32 some philosophy. So maybe what we need to do is just get society to take philosophy more seriously and to
0:49:38 see the role that has to play in the project of finding out about reality. And then I think we’ll make
0:49:40 progress in consciousness.
0:49:46 So if people want to get really squirrely and explore consciousness as something perhaps
0:49:56 non-localized or not limited to the brain, they can read a collection of different writings called
0:50:03 Mind Beyond Brain, which was edited by David Presti. Now, if David Presti were just playing singing bowls
0:50:09 and swinging kopal around the public square, walking around in rags, it would be one thing.
0:50:13 But he’s a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in the
0:50:18 Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for nearly 20 years. Still teaches and also has worked as a
0:50:23 clinical psychologist in the treatment of addiction and PTSD and so on at the Department of Veteran Affairs,
0:50:28 Medical San Francisco and SF. Very interesting. Not all chapters, in my opinion, are strong,
0:50:34 but a few will definitely provoke some very bizarre questions. So that’s something people can dig into
0:50:42 if they’d like. Let me ask you about the hypothetical situation, which is if we made another bet.
0:50:49 So let’s say that you bet me. You’re like, you know, 20 years from now, we’re going to figure it out.
0:50:57 Cradle wine. Your choice. It’s like, fantastic. And it gets figured out. We somehow determine,
0:51:02 maybe it’s with the help of quantum computing and harnessing the power from other universes.
0:51:06 By the way, if people haven’t listened to the discussion of quantum computing I had with Steve
0:51:10 Jurvetson quite a while back now. Go back and listen to that if you think what I just said is
0:51:17 strange. It is. But let’s say it gets figured out. What is the payoff? This might sound also like a
0:51:25 very dumb question. Is it trying just to resolve some deep angst and the not knowing as it relates
0:51:30 to consciousness? Or is there more to the potential payoff if we were to somehow figure it out?
0:51:36 You know, I actually think there are very important practical ethical concerns here.
0:51:42 I mean, one thing we’ve touched on slightly is animal consciousness, which animals are conscious.
0:51:50 And I mean, actually, the direction of travel has been going more and more things are conscious as
0:51:54 time has gone on. There was recently a letter written by dozens of neuroscientists
0:52:00 arguing that we need to at least take seriously the possibility that insects are conscious.
0:52:04 I mean, there was a time people didn’t think babies were conscious and used to do
0:52:11 quite horrible things on babies without anesthesia. God, and that was not that long ago. This is not
0:52:12 the 1400s we’re talking about.
0:52:17 You know, it’s only recently people are thinking birds and fish are conscious. So, you know,
0:52:22 us panpsychists have taken it all away and we’re just waiting for everyone to catch up. I’m being
0:52:28 slightly ironic. But, you know, plants, I don’t think people are at the stage necessarily where they
0:52:32 are. Well, there are some biopsychists who think, well, they’re not panpsychists,
0:52:37 but they think all living things are conscious. But we have learned incredible things about
0:52:44 plant intelligence, that plants can be subject to conditioned learning, which was incredibly
0:52:52 surprising that the extent to which trees communicate onto the ground and share information and between
0:52:58 species, there’s cooperation and sharing of food and nutrients. And there’s just some incredible
0:53:03 buzzing community beneath the ground. So I think, you know, as we learn more about
0:53:09 animals and plants, it is leading people to ascribe consciousness more and more widespread.
0:53:14 But look, I mean, this is a very serious ethical question, which things are conscious. People often
0:53:19 think I’m going to be a vegan, but it makes it harder if you’re a panpsychist. If you’re not a
0:53:24 panpsychist or a biopsychist, you’ve got a nice, easy, ethical dividing line. You know,
0:53:30 plants aren’t conscious. I just won’t eat things that are conscious. But I think trees and plants
0:53:34 are conscious, you know, and I’ve got to eat something. So it just, it really, there really
0:53:42 is ethical issues here. The other one is people in comas who we can’t communicate with in the normal
0:53:48 way at least. Are they conscious? Can they hear us? You know, I mean, one of the fascinating was
0:53:56 maybe 10 or 15 years ago now that scientists were able to communicate with somebody in a coma through
0:54:02 asking yes or no questions and saying, you know, for the yes question, I can’t remember the details now,
0:54:07 you know, think of playing tennis. And then they observe, they scan the brain to see if the motor
0:54:12 region was activated and communicated with someone through scanning their brain and found
0:54:17 out that they did have meaningful thought. So, I mean, those are the two big ethical questions,
0:54:20 I suppose. But look, I don’t think we should underplay
0:54:31 questions that just don’t have practical significance, but are part of what it means to be a human being in
0:54:37 sense of the noble project of trying to have our best guess as to what reality is like. I think human
0:54:43 life isn’t just about, you know, building bridges, curing disease, working on the economy, as important
0:54:49 as those things are. I think we want to know, what is this world we’re living in? How do we fit that into
0:54:55 our own understanding of our meaning and purpose in this life? And so, you know, consciousness is important
0:55:03 for that purpose too. And there’s also oftentimes practicality on the further side of something that
0:55:08 seems impractical, or at least not immediately practical. That happens all the time in science,
0:55:12 happens all the time in medicine, all the time in pharmaceutical development.
0:55:16 I could give you two good examples of that, actually.
0:55:16 Please.
0:55:24 Where blue sky thinking has gone in. Well, the Reverend Thomas Bayes was annoyed by the atheist
0:55:30 David Hume in the 18th century with his argument against miracles, that we should never trust
0:55:36 miracles because it’s always going to be more likely that it was deceit or error rather than a break in
0:55:41 the laws of nature. Thomas Bayes, Reverend Thomas Bayes, was like, what’s going on here? And he wrestled
0:55:46 with this and he came up with a little bit of mathematics that we now call Bayes’ theorem,
0:55:55 which is our core mathematical way of understanding evidence. It was very important in tracking the
0:56:02 COVID pandemic. It informs a huge bit of neuroscience we call predictive processing. Another quick example,
0:56:10 I mean, Bertrand Russell, my hero, and Gottlieb Frege, were wrestling with the very abstract question of,
0:56:17 can we reduce mathematics to logic? Why the hell would you be worried about that? But can we just
0:56:23 explain all of maths away? Philosophers worry about numbers. What the hell are numbers? Where are numbers?
0:56:30 You know, Plato, back in the dawn of Western philosophy, Plato thought numbers are really out there. Some
0:56:35 philosophers think, I don’t want to believe in this magical world of numbers, platonic heaven. Maybe we
0:56:39 can just get it all reduced to logic. And they wrestled with this and it didn’t really work out, but they
0:56:47 came up with predicate logic, which is, you know, been hugely important in computer science and,
0:56:53 and God, it’s huge, loads of areas of science. So yeah. So look, we need to be, to worry about just
0:57:00 focusing on the practical questions. You know, we need space for blue sky thinking and trying things out
0:57:01 because you don’t know where it’s going to end up.
0:57:07 I’m going to come back to Bertrand Russell, which I was planning on hitting regardless. But first,
0:57:16 I thought we could explore a little bit your experience with virtual reality. And this was in
0:57:23 the seven pages that you sent to me. Some other reading related to the present moment, which we don’t
0:57:29 have to go to in depth, but specifically the experience you had with VR, if you could just
0:57:36 speak to that, because part of my hope with conversations like this is just to point out to
0:57:48 people how what we take for granted as the ordinary is so fucking crazy on so many levels that it’s worth
0:57:53 taking a pause very once in a while to revisit it. And I thought your experience was a very eloquent
0:58:00 way of putting that into perspective. Thank you. Yeah, this is a funny one. I suppose just,
0:58:07 you know, when you first try VR goggles, it’s just like, oh my God, this is world and I can interact
0:58:13 with it. And unfortunately I was with my two little kids and they wanted their turn. And obviously I only
0:58:17 have like five minutes and I was like, it’s not fair. Why do they get to do so that? I was thinking,
0:58:21 you know, I was just, I wasn’t going to have another go because my kids are playing with us. Oh, back to
0:58:30 boring reality. And listen, it dawned on me. Actually normal reality, even this kind of mundane
0:58:38 living room I was sitting in is so much richer than the best VR we have, right? You could, you know,
0:58:47 the subtlety of touching a leaf or stroking a carpet or breathing the air. If you pay attention to the air
0:58:52 going in your nose and, you know, I mean, there’s just so much richness in every present moment.
0:58:58 The only problem is for some reason, I don’t know, it’s something to do with evolution probably.
0:59:04 Us humans are sort of set up to get bored of it very quickly. And we just want the next thing that we
0:59:11 want to get me a next Netflix drama, get me a drink to just sort of drown my sorrows. And so I just think
0:59:22 that really dawned on me in a deep way, the importance of just trying to calm that restless
0:59:29 boredom and just get back to the richness that the present moment has to offer. I mean, this is why I’m
0:59:36 on my kids actually. I didn’t say this in the pages you kindly read, but I found actually, I’ve got a four
0:59:40 year old and eight year old. Actually playing with kids can be kind of meditative, like a spiritual
0:59:46 experiment. I mean, I’ve got a friend, I remember a colleague when they first had kids and they said,
0:59:52 it’s really boring, isn’t it? Playing with kids. You know, in a sense it is, but you know, at first it’s
0:59:58 boring playing role play, playing. One of my kids want to play teachers all the time, but, and it’s boring
1:00:02 at first and you want to, I want to do something else. I want to do something more. But then if you just
1:00:08 bear with it and you let the restlessness calm and then you absorb in it and you see, you know,
1:00:16 the wonder of the weird way they’re thinking and the strange expressions and their unusual behavior and
1:00:21 the richness of the present moment. And it’s just a different way of thinking about the value of
1:00:25 meditation or mindfulness or just trying to calm yourself in the present moment. That’s the beginning
1:00:29 of happiness, I think, isn’t it? Just getting yourself settled in the present moment.
1:00:38 All right. As promised, Bertrand Russell, and this is going to take us into some fun territory, I suspect.
1:00:49 Why is Bertrand Russell one of your heroes? And maybe you could speak to William James as well and answer
1:00:49 that same question.
1:00:57 Bertrand Russell, I think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he, in very important work in the
1:01:04 1920s, he sort of solved all the mysteries and, and it got actually, sadly forgotten about for a long time. And it’s
1:01:11 only in the last 10 or 15 years, it’s really been rediscovered. Not that it was literally forgotten about, but it’s
1:01:26 another figure to throw in from the same period, the 1920s, is Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first
1:01:33 scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That made Einstein an overnight
1:01:40 celebrity. And it was a big moment, actually. It was because it was, was it between the wars, I think? And it was an English
1:01:49 experimental scientist confirming the theory of a German or a Swiss German scientist. And a Swiss German
1:01:55 scientist, not only confirming their theory, but their theory that overturned a couple of hundred years
1:02:01 of Newton, right? Newton had the theory of gravity. Eddington’s observation showed that actually Einstein’s
1:02:07 slightly more nuanced theory did better than Newton’s. So anyway, they worked together and they thought about
1:02:12 these questions around consciousness in a really fascinating way. And without wanting to get into
1:02:18 too much of the technicalities, I think their essential insight was that physical science doesn’t
1:02:24 really tell us what matter is. Now, when I first heard that, I honestly thought, this is ridiculous.
1:02:30 What are you talking about? You know, you read physics, you get this rich story about the nature of space and
1:02:37 time and matter. But their point was, well, of course, important and rich as that is, ultimately at base,
1:02:45 physics just gives us mathematical structure. And so in a sense, physics doesn’t care what matter is.
1:02:49 It doesn’t care what physical reality is. It just cares what its mathematical structure is.
1:02:54 If you get the mathematical structure, that’s all physics cares about. And, you know, Stephen Hawking
1:02:59 famously captured this on the last page of A Brief History of Time when he said,
1:03:06 even the final theory of physics won’t tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes
1:03:12 a universe for them to describe. So really, I mean, the way we conventionally think about consciousness,
1:03:18 people tend to think, oh, we know what matter is. We know what the brain is, but we don’t know what
1:03:23 consciousness is. We don’t know what this weird consciousness thing. Russell said, it’s precisely
1:03:28 the other way around. We know what consciousness is by being conscious. You know what pain is when you
1:03:34 feel it. It’s the brain. It’s physical reality. We don’t know what it is. We just know it’s abstract
1:03:38 mathematical structure. We don’t know what fills out that mathematical structure.
1:03:43 And so building on these insights, I don’t know how much you want to get into this. Building on
1:03:51 these insights, philosophers have worked out ways of, if we started with the postulation of networks of
1:03:57 simple conscious entities, so long as through their interactions, they had the right patterns,
1:04:04 the right mathematical structures, we’d get physics out of that. We could get physics out of consciousness.
1:04:09 I think we know from Russell, I think we know that can be done. We don’t know if we can get
1:04:15 consciousness out of physics, but we know we can get physics out of consciousness. Why are we still
1:04:21 banging our head against a brick wall thinking, you know, how can we get consciousness out of physical
1:04:27 stuff? When does it, we know it can be done the other way around. We’ve made sense of that. Let’s just
1:04:34 at least run with that as an option. I know it feels a bit weird, but you know, that’s just a cultural
1:04:40 thing. Where does William James fit in to your life and why such an influence?
1:04:48 I think even more than Russell, William James is my big hero. I think just something about his
1:04:55 intellectual character, I think. If you read James, he feels like someone in the present moment. He’s
1:05:03 just so up to date and sharp and reasonable in his thinking. But I mean, on all sorts of areas,
1:05:08 I mean, he wrote wonderful things on panpsychism. In terms of the challenges to panpsychism, actually,
1:05:13 the big disgust challenge of panpsychism, you know, how do little conscious things come together to make
1:05:19 big conscious things. It’s become known as the combination problem. But William James is actually
1:05:25 the first person wrestling with this. I also like his, you know, the stuff he wrote on religion. You
1:05:29 know, people talk about religion, they talk about Pascal’s Wager. It’s interesting, Pascal’s Wager,
1:05:35 but you need to read James if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. His great paper, The Will to
1:05:40 Believe, he later thought, I think rightly should have been called The Right to Believe. And he was
1:05:46 challenging this idea that a contemporary of his Clifford put forward, but later Bertrand Russell on
1:05:52 the other side put forward, you know, that in terms of belief, you follow the evidence. All you need to do
1:05:58 is follow the evidence and you’ve got strictly anything beyond the evidence you can’t go for. And James
1:06:03 reflects on this, well, look, it’s a bit complicated. You know, the worry with going over the evidence is, well,
1:06:09 you might believe false things, but there’s another risk, isn’t there? You might not believe true things.
1:06:15 To some extent, he tried to justify, to some extent we can tentatively, in certain limited
1:06:23 circumstances where there is uncertainty, where our rational argumentation and experiments can’t settle
1:06:30 matters. Maybe it can be rational to choose to believe. And he made a real case for that. And it
1:06:34 was absolutely fascinating. And you appreciate you’re taking a risk and you know, you’re not making an
1:06:39 intellectual error because you know, you’re taking a risk. You know, you’re going beyond the evidence,
1:06:45 but you’re in your right mind prepared to take that risk. It’s just a beautiful discussion and all sorts
1:06:51 of wonderful analogies and explorations. Everyone should read William James. He’s a patron saint of great
1:06:52 intellectual thinking.
1:06:58 If people needed to start with one or if they were only going to read one, where would you have them
1:07:06 start? I would suppose the most recognizable of his writing for at least an American audience would probably be the
1:07:10 varieties of religious experience. But would you start there or would you have people start somewhere else?
1:07:15 The one I just mentioned, Will to Believe, if that sounded interesting to you, is fairly readable.
1:07:21 But yeah, the other, I mean, the varieties of religious experience, that is still one of the best
1:07:28 explorations of mystical experiences, the chapter on mystical experiences. You know, a lot of it’s a
1:07:36 psychological study and an attempt to define mystical experiences. And his definition still stands to this
1:07:40 day. But at the end, actually, it’s interesting. He says, he asked the question,
1:07:47 Would it be rational to trust a mystical experience? Suppose I’m having this mystical experience that
1:07:53 seems to me there’s this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. Would it be rational to
1:07:58 trust that? I think many people would say, well, no, it’s just something funny going on in your brain.
1:08:06 You know, it could be a delusion. But James says, well, we all think it’s okay to trust our ordinary
1:08:13 sensory experiences. But, you know, that could be a delusion. We could be in the matrix. This could all
1:08:18 be a dream. And you could say, well, we could test our senses, but only by using your senses. So it’s kind
1:08:25 of circular. So all knowledge has to start with just a decision to trust your experience. It’s a sort of
1:08:32 double standard. If you say it’s okay to trust ordinary sensory experiences, fallible as they are,
1:08:38 but it’s not okay for someone having a mystical experience to trust what that seems to be telling
1:08:43 them about reality. There’s a sort of double standard. What justifies that? And I mean, there’s a big
1:08:49 debate, but you know, it is a really important and challenging point in foundational thinkings about
1:08:55 knowledge. Highly recommend William James. Also, if people want an adjunct to that, there’s a book
1:09:00 called The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences, the newer book, 21st Century Research and Perspectives by
1:09:08 a scientist named David Yaden, Y-A-D-E-N out of Johns Hopkins. And that is also worth taking a gander at
1:09:16 if you are particularly interested in mystical experiences, what that means, and the different,
1:09:24 I suppose, flavors of reality that can entail. Let’s come back to Bertrand Russell. And the way I’m going
1:09:30 to make this segue is I’m going to read something from your notes that you sent me as possible
1:09:36 exploration for this conversation. So your last book, Why? Explored the middle ground between God
1:09:41 and atheism. Now I’m going to paraphrase this just to make a third person, or a second person, I guess.
1:09:47 You came out as a heretical Christian, which caused a big reaction, a heated discussion within the
1:09:51 philosophical community, the traditional Christian saying you weren’t really a Christian because you
1:09:56 didn’t have the correct beliefs, quote unquote, and atheist philosopher saying that you’d lost your mind.
1:10:05 Okay. And Bertrand Russell has a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. And I’m wondering, you can edge
1:10:11 into this however you would like, but I’m curious what you think he gets right or wrong in that book,
1:10:17 since you see him very familiar with his work. And then I would love for you just to explain what it
1:10:19 means for you to be a heretical Christian.
1:10:25 Maybe I could just do those the other way around, because it might sort of help see where I’m coming.
1:10:31 I mean, this has been quite a journey, really. I didn’t think I would return to religion. I mean,
1:10:36 I was raised Catholic, actually, going to church every week. I was a terrible altar boy. I was always
1:10:43 forgetting to ring the bells at the right time. And anyway, but by the time I was 14, I decided God
1:10:50 didn’t exist. And I refused to get confirmed upsetting my grandmother. My mom sent me to see the priest who
1:10:57 tried Pascal’s wager on me, but it didn’t work. Anyway, you know, I spent the next 30 years an
1:11:03 atheist. But I think I’ve always been a spiritual person. You know, I’ve always talked about mystical
1:11:10 experience in some sense, had a sense that there’s a deeper reality at the core of things. But you know,
1:11:18 I engaged with it in my own way through engagement with nature, meditation, yoga classes, you know,
1:11:24 and so on. I was a part of the ever-growing grouping of spiritual but not religious.
1:11:32 More recently, I suppose, I guess, at least for me, I’ve come to see the value of the things
1:11:38 I had in that religious community in my upbringing. You know, I think for all its faults, you know,
1:11:46 I think religion has a unique way of bringing the community together, you know, through rituals that
1:11:53 mark the changing of the seasons and the big moments of life, you know, birth, coming of age,
1:12:00 marriage, death, through rich tradition, you know, going back thousands of years. And so, like, I suppose
1:12:06 at some point it seemed to me that being spiritual but not religious, you know, I’m just talking for
1:12:14 myself now, we’re starting to feel a bit, maybe a bit lonely, a bit unstructured, almost aimless. And I guess I’ve
1:12:19 come to think over time that, and this is what my new book I’ve just started this week is on, there are ways of
1:12:27 engaging with traditional religion, maybe get into, that avoid some of the real worries that people have with
1:12:35 religion, dogmatic certainties or, you know, things we could go into, but which also allow you to gain
1:12:44 some benefits, like a community, structured practice, a rich tradition. And, you know, I suppose what I’m
1:12:51 interested in is just, I’ve come to find that works for me, and I suppose I’d just like to raise that
1:12:56 possibility for others. So I’m not here saying, oh, this is the one true faith you’ve got to believe,
1:13:00 I’m just saying, look, I’m interested in different experiments in living. And I think there’s a way
1:13:08 of engaging with religion that perhaps not everyone is fully aware of. And so that’s what I’m trying to
1:13:12 do there. But anyway, Bertrand Russell, yeah, I’ve talked more about this sort of personal things there,
1:13:19 but on the intellectual matters, you know, there’s this bloody perennial debate between
1:13:27 believers and atheists, you know, which side are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope, you know,
1:13:36 who’s right, which team are you on? And I’ve just come to find over time, I think both sides of getting
1:13:41 something right and something wrong. I think there’s things, traditional believers in God,
1:13:46 at least the, you know, Western gods struggle to explain like the horrific suffering, why the hell
1:13:53 would God allow cancer and earthquakes and all that? I think there’s also things that atheists,
1:13:57 traditional atheists struggle to explain. One thing I’ve focused a lot on recent work in my why book is
1:14:03 the fine tuning of physics for life. This surprising discovery that for life to be possible,
1:14:10 certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range, such that it’s actually
1:14:15 incredibly improbable that a universe like ours would have the right numbers for life just by chance.
1:14:20 You know, that’s something it’s hard to make sense of on a normal atheistic picture. So what I try to do
1:14:27 in the why book really is just, but let’s just have a think about middle ground options. Maybe there are
1:14:32 elegant middle ground options that can avoid the difficulties on both sides. I’m now coming to
1:14:38 Russell. You might think I’m like a politician dodging the question, but well, this fine tuning
1:14:45 of physics for life wasn’t there when Russell was alive. It’s just since the 70s, 80s, I mean,
1:14:51 the late 90s, the cosmological constant, which is to do with dark energy and the acceleration of the
1:14:58 universe. That was only 1998, I think. So this just wasn’t there for Russell. And I annoy people on X.
1:15:04 I’ve really wound people up by saying that Bertrand Russell would probably believe in cosmic
1:15:09 purpose now because he followed the evidence where it leads. But you know, the evidence wasn’t there in
1:15:14 his day. And, uh, you know, but I think he would have followed that evidence. It’s hard for human
1:15:19 beings to do, isn’t it? To sort of, you know, you get used to one thing and then the evidence changes.
1:15:24 And the economist Keynes, there’s a famous incident. A journalist said to him, you didn’t
1:15:29 used to think that. And he said, well, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What do you do,
1:15:31 sir? That’s really hard for human beings to do.
1:15:36 All right. So let’s talk about Bertrand Russell following the evidence and cosmic purpose. Cause
1:15:42 I want to explore this. I know very little about, I suppose, how you might describe cosmic purpose.
1:15:47 And I would like to hear more. So when people hear you perhaps refer to the constants for life
1:15:52 on earth, right? The 30 or so fundamental constants. I mean, there is an argument to be made that,
1:15:57 well, life would only appear if these things existed, therefore, yada, yada, yada. But we
1:16:05 don’t need to delve into that. What I’m curious about is when people hear you say that, and that it is
1:16:13 incredibly unlikely to happen by chance, they might take that to imply some type of primary mover,
1:16:27 a.k.a. a god of some type. Does cosmic purpose require someone to be a theist, to believe in a
1:16:27 god or gods?
