#139 David Bentley Hart - All Things Are Full of Gods

29:33Alex O'Connor:know if there's a good word for like idealists panpsychists pantheists like any sort of mind first, people. God is theist. Yeah, that would do. Theism would be an obvious category there. Yeah, well, I want to get to that. But in fact, as a means to getting there, I kind of wanted to ask about this accusation that sometimes pose, which is like, okay, fair enough. So, look, the scientific method is a method and it might be a mistake to assume that that is our metaphysics. But The fact that that's a mistake isn't enough to say that it definitely isn't the metaphysic. And it also isn't enough, even if it did do that, it isn't enough to say, oh, therefore, you know, it must be like mind at the foundation of reality.

30:23Alex O'Connor:And some people get the impression that there's this kind of idealism of the gaps where people are saying like, you know, we know that consciousness is there and we know that science doesn't offer a good metaphysics. So let's put consciousness in there. But we want to avoid that, right? So could you tell us how we get from where we are now to the actual case for the metaphysical truth? Well, sometimes, in fact, you do get an idealism of the gaps. Of course, you get a materialism of the gaps, too. I mean, emergence is a magic word in materialism. And trying to get past the conceptual difference between weak or structural emergence and strong emergence, and the way the two are sort of merged without commentary in a way that doesn't make sense.

31:10But yeah, there is an idealism of the gaps. But in the book we're discussing, I tried to do just the opposite, which was to say that when we attend to the phenomena of mind, of life, and of language, those are the three topics of the book. And I take them to be one and the same problem, actually, for a materialist metaphysics. uh the it's not enough just to say or it's not only enough to say that the materialist narrative is defective it's also not enough to to do what say the intelligent design people do and speak of irreducible complexities because they're still thinking in terms of mechanical complexities in which yes there's an intentional agency but they just think that's a sort of a higher order in the same way that i could design a computer perhaps if i knew how to do that i can't even fix a toaster, you know.

32:00But if I could, you know, I could then go on to argue that evolution has forged me as a system that is mechanical to, you know, simply saying that these orders of complexity look designed from outside also isn't sufficient. The issue that's interesting is the nature of the order. Is it an order that really can be shown to be top-down in an irreducible way and at an original and primordial level. Now, I don't believe that you can rest content with the terminal dualism. You can't just say, well, there is a power of mind and there is a power of matter. Because this is an old metaphysical quandary, of course, if they can interact at all, that means there's some ontological context of non-repugnancy that they share in common that still has to be looked at as the more original principle.

32:52So for me, a dualism doesn't work at any number of levels, but especially it doesn't work as an explanatory model. But when we get to the issue of actually looking at what mind does, and not only whether it's compatible with the mechanical narrative, or whether in fact it demands something more like, well, the Aristotelian model is a good example. I'm not like a Thomist who's just dogmatic Aristotelian, so anyone, you know, I just throw the word out like formal causality. But nonetheless, the etiology that Aristotle developed was not an attempt at a mechanical explanation of how different forces converge to create natural forms.

33:36Rather, it's a set of rational relations that are mind-like. Now, the question is, is that just a representation? Is Kant right that we're just totally limited to that apparatus? Or is Hegel right in saying, well, no, even the ability to recognize representation as a limitation means we've already got a rational power going beyond it and recognizing it more prior condition. And I agree with Hegel that there's something fundamentally incoherent in proclaiming the nature of a limit that you can't get past. Because if you can't get past it, you shouldn't be able to understand its nature. You don't know what it's limiting you from.

34:15And just saying, Well, that in itself is already an assertion about ontology and manifestation, right? So we look at the phenomena around what mind does and try to construct a narrative and find that in many ways it seems to rest entirely on itself. Consciousness has an infuriating quality that everyone from Aristotle to Brentano and Husserl agonized over, or at least noted. I don't know if Aristotle agonized over it. We don't really have his dialogues, we only have lecture notes. But that consciousness is instantly recursive. Consciousness is only consciousness because it's conscious of itself being conscious.

