How Modern Science Got Consciousness Wrong From the Start | Philip Goff

0:00I think the problem of consciousness was built into the way we design science, right, by the father of modern science, Galileo. Can you talk about Galileo's error? Galileo wasn't simply separating the qualia from the mathematics for scientific reasons. So what did Galileo do? He took consciousness outside of the domain of science. I mean, the universe is not a biological system, right? If consciousness for higher forms of biology is more developed than, say, a bird compared to a human, how do you feel about the proposal that a computer system, in that there is a form of consciousness flowing through the physical system, that if that system is complex enough, a higher form of consciousness can emerge?

0:52Thanks, Craig. Looking forward to the conversation. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe. I mean, in a way, you might see it as a continuation of a trend that's been going on for some time now. You know, at the start of the scientific revolution, we thought only we were conscious and animals were sort of unfeeling mechanisms. And then over time, we've attributed consciousness to more and more animals, starting off with higher primates, other mammals. only fairly recently birds and fish are typically attributed consciousness and then um maybe a couple of years ago now there was a couple of hundred scientists signing a letter that they take insect and reptile consciousness seriously so panpsychists take this to its logical conclusion holding that not only the simplest forms of life but the molecules atoms subatomic particles making up life has its own very, very simple forms of consciousness.

2:08So we are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. That's the basic idea. Can you talk about Galileo's error? What I'm most passionate about is that this is not just another scientific problem we haven't dealt with yet. You know, it's not just, oh, we need to do a few more brain scans and we'll crack This is an utterly unique problem. And I mean, I'm one way into this is I think the problem of consciousness was built into the way we design science. by the father of modern science, Galileo. He was a great experimental scientist, but he was also a great philosopher. And it was his philosophical innovations that really shaped the foundations of the scientific revolution.

3:01So Galileo wanted science to be purely mathematical, something we take for granted these days. but at the time it was a radical innovation. But Galileo had to do a little bit of philosophical work to make sense of that. Because the trouble is, I mean, one thing about consciousness, it's the only phenomenon that we have direct access to, right? And that direct access reveals to us something about its nature. You know, the redness of a red experience, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint. We have direct access to the character of consciousness from the inside. That's one way which this is such a unique phenomenon.

3:50But Galileo appreciated you can't capture these subjective qualities we directly encounter in our experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes, you can't fully capture those in the purely quantitative language of mathematics, okay? An equation can't capture that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. I mean, there are all sorts of things we can capture about the structure of, say, color experience in mathematical language. But, you know, to make the example vivid, Suppose we have a blind from birth neuroscientist, right? You can tell them anything you like framed in the language of mathematics about the objective brain processes involved in color experience.

4:43That will never convey to them the redness of a red experience, what it's like to see red. So there's information here, information about the nature of consciousness that we have from the inside that you can't fully capture in a mathematical, purely quantitative language. So what did Galileo do? Well, he took consciousness outside of the domain of science, right? He said, if we want this purely mathematical story, this purely quantitative story, we need to take consciousness out of the picture. So he basically divided nature into two. On the one hand, we've got the domain of science with its purely mathematical quantitative story.

5:30On the other side, we've got consciousness. That's in the soul. That's got these funny qualities, colours, sounds, smells, tastes. And that was the start of mathematical physics, which has gone incredibly well. But what we've forgotten is that success was premised on dividing reality into two. And I think if we now want to fully bring consciousness into the scientific story, we need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated, joining them back together. And I think panpsychism offers the best way to do that. And Galileo wasn't simply separating the qualia from the mathematics for scientific reasons.

6:21there was also a very dominant religious environment that presumably he believed in at some level, that there was a soul and that these things were features of the soul and not of the physical universe. But let me ask you, are you saying that consciousness is like gravity in the Einsteinian view, that it's a fundamental property of the universe, just as space-time is a fundamental property? yeah just on on your first point of course Galileo had some deep difficulties with the church over his Copernican view that the the sun was in the center of it all rather than the earth I'm not sure his views on consciousness um were wrapped up in a clash with the church though and in fact he was in in many ways rebelling against the view of the church on this because the church inherited the view of Aristotle, that the world is filled with qualities, colours, sounds, smells, tastes.