1:16:36 No, no. I mean, I wouldn’t go for the very traditional idea of god as all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly
1:16:43 good, because then you’ve got the problem of suffering. I’m bothered by what both sides struggle
1:16:49 with, and this is why I annoy everybody, you know, because I’m annoying both sides of this debate.
1:16:55 I think there are options, middle ground options, that can deal with the fine-tuning
1:17:03 in terms of some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness without going to the very traditional
1:17:08 god and getting to suffering. So in the why book, I explore a few different possibilities.
1:17:16 One is maybe laws of nature with purposes built into them. So we don’t have some kind of
1:17:24 mind behind the universe setting things up. There’s just a sort of fundamental tendency in reality
1:17:31 towards certain goals, maybe the emergence of life. Now this sounds a bit, in itself, a bit wacky and
1:17:39 mystical. But actually, a couple of our most rigorous philosophers, Daniel Nolan and John Hawthorne,
1:17:46 have actually given a very detailed, rigorous mathematical account of what such a, what we
1:17:53 call teleological laws, so telos from the Greek purpose, laws with purposes built into them would
1:18:00 look like. So I think like, it ends up being, you could just have a scientific proposal of just a
1:18:05 different way of thinking about laws of nature. It’s weird in a cultural sense, but that is one
1:18:14 option. I mean, another option is something closer to the traditional god, but a tweak on it. I’ve explored
1:18:22 the idea of maybe a god of limited powers, who’s just not able to do whatever they want. And you know,
1:18:28 I think we could be quite precise about what those limitations might be to yield the world we find.
1:18:33 Or the simulation hypothesis, Nick Bostrom’s famous for exploring, and David Chalmers in his recent book,
1:18:39 Reality Plus. You know, maybe we’re in a computer simulation, and there’s some random software
1:18:44 engineer who set it all up. Very finally, I’ve talked too much already. The view I explore in
1:18:50 most detail in the book is the idea that the universe itself is conscious, which again, sounds a bit
1:18:56 extravagant at first, but actually, if you’re already a panpsychist, I think that’s already a plausible view.
1:19:02 You already think perhaps that the universe is conscious, because you think fields are the
1:19:07 fundamental physical things. Then it’s perhaps not too much of a step to think what this fundamental
1:19:16 conscious thing might have certain goal-directed states, even if it’s a very alien, strange mind,
1:19:22 very different to us. I just think we get stuck in these dichotomies. Let’s just explore these
1:19:23 different options.
1:19:33 So question for you on the intersection of your childhood with where you are now, I suppose, or maybe the
1:19:43 trajectory. How did you decide to become an atheist at age 14? Was it the omnipotent, omnibenevolent
1:19:48 contradiction with suffering in the world? Was there something else that triggered it? How did you decide
1:19:54 that? I think it was a mix of things. Yeah, the problem of evil and suffering was part of it on the
1:20:00 intellectual side. Also ethical things. You know, I thought Christianity had backward views on women and
1:20:08 sexuality and, you know, time I was questioning my sexuality. And also, I think, I mean, I think fundamentally, I just
1:20:14 thought Christianity in particular was very unspiritual. You know, I thought Buddhism is spiritual, but
1:20:21 Christianity is about doing what the old guy in the sky wants so you get to heaven. But I mean, what I’ve
1:20:27 discovered more recently, and this is part of why I’ve returned to this slightly non-standard form of
1:20:35 religion, engagement with religion, is the mystical traditions of Christianity, which have always been
1:20:41 there right back to the start, but are perhaps more prominent in the Eastern Orthodox Church,
1:20:48 where there’s less emphasis on sin. My childhood, it was all about sin. But for the Eastern Orthodox
1:20:54 Church, there’s nothing to do with God wanting to find someone to punish for our sins. That’s not a
1:21:02 part of the picture at all. In fact, that was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. A lot of
1:21:06 people in the US think that’s the essence of Christianity. Anyway, but for the Eastern Orthodox Church,
1:21:15 it’s the fundamental story is about God and the universe becoming one, entering into a deep state
1:21:21 of unity. That’s really the core of it. And I mean, this I had nothing about in my Catholic upbringing,
1:21:29 but it’s something that deeply resonates with me and, you know, makes sense of a lot of my deeper
1:21:34 spiritual experiences. I suppose, you know, it’s those elements of mysticism I thought were in
1:21:40 just in Hinduism, Buddhism, but are actually present, not just in Christianity, but, you know,
1:21:45 you’ve got Kabbalah in Judaism, you’ve got Sufism in Islam. That’s what I’m researching at the moment,
1:21:51 these wonderful Islamic traditions. I’m reading a book, a classic book, looking at the exploration
1:21:56 between Stoicism that I know you’re interested in and Sufism in Islamic,
1:22:01 the mysticism of Islamic philosophy. So yeah, so I think there’s always been that mystical component
1:22:07 and a way of engaging that’s, you know, less dogmatic and certain. Maybe you don’t know it’s true.
1:22:10 Maybe it’s something you hope is true. Maybe you take it as a beautiful metaphor.
1:22:15 There are these ways of doing it. And I think churches and synagogues would be a more interesting
1:22:23 place if they were full of people, more full of people engaging with it in this way. I like
1:22:26 conservatives. I don’t hate conservatives and traditionalists, but I think there can be a
1:22:34 natural balance of progressives and conservatives. You know, the conservatives saying, you know,
1:22:38 let’s not throw everything away too quickly. And the progressives saying, hold on, we need to update a
1:22:42 bit. And in religion, it’s gone a little bit too much dominated by traditionalists. And I think it
1:22:48 would be nice if we mixed it up a bit. And that’s what I’m trying to press in the book I’ve just
1:22:49 started.
1:22:53 We’re going to come back to some of your deeper spiritual experiences. I’m wondering if you could
1:23:01 share one or two, but I also want to say that a lot of people listening or watching probably associate
1:23:07 me with Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, but I actually have more books and more poetry related to Sufism in
1:23:14 my house than anything related to Stoicism. I have quite a bit on Stoicism, but also sponsored a statue
1:23:22 here in Austin in a statue garden. And this particular statue is of St. Francis of Assisi.
1:23:29 And we could talk about Merton. I mean, there are origin stories that involve mystical slash direct
1:23:35 experience in most, if not all of the major traditions people listening would recognize.
1:23:41 And the Immortality Key is actually quite interesting read for people who haven’t checked it out, Brian
1:23:48 Murarescu. But let’s come back to your deeper experiences. Are you willing to share one or two of
1:23:49 those?
1:23:56 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ll have to get some recommendations from you on Sufism. Let me think. I mean, I suppose
1:24:03 what I’ve found, what I’ve been thinking recently is what I like about this Eastern Orthodox way of
1:24:13 thinking about mystical experience is that it’s very close to certain things we find in Hindu mysticism,
1:24:26 wisdom like Advaita Vedanta. But the end goal that you’re aiming at still involves love and sociality.
1:24:32 I mean, I was watching something by a very good Hindu mystic, who I’m actually going to be in conversation with
1:24:39 in a few months, talking about a metaphor that the ultimate goal is with the analogy of an ice cube
1:24:44 melting in the ocean. You know, you just lose your identity, you’re sort of absorbed in the divine,
1:24:53 right? Whereas in the Eastern Orthodox conception of Christianity, the ultimate goal is still,
1:25:02 it involves unity, but still difference, right? It’s unity with God, with other people. I mean,
1:25:09 I suppose what I see reflected in the Eucharist and it’s the sociality, a mystical sociality that is
1:25:17 a deep sense of kind of binding people together and to something bigger. So I suppose that’s part of
1:25:24 what’s really resonated with me. And this is not some big overwhelming mystical experience, but it’s
1:25:34 making sense of those experiences that have always been there at my more spiritual moments. I find
1:25:44 actually that the soft light of first very early morning or dusk, I find somehow most spiritual. I
1:25:49 don’t know why that is, making sense of these experiences. Actually, I mean, just one more thing.
1:25:53 It was just Ash Wednesday this week, the start of Lenten. It was.
1:26:01 You know, I’m in an Anglican church where you get the ashes and it really touches me what they say
1:26:09 when they say, remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. I think what it does to me is,
1:26:17 you know, I’ve had some worldly success in academia to an extent in public stuff. And I think at the moment
1:26:24 of that being done, I think it was maybe last year, I think I had a very vivid sense of how my sense of
1:26:33 myself was getting a bit reliant on that and dependent on, you know, success and, you know,
1:26:39 my sense of who I was. And that just being told, you know, kind of brought me a bit to tears that you
1:26:44 are dust and to dust you. You know, and I think that’s, I’ve been reading actually the great Christian
1:26:50 mystic who was tried for heresy, Meister Eckhart. And reading about, you know, I always thought,
1:26:55 I guess the focus on sin that was always from my childhood. I thought like, again, for Lent,
1:27:00 you know, abstaining, I thought that’s about sin and punishing yourself and you’ve got to feel sad.
1:27:07 But the way Eckhart sees it is, and the way he interprets passages from the Bible about sacrifice,
1:27:15 it’s just about getting away from your reliance on these things, your sense of yourself, your sense
1:27:23 of happiness, getting down to something more real and fundamental at the core. And so some of the ways in
1:27:29 which through engaging with a rich tradition, I’ve delved deeper into and explored my spiritual
1:27:30 experiences, I suppose.
1:27:37 So you said the next 30 years as an atheist. So it seems like you’ve in some form come back into
1:27:42 the fold. Maybe you have some sunglasses and a fake mustache, but you’ve come back into the fold in
1:27:49 some sense. What triggered that? What was the, I mean, maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back
1:27:56 isn’t the right metaphor to use, but was there a conversation, a moment, a period of difficulty?
1:28:00 What catalyzed that?
1:28:06 I’d say again, as with leaving, it was a mixture of things. I could talk about the intellectual stuff
1:28:13 we’ve already touched on, I suppose, was starting to think both sides of the God-atheism debate of
1:28:18 something right and something wrong. And there’s got to be more to it though. There’s got to be more
1:28:19 like direct experience.
1:28:22 That was the intellectual stuff. That was the intellectual stuff. And that’s what led to my
1:28:27 why book, which was earlier, at least when I wrote it, it was earlier to all this. But then on the
1:28:32 spiritual level, well, I guess it’s what I said learning more about just from conversations with
1:28:40 different kinds of Christian thinkers. Joanna Leidenhag is a young panpsychist theologian
1:28:48 who writes on how panpsychism fits much better with a spiritual conception of reality. And
1:28:53 actually, I should say there’s a bit of a divide on this. Many panpsychists like David Chalmers,
1:29:00 Luke Rolofs, Angela Mendelovici, a very secular atheist. I think Chalmers is a bit annoyed that I’m
1:29:06 getting into religion. It’s like, we’re trying to get this serious science. People are going to think
1:29:13 it’s all just religion. But other panpsychists, Hedahas and Merck, Itai Shani, do see a consonance
1:29:18 with panpsychism. So learning about the mystical traditions, learning about these conceptions of
1:29:22 God, where God and the universe are not totally distinct. I’m not even sure I want to use the
1:29:24 word God, you know, but I’ve started now.
1:29:26 Tricky one, that, yeah.
1:29:31 Maybe there’s some overlap, maybe like a Venn diagram, you know, there’s God on one side,
1:29:36 us on the other, and there’s sort of overlap in the middle. I interpret Meister Eckhart as
1:29:42 holding something like that. Maybe that’s why he got in trouble. So that was part of it. And
1:29:46 I don’t know. So, I mean, one final thing, I don’t know how much of interest this is,
1:29:50 but I mean, I always have problems with the resurrection because I mean, one, it’s not just
1:29:54 there being miracles, although that’s part of it. You know, my answer to why there’s suffering
1:30:00 is if there is a God in whatever sense, they can’t do anything about it, right? Or there’s
1:30:05 just, there isn’t a God who’s letting that happen. But if there’s a God who can raise people from
1:30:10 the dead, you know, then we’re back to, well, why don’t you do that more often? But anyway,
1:30:18 I was reading one of my favorite biblical scholars, a guy called Dale Allison, who’s a wonderful
1:30:26 free thinker. He’s always exploring both sides of a position and ending up places he wouldn’t like
1:30:30 to be, maybe on a certain point of biblical interpretation. He’d like to be more liberal
1:30:34 and he ends up having a slightly more conservative. Anyway, but he’s got a wonderful recent book on the
1:30:41 resurrection exploring non-standard versions of the resurrection were, for example, that the
1:30:48 resurrection experiences of the first Christians were visionary, almost mystical experiences rather
1:30:54 than seeing and touching a body. And I was debating that this, it’s been a busy week. I was debating
1:31:00 that with, on Wednesday with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of William Lane Craig, who is perhaps one of
1:31:05 the biggest, most influential Christian philosophers, but he’s very, very, very, very traditional.
1:31:11 You know, I mean, if you’re not Christian, you’re going to hell, you know, very traditional. And
1:31:20 we had a lovely, very, very fiery debate this week. And as I knew he would be, he studies his debating
1:31:27 opponents and he was straight in there. Panpsychism is, you know, incoherent, unscientific. This view of the
1:31:33 resurrection is unhistorical, doesn’t make sense. But anyway, we had a, I responded and kind of went,
1:31:39 that’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out. But, but yeah, so I suppose it was those three things has been a bit
1:31:46 long winded. It was the intellectual stuff, that these middle ground options between God and atheism. It was the
1:31:55 spiritual stuff, discovering these mystical traditions that resonate with me deeply. It was this weird view of the
1:31:59 resurrection. It was discovering, actually, there’s been a big movement in philosophy of religion, thinking
1:32:07 about the nature of faith. Reading, actually, Karen Armstrong, a wonderful historian of religion, who has
1:32:15 argued that this focus on belief being so important in religion is like a modern corruption. She traces it
1:32:21 back, actually. If we look at the word pistis in the New Testament that we translate as belief,
1:32:27 it actually doesn’t mean belief in the modern sense. It has connotations of trust, engagement,
1:32:33 commitment. And interestingly, when we first translated the Bible into English in, was it 15th,
1:32:39 16th, 17th century, the word believe, the English word belief was closer to that. It’s close to the
1:32:45 German word believe and to love. It had connotations of commitment, engagement. She quotes
1:32:50 from a Shakespeare play, All’s Well That Ends Well, I think. There’s a character, Bertram, who’s
1:32:59 looking down on Helena because she’s lowborn, and he’s told, believe not thy disdain. Believe not thy
1:33:04 disdain. So that means sort of don’t have your heart in it. So actually, then the word believe changes
1:33:08 meaning with the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution. Now it means just sort of
1:33:14 intellectual commitment to a hypothesis about reality. So now we think that’s what you read
1:33:20 the New Testament and you feel like Jesus talking about belief and you think, oh, he really cares
1:33:25 about what propositions of reality you believe. That’s what salvation depends. Whereas actually,
1:33:30 it was more about commitment, having your heart in things. So I think realizing there are the ways of
1:33:34 engagement, you don’t have to think, this is definitely true. I felt like I was in my Catholic
1:33:38 upbringing. This is the answer. It’s definitely true. You can be highly uncertain. You can take it as a
1:33:44 metaphor. You can take it as a hope. You can trust it. You can be a bit heretical. And so yeah,
1:33:50 all of these things opened up this way of engaging. And once I went down there, I’ve just got so much
1:33:55 out of it. It’s the structure, the community, the depth of engagement has really worked for me.
1:34:01 Let’s dig into that just a little bit. I would love to ask a few more questions because a few things
1:34:07 hop to mind. The first, and I have in fact checked this, I’m no religious historian. So my apologies to
1:34:12 anyone who’s offended by this, but I recall someone credible, I won’t mention their name,
1:34:16 saying to me, they’re like, you know, it’s really a shame. There’s so much friction oftentimes,
1:34:22 at least in the Middle East, between Jews and Muslims, because they have a few things that are
1:34:28 quite similar. And the way it was positioned to me was in Christianity, it’s very important what you
1:34:38 believe. But in Judaism and in Islam, it’s more important, perhaps what you do. And heavily
1:34:43 ritualized, that can also be true in Christianity, of course. And I’ve thought about that. And then I’m
1:34:49 going to make an awkward transition to my friend, A.J. Jacobs, who wrote a book called The Year of Living
1:34:57 Biblically, in which he tried to follow all the Rules of the Old and New Testament. It’s intended to be a
1:35:04 funny, but also very informative read. I learned a lot about religion from that book. But the way he put
1:35:09 it, when he was describing his upbringing, he was raised Jewish, he said, and I’m paraphrasing,
1:35:20 I was raised Jewish, but I am to Judaism as Olive Garden is to Italian. So Olive Garden is, of course,
1:35:28 just this fast food chain here where you can get free breadsticks. So he was socially and culturally
1:35:35 Jewish, but not ideologically religiously Jewish at that point. And this is going to be a whole
1:35:44 word salad of things I’m throwing out. But I wonder then how well you can build a community
1:35:53 or have that social fabric that religion provides, which I am often hungry for, if I’m being honest.
1:36:00 I think there’s uncontroversially an epidemic of loneliness, and there are a million reasons for
1:36:08 that, only some of which I’m sure we’re even aware of. But mental illness, diagnoses of chronic anxiety,
1:36:14 treatment-resistant depression, etc., all seem to be in some type of parabolic incline. And I think
1:36:19 connection is, I don’t want to say the antidote, but one of the strong kind of countervailing
1:36:24 options for addressing that. And religion is appealing on that level. My parents started
1:36:31 going to church maybe 15 years ago after never going to church, precisely for that reason. But I’m
1:36:39 wondering how well you can cohere as a community if you don’t truly believe. There’s an article,
1:36:46 I suppose an essay, called Why Strict Churches Make Strong Churches that talks about this and the
1:36:52 freeloader problem and things like that. But what has been your experience in terms of the benefit you
1:37:00 derive from a community and the degree of belief in Scripture? Because man, oh man, if we’re talking
1:37:08 about Deuteronomy, Leviticus, I mean, if you start taking all that stuff literally, it paints a pretty
1:37:15 rough picture for things. How do you think about that? Like, is true belief in Scripture a prerequisite
1:37:25 for adherence to the type of rituals and so on that help bond a community? Or is that not the case?
1:37:31 These are great questions that I’m still reflecting on and I’m still thinking about.
1:37:37 And I think you’re certainly right in the present moment, at least in the Jewish community.
1:37:45 There’s more of an openness to this being a cultural phenomenon and belief being less important.
1:37:52 I remember, what was the context now? A young Jewish woman tweeted at me, maybe when I was talking
1:37:59 about this religious stuff, oh yeah, my rabbi said when I was going to have my bar mitzvah and I said,
1:38:04 oh, I don’t believe in God. And the rabbi said, no, no, no, the rules don’t have any gods but me.
1:38:08 Right? So it’s a negative. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe at all. Just don’t have any other
1:38:14 gods. That was a nice twist. I suppose what I’d like to see is just a little bit more openness
1:38:23 to that in the Christian community. And to what extent is it possible? I mean, certainly Karen
1:38:32 Armstrong thinks this kind of focus, strong focus on belief is a more recent adaptation. Her book,
1:38:37 I mean, her great book, The Case for God, which is a bad title, I think, because you think it’s going
1:38:46 to be some proof of God or something, but it’s not at all. It’s a history of religion and she divides
1:38:53 religion into two epochs. Part one, which she calls the unknown God, which goes from 50,000 BC
1:39:01 to 1500 AD. And then what she calls the modern God is from 1500 AD to the present moment. So she thinks
1:39:06 there is some radical shift in this focus on, you know, with the scientific revolution and the
1:39:13 Protestant reformation on belief, which propositions do you believe? Of course, it has always been true
1:39:20 in Christianity from the early centuries, at least we’ve got, you know, from the fourth century when
1:39:24 the Roman empire under Constantine became Christian, you know, we have, he got this council and we have
1:39:30 the official creeds, but it’s another question. It’s a subtly different question. Did you have to
1:39:35 believe them? So there was a big fight about which are the correct ones, but do you have to believe
1:39:42 them? Armstrong thinks if we’re to be more accurate historically, what believe should mean is commit.
1:39:46 So you should be saying, instead of saying, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, you should
1:39:52 be saying, I commit, I engage with that. I have my heart in that. That’s really what they meant by
1:39:58 those terms. And, you know, the emphasis on the non-literal, you know, with the mystical traditions
1:40:05 that have always been there, that they would look at an allegorical understanding as in some sense,
1:40:09 I mean, Origen, who I’ve been researching for this new book, who was, when’s Origen? Second century,
1:40:16 I think. He was in a sense, a bit of a heretic, but he was sort of before it was properly defined,
1:40:20 but he’s one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the early days, one of the fathers
1:40:27 of the church. And he had this idea of the three levels of understanding scripture. The first level
1:40:31 is the literal meaning, you know, what stuff, what people did, if there’s miracles and so on. Yeah,
1:40:36 that’s okay. But then the next stage is the moral, right? What is the moral meaning? And
1:40:42 then the deeper and higher stage, he thought, was the allegorical. And what is going on here
1:40:44 at a spiritual allegorical level?
1:40:52 What would be an example of an allegorical understanding of a portion of the Bible or a story?
1:41:00 Let’s just take the central idea of Jesus, right? I mean, what has always resonated with me with that,
1:41:07 even when I, my long period of not being any part of this, was the almost sort of turning upside down
1:41:13 of worldly values that were identifying God, not with the king in the castle, you know,
1:41:20 but with the naked, executed peasant, right? The guy who hangs out with outcasts. And that was,
1:41:25 I mean, his wonderful recent book, Dominion by Tom Holland, which is again, a history of the influence
1:41:32 of Christianity. What a bloody radical idea that was. It was ridiculous that, you know, some of the
1:41:39 earliest critiques of Christianity very, very early were sort of the figure of the crucified Jesus with
1:41:46 a donkey head on. It was just ridiculous that this was the most humiliating punishment. And what this
1:41:51 is supposed to be God, I mean, this is, whether that’s literally true, whether it, but what it stands
1:41:58 for, to me, it reveals something deep and ultimate, whether or not it’s literally true, deep and ultimate
1:42:04 about what is important and what is of value. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. And
1:42:09 I don’t know, sometimes with Christianity at the moment in the US, it doesn’t, it seems like this
1:42:14 is a little bit forgotten, but Holland talks about what an impact it had on the Roman empire,
1:42:21 that suddenly, you know, the poor and the weak had moral value to Roman aristocrats. This is like,
1:42:24 wait, what are you talking about? Another thing he talks about, actually, I’ve always thought,
1:42:30 I don’t have a traditional view on sexual ethics in Christianity, but he talks about actually how
1:42:39 valuable no sex before marriage was in those early days, because we’re talking of a time when slaves
1:42:48 and women had no rights, obviously. And to an extent, obviously a limited extent, it prevented rape,
1:42:54 because if you were going to be a Christian Roman, you had to wait till marriage. And,
1:42:59 you know, obviously this didn’t work, but you can see a role for it. Maybe it’s a role that
1:43:05 we don’t need to so much cling to that original meaning. I mean, like in the way, here’s a good
1:43:09 example of what’s changed with Christianity. It used to be totally universal. You couldn’t charge
1:43:16 interest. That was a sin. Now, you know, these days, yeah, usury. These days, no Christians
1:43:21 that I know of hold that because of our understanding of the modern market economy. We reinterpret these
1:43:27 things. But what about being gay, right? Why haven’t we re-understood that? I mean, many Christians
1:43:31 have, but many Christians haven’t in a modern understanding of sexuality. I think that’s because
1:43:36 there are fewer liberals and progressives in the church now. And, you know, I mean, it has changed.