35:03So if you're trying to, say, reduce this to a mechanistic merit of one module, proprioceptively looking at a larger module as part of it, you do get an infinite regress of causes. Whereas if you do something more like what Schelling did or what Kashmiri Shaivite philosophers did, understanding that or in Vedanta, supremely Adi Shankaracharya, recognizing that consciousness itself is its own premise and rests upon itself, you avoid that sort of—this is just one argument among hundreds of it. But the same is true with intentionality. Intentionality, always when you look at it carefully, has both a transcendental or remote end within the compass of which more proximate ends and desired.

35:54And again, how do you square that with the materialist narrative when you look at it and you find that there's always this prior purpose to having a purpose? But then you can get much more concrete than that. I mean, you know, all these movements in the life sciences in recent years have been attempts like systems biology and processual biology and Dennis Noble's biological relativity and all that. honest attempts to get in touch with the sort of hierarchical structure of life in which there seem to be not only infrangible composites, like, you know, at the lowest level, nucleic acids and proteins and things like that.

36:33Again, that's the intelligent design approach. But more than that, a whole system of intelligibility and coordinated activity at the top of which there is a literally semiotic level, semantic and syntactic and symbolic thought being involved in it, in which there's an actual hermeneutical dynamism going on, first of all, within an organism, how cells can re-edit their own genomes in coordination with one another, but how they pass information on to another generation, which an RNA polymerase has to read it out from the DNA, and then it's re-inscribed in the DNA. You know, this is an interpretive activity.

37:18And then you have to say, well, this is more than just an analogy to language. This is doing what language does. And then you can look at the structure of language and can you really reduce that to an evolutionary narrative that starts from a pre-linguistic, pre-semantic, pre-semiotic. And I think absolutely you cannot. Again, that would be, I would take up, many hours arguing that, and so on and so forth. And one last thing I'll point out when I talk about the life sciences. One of the great biologists who was also a philosophical intellect, sort of the next generation after Polanyi, was Robert Rosen.

38:01And his book Life Itself actually was one of the books that really challenged my own sense of what I understood. but it took me to a much deeper appreciation of, for him, the laws of life are fundamental, and the laws of physics are just limits conditions. So you cannot get to life starting with physics as your only canon of laws. Rather, you have to start with, and this is a rather radical proposal, but it makes sense. But if you follow that to its end, I think you're going to end up finding that you're back at formal and final causes and And structure of mind becomes the paradigm for understanding the structure of everything, language, life, and certainly the agency of mind.

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39:52Alex O'Connor:Yes, it's a long book for a reason. And what I'm interested in doing is picking out areas that I think will be of particular interest to our listeners based on some of the conversations I've been recently having. So one question that you've covered, but perhaps people will want a bit more detail on, is what's wrong with emergence? I mean, there is this view that, okay, it is a bit weird that the universe is made out of, you know, material stuff, just a bunch of inert marbles that bump into each other. and that somehow you get things like the taste of coca-cola and the redness of red from their arrangement but what's so funny about that given that we have all kinds of processes which are not present in the fundamental part the wetness of water is not present in the hydrogen and the oxygen you know the sponginess of the cake to borrow john cottingham's example isn't in any of the ingredients none of the ingredients are spongy but if you put them together in the right way, in the right temperature, you get sponginess.

40:54Alex O'Connor:Why can't consciousness be something like that? Oh, for the simple reason that, again, that's what I was talking about earlier, the way the word emergence covers a multitude of sins. It also covers a gap. There are two kinds of emergence. The one you're talking about is obvious. It rationally follows not only from a materialist metaphysics, but just any knowledge that composites do things that the individual ingredients don't do. We also know, however, that what composites do are structural amplifications of powers resident in the ingredients. So the wetness of water follows from the specific nature of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom and the way in which the combustible nature of either is negated in this combination.