7:42This division Galileo made of putting consciousness just in the soul outside of what physical science can study, that was a very rebellious move, actually. We got used to it now, but it was quite radical at the time. I mean, I think actually just Galileo appreciated that this is a very unique phenomenon here. I mean, you know, contrast with any other phenomena science studies, let's say lightning, right? Before we do the science, we've got no idea what lightning is. It could be the anger of the gods, you know, or water. We used to think water was a fundamental element together with earth and air and fire.

8:27You don't know what the hell water is until you do the science. But with consciousness, you have a good grip on what it is from the inside by being conscious, by being immediately acquainted with your own experiences. And there is information there about the nature of consciousness that you can't get from the science. As I say, a blind from birth neuroscientist is never going to know the character of a red experience. So actually there's information we have about consciousness from the inside that needs to be added to the scientific story. So Galileo, in a way, instead of confronting that, he thought, let's just put it on one side.

9:13If we just put consciousness on one side, we can stop worrying about it. We can get on with mathematical physics. I think that was a good move because it allowed mathematical physics to start, and that's obviously gone very well. But if we want to bring consciousness into the scientific story, we need to somehow take what we know about the physical world from experiments, obviously absolutely crucial, but also what we know about consciousness from the inside. These two sources of information, we need to bring them together. And until we get, you know, at first base in understanding what a unique explanatory enterprise this is, we're not going to make progress on consciousness.

9:52But I think I wandered off your, that was, I just focused on the first bit of your question. What was the second bit of your question? The second was, do you see it when you talk about it as a fundamental property? Is it like Einstein's space-time, that it just exists as this indivisible quality of the universe? Yeah, panpsychists definitely take it to be fundamental. And, you know, there is precedent in science. A lot of presidents were taking something as fundamental. I like to give the example of Maxwell with his theory of electromagnetism in the 19th century. Maxwell didn't explain electricity and magnetism in terms of features of reality that science was already committed to.

10:47he added new fundamental electromagnetic properties and laws and then built up from that basis. So similarly, panpsychists add consciousness as a fundamental feature of the universe, obviously in very rudimentary forms at the fundamental level. And then the view is that our consciousness, the very complex consciousness of the human or animal brains, is somehow built up from those more fundamental elements. But actually, there's another thing that needs to be said here. It's not just that we are adding consciousness alongside the property science already believes in, like mass, spin and charge and so on.

11:33The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out in her public writings on panpsychism, that would kind of show up in our experiments, right? But if there was this new property alongside the properties physics already studies, that would kind of show up in our experiments. We'd falsify the standard model of particle physics or something. No, the claim is rather that the consciousness story underlies what physics is getting at. That ultimately, at the fundamental level of reality, according to panpsychists, all there is is consciousness. and the mathematical story that physics is telling us arises, emerges from that more fundamental story about consciousness.

12:21So it's kind of turning the problem of consciousness on its head. You know, the normal way we think about the problem of consciousness is we start with the stuff physics talks about or chemistry and neuroscience, that story. We try and get consciousness out of that. The panpsychist says, no, no, no, no, no. we've tried that it doesn't work it arguably doesn't even make sense we're going to turn it upside down we're going to start with consciousness and account for everything else account for physics chemistry neuroscience in terms of consciousness and i think that way of doing it makes a lot more sense and is proved more productive i think in some ways yeah you talk about a gradient or a spectrum or i'm not sure the language that you use but that that in higher more complex organisms consciousness is is is more developed and that is you go down the the tree of life or or of of the physical world to the level of electrons and quarks and that sort of thing there's that property still exists but in a in a very very simple state and and i i think at one time i mean i've read this this problem of the combination problem like how do you get from those fundamental particles, if indeed they are particles, and build up to the level of a complex organism.

14:05And more recently you have this idea of, I think you call it cosmic, you'll cause cosmopsychism where it's this fundamental property that that flows through or is manifest in every level of physical reality. It's not built up from the quantum field. It's rather coming down the other way. Is that a fair assessment or a fair explanation? So panpsychists hold that the fundamental physical entities have consciousness of some incredibly rudimentary form. But it's a question for physicists what the fundamental physical entities are. We tend to think of them as particles, electrons or quarks. But actually, many theoretical physicists these days are inclined to think, actually, reality isn't made up of particles.

15:09It's made up of universe-wide fields, and particles are just sort of local excitations in those fields. So if you combine that kind of view with panpsychism, we reach the view known as cosmopsychism, that the fundamental conscious mind is the universe itself. so we shouldn't think of that as you know god or something or you just because something has consciousness it doesn't mean it has intelligence agency uh understanding these are the very complex forms of consciousness that arise from millions of years of evolution so if the universe is conscious presumably it's going to have very very complicated consciousness just because the universe is physically very complicated, but it doesn't mean it's going to have intellectually sophisticated consciousness.