1:43:40 It has, in my church, the English church, we haven’t got all the way to gay marriage, but we’ve got
1:43:46 blessings on gay couples. But yeah, so what my aspiration really is, you know, get more liberals
1:43:51 involved in these things, not to get rid of the traditionalists, but to have that beautiful, healthy
1:43:55 equilibrium. There’s always been that, you know, there’s always been radicals. There’s always been
1:44:01 progressives that have been mixing it up and moving it forward. You know, Aquinas was bloody radical at
1:44:09 the time. Now it’s the official Catholic church philosophy, you know? So I think there’s possibilities
1:44:10 that are unexplored here.
1:44:21 Without your childhood experience with Catholicism, do you think you would have returned to, in some form,
1:44:27 or re-entered Christianity? Or do you think, since you mentioned, at one point at least,
1:44:34 you felt that Buddhism or Hinduism were more spiritual, do you think you would have perhaps
1:44:37 ended up in a different camp, slightly different camp?
1:44:44 One thing I will say just to preface that is, it’s not obviously wrong to me that you will
1:44:52 choose what you feel culturally comfortable with. Because I think these matters are very uncertain.
1:44:56 I mean, if you get to a point where you think, no, this religion, this other religion, different to the
1:45:01 one I was raised with, definitely, definitely true. Then, you know, okay, probably the rational thing to do
1:45:08 is to convert. But if you’re like, in a situation where it’s very uncertain whether any religion is
1:45:13 true, it’s very uncertain which. And I think it makes sense if you’re from a Muslim background,
1:45:21 that fits with your identity. And it would be such a shift to become a Christian. Maybe even if you
1:45:25 think, if you happen to think, I’m not saying they should think this, but if they think Christianity is
1:45:30 a bit more likely to be true. But if it’s still so uncertain, you know, I think it could be rational
1:45:36 to just stay with what’s going to really work for you and fit with your community and your identity. I don’t
1:45:39 think God cares that much which team you’re on.
1:45:45 William Lane Craig would absolutely kill me for saying that. But I suppose it matters. I suppose it matters
1:45:50 if you think you’re going to hell if you’re not Christian. He’s got a good answer. I researched him a lot
1:45:54 for this debate we had this week. And I discovered he’s got a good answer to the question of what about
1:46:00 countries who’ve never heard of the gospel, right? And so don’t become Christian, you know,
1:46:05 more so in history, but even to the present day. His answer is, well, they wouldn’t have turned to
1:46:10 Jesus anyway, because God knows what you’re going to do. And God has set things up that they wouldn’t
1:46:19 have become Christians anyway. So it’s okay that they’re going to hell. Anyway, I mean, he’s a great
1:46:25 philosopher, a very bright guy, and probably the most influential Christian thinker at the moment.
1:46:26 So we need to balance things out.
1:46:32 That’s a tough one. That type of like sort of theological determinism. It raises questions
1:46:38 about the value of all those missionaries that have been sent about. Or then we get into free will and
1:46:39 like all sorts of stuff.
1:46:44 He does. He’s got a complex story. He does believe in free will. He thinks it’s compatible to say you’ve
1:46:48 got free will, but God knows what you’re going to freely do. This is part of what we debated,
1:46:52 actually. I don’t think that makes coherent sense. But anyway, just to answer your question,
1:46:58 I mean, who knows? It’s partly cultural, but, you know, I do find things of, I mean, this
1:47:04 Eastern Orthodox way of mystical tradition makes a lot of sense of my spiritual experiences for the,
1:47:09 I think at the moment for me, more so than the Hindu stuff I used to believe in,
1:47:15 for me personally, at least. And I just, I do love the teaching and character of Jesus. And I just
1:47:20 think he was, I did a talk recently, I don’t know if I should say, I did talk recently at a very,
1:47:25 very right-wing audience in Oxford on this stuff. And I said, those of you who haven’t read the Bible,
1:47:30 Jesus is pretty damn woke. I was just trying to wipe people up. But anyway.
1:47:35 That’s a hell of a Molotov cocktail of an opener for that audience.
1:47:36 He had a bit of a gasp.
1:47:37 Yeah.
1:47:43 You know, the story of the Good Samaritan, right? Which is, Jesus told that story because he was
1:47:48 asked, who is my neighbor, right? And why did he tell a story about a Samaritan? Because they were
1:47:55 the hated ethnic group of his listeners, right? So, you know, I said to this audience, if he was
1:47:58 telling that story today, the Good Samaritan would be, I don’t know, a Muslim immigrant or
1:48:03 a trans woman. Then I did, I thought, try and have a bit of going against polarization. Or maybe
1:48:08 if Jesus was talking to a load of liberals, maybe the Good Samaritan would be wearing a MAGA hat.
1:48:14 Who knows? I don’t know. But, you know, basically you say, look, the people you hate or the people
1:48:21 who are different, they should be. But that’s just like radically light years ahead of its time. I mean,
1:48:28 Tom Holland makes this good case that the ideas of human dignity, which shaped the abolition of
1:48:34 slavery and the civil rights movement were rooted in these radical ideas of equal human dignity.
1:48:38 So I do think there’s, you know, there’s something very special for me there. But at the end of the
1:48:39 day, these matters are very uncertain.
1:48:49 So aside from the, I have to ask again, forgive me, but aside from the beauty of the liminal spaces
1:48:55 during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk and the beautiful red of a sunset, have you
1:48:59 experienced anything you would describe as a mystical experience?
1:49:06 I would say not full blown, no, not to the two terms I could use. I suppose I think a mystical
1:49:11 experience is the more full on thing, but then there’s this wonderful term, numinous, to mean
1:49:11 the sort of…
1:49:12 It’s a great word.
1:49:16 A sense of, maybe mini mystical experience.
1:49:17 Mystical light.
1:49:23 I mean, I did psychedelics when I was a teenager and, you know, had some very deep experiences.
1:49:28 I don’t know why I didn’t sort of in, in my twenties and thirties, but now I’ve got young
1:49:36 kids. It’s hard to find time to do some psychedelics or have a 17th dimension, have a, have a 10 day
1:49:41 meditation retreat. Annika Harris is always telling me I’ve got to do a 10 day meditate. I don’t know
1:49:46 why I didn’t actually do that when I had the chance, but yeah, I mean, as I get older, actually
1:49:50 before I proposed to my wife, she didn’t know I was going to propose. I was talking about
1:49:55 like, when I retire, what do you do when you retire and play golf? I want to have a sort
1:50:00 of semi monastic existence, you know, kind of long period. And she was like, why are you
1:50:03 telling me this? I don’t know. I just wanted to know.
1:50:07 She’s like, Oh fuck. What did I sign up for here?
1:50:12 Well, I wanted her to know this before I asked her. We were in the mountains in Austria and
1:50:16 then we went outside and I said, do you want to marry me? Anyway. But yeah, so I think, I
1:50:20 think I would like to, you know, maybe when the kids are, as I get older, I don’t want to
1:50:26 carry on trying to be, what am I trying to do? I don’t know, be successful in whatever
1:50:30 I’m trying to do for the rest of my, this is one thing actually that’s religion has helped
1:50:35 me with the thing. You know, you never find happiness that way. It’s never enough. You
1:50:40 know, you want to sell more books or get more views or get more money. I have an idea that
1:50:48 I want to, as I get older, slowly lapse into monasticism. Maybe a bit of help from some
1:50:52 ayahuasca or something, but yeah. So maybe I’ll have more mystical experience at that point.
1:50:57 But I think at the moment I would say I’m confined to the numinous. And to that extent, you know,
1:51:02 it’s evidentially, it’s, it’s not that significant. You know, I’m open to, it could be a delusion,
1:51:08 you know, but I’m choosing, thanks to William James’s inspiration, I’m choosing to trust these
1:51:14 numinous experiences and to trust this Christian mystical way of understanding them and to work
1:51:19 with them and engage with them. And, and I’m loving it. I’m getting a lot out of it. And,
1:51:23 you know, people think religion is all about the afterlife or something, but I’ve found living
1:51:29 in hope of a greater purpose has made me less bothered about my personal success. And it’s just
1:51:34 really opened me up a lot more to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer friends,
1:51:35 family, and so on.
1:51:41 So I want to explain something I said earlier, which was related to the number of books on
1:51:49 Sufism. And the reason for that is not a particular interest in Islam, although I do think there
1:51:56 are interesting aspects of that to explore. And if you’re interested in Dune, the book and not
1:52:00 the movies, although I thought the movies were very well adapted, but they basically stripped
1:52:08 all Arabic and Islamic influence from the book, like Lisan al-Gaib, one of the many Arabic phrases,
1:52:13 the tongue of the unseen. So digging into some of the etymological origins of the words used in Dune
1:52:22 adds another layer of fascination to it. But the reason for these books is because I enjoy the poetry
1:52:32 poetry and I find the poetry to be beautiful and capture for me the, I suppose, essence of mystical
1:52:40 experience, which I’ve been fortunate enough to have myself on a number of occasions incredibly well
1:52:47 without using the G word or other words that I rightly or wrongly have developed somewhat of a mild
1:52:53 allergic reaction to, right? So Christian mystics have some beautiful writing, but it tends to be a
1:53:01 little heavy on God and Jesus for my, and not for my taste, it’s just that the strong connotations
1:53:09 lead my mind to wander when I want to be immersed in the poetry itself. And so if we’re looking at,
1:53:17 say, Halaliza Gafuri’s relatively new translations of Rumi, as an example, or much of the poetry of
1:53:23 Hafez, both of which I would recommend, I can work with taverns. I can work with getting drunk on wine.
1:53:32 I can work with many of the metaphors that are used. The caravan. I mean, many of these evocative phrases
1:53:41 are enough to immerse me in the language. And I think what’s trying to be transmitted without pulling me
1:53:50 into some type of political distraction or childhood experience that subtracts rather from adds to the
1:53:56 experience. So a lot of it is poetry, not all, but a lot of it is certainly poetry. And then broadly
1:54:04 speaking, I suppose mystics, and I’m sure people would disagree with this, but accounts of firsthand
1:54:11 experience with what they may consider divine. These make for fascinating reading for me.
1:54:17 And certainly if you look at, if you really take a microscope to the origin stories of a lot of
1:54:23 these religions, I mean, it becomes very plausible that most, if not all of them started with direct
1:54:30 experience of some type that rhymes with many of the descriptions you would find in the books that
1:54:37 I’m looking at on my bookshelves as an example. So stoicism can be a little sterile. I’d say stoicism
1:54:48 for me, incredibly helpful, incredibly powerful as a tool for reducing suffering, but it doesn’t,
1:54:57 to my reading of it, give you a whole lot in terms of increasing joy and subtraction alone doesn’t add the
1:55:06 good. So for that, I tend to stray from stoicism into epicureanism and different types of mysticism
1:55:09 and so on. So that’s, that’s the background.
1:55:15 That’s all absolutely fascinating. Well, I’d love to get some of those recommendations. Maybe I’ll just,
1:55:22 for the super literature and poetry and yeah, it sounds, that is really working for you and that’s
1:55:28 wonderful. And yeah, I mean, I think you’re definitely right that the great religions do seem
1:55:35 to begin with experiences. I mean, you know, in the Christian case, it seemed to be what they called
1:55:43 the resurrection, seemed to be this explosion of strong experiences that the early Christians had
1:55:49 after Jesus had died. And you can make of that what you will. I prefer to think of it as visionary
1:55:53 rather than seeing and touching a body. But there does seem to have been some historians thing. I
1:55:59 mean, even atheists, I mean, Bart Ehrman is our best atheist Bible scholar. We’ll certainly concede
1:56:07 that there were these radical experiences by people like Peter and Mary Magdalene that kickstarted the
1:56:11 Christian movement. So I think you’re right, it comes back to experience. But I mean, I share your
1:56:18 issues with the connotations of the word Jesus, the word God. First of all, what I’m trying to do is
1:56:23 shift things. Actually, one thing I wrote on this when I had my going public as a heretical Christian,
1:56:29 I wrote this thing for Eon magazine, people might be interested in. And I borrowed something from
1:56:36 another writer whose name escapes me now. Rather than using the word Jesus, use the Jewish word Yeshua.
1:56:40 Just to kind of defuse it a little bit.
1:56:45 Because I know, I think of a certain kind of US Christian, a certain kind of very distinctive,
1:56:51 which is not what I’m talking about and not my experience. And the word God as well, yeah.
1:56:56 Well, what do you think I should use for God in this book? What should I, you know, the transcendent?
1:56:57 Oh, that’s a tough one.
1:57:04 Actually, do you know, William James used the term the more with a capital M, you know, which I think is a nice.
1:57:05 I like that.
1:57:08 Or the divine, or yeah, I don’t know. It’s all I’m still wrestling with.
1:57:10 Divine’s tricky too.
1:57:11 I like the more.
1:57:15 And I’m going to get a bunch of angry posts on social media.
1:57:23 I don’t have anything against, on some fundamental level, the word God or anything with Jesus either.
1:57:31 It’s just that oftentimes God is not defined well enough to justify the life or death debates
1:57:34 and fighting that happens around the term, if that makes sense.
1:57:40 And there are a lot of words that cause trouble in life if not defined.
1:57:52 I should also just qualify, when I mentioned the direct experience, I was not referring to necessarily the stories in the Bible,
1:58:01 but also the possibility that, for instance, the acacia tree is prevalent in parts of the Middle East.
1:58:07 The root bark of which, it might be the leaves actually, somebody could correct me here, I’m going to be mixing things up,
1:58:16 contain DMT, NNDMT, and then also the prevalence of Syrian rue, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
1:58:19 What else is a combination of those two things?
1:58:21 Ayahuasca, as an example.
1:58:27 So, the point being, to render the NNDMT bioactive, it is entirely possible that people in the ancient world,
1:58:37 as people and animals, by the way, have figured out that certain psychoactives can be sort of orally bioavailable.
1:58:42 This comes back to Brian Murray, as given some of his writing, if people want to explore that.
1:58:48 But this is definitely, it’s definitely a clear and present topic on my mind.
1:58:55 The place of religion and the seemingly, people might come after me for this also,
1:59:00 but like evolved instinct for something resembling religion.
1:59:07 I don’t know if it’s functional, if it’s vestigial, but could be that, and this would be my position,
1:59:10 that I don’t think humans are unique at all in being conscious,
1:59:15 but I do think we may be unique in our awareness of mortality and ultimate death.
1:59:20 And that presents quite a quandary.
1:59:26 And religion offers some, at the very least, salve for that.
1:59:28 Anyway, that isn’t a very pointed question.
1:59:30 It’s more of a rambling.
1:59:36 Fascinating possibility, the role of psychedelic substances in formation of religion.
1:59:39 And, you know, I would say that wouldn’t undermine it, right?
1:59:44 I think that doesn’t mean these experiences are delusions or, you know, and I’ve got hope,
1:59:49 I think as we have engaged more with psychedelics and there is more of an openness.
1:59:53 Actually, you know, I mean, I wrote this book, I modestly titled Why the Purpose of the Universe.
2:00:01 I mean, a similar book was written 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, 15 years ago nearly,
2:00:06 by the great philosopher Thomas Nagel called Mind and Cosmos.
2:00:09 And he got absolutely destroyed in reviews.
2:00:13 He was saying, oh, he’s lost his mind.
2:00:16 Whereas Thomas Nagel is a better philosopher than me.
2:00:21 I’m not saying this is a better book, but it had a much warmer reception.
2:00:24 It got a five-star review in Popular Science magazine.
2:00:27 It got, you know, I’m honestly not saying this to boast.
2:00:30 I’m not, I just, it’s a sign of cultural change.
2:00:33 Most of the reviews said, I don’t agree with this, but it was a good book.
2:00:39 But anyway, I think that’s a real sign of that there’s a greater openness to some of these
2:00:41 things that are going, it’s certainly a greater openness to spirit.
2:00:44 I think new atheism is a bit passé now, isn’t it?
2:00:47 And I think there’s a great openness to spirituality.
2:00:57 I suppose I’m exploring whether that can connect with traditional religion in a very uncertain,
2:00:59 mildly heretical way.
2:01:02 And whether for some people could get something out of that.
2:01:05 And I’m just trying out that option, I suppose, if you like.
2:01:08 Something interesting seems to be happening, I think.
2:01:10 For sure.
2:01:17 I remember a few years ago, I was at an event, and the topic of the table, we were organized
2:01:19 into small groups for every dinner.
2:01:27 And you would have set topics, and somebody would try to facilitate the said topic or question.
2:01:33 And the topic was something along the lines of, what are your predictions for the next three
2:01:33 to five years?
2:01:36 And this was, I guess, two or three years ago.
2:01:45 And one of the people at my table was one of the strongest figures, biggest figures in the
2:01:48 evangelical Christian movement in the United States.
2:01:52 And we all had a fantastic conversation.
2:01:55 I ended up going first or second.
2:02:03 And my answer was, I think there’s going to be an explosion of interest in…
2:02:08 religions that have seen an exodus on some level over the last few decades.
2:02:18 And there’s also going to be a proliferation of new religions, new churches to meet the hard
2:02:44 and the mass communication through social media and separate the signal from the noise from a sort of scientific, like rational materialist worldview is going to become so hard.
2:03:03 And I’m not saying it’s not a worthwhile objective, but so hard and really impossible for the vast majority of people who are not trained to filter through those things and don’t have firsthand access to scientists, that there will be, for all of those reasons and more, a return to religion.
2:03:12 If you look at also then adding the accelerant of psychedelics to that, which I have very mixed
2:03:16 views on these days, by the way, which is just to say, like the Eleusinian mysteries, okay, if
2:03:22 you have a handful of people after a long time are inducted into consuming some derivative of
2:03:25 ergot, which would be similar to say LSD, that’s one thing.
2:03:34 But when you have the potential of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people taking these substances, nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of humankind.
2:03:37 So we’ll see what type of mixed blessing that is.
2:03:52 But it’s been fascinating to see how many new churches have been established in the U.S., which on some level, I think, are largely created to provide constitutional protection if you are using psychedelics as a sacrament, right?
2:04:09 So it’s a legal protection, but how once the horses are out of the barn and people have formed these churches and religions, they actually become interesting in and of themselves as religions, even without the added psychedelic sacraments.
2:04:21 So you see, say, former conservative Mormons in Utah splintering off and creating religions that incorporate both Christianity and psychedelic use.
2:04:39 And I mean, there’s some itch that these things, whether the sort of Abrahamic traditional religions or the newer religions scratch, that it’s difficult to put a finger on, but it’s also pretty hard to refute, it seems to me.
2:04:39 I don’t know.
2:04:42 I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen.
2:04:47 I mean, there’s been an increase in paganism here, and my wife’s not religious.
2:04:53 I take the kids to church on my own, and she was thinking of exploring Wicca at some point.
2:04:56 I would have loved to say in church, where’s your wife?
2:04:57 Oh, she’s a witch.
2:05:02 Yeah, I don’t know.
2:05:08 For me, I think spirituality is important, and I think more and more people are appreciating that there’s a role.
2:05:14 For something that’s structured that brings people together.
2:05:24 You know, there are powerful forces in the world, powerful forces showing hatred, division, you know, something that grassroots brings people together, connects them to something greater.
2:05:29 You know, I suppose that’s what I believe in, and that’s what I would like to encourage.
2:05:34 I’m trying one way of doing that, engaging in a slightly different way with the traditional religions.
2:05:39 But, you know, I’m excited if other people are trying different things, and let’s see where it goes.
2:05:42 Let’s see where it goes, indeed.
2:05:43 Two last questions.
2:05:45 These are pretty quick ones, I suspect.
2:05:47 This is the billboard question.
2:05:58 So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions, hundreds of millions of people, take your pick.
2:06:03 Can’t be anything commercial, of course, but it could be a quote, an image, doesn’t need to be your quote.
2:06:06 Anything at all, something you’d want to convey to a lot of people.
2:06:07 Do you have any thoughts for what you would put on it?
2:06:15 I guess I’m torn between the sort of, the more intellectual things, the drier things, or the things to do with kind of meaning.
2:06:22 And, I mean, on the former, I suppose I’m more passionate about the importance of philosophy, and we need to, sometimes you can’t just do experiments.
2:06:25 Sometimes you need to make judgment calls, but that’s kind of boring and dry.
2:06:32 I mean, I suppose in terms of more meaning of existence kind of things, I think, touching on what we said earlier, I suppose,
2:06:42 because I think one of the things I feel I’ve learned as I’ve got older is the importance of trying to not start from what do I want, what’s going to make me successful,
2:06:49 to try and orientate yourself to what contribution can I make?
2:06:52 How can I make the world a slightly better place?
2:07:01 If your fundamental life goal is making me more successful, that’s not going to end well, you know, because it’s never enough.
2:07:05 It never, I mean, I think I’m kind of lucky that I’m not that bothered about money.
2:07:07 I’m not really into power, really.
2:07:10 I don’t really, but I do have a bit of an ego, do you know what I mean?
2:07:17 I do want to be respected philosophers, but it’s never enough you’re always sort of jealous of someone who’s doing better.
2:07:30 So I think the more one can try, and it’s not easy, right, to just continually orient your life to reality outside of yourself and just trying to make a contribution.
2:07:33 That’s actually, that’s what I do in prayer, actually.
2:07:37 I pray last thing at night and meditate first thing in the morning.
2:07:40 So I think, you know, talking to God at night, listening to God in the morning.
2:07:50 And, you know, I think in prayer, I just orientate myself to sort of try and never, it works perfectly, but try and make your life goal, making some kind of contribution.
2:07:57 And I find that just takes the pressure off you and does really just free you up.
2:07:57 For sure.
2:08:01 To just enjoy what the present moment has to offer.
2:08:14 So yeah, so I suppose, I was trying to think, you to my billboards, you saying about this, and I was thinking, it made me think of these signs you stop in the war saying, don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
2:08:17 You know, that’s in a sort of spirit of nationalist war effort.
2:08:18 That’s not what I’m getting at.
2:08:23 But maybe, you know, something like, don’t start from what do I want, start from how can I contribute?
2:08:25 And I sort of think happiness flows from that.
2:08:29 So something like that, a bit more, I need an editor, don’t I?
2:08:31 So if it’s sharpened up a bit, we’ll be on the billboard.
2:08:35 We’ll take it to Madison Avenue.
2:08:36 We’ll figure it out.
2:08:39 And Philip, where are the best places for people to find you?
2:08:41 Is it philipgothphilosophy.com?
2:08:43 Is that the best place to point people?
2:08:46 Yeah, that’s my website that I try and update regularly.
2:08:55 It’s got academic stuff and popular articles and lots of videos and complete archive of the media stuff I’ve done that I try to keep up to date.
2:09:04 I spend too much time arguing on, well, it used to be X and then all the liberals have gone to Blue Sky and I’m doing both.
2:09:09 I kind of worry about this bit of a divided community, so I’m arguing on both.
2:09:11 And it’s interesting the different reactions you get on.
2:09:14 But yeah, I spend too much time arguing on.
2:09:18 That’s been really useful, actually, for learning this thing.
2:09:23 You know, I think when my book first came out and I was on sort of Joe Rogan and stuff,
2:09:25 and I think he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
2:09:26 It was like my fault.
2:09:33 But part of what’s helped me communicate with a general audience, I think, is arguing with ordinary people on X and Blue Sky.
2:09:38 And yes, if you want to have an argument, it’s getting bit, I can’t keep up with it these days.
2:09:40 But have an argument with me there if you want to.
2:09:42 I have a sub stack I just started.