41:47And you can see the molecular stacking. You understand that water is a physical extension of a physical process. And you'd say, well, okay, brain processes are the same thing. And brain processes may be. The structure of consciousness, however, to begin with, poses a very radically different. And this is where we get to strong emergence. And the really, the most, again, as I say, the most consistent materialist position is sort of like that of Paul and Patricia Churchland and other Illimitivists who want to say that everything is weak emergence if we could just understand, if we could just get rid of the folklore of things like intrinsic intentional states.

42:31But you notice in order to get to that, you have to not show how intrinsic intentional states arise from intrinsically non-intentional ingredients. You have to do away with intrinsic intentional states as illusory. And Dennett understood this. Rosenberg understands this. Because here we're talking about phenomena at a different level of, if you want to call it emergence, of emergence or of appearance. You can see it. I mean, I remember vividly, we don't even, again, I'm going to sound like an intelligent design theorist, but I remember vividly reading somebody defending the notion of emergence by two examples.

43:16One was the wetness of water. That seems to be everyone's favorite. Because, you know, sure, it's counterintuitive that two combustible elements produce a viscosity that can extinguish flight. But the other was a computer and how you couldn't reduce its functions to the arrangement of its parts. And of course, what should be immediately obvious is that the two are discontinuous examples to begin with. So even if you want to do what I said earlier and reduce the designer of the computer down to his or her constituent parts, you're beginning there with a phenomenon that has been created by the impress of a form upon things that produces functions that only function fully at the hermeneutical level of a conscious and intending mind, because the physical activities on the screen have no intrinsic meanings, right?

44:16What we've done is we've created a medium by which a different kind of causality. We've created, first of all, a medium that required a real intentionality. And real intentionality is already an anomaly within a mechanistic narrative. It simply is because it allows for finality to be a real rational and anteceding cause in the present. Not a mechanical cause, but a real rationale that determines the shape of things. But even when you get past that, you realize that what the computer is doing is not what the computer is doing. It's what an intentional agency at one end of a process and another intentionality at the other end of the process is doing in a hermeneutical space that does not exist at the material plane at all.

45:06or a noetic space where a finality and all of the ingredients of what go into the phenomenon that has this finality in this form exist already in a kind of ideal unity. So, you know, idealism is a sort of natural intuition to begin with. Well, the more you think about the structure of a language, the more you look at the structure of mind, but also the more you look at the structure of life, the harder and harder, almost to the point of vanishing away entirely, becomes the possibility of seeing it as a structural emergence. What a wheel does is a structural emergence of what the molecules in a wheel do.

45:51So, what a house does is not exactly a structural emergence of what the ingredients of a house do, but with the application of another intentional agency, you get a house. What the mind that's building that house is doing requires an intentionality that I would argue is so primordial, and again, so recursively infinite if reduced to material causes, as to be really impossible to reconcile with materialism. Again, though, emergence is a useful term because it's a qualifier. It's used as a university in order to cover over an analogy. Weak and strong are two very different things, structural emergence and a true strong emergence.

46:40And so every once in a while you'll meet a materialist who will just say, okay, yes, I do believe in strong emergence. That's just the way reality works. And we see it at the quantum level. Particles just appear. Okay, so we're not really now talking in terms of scientific rationality that's trying to give an explanation of why this happens. We're just saying it happens. Two problems, again, as I mentioned earlier with Rosenberg, particles don't just appear. This isn't ex nihilo. Within a quantum field, there are certain statistically predictable events. all right and when you try to translate this out of that already very reductive and questionable understanding of quantum mechanics what you basically have is magic and I don't mind people believing in magic I'm not I'm not a dogmatist regarding anyone's ontology if you believe in magic go for it but don't call it science and don't tell me that this is the more coherent ontology of mind than the upcast one