16:01It could be just a kind of meaningless mess or something. But yes, I think you're asking a question about the combination problem, which I guess has become known as the central challenge to panpsychism. Okay, you're postulating these simple forms of consciousness, but how do you get our consciousness out of that? Well, you know, I mean, so there are, there are, again, a couple of approaches here. I mean, there's a very easy way of solving this, which is just to add another primitive, as it were, just to say, look, it's just a fundamental fact about our universe that when conscious particles combine in certain ways, they unify together to make new forms of complex consciousness.

16:52So that's what one approach panpsychists can have that just kind of removes the problem by just adding another primitive. Other panpsychists try to tell a more reductionist story and say, no, no, you know, it's just when you get conscious particles in a certain way, automatically a unified consciousness arises and then try and give some kind of explanatory story for that. Now, whichever way you go on this, I think the important thing to realize is you still retain the core explanatory attraction of panpsychism, which is that you explain physical reality in terms of just one kind of property, namely consciousness.

17:36That's the aspiration of the panpsychist. Maybe you want to talk a little more about that, maybe not, but is to completely bottom out reality in one very simple kind of property. So whether we have to sort of add something to get from simple forms of consciousness to more complex forms of consciousness, or whether we can tell a more reductious story, that's a further question. But still, panpsychism retains that that Occam's razor respectable characteristic of being able to bottom everything out in just one kind of property. Yeah. Um, I mean, that doesn't, so before we started, I was saying that the, what has gotten me interested in this is all of the talk, uh, in artificial intelligence circles about the potential for complex computer programs, you know, LLMs to start with, and presumably there will be much more complex systems going forward that, you know, on the emergent theory of consciousness, that it's this property that emerges from all of the electrical activity in the brain.

19:01It just seems that panpsychism works with that theory because complex computer programs, like a large language model, are ultimately physical processes. And if consciousness for higher forms of biology is more developed than, say, a bird compared to a human, And how do you feel about the proposal that a computer system, in that there is a form of consciousness flowing through the physical system, that if that system is complex enough, consciousness, a higher form of consciousness could emerge? so i mean the way i think about the challenge of consciousness i i think there's a division of labor between the scientific task and the philosophical task so i think the scientific task is to work out which kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness um and it's very hard because as we've discussed we we know about consciousness primarily from the inside if you're looking from the outside it's very it's very hard to tell if something's conscious you know i can't look in your brain and see your feelings this is why it's so hard to ascertain whether a fish or a fly has consciousness so you know the the best we can do

21:04is study human beings, scan our brains, because if you're dealing with a human being, you can ask them, you know, what are you feeling right now? And scan their brains and try and correlate which kinds of activity are going, which kinds of experience, and then basically extrapolate from the human case.

21:24And it's proved very difficult. And look, I'm optimistic and I'm enthusiastic about that task. But the fact is, it hasn't thus far got the expected results. You know, there's famously 25 years ago, the neuroscientist Christophe Koch bet the philosopher David Chalmers that this would all be wrapped up by now. You know, we'd have the neural correlates of consciousness all agreed on. And a couple of summers ago, he publicly recanted, publicly gave in on that bet and gave David Chalmers the crate of fine wine he'd promised him. And, you know, there's more and more people now saying it's not clear we're ever going to be able to conclusively settle this.

22:12I mean, an interesting paper by Tom McClelland at Cambridge, it's just come out, arguing for permanent agnosticism on a core question here that's of great relevance to AI. Is consciousness biological or computational? right um obviously whether or not that you think of the human brain as a computer it can certainly do computations is is it the more computational aspects of our brains that render us conscious or is it the more biological aspects and mcclellan goes through you know the proponents on both sides um annal seth for example on the biology side who i i interviewed for my substack last week actually and people on both sides of this discussion and thinks actually the way they're interpreting the evidence just depends on the assumptions they already have it's very hard to ask you know what kind of what kind of test could you give to sort of settle that whether computer whether consciousness is biological or computational so it is very difficult now i'm not saying i'm not giving up i want to keep going with this and i want to keep i think really what we need is scientists and philosophers working together.