2:09:45 I try and do something every month on a sub stack.
2:09:52 If you want to pick a fight and have an argument with Philip, then I suppose X is the best gladiatorial arena for that.
2:09:54 Oh, the books, Galileo’s error and why.
2:09:57 They’re a great read, I hear.
2:10:02 And as far as the great place to argue goes, the dose makes the poison, folks.
2:10:04 So just be careful with your dosing.
2:10:05 Philip, this has been so fun.
2:10:10 Thank you for taking the time to have such a wide-ranging conversation.
2:10:11 I really appreciate it.
2:10:13 And I took a bunch of notes for myself.
2:10:16 I’ll be revisiting the show notes when they’re put together.
2:10:20 And is there anything else you’d like to say or point people to?
2:10:23 Any formal complaints you’d like to lodge publicly?
2:10:26 Anything at all you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
2:10:29 No, that was just to say thank you.
2:10:30 I think you’re right.
2:10:36 It has been a wonderful, we had a good session on the panpsychism and a good session on the religion stuff.
2:10:42 And I’ve learned a lot, actually, about Sufism and lots of, yeah, I want to think a lot of things I want to follow up there.
2:10:49 They’re going to be very useful for this book I’ve just started that hopefully I’ll write if I can spend less time arguing on X.
2:10:52 Philip underscore Goff.
2:10:53 Yeah.
2:10:56 Yeah, thanks so much.
2:10:58 Let’s stay in touch.
2:10:58 Absolutely.
2:11:00 Yeah, thanks, Philip.
2:11:07 And for everybody listening, as usual, we will have show notes with links to everything we discussed and probably more at tim.blog slash podcast.
2:11:13 And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself.
2:11:15 Thanks for tuning in.
2:11:17 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
2:11:20 Just one more thing before you take off.
2:11:22 And that is Five Bullet Friday.
2:11:27 Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
2:11:34 Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday.
2:11:35 Easy to sign up.
2:11:36 Easy to cancel.
2:11:45 It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I’ve found or discovered or have started exploring over that week.
2:11:47 It’s kind of like my diary of cool things.
2:11:59 It often includes articles I’m reading, books I’m reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
2:12:06 And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you.
2:12:13 So if that sounds fun, again, it’s very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
2:12:17 If you’d like to try it out, just go to Tim.blog slash Friday.
2:12:21 Type that into your browser, Tim.blog slash Friday.
2:12:23 Drop in your email and you’ll get the very next one.
2:12:24 Thanks for listening.
2:12:36 In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding microplastics and many other commonly found compounds all over the place.
2:12:39 One place I looked is in the kitchen.
2:12:43 Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be.
2:12:55 A lot of nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS, in other words, spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your home.
2:12:57 In your body, Teflon is a prime example of this.
2:13:00 It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
2:13:04 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor.
2:13:10 And the first thing I did was look at the reviews of their products and said, send me one.
2:13:14 And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro.
2:13:18 And the claim is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating.
2:13:22 So that means zero forever chemicals and durability that’ll last forever.
2:13:23 I was very skeptical.
2:13:24 I was very busy.
2:13:25 So I said, you know what?
2:13:27 I want to test this thing quickly.
2:13:28 It’s supposed to be nonstick.
2:13:30 It’s supposed to be durable.
2:13:31 I’m going to test it with two things.
2:13:40 I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating.
2:13:45 And then I’m going to test it with a snake sear because I want to see how much it retains heat.
2:13:49 And it worked perfectly in both cases.
2:13:53 And I was frankly astonished how well it worked.
2:13:57 The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
2:14:02 It replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine.
2:14:04 And the design is really clever.
2:14:10 It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick into one product.
2:14:18 And now Our Place is expanding this first-of-its-kind technology to their Titanium Pro cookware sets, which are made in limited quantities.
2:14:28 So if you’re looking for non-toxic, long-lasting pots and pans that outperform everything else in your kitchen, just head to fromourplace.com slash Tim.
2:14:31 And use code Tim for 10% off of your order.
2:14:36 You can enjoy a 100-day risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns.
2:14:36 Check it out.
2:14:39 Fromourplace.com slash Tim.
2:14:46 As many of you know, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a Midnight Luxe mattress from today’s sponsor, Helix Sleep.
2:14:52 I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs, and feedback from friends has always been fantastic.
2:14:53 Kind of over the top, to be honest.
2:14:56 I mean, they frequently say it’s the best night of sleep they’ve had in ages.
2:14:58 What kind of mattress is it?
2:14:58 What do you do?
2:14:59 What’s the magic juju?
2:15:03 It’s something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever.
2:15:10 I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom, which I sometimes sleep in.
2:15:15 And I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some lower back pain that I’ve had.
2:15:20 The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots.
2:15:32 It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and micro coils that create a soft contouring feel.
2:15:37 Which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side, I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create.
2:15:44 And with a luxurious pillow top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night that I use it.
2:15:50 The best part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead of stiff.
2:15:53 Stiff, that is the name of the game for me these days.
2:15:59 Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial, fast, free shipping, and a 15-year warranty.
2:16:00 So check it all out.
2:16:06 And you, my dear listeners, can get between 20% and 27% off, plus two free pillows on all mattress orders.
2:16:11 So go to helixsleep.com slash Tim to check it out.
2:16:14 That’s helixsleep.com slash Tim.
2:16:17 With Helix, better sleep starts now.
0:00:10 The Tim Ferriss Show. I would say that it is my hope with conversations like this
0:00:22 to reintroduce perhaps a degree of wonder and questioning and awareness in my listeners that
0:00:29 enriches their lives. Because the how-to stuff, the tactical, practical, sort of toaster instruction
0:00:39 type do this, do that is helpful. But sometimes the what-to-do question takes precedent over
0:00:45 everything else and you can end up operating as something like an ant in an ant colony.
0:00:53 And I, with these philosophical conversations, hope to open people to different perspectives
0:00:58 and ways of looking at their own lives and the world around them. And my guest today is
0:01:04 Philip Goff. Philip is a professor of philosophy at Durham University. His main research focus is
0:01:09 consciousness, big topic, but he’s interested in many questions about the nature of reality.
0:01:14 We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. He is best known for defending panpsychism,
0:01:18 the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
0:01:23 15 years ago, panpsychism was kind of a joke. It was laughed at if it was thought of at all.
0:01:28 Goff has led a movement that has made panpsychism a mainstream position, taught to undergraduates,
0:01:34 and widely discussed in academic journals. He is the author of Galileo’s Error, Foundations for a
0:01:40 New Science of Consciousness, and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. He’s published many,
0:01:45 many 50 or so academic articles and has written extensively for newspapers and magazines, including
0:01:49 Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and many others. You can find him on
0:01:58 Twitter, that is x at Philip underscore Goff. That’s P-H-I-L-I-P underscore G-O-F-F. And you can find
0:02:03 all things Philip at philipgoffilosophy.com. We’re going to get right into the conversation,
0:02:06 but first, just a few words from the people who make this podcast possible.
0:02:12 As many of you know, for the last few years, I’ve been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from
0:02:16 today’s sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs,
0:02:21 and feedback from friends has always been fantastic, kind of over the top, to be honest. I mean,
0:02:25 they frequently say it’s the best night of sleep they’ve had in ages. What kind of mattresses? What
0:02:30 do you do? What’s the magic juju? It’s something they comment on without any prompting from me
0:02:36 whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite in a new guest bedroom,
0:02:41 which I sometimes sleep in, and I picked it for its very soft but supportive feel to help with some
0:02:46 lower back pain that I’ve had. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the
0:02:50 right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer
0:02:56 with full perimeter zoned lumbar support right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and
0:03:02 micro coils that create a soft contouring feel, which also means if I feel like I want to sleep on my side,
0:03:06 I can do that without worrying about other aches and pains I might create. And with a luxurious pillow
0:03:11 top for pressure relief, I look forward to nestling into that bed every night that I use it. The best
0:03:17 part, of course, is that it helps me wake up feeling fully rested with a back that feels supple instead
0:03:23 of stiff. And that is the name of the game for me these days. Helix offers a 100-night sleep trial,
0:03:29 fast, free shipping, and a 15-year warranty. So check it all out. And you, my dear listeners,
0:03:37 can get between 20 and 27% off plus two free pillows on all mattress orders. So go to helixsleep.com
0:03:45 slash Tim to check it out. That’s helixsleep.com slash Tim. With Helix, better sleep starts now.
0:03:51 In the last handful of years, I’ve become very interested in environmental toxins, avoiding
0:03:58 microplastics, and many other commonly found compounds all over the place. One place I looked
0:04:05 is in the kitchen. Many people don’t realize just how toxic their cookware is or can be. A lot of
0:04:11 nonstick pans, practically all of them, can release harmful forever chemicals, PFAS, in other words,
0:04:16 spelled P-F-A-S, into your food, your home, and then ultimately that ends up in your body.
0:04:21 Teflon is a prime example of this. It is still the forever chemical that most companies are using.
0:04:27 So our place reached out to me as a potential sponsor. And the first thing I did was look at
0:04:35 reviews of their products and said, send me one. And that is the Titanium Always Pan Pro. And the claim
0:04:41 is that it’s the first nonstick pan with zero coating. So that means zero forever chemicals and
0:04:46 durability that’ll last forever. I was very skeptical. I was very busy. So I said, you know what? I want to
0:04:51 test this thing quickly. It’s supposed to be nonstick. It’s supposed to be durable. I’m going to test it with
0:04:56 two things. I’m going to test it with scrambled eggs in the morning because eggs are always a disaster
0:05:03 in anything that isn’t nonstick with the toxic coating. And then I’m going to test it with a
0:05:11 steak sear because I want to see how much it retains heat. And it worked perfectly in both cases. And I was
0:05:18 frankly astonished how well it worked. The Titanium Always Pan Pro has become my go-to pan in the kitchen.
0:05:23 And it replaces a lot of other things for searing, for eggs, for anything you can imagine. And the
0:05:29 design is really clever. It does combine the best qualities of stainless steel, cast iron, and nonstick
0:05:36 into one product. And now Our Place is expanding this first of its kind technology to their Titanium
0:05:41 Pro cookware sets, which are made in limited quantities. So if you’re looking for non-toxic,
0:05:46 long-lasting pots and pans that outperform everything else in your kitchen, just head to
0:05:54 fromourplace.com slash Tim. And use code Tim for 10% off of your order. You can enjoy a 100-day
0:05:59 risk-free trial, free shipping, and free returns. Check it out, fromourplace.com slash Tim.
0:06:29 Philip, let’s kick it off with a question about another interview, which I very rarely do.
0:06:36 But in this particular case, I think it will offer us perhaps a road into tying a few things together
0:06:43 for people who are listening. And this relates to an interview by a Pulitzer Prize-winning author,
0:06:49 Gareth Cook, which ended up being one of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020.
0:06:56 Philosophy can get very abstract. It can really get out there. It can become hard to grasp or,
0:07:03 in the minds of many, hard to apply. But let’s begin with what made that interview stick. What do you
0:07:11 think some of the concepts or ingredients or lines, anything was that made that resonate with so many
0:07:19 people? Rather than anything I’ve done, I think just consciousness and this strange view I built my
0:07:29 career defending, it’s a view that somehow resonates with people in all sorts of ways. It’s been an
0:07:37 incredible journey because it’s a view that 15 years ago was ridiculed insofar as it was thought about at
0:07:47 all, at least in my Western philosophical tradition. But in this short time period, it’s come to be a
0:07:53 mainstream academic position that is taught to undergraduates and is widely published on an
0:07:57 academic journal. So it’s been an astonishing transformation, really. And it’s really been
0:08:03 exciting to be part of that. Why does it resonate so much with people? One part of it is,
0:08:12 I think people who’ve had psychedelic experiences, many of them have this sense that consciousness
0:08:20 pervades the universe in a deeper sense than in the more familiar, ordinary scientific view of things.
0:08:25 In fact, on the questionnaire for mystical experiences, you know, the proper psychological
0:08:30 questionnaire, one of the boxes you tick is, do you have a sense that there is a living presence in all
0:08:36 things? And so I suppose, I mean, this has not been, from my academic starting point, this was not
0:08:43 the route I took to panpsychism. I think it solves a lot of the mysteries and paradoxes of consciousness.
0:08:50 There are cold-blooded intellectual reasons to go for it. But many people reading about my work who’ve
0:08:56 had psychedelic experiences, something about it makes sense. And, you know, and I’m open to thinking
0:08:57 about that too, very much.
0:09:05 Let’s define some terms, right? Because sometimes I think panpsychism gets a bad rap or maybe just
0:09:11 needs a rebrand, like Patagonian Toothfish being renamed Chilean Sea Bass. Maybe that’s what panpsychism
0:09:20 needs. I’m not sure. But I want to talk about the cold-hearted intellectual reasons or arguments for
0:09:25 panpsychism. But in simple terms, because I think some folks can maybe conflate it with something
0:09:33 akin to animism and add on a few layers that are perhaps unnecessary. What is, in simple terms,
0:09:35 for a lay audience, panpsychism?
0:09:40 That’s a good starting point. I mean, in terms of the rebrand, actually, my good friend,
0:09:46 Annika Harris, who’s very sympathetic to panpsychism, she’s always saying, this is a terrible name.
0:09:55 We need to rebrand it, but I kind of think it’s a bit late. It’s kind of stuck. But panpsychism is the
0:10:02 view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality.
0:10:09 Perhaps a way into that is, you know, if you start with human consciousness, that is incredibly rich and
0:10:17 complex the result of millions of years of evolution. But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes.
0:10:23 You know, the consciousness of a sheep is simpler to the consciousness of a human being. What it’s like
0:10:30 to be a snail is simpler to what it’s like to be a sheep. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of
0:10:38 life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. For the panpsychist, this keeps going on
0:10:46 right down to the fundamental building blocks with perhaps fundamental particles like electrons and
0:10:55 quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect the incredibly simple nature.
0:10:59 There’s a common misunderstanding. People always think, oh, what are you saying? Electrons are
0:11:05 feeling existential angst or wondering if it’s Tuesday or something. But the idea is that’s human
0:11:10 consciousness, right? Don’t be anthropomorphic about this. You know, this is, for panpsychists,
0:11:18 human consciousness is a sort of weird, highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
0:11:25 So there’s so many different directions we could go here. We may get into some rather gnarly questions
0:11:35 quickly. So just to reiterate and to sort of clarify for myself or for listeners also. So from human to
0:11:41 sheep, but all the way down to, we can certainly go to quarks and so on with the way you described it,
0:11:49 but you would have a pool of water, maybe the water droplets, rocks, trees, the constituent parts of trees,
0:11:54 etc. And so on, sort of as you reduce down. How would you think about that?
0:12:01 Just one small qualification though. Yeah, it is a kind of common misunderstanding that panpsychists
0:12:07 think absolutely everything is conscious. And it’s understandable. That’s actually what the word
0:12:15 means, pan, everything, psyche, mind. But panpsychists don’t necessarily think literally everything is
0:12:24 conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks are conscious in some very simple way.
0:12:30 Maybe electrons and quarks, like the example I just gave, but maybe not. I mean, it’s a question for
0:12:37 physicists, not philosophers like me. What are the fundamental components of reality? These days,
0:12:45 many theoretical physicists are more inclined to think that our universe is made up of universe-wide
0:12:54 fields. And particles are just local excitations in those fields. So if you combine that with panpsychism,
0:13:02 you get the view that the fundamental forms of consciousness underlie these universe-wide fields.
0:13:09 This gets closer to a form of panpsychism known as cosmopsychism, that the universe itself is conscious.
0:13:14 Although again, we need to be careful. That doesn’t necessarily mean the universe is God or the
0:13:20 universe is… It could be just the universe is just kind of this messy, blobby, nonsense consciousness,
0:13:27 right? So that’s the idea that basic things are conscious and that many other things, of course,
0:13:34 are conscious. Humans and animals and our consciousness is somehow built up from these simpler forms of
0:13:41 consciousness. But it doesn’t mean every random combination of conscious particles makes something
0:13:47 that has its own unified consciousness. So it doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, rocks and socks
0:13:54 and tables and chairs. I remember teaching this to our undergraduates and I had a PowerPoint slide up
0:14:00 with socks on and saying, your socks might not be conscious. And one of the students obviously took a
0:14:06 photo of that, put it on social media. This is what we’re learning in my classes. But anyway, I think it was
0:14:15 lighthearted. But yeah, so although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious. I just
0:14:23 mentioned Annika. I think she thinks that. My friend Luke Roloff’s very good, very down-to-earth
0:14:28 scientific panpsychist philosopher. But he does think literally everything is conscious. But even
0:14:36 then, it’s not going to be a kind of consciousness a human being has. That is a very specific, highly
0:14:41 organized form of information processing. Whereas if a table is conscious, it’s going to be just some
0:14:47 meaningless, fragmented, disunified nonsense. But yeah, that’s the basic idea.
0:14:55 So first things first, I want to give a nod to Annika Harris. She has a very extensive audio
0:15:01 documentary that relates to consciousness. People want to do a deep dive into these subjects. But
0:15:07 this word consciousness may be bothering people at this point in the conversation, kind of like a pebble
0:15:14 in a shoe. Because for most people wandering about going to Starbucks and watching Netflix and so on,
0:15:21 consciousness, they may have not taken the time to define it precisely. But the intuited sense is
0:15:27 something along the lines of awareness. Maybe it’s awareness that you are aware of, but there’s some
0:15:33 degree of awareness. So when you talk about a table or socks or rocks, I understand that you didn’t imply
0:15:40 that everything has its own consciousness. But how should they think of this word when applied to what
0:15:46 people would consider inanimate objects, for instance?
0:15:53 It’s a really important question, because it is a little bit of an ambiguous word. And I agree
0:16:01 with you when I’m talking to the public. People often think that it means something quite sophisticated,
0:16:06 like self-consciousness or awareness of one’s own existence.
0:16:08 And Philip, could I interrupt you for one second?
0:16:08 Yeah.
0:16:15 I thought what I might do is just kind of line up some support before we go too far into this.
0:16:25 And are there any physicists, because some people might think of them as the most refined plumbers of
0:16:29 reality. Sorry, guys, if that’s insulting. I just came up with that on the fly. But architects,
0:16:35 maybe decipherers, detectives, there we go, choose your label. Are there any physicists,
0:16:43 credible physicists, who would more or less agree with some of the positions and theories that you
0:16:45 are describing related to panpsychism?
0:16:54 One person that stands out here is Roger Penrose, who’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Fascinating,
0:16:59 very interesting thinker. I was lucky enough to have one-to-one lunch with Roger Penrose once,
0:17:02 kind of by chance at a big consciousness conference.
0:17:04 That’s lucky. He’s getting up there in age.
0:17:11 One of the organizers sat him down, and we just sat together, and we had a lovely chat about our
0:17:19 different views. But he’s defended a view that’s very close to panpsychism. The quantum collapse
0:17:24 is connected to the generation of consciousness. One thing, I don’t know how much you want to get
0:17:25 into his view.
0:17:25 Let’s get into it.
0:17:32 He’s influenced by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which, not getting into too much detail,
0:17:39 roughly proves that for any finite set of axioms, you’re not going to be able to generate
0:17:45 algorithmically all of the truths of mathematics. This was the fascinating thing Gödel proved.
0:17:52 And so that leads Penrose to think, well, there must be something non-computational
0:17:59 about human mathematical thought. Because if it was just algorithmic and computational,
0:18:04 we wouldn’t get all those truths of arithmetic that we are able to comprehend.
0:18:11 And then where that leads him is he thinks, well, it must be at the quantum level rather than at the
0:18:18 level where we have classical physics. And this led him in combination with scientist Stuart
0:18:25 Hamerov to explore the less common position that consciousness is connected to quantum
0:18:30 stuff in the brain in what we call the microtubules. So yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating
0:18:35 position that Roger has got into. I mean, another question that might be more pertinent is what
0:18:40 about neuroscientists? Because I suppose, you know, consciousness is in the purview of the
0:18:44 neuroscience. The science of consciousness, I think, is part of neuroscience.
0:18:51 So let’s hop to that. But I want to give you just a bit of trivium related to Penrose. So I followed
0:18:59 Penrose’s work and Hamerov, very deeply interested. And I ended up, by a number of lucky coincidences,
0:19:08 doing a week at Wadham College, where I believe he is a fellow. And his book was in my room where I stayed.
0:19:15 And I asked someone about him. And I feel like I just missed him by a week. And I was very sad about
0:19:16 this.
0:19:22 He’s so open minded. He’s such so many areas of thought. Just a really fascinating figure.
0:19:25 So neuroscientists, let’s hop into that arena.
0:19:31 I mean, the first thing you should know about the science of consciousness is there is no consensus.
0:19:38 There is famously, I don’t know whether you’ve heard this, the 25 years ago, the neuroscientist,
0:19:44 Christophe Koch, bet the philosopher, David Shalmers, that this would all be wrapped up by now.
0:19:50 We would attract, we would attract what we call the neural correlates of consciousness, those
0:19:57 aspects of brain activity that perfectly correspond to consciousness. And he bet him a crate of fine wine.
0:20:04 And it was a public bet. Well, was it last summer or the summer before he publicly conceded defeat on
0:20:11 that? Because there is no consensus. But one of the major possibilities, one of the major views that is
0:20:19 disputed and debated is the integrated information theory. And that gets us very close to panpsychism or
0:20:27 or is even itself a form of panpsychism because it entails that consciousness is more widespread than
0:20:33 we ordinarily take it to be. And it certainly goes into the inanimate realm. There’s two reasons this
0:20:38 is getting thought about. I mean, maybe psychedelics is a third reason, but there’s two reasons. One is
0:20:43 the newfound philosophical interest, but also this interest in the integrated information theory.
0:20:47 But also just finally, I mean, I think from what we’ve already said,
0:20:55 it becomes clear with consciousness, it is not just a scientific issue. The science is absolutely
0:21:01 crucial and the experimental work. But with consciousness, there are so many philosophical
0:21:09 questions we need to address. And I think actually what we’ve found is that’s part of the reason we haven’t
0:21:15 achieved consensus. Because actually, forget the big philosophical questions. How you interpret the
0:21:22 scientific data on the brain and consciousness depends on your philosophical assumptions. There’s
0:21:27 a dispute among scientists about whether consciousness is at the front or the back of the brain. And
0:21:32 actually, I think the splits on that is something to do with the philosophical assumptions. So we need
0:21:34 scientists and philosophers working together.
0:21:42 I want to get back to that because that’s a very meta examination of science and the scientific method
0:21:47 that I want to get into. But since I’m a stickler for terms, the integrated information theory,
0:21:52 can you speak to that for one moment? And I funded a fair amount of science also at Johns Hopkins and
0:21:57 other places where I believe they developed the mystical experience questionnaire, at least in part.
0:22:04 The integrated information theory, could you define that for us before we get back to the sort of,
0:22:08 And for people listening, don’t worry, I keep good notes and I have a good memory. We’re going to get
0:22:14 to the definition of consciousness outside of the broadly layperson interpretation of, say, awareness.
0:22:18 Haven’t forgotten about it, but just because that might take us down a bunch of side alleys, I want
0:22:22 to stick where we are for a second. The integrated information theory, what is that?
0:22:29 So this is one of the proposals. I mean, we can maybe distinguish the sort of scientific task of
0:22:36 consciousness from the philosophical task that, as I say it, the scientific task is which brain activity
0:22:42 goes along with which kinds of conscious experience. And more generally, in general, what is required
0:22:48 from a physical system to get consciousness? And integrated information theory is one proposal.