47:47Alex O'Connor:You know, I find it quite... Or of language, yes. I find, I mean, it's quite, it gets a bit sort of complicated and we use some philosophical terminology when talking about strong emergence, weak emergence. One thing I like to point out, which I think gets at a similar point, but I wonder what you make of this, is that in all of the most sort of jarring instances of emergence, you know, when I talk to people about consciousness and they say consciousness is emergent just like the image on a screen is emergent from zeros and ones in a computer or temperature is emergent from vibrations of atoms atoms aren't hot or cold but if they vibrate all together then you get this thing called temperature which emerges and i was came from reading thomas nagel he says something very very briefly in like one sentence that suddenly sort of stopped me in my tracks and i thought i don't know if this applies universally but it seems to me that most of the time when someone gives an analogy for consciousness of something else which is emergent, that other thing which is emergent relies on the existence of consciousness to emerge.

48:57Alex O'Connor:So temperature, for example, if all you mean by temperature is fast vibration of atoms, then nothing interesting has actually emerged. You've got individual atoms which vibrate very fast. You put lots of them together and you have an object which is made of really fast vibrating atoms nothing interesting has happened if you want to say no no but there's this new thing which is like heat it's this it's this thing called temperature hot and cold well that's something that you experience you don't experience the vibration of the atoms you experience this phenomenological like qualia for want of a better word of temperature and so the thing that's there quali yeah is is because it's singular guard our latin yes quite quite quite i need to be held to account.

49:43Alex O'Connor:The thing that's emerged in that instance of temperature, the interesting thing, is a conscious experience. Likewise, the zeros and ones on a computer produce, well, they produce an image on a screen. Yes, only if there is a conscious mind looking at the image. Otherwise, all there is, is a bunch of vibrating atoms or waves or electromagnetic waves coming out of a screen. And so when somebody says, you know, isn't consciousness emergent just like all this other stuff, all that other stuff relies on consciousness. So you've actually still only got this one thing in the universe called consciousness, which allegedly emerges.

50:19Alex O'Connor:And all of these analogies actually sort of presuppose the very thing they're trying to analogize. Does that make sense? Yeah, but can I make some distinctions here? We have to be careful when we use the word consciousness, because in Anglophone philosophy, this tends to be separated from the questions of intentionality, unity of apprehension, because there is a sort of divide and conquer approach. If you can break these down to discrete faculties, you can show how each of them in isolation is a mechanistic part. Now, my argument in the book, and I think argument of better philosophers than I, there's a moment of false humility there.

50:57But the argument of others is that mental agency isn't dissolvable that way into discrete faculties. That's just a façon de parler, and we use it to talk about this. So it's not just consciousness, it's intentionality. It's understanding meaning as. Now, you're talking about temperature. It's easier to say, well, that could just be a purely functionalist way of saying it. It's a form of data processing in which the illusion or the epiphenomenon of experience, or not the epiphenomenon, but the functional token of experience has a part to play. I find that wrong already, because I think to recognize anything is anything, even the sensation, there's always a prior engagement of intentionality.

51:41There's no such thing as consciousness that's pure patiency, that's pure. So you've always got already, you start from an ontological deficit in your description. Something primal to the experience is being emitted from your description. With the image on the screen, yeah, obviously, I mean, this is a purely hermeneutical transaction at this point. It's not just that you're receiving data. You are seeing as because you're intending as a certain meaning. Otherwise, yes, all you have are photoelectric events. Even that's too descriptive. if that's too thick a description for what's actually going on.

52:25But it's, you know, and remember, the image, well, I'll give you another example, optical illusions, say the rabbit duck, is what looked at these as that you can tell yourself to see it as one or the other, right? Which should apprise you. The optical illusions are, I think, much more of a challenge for the materialist view of functionalism especially then we give them credit for being. Dennett would say, well, here's the purpose of having this ability. But again, that doesn't explain away the preposterous notion that intentionality is an illusion of the intentional stance. So yes, these metaphors, I don't remember that sentence from Thomas Nagel's book.