23:28What we might have to do, I think, is temporarily fragment the field into scientists working under certain philosophical assumptions, working together with philosophers in terms of how the experiments are designed, in terms of how the results are interpreted, and just see which paradigm bears fruit. because at the moment we don't seem to be making progress. But, you know, I guess as a panpsychist, I'm more on the sort of biological side than the computational side because for a panpsychist, consciousness is the stuff of reality. It's, as it were, the flesh and blood of the physical universe. It's not about abstract, you know, computational processing.

24:18So my philosophical starting points make me very skeptical that large language models or anything resembling them are going to end up being conscious. Now, I don't think, finally, I don't think consciousness is magical or supernatural. So I think it's going to be possible in principle to have artificial consciousness. But I think we should be thinking of something in the first instance more like an artificial living system, right? Maybe a microbe, an artificial microbe in the first instance, and building up to something with the complexity of a human being. But I don't think it's going to look like a large language model.

24:56Yeah, well, that's interesting. But when you talk about panpsychism of consciousness as a property that touches everything or flows through everything or everything is manifest through that property, that includes everything and not everything is a biological system. I mean, the universe is not a biological system, right? I see. Yeah. So you might think panpsychists are going to think large language models are conscious because kind of everything's conscious. Well, actually, panpsychists don't think literally everything is conscious, despite the etymology of the word pan meaning everything, psyche meaning mind.

25:43The claim is that the fundamental building blocks of the universe, whether they're particles or whether they're fields, they have rudimentary forms of consciousness. But it doesn't follow that every random combination of particles has consciousness. So a panpsychist isn't going to necessarily think, you know, this cup I'm holding is conscious. They're just going to think maybe the fundamental particles making up that cup have some kind of rudimentary consciousness. But the cup as a whole need not have its own sort of unified conscious experience. So, and as I say, this is, so the way I divide up the scientific and the philosophical task, I think this is fairly, fairly common understanding, not something unique to me.

26:34So it's the scientific task to work out which things are conscious. But then it's a philosophical task to answer the why question. why? Why is consciousness and physical reality joined together, correlated in the way science reveals to us? I don't think that is a scientific question. Why is it not a scientific question? Because the task of consciousness is to marry, to bring together this stuff we know about from the inside with the stuff we know about from experiments and observations from the outside to bring them together, to find a simple way of unifying them. And that's just not a scientific task.

27:23We're in this period of history where people can't get a grip on that. They think, you know, experiments tell us everything. But I think once we understand, think deeply, for example, about how science was set up.

27:42Not every question could be answered in an experiment. And this is one question that is just not an experimental scientific question, although it's very closely related to the science of consciousness. So we need the science and the philosophy working together on this one. Kamerts and Kamerts experiments in 2015 with ants where they would put a blue dot on the face of the ant and other ants would attack it because they would identify it as from outside the colony. And the ant, when presented with a mirror, would furiously try to erase the mark off its face which would suggest that the ant is aware that the reflection is uh of itself i mean that's a form of self-awareness what do you make of those experiments yeah it's very tricky because okay is is that conscious is that consciousness or is it the behavior of a non-conscious mechanism.

28:55I mean, it maybe depends what we mean by consciousness here. Maybe we need to really pin that down. What I'm meaning by consciousness is subjective experience. Your consciousness is what it's like to be you. Feeling pain, feeling tired, seeing color, hearing sound, all these facets of what it's like to be you. so something is conscious if there's something that it's like to be it if it has inner experience a first person perspective now it seems completely conceivable to me and to most people i think that you you could have a very complex mechanism um let's let's say let's pretend for the sake of discussion you can't get consciousness from silicon let's just let's just say that we find out that's true you could still build a very complex robot made from silicon um stick a large language model inside it um you could have a conversation with it i think you know it's looking that incredible uh robotics display we saw in chinese new year just recently you know i think in a 10 years time we're gonna have robots that behave like us that you can have a chat to.

30:16It's not, they may not be conscious though, but if they behave like us, then they can do kind of self-monitoring and they can recognize when there's a mirror image of themselves or something. And they can mechanistically behave in a way that involves kind of self-monitoring and so on. I don't think that follows that they have inner life, that they have a first-person perspective. So, yeah, it's not totally, yes, a very interesting paper. Another paper is just out by Matthias Michel, a very good philosopher who works very deeply in the neuroscience of consciousness and a philosopher who doesn't agree with me on much at all, I must say, but I found his absolutely fascinating work for being heavily embedded in the scientific project and seeing, you know, with all of these sort of tests of consciousness, there's an assumption, you've just given one, yeah, that like certain kinds of self-monitoring are signs of consciousness, or maybe higher order thought is a sign of consciousness, or maybe certain other kinds of responsiveness.