0:22:56 And roughly, it says that consciousness corresponds to integration. You get a conscious system when the way
0:23:03 information is stored in the system depends upon the integration between the parts of the system.
0:23:09 They have a mathematically precise way of defining this. They represent it with the letter phi.
0:23:17 And the proposal is that at the exact moment when a system has more integrated information in the whole
0:23:22 than in the parts, that’s when the lights come on. That’s when you get consciousness.
0:23:28 So, I mean, that is what is so striking about the brain. In fact, the parts of the brain that are
0:23:34 associated with consciousness are not necessarily the parts that have the most neurons, but they do
0:23:41 seem to be the parts that involve deep, deep integration. Each neuron being connected to hundreds
0:23:46 and thousands of others yielding trillions of connections. I mean, maybe to connect to how computers
0:23:53 work. If the integrated information theory turns out to be true, computers that are anything like what
0:23:58 we currently have are actually not going to be conscious. Because the way in which information
0:24:03 is stored in a computer is less dependent on integration. If you take out a bit of, you know,
0:24:09 a few transistors, you won’t necessarily lose that much information. But if you take out a small part of
0:24:15 the brain, at least comparatively, you lose a hell of a lot of information because the way in which
0:24:22 information is stored is so much more holistic and to do with integration. And so the theory basically says
0:24:25 that is the hallmark of consciousness. That’s what it’s all about.
0:24:35 So let’s perhaps make a contrast of styles. And then, because I don’t want to hold out and tease people
0:24:40 for too long, we’ll try to take a stab, or I will, I’m using the royal we, I will ask you to take a stab,
0:24:46 just giving us a working definition of consciousness that doesn’t depend on a table asking itself,
0:24:52 why am I here? What’s going on? And before we get to that, though, contrast and styles, perhaps,
0:24:59 the integrated information theory seems to imply, and this is something I have zero familiarity with,
0:25:06 so I could get this wrong, on consciousness as an emergent property. So things are simple,
0:25:13 they get more complex, and when they reach a requisite level of complexity, where the sum of
0:25:19 the parts is greater than the whole, as you would expect it, the lights turn on. And maybe I’m
0:25:25 misinterpreting that. But I’m wondering if that is accurate, if you, as someone who has looked at this
0:25:32 very deeply through philosophical lenses, would agree with that? Or does it start from the very
0:25:37 beginning with the smallest constituent parts? Does that make any sense?
0:25:44 It does make a lot of sense. And here you’re focusing on a key big question here, you know,
0:25:51 chicken or egg, which comes first? The physical world or consciousness? And you know, the standards,
0:25:56 scientific assumption is, well, it’s the physical universe that’s first, you know,
0:26:05 particles forming complex systems, brains, and then in some of the complex electrochemical signaling
0:26:11 in brains, consciousness pops up, it’s emergent, as you say. Whereas the panpsychist actually
0:26:19 turns that on its head and says, no, no, no, consciousness, some story about very simple
0:26:27 conscious entities is the foundational story. And in fact, physical reality emerges from that more
0:26:32 basic story about consciousness. Now you asked about integrated information theory, or they call it IIT
0:26:41 for short. And I’ve always been a little bit unsure. You know, the key figures here are Giulio Tononi and
0:26:47 Christoph Koch, who I mentioned earlier. We had a conference recently in Sweden bringing together
0:26:53 philosophers working on panpsychism and leading proponents of integrated information theory.
0:26:59 And we really wrestled it out. And I actually was pleasantly surprised to realize we’re actually on the
0:27:05 complete same page as this. I think at least the leading proponents of integrated information theory,
0:27:13 those neuroscientists are like us philosophers of the view that it’s consciousness that’s fundamental
0:27:17 actually, and everything else flows from there. Everything else comes out of consciousness.
0:27:28 Is that a close cousin or does it rhyme with what Max Planck, icon, German physicist, said so long ago?
0:27:34 I have never had the full context of this quote. And this is as good a time as any after you answer this
0:27:39 just to give us a working definition of consciousness that can be applied in the way you would like to
0:27:44 apply it. So Max Planck, I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from
0:27:49 consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we
0:27:55 regard as existing postulates consciousness. So Max Planck, 1852 to 1947, Nobel Prize winning German
0:28:04 physicist and the father of quantum theory. Was he referring to more or less what you are discussing,
0:28:07 or did he say this in a different context?
0:28:14 It’s fascinating what you point to there. And it’s not just Max Planck. It was a fairly widespread view
0:28:20 among many physicists at the time. A colleague of mine who works in the history of philosophy tweeted
0:28:27 something recently that was a quote from a physicist from the 1930s. Oh God, I can’t remember now who it was
0:28:33 saying, of course, all physicists think consciousness is fundamental now. It’s just like, what? I think, you know,
0:28:42 something happened in the post-war years where this all went out the window and we moved to dominance of
0:28:48 what we call materialism. Roughly that the physical world is fundamental. We can leave it to the historians
0:28:53 perhaps to work out what was going on there. But what was the interest of Max Planck? I mean, I should
0:29:00 say I’m not an expert on Max Planck, but I suspect it might be something to do with quantum mechanics and
0:29:05 some of the mysteries that have emerged since those early days of quantum mechanics. I mean,
0:29:11 the weird thing about quantum mechanics is that if we just take the core bit of mathematics,
0:29:19 what we call the Schrodinger equation, it seems to describe this weird world of what we call
0:29:24 superpositions. And don’t ask me what a superposition is because nobody knows, but it’s something to do with,
0:29:30 you know, the particle is not in this location and not in that location, but sort of in both and
0:29:35 neither at the same time or, you know, captured with the famous Schrodinger cat thought experiment
0:29:42 were. If you just apply the Schrodinger equation, you’ll find that the cat, before we open the box,
0:29:47 the cat is living and dead. And there’s many cats or some of them living, some of them dead. But of
0:29:53 course, that’s not what we ever observe. Whenever we actually observe the particle, it’s in a definite
0:29:58 location. Whenever we actually open the box and look at the cat, if we were cruel enough to
0:30:04 actually do the Schrodinger’s cat experiment, we’d see a definitely living cat or a definitely dead cat.
0:30:08 What on earth is going on there? And what the early pioneers of quantum mechanics said is,
0:30:15 well, when you make an observation, things change. And a different bit of mathematics, what we call
0:30:22 the Born rule, comes in and tells you what you’re going to observe, or at least the probability of what
0:30:26 you’re going to observe. So it’s a sort of bridging principle that takes you from this weird world of
0:30:32 superpositions to the definite reality you’re actually going to observe. And, you know, the early pioneers of
0:30:40 quantum mechanics, like Niles Bohr, they didn’t want you to ask questions about that. In fact, they hated Niles
0:30:47 Bohr. You know, people talk about him, the people who knew him, just say he was this incredibly charismatic
0:30:55 figure. People compared him to Jesus or Socrates. But he also ruled like a communist dictator in crushing
0:31:01 opposition. If you ask questions about what is going on in reality to make quantum mechanics make
0:31:06 sense, your career would be over, right? They didn’t want you asking those questions. But, you know,
0:31:12 one answer that some people reached in the 1960s Nobel Prize winning quantum pioneer Wigner,
0:31:19 well, maybe it’s consciousness that’s making the difference, right? Maybe that’s what’s the difference
0:31:24 between before you’re observing the particle, and it’s in many locations and when you observe it, or before you
0:31:32 open the box to see what’s going on with the cat. It’s the interaction of consciousness that changes reality
0:31:38 from this wacky world of superpositions to a definite reality. And that’s been somewhat neglected over the years,
0:31:44 But actually, some friends of mine, David Chalmers, who I mentioned, and Kelvin McQueen, have actually
0:31:50 taken that view and explored it in rigorous detail. They don’t necessarily think it’s true,
0:31:58 but there’s value in just analytically exploring this position, laying it out rigorously, looking at
0:32:03 the pros and cons. So maybe that natural connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics was
0:32:06 something to do with it. But I’m not totally sure.
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0:33:22 We go down a number of different paths from here, of course. What is a good placeholder definition of
0:33:30 consciousness for the purposes of how you’ve been using it in the context of panpsychism?
0:33:36 The way the word consciousness is standardly used, I think in both science and philosophy,
0:33:45 it just means subjective experience. Your consciousness is just what it’s like to be you.
0:33:52 So, you know, right now you’re having an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you,
0:33:58 visual experience of the room around you. You know, if you pay attention, you’ll notice the
0:34:05 subtle tactile sensations of the chair beneath your body. This is just all part of what it’s like to be you.
0:34:12 And that’s all we mean by consciousness. So now we can start to see that it make a little bit more
0:34:17 sense that this could exist in very simple forms, because we’re not necessarily talking about
0:34:23 conceptual understanding or awareness of your own existence. We’re just talking about experience.
0:34:28 And, you know, maybe bedbugs could have experience. Maybe something even simpler could have
0:34:30 very, very simple forms of experience.
0:34:37 Thank you. And if people want to impress or confuse their friends at the next cocktail party,
0:34:40 could they call those things qualia? Would that be a word they should throw around,
0:34:43 perhaps? Or qualia, a different thing entirely?
0:34:51 No, no, that’s the philosopher’s lingo, I suppose, to mean, I guess, the qualities we encounter in
0:34:58 conscious experience. And some people think that’s really at the heart of the challenge here, the colors,
0:35:05 the sounds, the smells, the taste. Consciousness seems to involve rich qualities, you know, the smell
0:35:15 of coffee, the taste of mint, the deep red of a sunset. And maybe it’s that that physical science struggles
0:35:22 with so much. Because physical science, since Galileo, has aimed to be purely quantitative,
0:35:30 purely mathematical, purely objective and personal. And so it’s hard to see how you can bridge the
0:35:37 explanatory gap between that purely quantitative world of physics and physical science and this
0:35:45 subjective, qualitative world of consciousness. And in fact, one final thing, physical science kicked off.
0:35:52 With Galileo taking consciousness outside of the domain of science for this precise reason,
0:35:57 because he thought, correctly, I think, you can’t capture those qualities in purely mathematical
0:36:02 language. If we want mathematical science, we’ve got to take consciousness out. And I think that’s
0:36:07 really, I mean, this is my book, Galileo’s Era. I think that’s really at the root of our current
0:36:12 predicaments of consciousness. We need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated 400
0:36:22 years ago. This may be a naive question, but if we can explore quantum mechanics in mathematical form,
0:36:33 and if we move from kind of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum mechanics, if quantum mechanical effects,
0:36:40 at least in part, explain consciousness, it’s a big if, I suppose, but if, couldn’t we then
0:36:45 reincorporate it into mathematics? Or do you think that’s a fool’s errand?
0:36:51 I mean, you’re making the case, I suppose, that the materialist will want to make the person who
0:36:58 thinks, no, no, we can do this. I mean, I suppose everyone agrees we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t
0:37:06 got even the beginnings. We haven’t got even the beginnings of an explanation of how electrochemical
0:37:15 signaling can somehow make a feeling. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people inspired by the success of
0:37:20 physical science think, come on, let’s, we can get there in the end. We just need to keep pushing at
0:37:28 this. But I suppose that’s why I think we do need to reflect maybe on the intellectual, philosophical
0:37:36 starting points of science with Galileo. This moment when Galileo kicked things off by taking consciousness
0:37:37 out.
0:37:46 How did Galileo strip consciousness out? Was it incidental? Was it very deliberate? Because it was
0:37:50 just like, okay, this is the misbehaving kid in the classroom. We need to put him in the corner.
0:37:53 How was that done? What was the error, so to speak?
0:38:01 Galileo wanted, and this was such a revolutionary innovation, wanted science to be just purely
0:38:07 mathematical. That had never been done before. But he understood that the problem is the qualities we
0:38:13 seem to encounter in our experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells, and the tastes. So he said,
0:38:16 you know, how do we get rid of them? You can’t capture them in mathematics. You can’t,
0:38:21 I mean, you can capture a lot, right? You can capture with color experience. You can divide
0:38:27 up color into the dimensions of hue, saturation, and brightness, right? And you can map out a
0:38:36 three-dimensional space there. But you can never convey to a blind from birth neuroscientist
0:38:43 with that sort of information, the redness of red, right? You know, what it’s like to see red.
0:38:48 Actually, there’s a great neuroscientist, Nut Norby, the late Nut Norby, he’s passed away now,
0:38:55 who was an expert color scientist who had cones missing from his eyes, so he could only see black
0:39:00 and white and shades of gray. And he talked in wonder, he was interested in the philosophy, talked in
0:39:07 wonderful, rich ways about how he understood the structure of color experience, but he couldn’t
0:39:14 quite get at the colors, the qualities themselves. So Galileo said, right, well, we need that to be
0:39:19 outside of the scientific domain. So what he said, he stripped the physical world of its qualities.
0:39:25 He said, you know, the colors, they’re not really in the objects. You know, this Batman mug I’ve got
0:39:30 here, you know, the blueness and the yellowness, that’s not really on the surface of the cup.
0:39:38 That’s in the conscious experience of the observer looking at it, or the spiciness isn’t really inside
0:39:43 the curry. It’s in the experience, the conscious experience of the person eating the curry. So he
0:39:49 strips the physical world of all these colors and sounds and smells, tastes. Where are they? They’re
0:39:55 in the soul, right? They’re in the soul. That’s outside of science. And once he’d stripped the qualities
0:40:01 away, you’ve free reign to capture everything else in mathematics. Now that was a good move because it
0:40:09 was the start of mathematical physics and it’s led to incredible technology and consensus on this body
0:40:15 of information. But I think we’re in a period of history where it’s gone so well. People now think
0:40:22 that’s everything. We found the way forward. But we need to remember it’s gone so well because it was
0:40:27 given a limited focus because consciousness was put outside of the domain of science.
0:40:32 So I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about these challenges of
0:40:36 explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, of course you can’t do that.
0:40:43 I designed physical science to exclude consciousness. If you want to bring consciousness back in the
0:40:49 scientific story, we need to rethink those foundations. We need to bring together what Galileo
0:40:53 separated. And I think that’s what panpsychism gives us a way of doing. It’s not telling us to
0:40:59 do science differently. It’s telling us to have a more expansive scientific method that brings
0:41:00 consciousness back into the story.
0:41:06 Ooh, I want to explore that last part. And I would just say, I mean, for folks listening,
0:41:11 and please excuse me, I’m operating way above my pay grade here, so I’m probably going to make
0:41:16 mistakes. But Newtonian physics, for instance, works fantastically well for so many things.
0:41:23 But once you have quantum mechanics introduced, it becomes very clear that it’s an excellent
0:41:30 toolkit, but it doesn’t have a complete range of applications, let’s just say. And if you talk
0:41:35 to any good doctor, I don’t know if this joke exists in, it’s not really a joke, I suppose,
0:41:40 but sort of a philosophical epistemological quip, which is, you know, 50% of what we know is wrong,
0:41:44 we just don’t know which 50%. If you talk to any really good doctor, they’ll tell you that.
0:41:49 So there’s no reason to believe that we have anything approaching complete understanding of
0:41:56 the physical world through the tools that we have available. How do you, you said expanding,
0:42:03 if I’m recalling correctly, sort of expanding the scope of science to include panpsychism. Do you have
0:42:05 any thoughts on how that might be done?
0:42:10 I think come back to this question of we just need to explore different explanatory projects.
0:42:18 For many decades now, we’ve been pursuing the following project, trying to explain conscious
0:42:26 experience in terms of utterly non-conscious processes in the brain. And that project, despite a lot of time
0:42:32 and energy and money, has gone precisely nowhere. Which is not to say the science of the brain has gone
0:42:39 nowhere. We’ve made incredible progress. But on that particular question of how electrochemical
0:42:44 signalling’s on the brain could make a feeling, you know, we haven’t even got the beginnings.
0:42:52 So the panpsychist says, well, let’s just try it upside down. Let’s try the reverse of that explanatory
0:43:00 project. You know, we start with consciousness. Can we get physical reality out of that? And I just think it’s
0:43:06 turned out that that’s a much more fruitful explanatory project. I think actually the mysteries have been
0:43:13 solved, essentially. And I think a lot of the resistance is, it just kind of feels weird.
0:43:18 It takes time to adjust to these things. But look, I would just say, just contrast these two explanatory
0:43:22 projects, right? Starting with physical science, trying to get consciousness out. Starting with
0:43:28 consciousness, trying to get physical reality out. Which works? And I think the latter, we’ve just made
0:43:29 much more progress on it.
0:43:35 You know, I was just doing a little bit of searching on perplexity for people who are
0:43:41 interested, which AI tool I am using, which tends to focus a lot on avoiding or minimizing hallucination.
0:43:48 I thought you were metaphorically referring to front and back of the brain when you were discussing
0:43:57 how your philosophical beliefs or what we would even call this sort of philosophical undergirding would
0:44:03 affect your scientific exploration or interpretation. But I put in a question, what do neuroscientists
0:44:10 believe is the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness? And the first thing that pops up, so IIT is here,
0:44:16 integrated information theory, but global neuronal workspace theory, man, they could use some branding on that,
0:44:23 but that’s okay. GNWT. This theory championed by Dr. Stanislas Dahin, I’m probably pronouncing that
0:44:27 incorrectly, suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of sensory information in the frontal
0:44:32 parts of the brain. The front of the brain acts as a sketch pad where sensory signals are combined with
0:44:37 memories and emotions, and this information is then broadcast across the brain. IIT posits that
0:44:41 consciousness emerges from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the brain.
0:44:46 And it goes on and on. And then there are many other theories. The thalamus and its interaction
0:44:52 with the cerebral cortex, thecipitotemporal area, the claustrum. That one has come up a bit with
0:44:57 neuroscientists I’ve spoken to at a few universities. Thin sheet of neurons connected to the neocortex.
0:45:04 Okay. Now, what do you think of the, let’s put IIT aside for a second, but just this general
0:45:11 pursuit, the pursuit of some neuroanatomical seat of consciousness, because the answers we get are only
0:45:18 going to be as good as our questions. And while science is excellent, the scientific method for
0:45:23 testing hypotheses, it doesn’t always give you a great set of tools for generating
0:45:31 the best or better questions. So do you feel like this is worth pursuing, or is there something that
0:45:38 scientists have as a blind spot that perhaps dooms this question from the very outset,
0:45:40 the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness?
0:45:47 Absolutely. You know, we need the science. We’re not going to make progress on consciousness
0:45:53 without science. And what you’ve pointed to is a really important debate. I mean, maybe just
0:46:00 touch on another way of saying, you know, why this is so hard to make progress on. And the reason is
0:46:08 consciousness is not publicly observable. I can’t look inside your brain and see your feelings and
0:46:15 experiences. I can’t look inside a fish and see, you know, does it have feelings? And this leads to all
0:46:22 sorts of ethical problems. I mean, what you can do if you’re dealing with a human being is you can ask
0:46:27 them, right? You can, while you’re scanning their brain, maybe you can stimulate a bit of the brain.
0:46:34 So what did that feel? And that’s really essentially the tool for doing the scientific task of trying to
0:46:42 mirror together the invisible world of consciousness and the visible world of the brain. It’s very hard,
0:46:49 but that’s what we try to do. But really, I think that’s where the limit is with science in regard to
0:46:55 consciousness. Because consciousness is not publicly observable, that is all you can do. It’s very
0:47:02 important, but that is all you can do. Try to get those correlations in the human case, and then try as best
0:47:13 you can to extrapolate to the non-human case. But that will always leave open the why question. Why does brain
0:47:19 activity go along with consciousness? Why should brain activity have anything to do with consciousness?
0:47:25 And I think at that point, you need to turn to the philosophy and just look at the various possibilities
0:47:31 that we’ve discussed. Well, maybe the physical world is fundamental and consciousness emerges. Maybe consciousness
0:47:37 is fundamental and physical reality emerges. Maybe they’re both radically different. This is what’s called
0:47:43 dualism. Maybe consciousness is in the soul, and that’s just separate from the body and the brain. And this is
0:47:50 actually, for what it’s worth, been the most popular theory in human history of consciousness,
0:47:55 that consciousness is somehow separate. But the scientific data on consciousness, important as it
0:48:00 is, is just neutral on all those possibilities. This is what I’m so passionate about getting across to
0:48:03 people. And I understand why people find that frustrating. And they think,
0:48:08 no, can’t we do an experiment? You know, can’t we? I mean, maybe you should say, well, we just don’t
0:48:15 know. All we know is the correlations. We just don’t know. Or we can try and do some philosophy. We can
0:48:21 try and see if, can we evaluate these different options? Maybe in terms of simplicity, Occam’s razor,
0:48:29 maybe that will get rid of the soul. Or how well their explanatory aims have gone. And I think when
0:48:35 we do that, panpsychism just looks more plausible. I’ve talked a bit longer. If I could say one more
0:48:41 thing about how we make progress. I think it might get to the point where what we need to do
0:48:50 is fragment the discipline a little bit into communities of scientists and philosophers. That is
0:48:57 to say, scientists doing experiments under certain philosophical assumptions. And that’s really actually
0:49:05 with IIT and global workspace theory, that is kind of already going on, but not explicit. But maybe we just
0:49:10 have to do that and see what bears fruit. You know, some neuroscientists I know don’t like that. And they think,
0:49:16 oh, we’re not going to be taken serious as credible science. We won’t get funding. I feel that. But
0:49:20 unfortunately, if you’re going to deal with consciousness, for all the reasons we’ve discussed,
0:49:26 it’s not publicly observable. Science was set up from taking it out the picture. You just need to do
0:49:32 some philosophy. So maybe what we need to do is just get society to take philosophy more seriously and to
0:49:38 see the role that has to play in the project of finding out about reality. And then I think we’ll make
0:49:40 progress in consciousness.
0:49:46 So if people want to get really squirrely and explore consciousness as something perhaps
0:49:56 non-localized or not limited to the brain, they can read a collection of different writings called
0:50:03 Mind Beyond Brain, which was edited by David Presti. Now, if David Presti were just playing singing bowls
0:50:09 and swinging kopal around the public square, walking around in rags, it would be one thing.
0:50:13 But he’s a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in the
0:50:18 Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for nearly 20 years. Still teaches and also has worked as a
0:50:23 clinical psychologist in the treatment of addiction and PTSD and so on at the Department of Veteran Affairs,
0:50:28 Medical San Francisco and SF. Very interesting. Not all chapters, in my opinion, are strong,
0:50:34 but a few will definitely provoke some very bizarre questions. So that’s something people can dig into
0:50:42 if they’d like. Let me ask you about the hypothetical situation, which is if we made another bet.
0:50:49 So let’s say that you bet me. You’re like, you know, 20 years from now, we’re going to figure it out.
0:50:57 Cradle wine. Your choice. It’s like, fantastic. And it gets figured out. We somehow determine,
0:51:02 maybe it’s with the help of quantum computing and harnessing the power from other universes.
0:51:06 By the way, if people haven’t listened to the discussion of quantum computing I had with Steve
0:51:10 Jurvetson quite a while back now. Go back and listen to that if you think what I just said is
0:51:17 strange. It is. But let’s say it gets figured out. What is the payoff? This might sound also like a
0:51:25 very dumb question. Is it trying just to resolve some deep angst and the not knowing as it relates
0:51:30 to consciousness? Or is there more to the potential payoff if we were to somehow figure it out?
0:51:36 You know, I actually think there are very important practical ethical concerns here.
0:51:42 I mean, one thing we’ve touched on slightly is animal consciousness, which animals are conscious.