53:13I do remember all the nasty things that were said about him for pointing out some rather humbly obvious things by people who saw him as an apostate from the Church of Materialism, like Steven Pinker. Not to be nasty, but Thomas Nagle is a far better philosopher than Steven Pinker. That's like saying the sky is higher than the grass, from my perspective. Well, I mean, Pinker's not a philosopher really anyway, except in his sense. But, yeah, I mean, that's the thing. We're always dependent on it. I've had people say, well, you know, the mind just works like television. You know, just as the camera sends images to the screen there, the mind, the world uses the data processing of neurology to send images to whom?

54:06Who's watching? Who's looking? It's an intending agency. you know and so we're not really getting closer to an explanation because i'm pretty sure the

54:14Alex O'Connor:television isn't watching itself yes yeah that's the thing it's like that the consciousness needs to be embedded in because we're so used to consciousness because like we can't but use our consciousness when we think when we when we like imagine like the tv or something we almost just like forget that the whole reason we can make sense of there being an image on a screen which is like made of fancy colors telling a story like is because we're presupposing consciousness it's impossible it is the sort of the old barclian point that it's impossible to conceive of like not conceiving something and so when you really try to sort of reflect on the nature of what's actually out there, if you remove all of that conscious stuff, if you remove the color and the heat and the feeling of sponginess when you press your fingers into it and all you're left with is the physical descriptions of the matter, nothing interesting has emerged at all.

55:16Alex O'Connor:You've just got a bunch of atoms bumping into each other. Yeah, and it's also a curious assumption about, again, this is say ontology, what is the really real? Now, admittedly, that's not a point you can settle. because, of course, the very grammar of the question is already suspect. But… So why would the bare distillate of physical limit conditions – let's put this in terms of Robert Rosen's issues about life sciences. We don't have to talk about consciousness yet. Why would that be the reality whereas the semantics of experience and of the world – and again, as you may remember from the book, especially when I get to the conversation about information and whether information becomes a fundamental law.

56:11of physics or what that would mean. I don't even like to say the bare syntax, because syntax really is something that exists only in relation to a semantic level already. I mean, again, this is my rather Plutinian, I suppose, or Vedantic notion of top-down causation. I honestly believe that the syntactic level is wholly dependent on the semantic and the semantic on symbolic thought in a way that you can't invert that successfully. You can metaphorically, you can go some way towards making it sound plausible, I just don't think it works in the end.

56:49And why have we made the ontological decision that what does not need, you know, the things that actually need to be explained to us? Because of course, the phenomenon itself is not the physical action as such, right? It's not the physical event. The what it's like, just to use Nakel's language, the what it's like of that experience of temperature, and I don't mean just at a psychological level, not what it's like for you, I just mean what it's like phenomenologically from any subjective, unified vantage of intentionality and consciousness, is not the same thing as the physical phenomenon. It's how these two are related that's the question we're trying to answer when we talk about things like mind, but also of life and language.

57:39And then simply saying, well, we're going to mistake Galileo's methodological bracketing and turn it into instead of metaphysics, is that we're actually saying, and this is what happens in philosophy of mind, that things that we know to be real, like intentionality and experience and unity of apprehension and so on, aren't real at all. They can either be conjured away as folk mythology, you know, as the way that—and sooner or later we'll be able to reduce this to how, I don't know, enzymes are working or electrochemical processes. Or, you know, they're functionalist illusions, user interfaces.

58:26uh it always turns into a weird and all turns into eliminativism eliminativism in the end anyway uh and why why is that can you just define eliminativism for our listeners oh i'm sorry uh i'm sorry i'm not a regular viewer so i don't know that's just fine topics come up uh eliminativism and in america the most famous proponents are paul and patricia churchill and husband and wife not brother and sister, which says that all the things that we're in the habit of talking about, like beliefs, intentions, desires, that's a psychological folklore that doesn't correspond to any reality. Eliminativism is the belief that we can ultimately arrive at a, first of all, neurological, but then biochemical, then chemical, and maybe ultimately a purely physical explanation of these things that does away with all these mythical creatures like beliefs, convictions, love, what it's like of, well, you keep talking about sponginess.