31:28But when you think about it, it's just not obvious that you need consciousness for those kinds of mechanistic functioning. And other scientists of consciousness are making different assumptions about the markers of consciousness. So this is not very optimistic. I mean, look, here's one thing, actually, that hardly anybody is focusing on that might be a way forward. if consciousness brings with it new forms of causation, new forms of causal operations that aren't completely reducible to known, understood chemistry, neuroscience. If that were the case, so that's a very sort of non-reductionist story, philosophers tend to call this strong emergence right where there's just new kind of fundamental calls or principles pop up um that can't be reduced to underlying chemistry and physics if that were the case that would be wonderful because you could then empirically see from the outside the markers of consciousness um i don't know anyone in the science of consciousness who's focused on that.

32:50I think because the dogma of the moment is a very reductionist story that really there's just physics. That's the physics is running the show and everything else is just more or less convenient ways of describing the world. Um, so, so yeah, look, it's, it's, it's all, we're at a period of the science of consciousness where the rules of the game are not clear. Um, and and it's exciting as well as stressful frustrating yeah i want to ask again on the on the ant experiment i mean and what you're saying about the mechanistic uh response that doesn't require consciousness that sounds like chalmers um what did he call them uh zombies Philosophical zombies, yeah.

33:44Philosophical zombies, yeah. But how else would you explain, and not only ants, but birds and different animals that the experiment's been applied to, How would you explain what appears to be a recognition of the self in a reflection? Well, I suppose I just don't see why we shouldn't think of that as something purely mechanistic. I mean, you could equally say, you know, how can we explain large language models responding in a way that seems intelligent, seems to have understanding without any kind of consciousness? Well, you know, once you understand the underlying mechanisms, you can sort of see how these things are trained up in a way that doesn't seem to.

34:45I don't think many people think large language models are conscious. Certainly you don't have to think they're conscious to understand how they're responding. So likewise, I suppose we have certain forms of behavior in these animals that involve responding to self-monitoring, as it were. and self-monitoring and in some sense building some kind of internal model of the self and behavioral responses make reference to that internal model. Now, I'm not a biologist. I don't know all the ins and outs of the latest theories of how that self-monitoring works, but I don't see why it couldn't be purely mechanistic.

35:40um but you know i mean look he is while we're on this biological case i mean here's another issue that i think people aren't focusing on that i'm always trying to press it press i think there's a real mystery of why consciousness evolved i mean certainly at least maybe there's a bit of a disagreement between us here perhaps but if you're like me and you do think it's it's conceivable that you can have very complicated, sophisticated behavior without any kind of inner experience. So, you know, I think we will have that soon with robots and large language models and so on. If you could have that in principle, then there's a mystery of why did natural selection make us conscious, right?

36:26Why not? Because natural selection just cares about behavior because it's only behavior that is relevant for survival, and that's what natural selection cares about. I'm slightly personifying natural selection here just for ease of exposition. So why didn't natural selection make us sort of complex survival mechanisms that mechanically track features of the environment and initiate various forms of survival-conducive behavior? Why do you need to have an inner life? now that actually this connects to what i was saying in my last answer i think uh and this is just this is just me pressing this at the moment but anyway i talk about this a lot in my oh my my book modestly titled why the purpose of the universe that is just out in paperback quick advert there um i think the ant solving this mystery of why consciousness evolved must involve some kind of strong emergence, must involve consciousness bringing into being new forms of behavioral response, new forms of causation that are not predictable just from the underlying chemistry or physics, because it's only in that way it could give you some kind of distinctive survival advantage that would make natural selection think, I want a little bit of that if I can carry on the personification.

37:58So, yeah. Can you think of an experimental design that could distinguish sort of minimal subjective experience from purely functional behaviors in any organism? Well, if I'm right that consciousness does involve some sort of strong emergence, then And in principle, there must be a noticeable behavioral difference. But the question is, are we at the level of our understanding of the brain to be able to make that problem tractable? So, I mean, I recommend to people an excellent book by Matthew Cobb, The Idea of the Brain, which traces the whole intellectual history of our understanding of the brain and the mind, going back to when we thought the mind was in the heart.