0:51:50 And I mean, actually, the direction of travel has been going more and more things are conscious as
0:51:54 time has gone on. There was recently a letter written by dozens of neuroscientists
0:52:00 arguing that we need to at least take seriously the possibility that insects are conscious.
0:52:04 I mean, there was a time people didn’t think babies were conscious and used to do
0:52:11 quite horrible things on babies without anesthesia. God, and that was not that long ago. This is not
0:52:12 the 1400s we’re talking about.
0:52:17 You know, it’s only recently people are thinking birds and fish are conscious. So, you know,
0:52:22 us panpsychists have taken it all away and we’re just waiting for everyone to catch up. I’m being
0:52:28 slightly ironic. But, you know, plants, I don’t think people are at the stage necessarily where they
0:52:32 are. Well, there are some biopsychists who think, well, they’re not panpsychists,
0:52:37 but they think all living things are conscious. But we have learned incredible things about
0:52:44 plant intelligence, that plants can be subject to conditioned learning, which was incredibly
0:52:52 surprising that the extent to which trees communicate onto the ground and share information and between
0:52:58 species, there’s cooperation and sharing of food and nutrients. And there’s just some incredible
0:53:03 buzzing community beneath the ground. So I think, you know, as we learn more about
0:53:09 animals and plants, it is leading people to ascribe consciousness more and more widespread.
0:53:14 But look, I mean, this is a very serious ethical question, which things are conscious. People often
0:53:19 think I’m going to be a vegan, but it makes it harder if you’re a panpsychist. If you’re not a
0:53:24 panpsychist or a biopsychist, you’ve got a nice, easy, ethical dividing line. You know,
0:53:30 plants aren’t conscious. I just won’t eat things that are conscious. But I think trees and plants
0:53:34 are conscious, you know, and I’ve got to eat something. So it just, it really, there really
0:53:42 is ethical issues here. The other one is people in comas who we can’t communicate with in the normal
0:53:48 way at least. Are they conscious? Can they hear us? You know, I mean, one of the fascinating was
0:53:56 maybe 10 or 15 years ago now that scientists were able to communicate with somebody in a coma through
0:54:02 asking yes or no questions and saying, you know, for the yes question, I can’t remember the details now,
0:54:07 you know, think of playing tennis. And then they observe, they scan the brain to see if the motor
0:54:12 region was activated and communicated with someone through scanning their brain and found
0:54:17 out that they did have meaningful thought. So, I mean, those are the two big ethical questions,
0:54:20 I suppose. But look, I don’t think we should underplay
0:54:31 questions that just don’t have practical significance, but are part of what it means to be a human being in
0:54:37 sense of the noble project of trying to have our best guess as to what reality is like. I think human
0:54:43 life isn’t just about, you know, building bridges, curing disease, working on the economy, as important
0:54:49 as those things are. I think we want to know, what is this world we’re living in? How do we fit that into
0:54:55 our own understanding of our meaning and purpose in this life? And so, you know, consciousness is important
0:55:03 for that purpose too. And there’s also oftentimes practicality on the further side of something that
0:55:08 seems impractical, or at least not immediately practical. That happens all the time in science,
0:55:12 happens all the time in medicine, all the time in pharmaceutical development.
0:55:16 I could give you two good examples of that, actually.
0:55:16 Please.
0:55:24 Where blue sky thinking has gone in. Well, the Reverend Thomas Bayes was annoyed by the atheist
0:55:30 David Hume in the 18th century with his argument against miracles, that we should never trust
0:55:36 miracles because it’s always going to be more likely that it was deceit or error rather than a break in
0:55:41 the laws of nature. Thomas Bayes, Reverend Thomas Bayes, was like, what’s going on here? And he wrestled
0:55:46 with this and he came up with a little bit of mathematics that we now call Bayes’ theorem,
0:55:55 which is our core mathematical way of understanding evidence. It was very important in tracking the
0:56:02 COVID pandemic. It informs a huge bit of neuroscience we call predictive processing. Another quick example,
0:56:10 I mean, Bertrand Russell, my hero, and Gottlieb Frege, were wrestling with the very abstract question of,
0:56:17 can we reduce mathematics to logic? Why the hell would you be worried about that? But can we just
0:56:23 explain all of maths away? Philosophers worry about numbers. What the hell are numbers? Where are numbers?
0:56:30 You know, Plato, back in the dawn of Western philosophy, Plato thought numbers are really out there. Some
0:56:35 philosophers think, I don’t want to believe in this magical world of numbers, platonic heaven. Maybe we
0:56:39 can just get it all reduced to logic. And they wrestled with this and it didn’t really work out, but they
0:56:47 came up with predicate logic, which is, you know, been hugely important in computer science and,
0:56:53 and God, it’s huge, loads of areas of science. So yeah. So look, we need to be, to worry about just
0:57:00 focusing on the practical questions. You know, we need space for blue sky thinking and trying things out
0:57:01 because you don’t know where it’s going to end up.
0:57:07 I’m going to come back to Bertrand Russell, which I was planning on hitting regardless. But first,
0:57:16 I thought we could explore a little bit your experience with virtual reality. And this was in
0:57:23 the seven pages that you sent to me. Some other reading related to the present moment, which we don’t
0:57:29 have to go to in depth, but specifically the experience you had with VR, if you could just
0:57:36 speak to that, because part of my hope with conversations like this is just to point out to
0:57:48 people how what we take for granted as the ordinary is so fucking crazy on so many levels that it’s worth
0:57:53 taking a pause very once in a while to revisit it. And I thought your experience was a very eloquent
0:58:00 way of putting that into perspective. Thank you. Yeah, this is a funny one. I suppose just,
0:58:07 you know, when you first try VR goggles, it’s just like, oh my God, this is world and I can interact
0:58:13 with it. And unfortunately I was with my two little kids and they wanted their turn. And obviously I only
0:58:17 have like five minutes and I was like, it’s not fair. Why do they get to do so that? I was thinking,
0:58:21 you know, I was just, I wasn’t going to have another go because my kids are playing with us. Oh, back to
0:58:30 boring reality. And listen, it dawned on me. Actually normal reality, even this kind of mundane
0:58:38 living room I was sitting in is so much richer than the best VR we have, right? You could, you know,
0:58:47 the subtlety of touching a leaf or stroking a carpet or breathing the air. If you pay attention to the air
0:58:52 going in your nose and, you know, I mean, there’s just so much richness in every present moment.
0:58:58 The only problem is for some reason, I don’t know, it’s something to do with evolution probably.
0:59:04 Us humans are sort of set up to get bored of it very quickly. And we just want the next thing that we
0:59:11 want to get me a next Netflix drama, get me a drink to just sort of drown my sorrows. And so I just think
0:59:22 that really dawned on me in a deep way, the importance of just trying to calm that restless
0:59:29 boredom and just get back to the richness that the present moment has to offer. I mean, this is why I’m
0:59:36 on my kids actually. I didn’t say this in the pages you kindly read, but I found actually, I’ve got a four
0:59:40 year old and eight year old. Actually playing with kids can be kind of meditative, like a spiritual
0:59:46 experiment. I mean, I’ve got a friend, I remember a colleague when they first had kids and they said,
0:59:52 it’s really boring, isn’t it? Playing with kids. You know, in a sense it is, but you know, at first it’s
0:59:58 boring playing role play, playing. One of my kids want to play teachers all the time, but, and it’s boring
1:00:02 at first and you want to, I want to do something else. I want to do something more. But then if you just
1:00:08 bear with it and you let the restlessness calm and then you absorb in it and you see, you know,
1:00:16 the wonder of the weird way they’re thinking and the strange expressions and their unusual behavior and
1:00:21 the richness of the present moment. And it’s just a different way of thinking about the value of
1:00:25 meditation or mindfulness or just trying to calm yourself in the present moment. That’s the beginning
1:00:29 of happiness, I think, isn’t it? Just getting yourself settled in the present moment.
1:00:38 All right. As promised, Bertrand Russell, and this is going to take us into some fun territory, I suspect.
1:00:49 Why is Bertrand Russell one of your heroes? And maybe you could speak to William James as well and answer
1:00:49 that same question.
1:00:57 Bertrand Russell, I think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he, in very important work in the
1:01:04 1920s, he sort of solved all the mysteries and, and it got actually, sadly forgotten about for a long time. And it’s
1:01:11 only in the last 10 or 15 years, it’s really been rediscovered. Not that it was literally forgotten about, but it’s
1:01:26 another figure to throw in from the same period, the 1920s, is Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first
1:01:33 scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. That made Einstein an overnight
1:01:40 celebrity. And it was a big moment, actually. It was because it was, was it between the wars, I think? And it was an English
1:01:49 experimental scientist confirming the theory of a German or a Swiss German scientist. And a Swiss German
1:01:55 scientist, not only confirming their theory, but their theory that overturned a couple of hundred years
1:02:01 of Newton, right? Newton had the theory of gravity. Eddington’s observation showed that actually Einstein’s
1:02:07 slightly more nuanced theory did better than Newton’s. So anyway, they worked together and they thought about
1:02:12 these questions around consciousness in a really fascinating way. And without wanting to get into
1:02:18 too much of the technicalities, I think their essential insight was that physical science doesn’t
1:02:24 really tell us what matter is. Now, when I first heard that, I honestly thought, this is ridiculous.
1:02:30 What are you talking about? You know, you read physics, you get this rich story about the nature of space and
1:02:37 time and matter. But their point was, well, of course, important and rich as that is, ultimately at base,
1:02:45 physics just gives us mathematical structure. And so in a sense, physics doesn’t care what matter is.
1:02:49 It doesn’t care what physical reality is. It just cares what its mathematical structure is.
1:02:54 If you get the mathematical structure, that’s all physics cares about. And, you know, Stephen Hawking
1:02:59 famously captured this on the last page of A Brief History of Time when he said,
1:03:06 even the final theory of physics won’t tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes
1:03:12 a universe for them to describe. So really, I mean, the way we conventionally think about consciousness,
1:03:18 people tend to think, oh, we know what matter is. We know what the brain is, but we don’t know what
1:03:23 consciousness is. We don’t know what this weird consciousness thing. Russell said, it’s precisely
1:03:28 the other way around. We know what consciousness is by being conscious. You know what pain is when you
1:03:34 feel it. It’s the brain. It’s physical reality. We don’t know what it is. We just know it’s abstract
1:03:38 mathematical structure. We don’t know what fills out that mathematical structure.
1:03:43 And so building on these insights, I don’t know how much you want to get into this. Building on
1:03:51 these insights, philosophers have worked out ways of, if we started with the postulation of networks of
1:03:57 simple conscious entities, so long as through their interactions, they had the right patterns,
1:04:04 the right mathematical structures, we’d get physics out of that. We could get physics out of consciousness.
1:04:09 I think we know from Russell, I think we know that can be done. We don’t know if we can get
1:04:15 consciousness out of physics, but we know we can get physics out of consciousness. Why are we still
1:04:21 banging our head against a brick wall thinking, you know, how can we get consciousness out of physical
1:04:27 stuff? When does it, we know it can be done the other way around. We’ve made sense of that. Let’s just
1:04:34 at least run with that as an option. I know it feels a bit weird, but you know, that’s just a cultural
1:04:40 thing. Where does William James fit in to your life and why such an influence?
1:04:48 I think even more than Russell, William James is my big hero. I think just something about his
1:04:55 intellectual character, I think. If you read James, he feels like someone in the present moment. He’s
1:05:03 just so up to date and sharp and reasonable in his thinking. But I mean, on all sorts of areas,
1:05:08 I mean, he wrote wonderful things on panpsychism. In terms of the challenges to panpsychism, actually,
1:05:13 the big disgust challenge of panpsychism, you know, how do little conscious things come together to make
1:05:19 big conscious things. It’s become known as the combination problem. But William James is actually
1:05:25 the first person wrestling with this. I also like his, you know, the stuff he wrote on religion. You
1:05:29 know, people talk about religion, they talk about Pascal’s Wager. It’s interesting, Pascal’s Wager,
1:05:35 but you need to read James if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. His great paper, The Will to
1:05:40 Believe, he later thought, I think rightly should have been called The Right to Believe. And he was
1:05:46 challenging this idea that a contemporary of his Clifford put forward, but later Bertrand Russell on
1:05:52 the other side put forward, you know, that in terms of belief, you follow the evidence. All you need to do
1:05:58 is follow the evidence and you’ve got strictly anything beyond the evidence you can’t go for. And James
1:06:03 reflects on this, well, look, it’s a bit complicated. You know, the worry with going over the evidence is, well,
1:06:09 you might believe false things, but there’s another risk, isn’t there? You might not believe true things.
1:06:15 To some extent, he tried to justify, to some extent we can tentatively, in certain limited
1:06:23 circumstances where there is uncertainty, where our rational argumentation and experiments can’t settle
1:06:30 matters. Maybe it can be rational to choose to believe. And he made a real case for that. And it
1:06:34 was absolutely fascinating. And you appreciate you’re taking a risk and you know, you’re not making an
1:06:39 intellectual error because you know, you’re taking a risk. You know, you’re going beyond the evidence,
1:06:45 but you’re in your right mind prepared to take that risk. It’s just a beautiful discussion and all sorts
1:06:51 of wonderful analogies and explorations. Everyone should read William James. He’s a patron saint of great
1:06:52 intellectual thinking.
1:06:58 If people needed to start with one or if they were only going to read one, where would you have them
1:07:06 start? I would suppose the most recognizable of his writing for at least an American audience would probably be the
1:07:10 varieties of religious experience. But would you start there or would you have people start somewhere else?
1:07:15 The one I just mentioned, Will to Believe, if that sounded interesting to you, is fairly readable.
1:07:21 But yeah, the other, I mean, the varieties of religious experience, that is still one of the best
1:07:28 explorations of mystical experiences, the chapter on mystical experiences. You know, a lot of it’s a
1:07:36 psychological study and an attempt to define mystical experiences. And his definition still stands to this
1:07:40 day. But at the end, actually, it’s interesting. He says, he asked the question,
1:07:47 Would it be rational to trust a mystical experience? Suppose I’m having this mystical experience that
1:07:53 seems to me there’s this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. Would it be rational to
1:07:58 trust that? I think many people would say, well, no, it’s just something funny going on in your brain.
1:08:06 You know, it could be a delusion. But James says, well, we all think it’s okay to trust our ordinary
1:08:13 sensory experiences. But, you know, that could be a delusion. We could be in the matrix. This could all
1:08:18 be a dream. And you could say, well, we could test our senses, but only by using your senses. So it’s kind
1:08:25 of circular. So all knowledge has to start with just a decision to trust your experience. It’s a sort of
1:08:32 double standard. If you say it’s okay to trust ordinary sensory experiences, fallible as they are,
1:08:38 but it’s not okay for someone having a mystical experience to trust what that seems to be telling
1:08:43 them about reality. There’s a sort of double standard. What justifies that? And I mean, there’s a big
1:08:49 debate, but you know, it is a really important and challenging point in foundational thinkings about
1:08:55 knowledge. Highly recommend William James. Also, if people want an adjunct to that, there’s a book
1:09:00 called The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences, the newer book, 21st Century Research and Perspectives by
1:09:08 a scientist named David Yaden, Y-A-D-E-N out of Johns Hopkins. And that is also worth taking a gander at
1:09:16 if you are particularly interested in mystical experiences, what that means, and the different,
1:09:24 I suppose, flavors of reality that can entail. Let’s come back to Bertrand Russell. And the way I’m going
1:09:30 to make this segue is I’m going to read something from your notes that you sent me as possible
1:09:36 exploration for this conversation. So your last book, Why? Explored the middle ground between God
1:09:41 and atheism. Now I’m going to paraphrase this just to make a third person, or a second person, I guess.
1:09:47 You came out as a heretical Christian, which caused a big reaction, a heated discussion within the
1:09:51 philosophical community, the traditional Christian saying you weren’t really a Christian because you
1:09:56 didn’t have the correct beliefs, quote unquote, and atheist philosopher saying that you’d lost your mind.
1:10:05 Okay. And Bertrand Russell has a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. And I’m wondering, you can edge
1:10:11 into this however you would like, but I’m curious what you think he gets right or wrong in that book,
1:10:17 since you see him very familiar with his work. And then I would love for you just to explain what it
1:10:19 means for you to be a heretical Christian.
1:10:25 Maybe I could just do those the other way around, because it might sort of help see where I’m coming.
1:10:31 I mean, this has been quite a journey, really. I didn’t think I would return to religion. I mean,
1:10:36 I was raised Catholic, actually, going to church every week. I was a terrible altar boy. I was always
1:10:43 forgetting to ring the bells at the right time. And anyway, but by the time I was 14, I decided God
1:10:50 didn’t exist. And I refused to get confirmed upsetting my grandmother. My mom sent me to see the priest who
1:10:57 tried Pascal’s wager on me, but it didn’t work. Anyway, you know, I spent the next 30 years an
1:11:03 atheist. But I think I’ve always been a spiritual person. You know, I’ve always talked about mystical
1:11:10 experience in some sense, had a sense that there’s a deeper reality at the core of things. But you know,
1:11:18 I engaged with it in my own way through engagement with nature, meditation, yoga classes, you know,
1:11:24 and so on. I was a part of the ever-growing grouping of spiritual but not religious.
1:11:32 More recently, I suppose, I guess, at least for me, I’ve come to see the value of the things
1:11:38 I had in that religious community in my upbringing. You know, I think for all its faults, you know,
1:11:46 I think religion has a unique way of bringing the community together, you know, through rituals that
1:11:53 mark the changing of the seasons and the big moments of life, you know, birth, coming of age,
1:12:00 marriage, death, through rich tradition, you know, going back thousands of years. And so, like, I suppose
1:12:06 at some point it seemed to me that being spiritual but not religious, you know, I’m just talking for
1:12:14 myself now, we’re starting to feel a bit, maybe a bit lonely, a bit unstructured, almost aimless. And I guess I’ve
1:12:19 come to think over time that, and this is what my new book I’ve just started this week is on, there are ways of
1:12:27 engaging with traditional religion, maybe get into, that avoid some of the real worries that people have with
1:12:35 religion, dogmatic certainties or, you know, things we could go into, but which also allow you to gain
1:12:44 some benefits, like a community, structured practice, a rich tradition. And, you know, I suppose what I’m
1:12:51 interested in is just, I’ve come to find that works for me, and I suppose I’d just like to raise that
1:12:56 possibility for others. So I’m not here saying, oh, this is the one true faith you’ve got to believe,
1:13:00 I’m just saying, look, I’m interested in different experiments in living. And I think there’s a way
1:13:08 of engaging with religion that perhaps not everyone is fully aware of. And so that’s what I’m trying to
1:13:12 do there. But anyway, Bertrand Russell, yeah, I’ve talked more about this sort of personal things there,
1:13:19 but on the intellectual matters, you know, there’s this bloody perennial debate between
1:13:27 believers and atheists, you know, which side are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope, you know,
1:13:36 who’s right, which team are you on? And I’ve just come to find over time, I think both sides of getting
1:13:41 something right and something wrong. I think there’s things, traditional believers in God,
1:13:46 at least the, you know, Western gods struggle to explain like the horrific suffering, why the hell
1:13:53 would God allow cancer and earthquakes and all that? I think there’s also things that atheists,
1:13:57 traditional atheists struggle to explain. One thing I’ve focused a lot on recent work in my why book is
1:14:03 the fine tuning of physics for life. This surprising discovery that for life to be possible,
1:14:10 certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range, such that it’s actually
1:14:15 incredibly improbable that a universe like ours would have the right numbers for life just by chance.
1:14:20 You know, that’s something it’s hard to make sense of on a normal atheistic picture. So what I try to do
1:14:27 in the why book really is just, but let’s just have a think about middle ground options. Maybe there are
1:14:32 elegant middle ground options that can avoid the difficulties on both sides. I’m now coming to
1:14:38 Russell. You might think I’m like a politician dodging the question, but well, this fine tuning
1:14:45 of physics for life wasn’t there when Russell was alive. It’s just since the 70s, 80s, I mean,
1:14:51 the late 90s, the cosmological constant, which is to do with dark energy and the acceleration of the
1:14:58 universe. That was only 1998, I think. So this just wasn’t there for Russell. And I annoy people on X.
1:15:04 I’ve really wound people up by saying that Bertrand Russell would probably believe in cosmic
1:15:09 purpose now because he followed the evidence where it leads. But you know, the evidence wasn’t there in
1:15:14 his day. And, uh, you know, but I think he would have followed that evidence. It’s hard for human
1:15:19 beings to do, isn’t it? To sort of, you know, you get used to one thing and then the evidence changes.
1:15:24 And the economist Keynes, there’s a famous incident. A journalist said to him, you didn’t
1:15:29 used to think that. And he said, well, when the facts change, I changed my mind. What do you do,
1:15:31 sir? That’s really hard for human beings to do.
1:15:36 All right. So let’s talk about Bertrand Russell following the evidence and cosmic purpose. Cause
1:15:42 I want to explore this. I know very little about, I suppose, how you might describe cosmic purpose.
1:15:47 And I would like to hear more. So when people hear you perhaps refer to the constants for life
1:15:52 on earth, right? The 30 or so fundamental constants. I mean, there is an argument to be made that,
1:15:57 well, life would only appear if these things existed, therefore, yada, yada, yada. But we
1:16:05 don’t need to delve into that. What I’m curious about is when people hear you say that, and that it is
1:16:13 incredibly unlikely to happen by chance, they might take that to imply some type of primary mover,
1:16:27 a.k.a. a god of some type. Does cosmic purpose require someone to be a theist, to believe in a
1:16:27 god or gods?
1:16:36 No, no. I mean, I wouldn’t go for the very traditional idea of god as all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly
1:16:43 good, because then you’ve got the problem of suffering. I’m bothered by what both sides struggle
1:16:49 with, and this is why I annoy everybody, you know, because I’m annoying both sides of this debate.
1:16:55 I think there are options, middle ground options, that can deal with the fine-tuning
1:17:03 in terms of some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness without going to the very traditional
1:17:08 god and getting to suffering. So in the why book, I explore a few different possibilities.
1:17:16 One is maybe laws of nature with purposes built into them. So we don’t have some kind of
1:17:24 mind behind the universe setting things up. There’s just a sort of fundamental tendency in reality
1:17:31 towards certain goals, maybe the emergence of life. Now this sounds a bit, in itself, a bit wacky and
1:17:39 mystical. But actually, a couple of our most rigorous philosophers, Daniel Nolan and John Hawthorne,
1:17:46 have actually given a very detailed, rigorous mathematical account of what such a, what we
1:17:53 call teleological laws, so telos from the Greek purpose, laws with purposes built into them would
1:18:00 look like. So I think like, it ends up being, you could just have a scientific proposal of just a
1:18:05 different way of thinking about laws of nature. It’s weird in a cultural sense, but that is one
1:18:14 option. I mean, another option is something closer to the traditional god, but a tweak on it. I’ve explored
1:18:22 the idea of maybe a god of limited powers, who’s just not able to do whatever they want. And you know,
1:18:28 I think we could be quite precise about what those limitations might be to yield the world we find.
1:18:33 Or the simulation hypothesis, Nick Bostrom’s famous for exploring, and David Chalmers in his recent book,
1:18:39 Reality Plus. You know, maybe we’re in a computer simulation, and there’s some random software
1:18:44 engineer who set it all up. Very finally, I’ve talked too much already. The view I explore in
1:18:50 most detail in the book is the idea that the universe itself is conscious, which again, sounds a bit
1:18:56 extravagant at first, but actually, if you’re already a panpsychist, I think that’s already a plausible view.
1:19:02 You already think perhaps that the universe is conscious, because you think fields are the
1:19:07 fundamental physical things. Then it’s perhaps not too much of a step to think what this fundamental
1:19:16 conscious thing might have certain goal-directed states, even if it’s a very alien, strange mind,
1:19:22 very different to us. I just think we get stuck in these dichotomies. Let’s just explore these
1:19:23 different options.
1:19:33 So question for you on the intersection of your childhood with where you are now, I suppose, or maybe the
1:19:43 trajectory. How did you decide to become an atheist at age 14? Was it the omnipotent, omnibenevolent
1:19:48 contradiction with suffering in the world? Was there something else that triggered it? How did you decide
1:19:54 that? I think it was a mix of things. Yeah, the problem of evil and suffering was part of it on the
1:20:00 intellectual side. Also ethical things. You know, I thought Christianity had backward views on women and
1:20:08 sexuality and, you know, time I was questioning my sexuality. And also, I think, I mean, I think fundamentally, I just
1:20:14 thought Christianity in particular was very unspiritual. You know, I thought Buddhism is spiritual, but
1:20:21 Christianity is about doing what the old guy in the sky wants so you get to heaven. But I mean, what I’ve
1:20:27 discovered more recently, and this is part of why I’ve returned to this slightly non-standard form of
1:20:35 religion, engagement with religion, is the mystical traditions of Christianity, which have always been
1:20:41 there right back to the start, but are perhaps more prominent in the Eastern Orthodox Church,
1:20:48 where there’s less emphasis on sin. My childhood, it was all about sin. But for the Eastern Orthodox
1:20:54 Church, there’s nothing to do with God wanting to find someone to punish for our sins. That’s not a
1:21:02 part of the picture at all. In fact, that was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. A lot of
1:21:06 people in the US think that’s the essence of Christianity. Anyway, but for the Eastern Orthodox Church,
1:21:15 it’s the fundamental story is about God and the universe becoming one, entering into a deep state
1:21:21 of unity. That’s really the core of it. And I mean, this I had nothing about in my Catholic upbringing,
1:21:29 but it’s something that deeply resonates with me and, you know, makes sense of a lot of my deeper
1:21:34 spiritual experiences. I suppose, you know, it’s those elements of mysticism I thought were in
1:21:40 just in Hinduism, Buddhism, but are actually present, not just in Christianity, but, you know,
1:21:45 you’ve got Kabbalah in Judaism, you’ve got Sufism in Islam. That’s what I’m researching at the moment,
1:21:51 these wonderful Islamic traditions. I’m reading a book, a classic book, looking at the exploration
1:21:56 between Stoicism that I know you’re interested in and Sufism in Islamic,
1:22:01 the mysticism of Islamic philosophy. So yeah, so I think there’s always been that mystical component
1:22:07 and a way of engaging that’s, you know, less dogmatic and certain. Maybe you don’t know it’s true.
1:22:10 Maybe it’s something you hope is true. Maybe you take it as a beautiful metaphor.
1:22:15 There are these ways of doing it. And I think churches and synagogues would be a more interesting
1:22:23 place if they were full of people, more full of people engaging with it in this way. I like
1:22:26 conservatives. I don’t hate conservatives and traditionalists, but I think there can be a
1:22:34 natural balance of progressives and conservatives. You know, the conservatives saying, you know,
1:22:38 let’s not throw everything away too quickly. And the progressives saying, hold on, we need to update a
1:22:42 bit. And in religion, it’s gone a little bit too much dominated by traditionalists. And I think it
1:22:48 would be nice if we mixed it up a bit. And that’s what I’m trying to press in the book I’ve just
1:22:49 started.
1:22:53 We’re going to come back to some of your deeper spiritual experiences. I’m wondering if you could
1:23:01 share one or two, but I also want to say that a lot of people listening or watching probably associate
1:23:07 me with Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, but I actually have more books and more poetry related to Sufism in
1:23:14 my house than anything related to Stoicism. I have quite a bit on Stoicism, but also sponsored a statue
1:23:22 here in Austin in a statue garden. And this particular statue is of St. Francis of Assisi.
1:23:29 And we could talk about Merton. I mean, there are origin stories that involve mystical slash direct
1:23:35 experience in most, if not all of the major traditions people listening would recognize.
1:23:41 And the Immortality Key is actually quite interesting read for people who haven’t checked it out, Brian
1:23:48 Murarescu. But let’s come back to your deeper experiences. Are you willing to share one or two of
1:23:49 those?
1:23:56 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ll have to get some recommendations from you on Sufism. Let me think. I mean, I suppose
1:24:03 what I’ve found, what I’ve been thinking recently is what I like about this Eastern Orthodox way of
1:24:13 thinking about mystical experience is that it’s very close to certain things we find in Hindu mysticism,
1:24:26 wisdom like Advaita Vedanta. But the end goal that you’re aiming at still involves love and sociality.
1:24:32 I mean, I was watching something by a very good Hindu mystic, who I’m actually going to be in conversation with
1:24:39 in a few months, talking about a metaphor that the ultimate goal is with the analogy of an ice cube
1:24:44 melting in the ocean. You know, you just lose your identity, you’re sort of absorbed in the divine,
1:24:53 right? Whereas in the Eastern Orthodox conception of Christianity, the ultimate goal is still,
1:25:02 it involves unity, but still difference, right? It’s unity with God, with other people. I mean,
1:25:09 I suppose what I see reflected in the Eucharist and it’s the sociality, a mystical sociality that is
1:25:17 a deep sense of kind of binding people together and to something bigger. So I suppose that’s part of
1:25:24 what’s really resonated with me. And this is not some big overwhelming mystical experience, but it’s
1:25:34 making sense of those experiences that have always been there at my more spiritual moments. I find
1:25:44 actually that the soft light of first very early morning or dusk, I find somehow most spiritual. I
1:25:49 don’t know why that is, making sense of these experiences. Actually, I mean, just one more thing.
1:25:53 It was just Ash Wednesday this week, the start of Lenten. It was.
1:26:01 You know, I’m in an Anglican church where you get the ashes and it really touches me what they say
1:26:09 when they say, remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. I think what it does to me is,
1:26:17 you know, I’ve had some worldly success in academia to an extent in public stuff. And I think at the moment
1:26:24 of that being done, I think it was maybe last year, I think I had a very vivid sense of how my sense of
1:26:33 myself was getting a bit reliant on that and dependent on, you know, success and, you know,
1:26:39 my sense of who I was. And that just being told, you know, kind of brought me a bit to tears that you
1:26:44 are dust and to dust you. You know, and I think that’s, I’ve been reading actually the great Christian
1:26:50 mystic who was tried for heresy, Meister Eckhart. And reading about, you know, I always thought,
1:26:55 I guess the focus on sin that was always from my childhood. I thought like, again, for Lent,
1:27:00 you know, abstaining, I thought that’s about sin and punishing yourself and you’ve got to feel sad.
1:27:07 But the way Eckhart sees it is, and the way he interprets passages from the Bible about sacrifice,
1:27:15 it’s just about getting away from your reliance on these things, your sense of yourself, your sense
1:27:23 of happiness, getting down to something more real and fundamental at the core. And so some of the ways in
1:27:29 which through engaging with a rich tradition, I’ve delved deeper into and explored my spiritual
1:27:30 experiences, I suppose.
1:27:37 So you said the next 30 years as an atheist. So it seems like you’ve in some form come back into
1:27:42 the fold. Maybe you have some sunglasses and a fake mustache, but you’ve come back into the fold in
1:27:49 some sense. What triggered that? What was the, I mean, maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back
1:27:56 isn’t the right metaphor to use, but was there a conversation, a moment, a period of difficulty?
1:28:00 What catalyzed that?
1:28:06 I’d say again, as with leaving, it was a mixture of things. I could talk about the intellectual stuff
1:28:13 we’ve already touched on, I suppose, was starting to think both sides of the God-atheism debate of
1:28:18 something right and something wrong. And there’s got to be more to it though. There’s got to be more
1:28:19 like direct experience.
1:28:22 That was the intellectual stuff. That was the intellectual stuff. And that’s what led to my
1:28:27 why book, which was earlier, at least when I wrote it, it was earlier to all this. But then on the
1:28:32 spiritual level, well, I guess it’s what I said learning more about just from conversations with
1:28:40 different kinds of Christian thinkers. Joanna Leidenhag is a young panpsychist theologian
1:28:48 who writes on how panpsychism fits much better with a spiritual conception of reality. And
1:28:53 actually, I should say there’s a bit of a divide on this. Many panpsychists like David Chalmers,
1:29:00 Luke Rolofs, Angela Mendelovici, a very secular atheist. I think Chalmers is a bit annoyed that I’m
1:29:06 getting into religion. It’s like, we’re trying to get this serious science. People are going to think
1:29:13 it’s all just religion. But other panpsychists, Hedahas and Merck, Itai Shani, do see a consonance
1:29:18 with panpsychism. So learning about the mystical traditions, learning about these conceptions of
1:29:22 God, where God and the universe are not totally distinct. I’m not even sure I want to use the
1:29:24 word God, you know, but I’ve started now.
1:29:26 Tricky one, that, yeah.
1:29:31 Maybe there’s some overlap, maybe like a Venn diagram, you know, there’s God on one side,
1:29:36 us on the other, and there’s sort of overlap in the middle. I interpret Meister Eckhart as
1:29:42 holding something like that. Maybe that’s why he got in trouble. So that was part of it. And
1:29:46 I don’t know. So, I mean, one final thing, I don’t know how much of interest this is,
1:29:50 but I mean, I always have problems with the resurrection because I mean, one, it’s not just
1:29:54 there being miracles, although that’s part of it. You know, my answer to why there’s suffering
1:30:00 is if there is a God in whatever sense, they can’t do anything about it, right? Or there’s
1:30:05 just, there isn’t a God who’s letting that happen. But if there’s a God who can raise people from
1:30:10 the dead, you know, then we’re back to, well, why don’t you do that more often? But anyway,
1:30:18 I was reading one of my favorite biblical scholars, a guy called Dale Allison, who’s a wonderful
1:30:26 free thinker. He’s always exploring both sides of a position and ending up places he wouldn’t like
1:30:30 to be, maybe on a certain point of biblical interpretation. He’d like to be more liberal
1:30:34 and he ends up having a slightly more conservative. Anyway, but he’s got a wonderful recent book on the
1:30:41 resurrection exploring non-standard versions of the resurrection were, for example, that the
1:30:48 resurrection experiences of the first Christians were visionary, almost mystical experiences rather
1:30:54 than seeing and touching a body. And I was debating that this, it’s been a busy week. I was debating
1:31:00 that with, on Wednesday with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of William Lane Craig, who is perhaps one of
1:31:05 the biggest, most influential Christian philosophers, but he’s very, very, very, very traditional.
1:31:11 You know, I mean, if you’re not Christian, you’re going to hell, you know, very traditional. And
1:31:20 we had a lovely, very, very fiery debate this week. And as I knew he would be, he studies his debating
1:31:27 opponents and he was straight in there. Panpsychism is, you know, incoherent, unscientific. This view of the
1:31:33 resurrection is unhistorical, doesn’t make sense. But anyway, we had a, I responded and kind of went,
1:31:39 that’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out. But, but yeah, so I suppose it was those three things has been a bit
1:31:46 long winded. It was the intellectual stuff, that these middle ground options between God and atheism. It was the
1:31:55 spiritual stuff, discovering these mystical traditions that resonate with me deeply. It was this weird view of the
1:31:59 resurrection. It was discovering, actually, there’s been a big movement in philosophy of religion, thinking
1:32:07 about the nature of faith. Reading, actually, Karen Armstrong, a wonderful historian of religion, who has
1:32:15 argued that this focus on belief being so important in religion is like a modern corruption. She traces it
1:32:21 back, actually. If we look at the word pistis in the New Testament that we translate as belief,
1:32:27 it actually doesn’t mean belief in the modern sense. It has connotations of trust, engagement,
1:32:33 commitment. And interestingly, when we first translated the Bible into English in, was it 15th,
1:32:39 16th, 17th century, the word believe, the English word belief was closer to that. It’s close to the
1:32:45 German word believe and to love. It had connotations of commitment, engagement. She quotes
1:32:50 from a Shakespeare play, All’s Well That Ends Well, I think. There’s a character, Bertram, who’s
1:32:59 looking down on Helena because she’s lowborn, and he’s told, believe not thy disdain. Believe not thy
1:33:04 disdain. So that means sort of don’t have your heart in it. So actually, then the word believe changes
1:33:08 meaning with the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution. Now it means just sort of
1:33:14 intellectual commitment to a hypothesis about reality. So now we think that’s what you read
1:33:20 the New Testament and you feel like Jesus talking about belief and you think, oh, he really cares
1:33:25 about what propositions of reality you believe. That’s what salvation depends. Whereas actually,
1:33:30 it was more about commitment, having your heart in things. So I think realizing there are the ways of
1:33:34 engagement, you don’t have to think, this is definitely true. I felt like I was in my Catholic
1:33:38 upbringing. This is the answer. It’s definitely true. You can be highly uncertain. You can take it as a
1:33:44 metaphor. You can take it as a hope. You can trust it. You can be a bit heretical. And so yeah,
1:33:50 all of these things opened up this way of engaging. And once I went down there, I’ve just got so much
1:33:55 out of it. It’s the structure, the community, the depth of engagement has really worked for me.
1:34:01 Let’s dig into that just a little bit. I would love to ask a few more questions because a few things
1:34:07 hop to mind. The first, and I have in fact checked this, I’m no religious historian. So my apologies to
1:34:12 anyone who’s offended by this, but I recall someone credible, I won’t mention their name,
1:34:16 saying to me, they’re like, you know, it’s really a shame. There’s so much friction oftentimes,
1:34:22 at least in the Middle East, between Jews and Muslims, because they have a few things that are
1:34:28 quite similar. And the way it was positioned to me was in Christianity, it’s very important what you
1:34:38 believe. But in Judaism and in Islam, it’s more important, perhaps what you do. And heavily
1:34:43 ritualized, that can also be true in Christianity, of course. And I’ve thought about that. And then I’m
1:34:49 going to make an awkward transition to my friend, A.J. Jacobs, who wrote a book called The Year of Living
1:34:57 Biblically, in which he tried to follow all the Rules of the Old and New Testament. It’s intended to be a
1:35:04 funny, but also very informative read. I learned a lot about religion from that book. But the way he put
1:35:09 it, when he was describing his upbringing, he was raised Jewish, he said, and I’m paraphrasing,
1:35:20 I was raised Jewish, but I am to Judaism as Olive Garden is to Italian. So Olive Garden is, of course,
1:35:28 just this fast food chain here where you can get free breadsticks. So he was socially and culturally
1:35:35 Jewish, but not ideologically religiously Jewish at that point. And this is going to be a whole
1:35:44 word salad of things I’m throwing out. But I wonder then how well you can build a community
1:35:53 or have that social fabric that religion provides, which I am often hungry for, if I’m being honest.
1:36:00 I think there’s uncontroversially an epidemic of loneliness, and there are a million reasons for
1:36:08 that, only some of which I’m sure we’re even aware of. But mental illness, diagnoses of chronic anxiety,
1:36:14 treatment-resistant depression, etc., all seem to be in some type of parabolic incline. And I think
1:36:19 connection is, I don’t want to say the antidote, but one of the strong kind of countervailing
1:36:24 options for addressing that. And religion is appealing on that level. My parents started
1:36:31 going to church maybe 15 years ago after never going to church, precisely for that reason. But I’m
1:36:39 wondering how well you can cohere as a community if you don’t truly believe. There’s an article,
1:36:46 I suppose an essay, called Why Strict Churches Make Strong Churches that talks about this and the
1:36:52 freeloader problem and things like that. But what has been your experience in terms of the benefit you
1:37:00 derive from a community and the degree of belief in Scripture? Because man, oh man, if we’re talking
1:37:08 about Deuteronomy, Leviticus, I mean, if you start taking all that stuff literally, it paints a pretty
1:37:15 rough picture for things. How do you think about that? Like, is true belief in Scripture a prerequisite
1:37:25 for adherence to the type of rituals and so on that help bond a community? Or is that not the case?
1:37:31 These are great questions that I’m still reflecting on and I’m still thinking about.
1:37:37 And I think you’re certainly right in the present moment, at least in the Jewish community.
1:37:45 There’s more of an openness to this being a cultural phenomenon and belief being less important.
1:37:52 I remember, what was the context now? A young Jewish woman tweeted at me, maybe when I was talking
1:37:59 about this religious stuff, oh yeah, my rabbi said when I was going to have my bar mitzvah and I said,
1:38:04 oh, I don’t believe in God. And the rabbi said, no, no, no, the rules don’t have any gods but me.
1:38:08 Right? So it’s a negative. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe at all. Just don’t have any other
1:38:14 gods. That was a nice twist. I suppose what I’d like to see is just a little bit more openness
1:38:23 to that in the Christian community. And to what extent is it possible? I mean, certainly Karen
1:38:32 Armstrong thinks this kind of focus, strong focus on belief is a more recent adaptation. Her book,
1:38:37 I mean, her great book, The Case for God, which is a bad title, I think, because you think it’s going
1:38:46 to be some proof of God or something, but it’s not at all. It’s a history of religion and she divides
1:38:53 religion into two epochs. Part one, which she calls the unknown God, which goes from 50,000 BC
1:39:01 to 1500 AD. And then what she calls the modern God is from 1500 AD to the present moment. So she thinks
1:39:06 there is some radical shift in this focus on, you know, with the scientific revolution and the
1:39:13 Protestant reformation on belief, which propositions do you believe? Of course, it has always been true
1:39:20 in Christianity from the early centuries, at least we’ve got, you know, from the fourth century when
1:39:24 the Roman empire under Constantine became Christian, you know, we have, he got this council and we have
1:39:30 the official creeds, but it’s another question. It’s a subtly different question. Did you have to
1:39:35 believe them? So there was a big fight about which are the correct ones, but do you have to believe
1:39:42 them? Armstrong thinks if we’re to be more accurate historically, what believe should mean is commit.
1:39:46 So you should be saying, instead of saying, I believe in one God, Father Almighty, you should
1:39:52 be saying, I commit, I engage with that. I have my heart in that. That’s really what they meant by
1:39:58 those terms. And, you know, the emphasis on the non-literal, you know, with the mystical traditions
1:40:05 that have always been there, that they would look at an allegorical understanding as in some sense,
1:40:09 I mean, Origen, who I’ve been researching for this new book, who was, when’s Origen? Second century,
1:40:16 I think. He was in a sense, a bit of a heretic, but he was sort of before it was properly defined,
1:40:20 but he’s one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the early days, one of the fathers
1:40:27 of the church. And he had this idea of the three levels of understanding scripture. The first level
1:40:31 is the literal meaning, you know, what stuff, what people did, if there’s miracles and so on. Yeah,
1:40:36 that’s okay. But then the next stage is the moral, right? What is the moral meaning? And
1:40:42 then the deeper and higher stage, he thought, was the allegorical. And what is going on here
1:40:44 at a spiritual allegorical level?
1:40:52 What would be an example of an allegorical understanding of a portion of the Bible or a story?
1:41:00 Let’s just take the central idea of Jesus, right? I mean, what has always resonated with me with that,
1:41:07 even when I, my long period of not being any part of this, was the almost sort of turning upside down
1:41:13 of worldly values that were identifying God, not with the king in the castle, you know,
1:41:20 but with the naked, executed peasant, right? The guy who hangs out with outcasts. And that was,
1:41:25 I mean, his wonderful recent book, Dominion by Tom Holland, which is again, a history of the influence
1:41:32 of Christianity. What a bloody radical idea that was. It was ridiculous that, you know, some of the
1:41:39 earliest critiques of Christianity very, very early were sort of the figure of the crucified Jesus with
1:41:46 a donkey head on. It was just ridiculous that this was the most humiliating punishment. And what this
1:41:51 is supposed to be God, I mean, this is, whether that’s literally true, whether it, but what it stands
1:41:58 for, to me, it reveals something deep and ultimate, whether or not it’s literally true, deep and ultimate
1:42:04 about what is important and what is of value. The first shall be last, the last shall be first. And
1:42:09 I don’t know, sometimes with Christianity at the moment in the US, it doesn’t, it seems like this
1:42:14 is a little bit forgotten, but Holland talks about what an impact it had on the Roman empire,
1:42:21 that suddenly, you know, the poor and the weak had moral value to Roman aristocrats. This is like,
1:42:24 wait, what are you talking about? Another thing he talks about, actually, I’ve always thought,
1:42:30 I don’t have a traditional view on sexual ethics in Christianity, but he talks about actually how
1:42:39 valuable no sex before marriage was in those early days, because we’re talking of a time when slaves
1:42:48 and women had no rights, obviously. And to an extent, obviously a limited extent, it prevented rape,
1:42:54 because if you were going to be a Christian Roman, you had to wait till marriage. And,
1:42:59 you know, obviously this didn’t work, but you can see a role for it. Maybe it’s a role that
1:43:05 we don’t need to so much cling to that original meaning. I mean, like in the way, here’s a good
1:43:09 example of what’s changed with Christianity. It used to be totally universal. You couldn’t charge
1:43:16 interest. That was a sin. Now, you know, these days, yeah, usury. These days, no Christians
1:43:21 that I know of hold that because of our understanding of the modern market economy. We reinterpret these
1:43:27 things. But what about being gay, right? Why haven’t we re-understood that? I mean, many Christians
1:43:31 have, but many Christians haven’t in a modern understanding of sexuality. I think that’s because
1:43:36 there are fewer liberals and progressives in the church now. And, you know, I mean, it has changed.
1:43:40 It has, in my church, the English church, we haven’t got all the way to gay marriage, but we’ve got
1:43:46 blessings on gay couples. But yeah, so what my aspiration really is, you know, get more liberals
1:43:51 involved in these things, not to get rid of the traditionalists, but to have that beautiful, healthy
1:43:55 equilibrium. There’s always been that, you know, there’s always been radicals. There’s always been
1:44:01 progressives that have been mixing it up and moving it forward. You know, Aquinas was bloody radical at
1:44:09 the time. Now it’s the official Catholic church philosophy, you know? So I think there’s possibilities
1:44:10 that are unexplored here.
1:44:21 Without your childhood experience with Catholicism, do you think you would have returned to, in some form,
1:44:27 or re-entered Christianity? Or do you think, since you mentioned, at one point at least,
1:44:34 you felt that Buddhism or Hinduism were more spiritual, do you think you would have perhaps
1:44:37 ended up in a different camp, slightly different camp?
1:44:44 One thing I will say just to preface that is, it’s not obviously wrong to me that you will
1:44:52 choose what you feel culturally comfortable with. Because I think these matters are very uncertain.
1:44:56 I mean, if you get to a point where you think, no, this religion, this other religion, different to the
1:45:01 one I was raised with, definitely, definitely true. Then, you know, okay, probably the rational thing to do
1:45:08 is to convert. But if you’re like, in a situation where it’s very uncertain whether any religion is
1:45:13 true, it’s very uncertain which. And I think it makes sense if you’re from a Muslim background,
1:45:21 that fits with your identity. And it would be such a shift to become a Christian. Maybe even if you
1:45:25 think, if you happen to think, I’m not saying they should think this, but if they think Christianity is
1:45:30 a bit more likely to be true. But if it’s still so uncertain, you know, I think it could be rational
1:45:36 to just stay with what’s going to really work for you and fit with your community and your identity. I don’t
1:45:39 think God cares that much which team you’re on.
1:45:45 William Lane Craig would absolutely kill me for saying that. But I suppose it matters. I suppose it matters
1:45:50 if you think you’re going to hell if you’re not Christian. He’s got a good answer. I researched him a lot
1:45:54 for this debate we had this week. And I discovered he’s got a good answer to the question of what about
1:46:00 countries who’ve never heard of the gospel, right? And so don’t become Christian, you know,
1:46:05 more so in history, but even to the present day. His answer is, well, they wouldn’t have turned to
1:46:10 Jesus anyway, because God knows what you’re going to do. And God has set things up that they wouldn’t
1:46:19 have become Christians anyway. So it’s okay that they’re going to hell. Anyway, I mean, he’s a great
1:46:25 philosopher, a very bright guy, and probably the most influential Christian thinker at the moment.
1:46:26 So we need to balance things out.
1:46:32 That’s a tough one. That type of like sort of theological determinism. It raises questions
1:46:38 about the value of all those missionaries that have been sent about. Or then we get into free will and
1:46:39 like all sorts of stuff.
1:46:44 He does. He’s got a complex story. He does believe in free will. He thinks it’s compatible to say you’ve
1:46:48 got free will, but God knows what you’re going to freely do. This is part of what we debated,
1:46:52 actually. I don’t think that makes coherent sense. But anyway, just to answer your question,
1:46:58 I mean, who knows? It’s partly cultural, but, you know, I do find things of, I mean, this
1:47:04 Eastern Orthodox way of mystical tradition makes a lot of sense of my spiritual experiences for the,
1:47:09 I think at the moment for me, more so than the Hindu stuff I used to believe in,
1:47:15 for me personally, at least. And I just, I do love the teaching and character of Jesus. And I just
1:47:20 think he was, I did a talk recently, I don’t know if I should say, I did talk recently at a very,
1:47:25 very right-wing audience in Oxford on this stuff. And I said, those of you who haven’t read the Bible,
1:47:30 Jesus is pretty damn woke. I was just trying to wipe people up. But anyway.
1:47:35 That’s a hell of a Molotov cocktail of an opener for that audience.
1:47:36 He had a bit of a gasp.
1:47:37 Yeah.
1:47:43 You know, the story of the Good Samaritan, right? Which is, Jesus told that story because he was
1:47:48 asked, who is my neighbor, right? And why did he tell a story about a Samaritan? Because they were
1:47:55 the hated ethnic group of his listeners, right? So, you know, I said to this audience, if he was
1:47:58 telling that story today, the Good Samaritan would be, I don’t know, a Muslim immigrant or
1:48:03 a trans woman. Then I did, I thought, try and have a bit of going against polarization. Or maybe
1:48:08 if Jesus was talking to a load of liberals, maybe the Good Samaritan would be wearing a MAGA hat.
1:48:14 Who knows? I don’t know. But, you know, basically you say, look, the people you hate or the people
1:48:21 who are different, they should be. But that’s just like radically light years ahead of its time. I mean,
1:48:28 Tom Holland makes this good case that the ideas of human dignity, which shaped the abolition of
1:48:34 slavery and the civil rights movement were rooted in these radical ideas of equal human dignity.
1:48:38 So I do think there’s, you know, there’s something very special for me there. But at the end of the
1:48:39 day, these matters are very uncertain.
1:48:49 So aside from the, I have to ask again, forgive me, but aside from the beauty of the liminal spaces
1:48:55 during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk and the beautiful red of a sunset, have you
1:48:59 experienced anything you would describe as a mystical experience?
1:49:06 I would say not full blown, no, not to the two terms I could use. I suppose I think a mystical
1:49:11 experience is the more full on thing, but then there’s this wonderful term, numinous, to mean
1:49:11 the sort of…
1:49:12 It’s a great word.
1:49:16 A sense of, maybe mini mystical experience.
1:49:17 Mystical light.
1:49:23 I mean, I did psychedelics when I was a teenager and, you know, had some very deep experiences.
1:49:28 I don’t know why I didn’t sort of in, in my twenties and thirties, but now I’ve got young
1:49:36 kids. It’s hard to find time to do some psychedelics or have a 17th dimension, have a, have a 10 day
1:49:41 meditation retreat. Annika Harris is always telling me I’ve got to do a 10 day meditate. I don’t know
1:49:46 why I didn’t actually do that when I had the chance, but yeah, I mean, as I get older, actually
1:49:50 before I proposed to my wife, she didn’t know I was going to propose. I was talking about
1:49:55 like, when I retire, what do you do when you retire and play golf? I want to have a sort
1:50:00 of semi monastic existence, you know, kind of long period. And she was like, why are you
1:50:03 telling me this? I don’t know. I just wanted to know.
1:50:07 She’s like, Oh fuck. What did I sign up for here?
1:50:12 Well, I wanted her to know this before I asked her. We were in the mountains in Austria and
1:50:16 then we went outside and I said, do you want to marry me? Anyway. But yeah, so I think, I
1:50:20 think I would like to, you know, maybe when the kids are, as I get older, I don’t want to
1:50:26 carry on trying to be, what am I trying to do? I don’t know, be successful in whatever
1:50:30 I’m trying to do for the rest of my, this is one thing actually that’s religion has helped
1:50:35 me with the thing. You know, you never find happiness that way. It’s never enough. You
1:50:40 know, you want to sell more books or get more views or get more money. I have an idea that
1:50:48 I want to, as I get older, slowly lapse into monasticism. Maybe a bit of help from some
1:50:52 ayahuasca or something, but yeah. So maybe I’ll have more mystical experience at that point.
1:50:57 But I think at the moment I would say I’m confined to the numinous. And to that extent, you know,
1:51:02 it’s evidentially, it’s, it’s not that significant. You know, I’m open to, it could be a delusion,
1:51:08 you know, but I’m choosing, thanks to William James’s inspiration, I’m choosing to trust these
1:51:14 numinous experiences and to trust this Christian mystical way of understanding them and to work
1:51:19 with them and engage with them. And, and I’m loving it. I’m getting a lot out of it. And,
1:51:23 you know, people think religion is all about the afterlife or something, but I’ve found living
1:51:29 in hope of a greater purpose has made me less bothered about my personal success. And it’s just
1:51:34 really opened me up a lot more to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer friends,
1:51:35 family, and so on.
1:51:41 So I want to explain something I said earlier, which was related to the number of books on
1:51:49 Sufism. And the reason for that is not a particular interest in Islam, although I do think there
1:51:56 are interesting aspects of that to explore. And if you’re interested in Dune, the book and not
1:52:00 the movies, although I thought the movies were very well adapted, but they basically stripped
1:52:08 all Arabic and Islamic influence from the book, like Lisan al-Gaib, one of the many Arabic phrases,
1:52:13 the tongue of the unseen. So digging into some of the etymological origins of the words used in Dune
1:52:22 adds another layer of fascination to it. But the reason for these books is because I enjoy the poetry
1:52:32 poetry and I find the poetry to be beautiful and capture for me the, I suppose, essence of mystical
1:52:40 experience, which I’ve been fortunate enough to have myself on a number of occasions incredibly well
1:52:47 without using the G word or other words that I rightly or wrongly have developed somewhat of a mild
1:52:53 allergic reaction to, right? So Christian mystics have some beautiful writing, but it tends to be a
1:53:01 little heavy on God and Jesus for my, and not for my taste, it’s just that the strong connotations
1:53:09 lead my mind to wander when I want to be immersed in the poetry itself. And so if we’re looking at,
1:53:17 say, Halaliza Gafuri’s relatively new translations of Rumi, as an example, or much of the poetry of
1:53:23 Hafez, both of which I would recommend, I can work with taverns. I can work with getting drunk on wine.
1:53:32 I can work with many of the metaphors that are used. The caravan. I mean, many of these evocative phrases
1:53:41 are enough to immerse me in the language. And I think what’s trying to be transmitted without pulling me
1:53:50 into some type of political distraction or childhood experience that subtracts rather from adds to the
1:53:56 experience. So a lot of it is poetry, not all, but a lot of it is certainly poetry. And then broadly
1:54:04 speaking, I suppose mystics, and I’m sure people would disagree with this, but accounts of firsthand
1:54:11 experience with what they may consider divine. These make for fascinating reading for me.
1:54:17 And certainly if you look at, if you really take a microscope to the origin stories of a lot of
1:54:23 these religions, I mean, it becomes very plausible that most, if not all of them started with direct
1:54:30 experience of some type that rhymes with many of the descriptions you would find in the books that
1:54:37 I’m looking at on my bookshelves as an example. So stoicism can be a little sterile. I’d say stoicism
1:54:48 for me, incredibly helpful, incredibly powerful as a tool for reducing suffering, but it doesn’t,
1:54:57 to my reading of it, give you a whole lot in terms of increasing joy and subtraction alone doesn’t add the
1:55:06 good. So for that, I tend to stray from stoicism into epicureanism and different types of mysticism
1:55:09 and so on. So that’s, that’s the background.
1:55:15 That’s all absolutely fascinating. Well, I’d love to get some of those recommendations. Maybe I’ll just,
1:55:22 for the super literature and poetry and yeah, it sounds, that is really working for you and that’s
1:55:28 wonderful. And yeah, I mean, I think you’re definitely right that the great religions do seem
1:55:35 to begin with experiences. I mean, you know, in the Christian case, it seemed to be what they called
1:55:43 the resurrection, seemed to be this explosion of strong experiences that the early Christians had
1:55:49 after Jesus had died. And you can make of that what you will. I prefer to think of it as visionary
1:55:53 rather than seeing and touching a body. But there does seem to have been some historians thing. I
1:55:59 mean, even atheists, I mean, Bart Ehrman is our best atheist Bible scholar. We’ll certainly concede
1:56:07 that there were these radical experiences by people like Peter and Mary Magdalene that kickstarted the
1:56:11 Christian movement. So I think you’re right, it comes back to experience. But I mean, I share your
1:56:18 issues with the connotations of the word Jesus, the word God. First of all, what I’m trying to do is
1:56:23 shift things. Actually, one thing I wrote on this when I had my going public as a heretical Christian,
1:56:29 I wrote this thing for Eon magazine, people might be interested in. And I borrowed something from
1:56:36 another writer whose name escapes me now. Rather than using the word Jesus, use the Jewish word Yeshua.
1:56:40 Just to kind of defuse it a little bit.
1:56:45 Because I know, I think of a certain kind of US Christian, a certain kind of very distinctive,
1:56:51 which is not what I’m talking about and not my experience. And the word God as well, yeah.
1:56:56 Well, what do you think I should use for God in this book? What should I, you know, the transcendent?
1:56:57 Oh, that’s a tough one.
1:57:04 Actually, do you know, William James used the term the more with a capital M, you know, which I think is a nice.
1:57:05 I like that.
1:57:08 Or the divine, or yeah, I don’t know. It’s all I’m still wrestling with.
1:57:10 Divine’s tricky too.
1:57:11 I like the more.
1:57:15 And I’m going to get a bunch of angry posts on social media.
1:57:23 I don’t have anything against, on some fundamental level, the word God or anything with Jesus either.
1:57:31 It’s just that oftentimes God is not defined well enough to justify the life or death debates
1:57:34 and fighting that happens around the term, if that makes sense.
1:57:40 And there are a lot of words that cause trouble in life if not defined.
1:57:52 I should also just qualify, when I mentioned the direct experience, I was not referring to necessarily the stories in the Bible,
1:58:01 but also the possibility that, for instance, the acacia tree is prevalent in parts of the Middle East.
1:58:07 The root bark of which, it might be the leaves actually, somebody could correct me here, I’m going to be mixing things up,
1:58:16 contain DMT, NNDMT, and then also the prevalence of Syrian rue, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
1:58:19 What else is a combination of those two things?
1:58:21 Ayahuasca, as an example.
1:58:27 So, the point being, to render the NNDMT bioactive, it is entirely possible that people in the ancient world,
1:58:37 as people and animals, by the way, have figured out that certain psychoactives can be sort of orally bioavailable.
1:58:42 This comes back to Brian Murray, as given some of his writing, if people want to explore that.
1:58:48 But this is definitely, it’s definitely a clear and present topic on my mind.
1:58:55 The place of religion and the seemingly, people might come after me for this also,
1:59:00 but like evolved instinct for something resembling religion.
1:59:07 I don’t know if it’s functional, if it’s vestigial, but could be that, and this would be my position,
1:59:10 that I don’t think humans are unique at all in being conscious,
1:59:15 but I do think we may be unique in our awareness of mortality and ultimate death.
1:59:20 And that presents quite a quandary.
1:59:26 And religion offers some, at the very least, salve for that.
1:59:28 Anyway, that isn’t a very pointed question.
1:59:30 It’s more of a rambling.
1:59:36 Fascinating possibility, the role of psychedelic substances in formation of religion.
1:59:39 And, you know, I would say that wouldn’t undermine it, right?
1:59:44 I think that doesn’t mean these experiences are delusions or, you know, and I’ve got hope,
1:59:49 I think as we have engaged more with psychedelics and there is more of an openness.
1:59:53 Actually, you know, I mean, I wrote this book, I modestly titled Why the Purpose of the Universe.
2:00:01 I mean, a similar book was written 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago, 15 years ago nearly,
2:00:06 by the great philosopher Thomas Nagel called Mind and Cosmos.
2:00:09 And he got absolutely destroyed in reviews.
2:00:13 He was saying, oh, he’s lost his mind.
2:00:16 Whereas Thomas Nagel is a better philosopher than me.
2:00:21 I’m not saying this is a better book, but it had a much warmer reception.
2:00:24 It got a five-star review in Popular Science magazine.
2:00:27 It got, you know, I’m honestly not saying this to boast.
2:00:30 I’m not, I just, it’s a sign of cultural change.
2:00:33 Most of the reviews said, I don’t agree with this, but it was a good book.
2:00:39 But anyway, I think that’s a real sign of that there’s a greater openness to some of these
2:00:41 things that are going, it’s certainly a greater openness to spirit.
2:00:44 I think new atheism is a bit passé now, isn’t it?
2:00:47 And I think there’s a great openness to spirituality.
2:00:57 I suppose I’m exploring whether that can connect with traditional religion in a very uncertain,
2:00:59 mildly heretical way.
2:01:02 And whether for some people could get something out of that.
2:01:05 And I’m just trying out that option, I suppose, if you like.
2:01:08 Something interesting seems to be happening, I think.
2:01:10 For sure.
2:01:17 I remember a few years ago, I was at an event, and the topic of the table, we were organized
2:01:19 into small groups for every dinner.
2:01:27 And you would have set topics, and somebody would try to facilitate the said topic or question.
2:01:33 And the topic was something along the lines of, what are your predictions for the next three
2:01:33 to five years?
2:01:36 And this was, I guess, two or three years ago.
2:01:45 And one of the people at my table was one of the strongest figures, biggest figures in the
2:01:48 evangelical Christian movement in the United States.
2:01:52 And we all had a fantastic conversation.
2:01:55 I ended up going first or second.
2:02:03 And my answer was, I think there’s going to be an explosion of interest in…
2:02:08 religions that have seen an exodus on some level over the last few decades.
2:02:18 And there’s also going to be a proliferation of new religions, new churches to meet the hard
2:02:44 and the mass communication through social media and separate the signal from the noise from a sort of scientific, like rational materialist worldview is going to become so hard.
2:03:03 And I’m not saying it’s not a worthwhile objective, but so hard and really impossible for the vast majority of people who are not trained to filter through those things and don’t have firsthand access to scientists, that there will be, for all of those reasons and more, a return to religion.
2:03:12 If you look at also then adding the accelerant of psychedelics to that, which I have very mixed
2:03:16 views on these days, by the way, which is just to say, like the Eleusinian mysteries, okay, if
2:03:22 you have a handful of people after a long time are inducted into consuming some derivative of
2:03:25 ergot, which would be similar to say LSD, that’s one thing.
2:03:34 But when you have the potential of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people taking these substances, nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of humankind.
2:03:37 So we’ll see what type of mixed blessing that is.
2:03:52 But it’s been fascinating to see how many new churches have been established in the U.S., which on some level, I think, are largely created to provide constitutional protection if you are using psychedelics as a sacrament, right?
2:04:09 So it’s a legal protection, but how once the horses are out of the barn and people have formed these churches and religions, they actually become interesting in and of themselves as religions, even without the added psychedelic sacraments.
2:04:21 So you see, say, former conservative Mormons in Utah splintering off and creating religions that incorporate both Christianity and psychedelic use.
2:04:39 And I mean, there’s some itch that these things, whether the sort of Abrahamic traditional religions or the newer religions scratch, that it’s difficult to put a finger on, but it’s also pretty hard to refute, it seems to me.
2:04:39 I don’t know.
2:04:42 I mean, I don’t know what’s going to happen.
2:04:47 I mean, there’s been an increase in paganism here, and my wife’s not religious.
2:04:53 I take the kids to church on my own, and she was thinking of exploring Wicca at some point.
2:04:56 I would have loved to say in church, where’s your wife?
2:04:57 Oh, she’s a witch.
2:05:02 Yeah, I don’t know.
2:05:08 For me, I think spirituality is important, and I think more and more people are appreciating that there’s a role.
2:05:14 For something that’s structured that brings people together.
2:05:24 You know, there are powerful forces in the world, powerful forces showing hatred, division, you know, something that grassroots brings people together, connects them to something greater.
2:05:29 You know, I suppose that’s what I believe in, and that’s what I would like to encourage.
2:05:34 I’m trying one way of doing that, engaging in a slightly different way with the traditional religions.
2:05:39 But, you know, I’m excited if other people are trying different things, and let’s see where it goes.
2:05:42 Let’s see where it goes, indeed.
2:05:43 Two last questions.
2:05:45 These are pretty quick ones, I suspect.
2:05:47 This is the billboard question.
2:05:58 So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions, hundreds of millions of people, take your pick.
2:06:03 Can’t be anything commercial, of course, but it could be a quote, an image, doesn’t need to be your quote.
2:06:06 Anything at all, something you’d want to convey to a lot of people.
2:06:07 Do you have any thoughts for what you would put on it?
2:06:15 I guess I’m torn between the sort of, the more intellectual things, the drier things, or the things to do with kind of meaning.
2:06:22 And, I mean, on the former, I suppose I’m more passionate about the importance of philosophy, and we need to, sometimes you can’t just do experiments.
2:06:25 Sometimes you need to make judgment calls, but that’s kind of boring and dry.
2:06:32 I mean, I suppose in terms of more meaning of existence kind of things, I think, touching on what we said earlier, I suppose,
2:06:42 because I think one of the things I feel I’ve learned as I’ve got older is the importance of trying to not start from what do I want, what’s going to make me successful,
2:06:49 to try and orientate yourself to what contribution can I make?
2:06:52 How can I make the world a slightly better place?
2:07:01 If your fundamental life goal is making me more successful, that’s not going to end well, you know, because it’s never enough.
2:07:05 It never, I mean, I think I’m kind of lucky that I’m not that bothered about money.
2:07:07 I’m not really into power, really.
2:07:10 I don’t really, but I do have a bit of an ego, do you know what I mean?
2:07:17 I do want to be respected philosophers, but it’s never enough you’re always sort of jealous of someone who’s doing better.
2:07:30 So I think the more one can try, and it’s not easy, right, to just continually orient your life to reality outside of yourself and just trying to make a contribution.
2:07:33 That’s actually, that’s what I do in prayer, actually.
2:07:37 I pray last thing at night and meditate first thing in the morning.
2:07:40 So I think, you know, talking to God at night, listening to God in the morning.
2:07:50 And, you know, I think in prayer, I just orientate myself to sort of try and never, it works perfectly, but try and make your life goal, making some kind of contribution.
2:07:57 And I find that just takes the pressure off you and does really just free you up.
2:07:57 For sure.
2:08:01 To just enjoy what the present moment has to offer.
2:08:14 So yeah, so I suppose, I was trying to think, you to my billboards, you saying about this, and I was thinking, it made me think of these signs you stop in the war saying, don’t ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
2:08:17 You know, that’s in a sort of spirit of nationalist war effort.
2:08:18 That’s not what I’m getting at.
2:08:23 But maybe, you know, something like, don’t start from what do I want, start from how can I contribute?
2:08:25 And I sort of think happiness flows from that.
2:08:29 So something like that, a bit more, I need an editor, don’t I?
2:08:31 So if it’s sharpened up a bit, we’ll be on the billboard.
2:08:35 We’ll take it to Madison Avenue.
2:08:36 We’ll figure it out.
2:08:39 And Philip, where are the best places for people to find you?
2:08:41 Is it philipgothphilosophy.com?
2:08:43 Is that the best place to point people?
2:08:46 Yeah, that’s my website that I try and update regularly.
2:08:55 It’s got academic stuff and popular articles and lots of videos and complete archive of the media stuff I’ve done that I try to keep up to date.
2:09:04 I spend too much time arguing on, well, it used to be X and then all the liberals have gone to Blue Sky and I’m doing both.
2:09:09 I kind of worry about this bit of a divided community, so I’m arguing on both.
2:09:11 And it’s interesting the different reactions you get on.
2:09:14 But yeah, I spend too much time arguing on.
2:09:18 That’s been really useful, actually, for learning this thing.
2:09:23 You know, I think when my book first came out and I was on sort of Joe Rogan and stuff,
2:09:25 and I think he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
2:09:26 It was like my fault.
2:09:33 But part of what’s helped me communicate with a general audience, I think, is arguing with ordinary people on X and Blue Sky.
2:09:38 And yes, if you want to have an argument, it’s getting bit, I can’t keep up with it these days.
2:09:40 But have an argument with me there if you want to.
2:09:42 I have a sub stack I just started.
2:09:45 I try and do something every month on a sub stack.
2:09:52 If you want to pick a fight and have an argument with Philip, then I suppose X is the best gladiatorial arena for that.
2:09:54 Oh, the books, Galileo’s error and why.
2:09:57 They’re a great read, I hear.
2:10:02 And as far as the great place to argue goes, the dose makes the poison, folks.
2:10:04 So just be careful with your dosing.
2:10:05 Philip, this has been so fun.
2:10:10 Thank you for taking the time to have such a wide-ranging conversation.
2:10:11 I really appreciate it.
2:10:13 And I took a bunch of notes for myself.
2:10:16 I’ll be revisiting the show notes when they’re put together.
2:10:20 And is there anything else you’d like to say or point people to?
2:10:23 Any formal complaints you’d like to lodge publicly?
2:10:26 Anything at all you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
2:10:29 No, that was just to say thank you.
2:10:30 I think you’re right.
2:10:36 It has been a wonderful, we had a good session on the panpsychism and a good session on the religion stuff.
2:10:42 And I’ve learned a lot, actually, about Sufism and lots of, yeah, I want to think a lot of things I want to follow up there.
2:10:49 They’re going to be very useful for this book I’ve just started that hopefully I’ll write if I can spend less time arguing on X.
2:10:52 Philip underscore Goff.
2:10:53 Yeah.
2:10:56 Yeah, thanks so much.
2:10:58 Let’s stay in touch.
2:10:58 Absolutely.
2:11:00 Yeah, thanks, Philip.
2:11:07 And for everybody listening, as usual, we will have show notes with links to everything we discussed and probably more at tim.blog slash podcast.
2:11:13 And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself.
2:11:15 Thanks for tuning in.
2:11:17 Hey, guys, this is Tim again.
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Philip Goff is a professor of philosophy at Durham University. His main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. He is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. He is the author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness and Why? The Purpose of the Universe.
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