59:37I'm not quite sure why that's your example. Hardness. I prefer hardness to sponginess. So yeah, that sounded rather nasty, actually. I prefer solidity. Okay. That's good for that. Yeah, well. But yeah, and I mean, to me, this is taking the methodological piety of the mechanistic philosophy to a point of psychosis. And what we're told by eliminativists is that we should want this to happen because beliefs and convictions, We all recognize that these are radically insufficient and defective explanations of what's going on. And I say, you know, I actually don't recognize that. Curiously enough, you know, if you tell me what you believe, and I, mistaking myself for an intentional system who has therefore an understanding of the intrinsic intentionality in what you're saying to me, and moreover attributing to you through this haze of delusion, that those beliefs really exist in your mind as intentions and convictions, I can predict what you might do if I challenge you on something that's fundamental to your beliefs, right?

1:00:54Or how you'll answer. I'm pretty sure that no physical calculus of what's going on in our bodies or in the substrate of our molecules is ever going to be able to yield that sort of predictive accuracy. So in fact, what they're calling a defective model that has to be superseded by the purely eliminativist physicalist account is in fact a phenomenologically verifiable, accurate, and extremely durable, I would say, assessment of reality. Now, it doesn't mean that it's not overlaid with a certain number of misunderstandings, misapprehensions, hasty assumptions about how it works, but it most certainly, the realm of consciousness and intentionality and all that certainly is not a defective model that requires elimination so that we can get down to all that's really real, which is chemicals, electrical impulses, and then below that, little billiard balls striking one another in the microscopic realm.

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1:02:47Alex O'Connor:so what's the upshot of all of this we've got like an inability of the modern materialistic picture to account for consciousness. But we sort of know consciousness is there, we experience it every day. Where does that leave us? But again, you're just talking about the insufficiency of the materialist arguments, whereas in the book, I'm proposing that when you really, and obviously that's the thing that would be the hardest to do a digest form of in a few minutes, but argue that we We actually have positive reasons for seeing in the structure of language and the structure of mental agency, but also in the structure of life.

1:03:30The more we know, the more baffling the difference between organism and machine becomes, and the more organic life seems to violate the boundary that we want to assume tidally between mechanistic, racist stensa, and non-mechanistic raised cogitans, or the illusion of raised cogitans. So there's a reason why—

1:04:23The infinite can be particular. But you have good reasons for saying that the opposite conclusion, making mind fundamental, is true. Now, so, I mean, for me, that's the upshot is that there's a better ontology. If you mean what's the moral or psychological or cultural upshot there, I can't help you because I'm a cold, cold soul who doesn't do pastoral talk.

1:04:50Alex O'Connor:Yeah, no, no, that is what I mean, is that I want to sort of, I ask that as a way to sort of plant a flag, that the position we're at now is that we've got some good reason. And like you say, we're being necessarily brief here, but I've covered this topic enough that hopefully people will at least be able to sort of join us at this point, where, okay, right, we've got this view that mind is fundamental to reality. And what I want to then ask, if that's the sort of upshot of what we've got so far, is like, what does that mean? We started with talking about what it means to say that the universe is material, some kind of, you know, marbles.

1:05:24Alex O'Connor:When we say that, you know, well, the universe is sort of fundamentally mind. It's like, OK, I'm all ears. That sounds interesting. But what do you mean? Do you mean that, like, if I dig down into atoms, they're going to have consciousness? Do you mean that there is one great big mind and all of our individual minds are somehow illusions or they part of it? How do we envision this? uh well something more like the latter than the former i don't as you know i don't believe in in the sort of panpsychism in which consciousness is some sort of property like mass or spin i mean you are always trying to re-mechanize even our post-meta-fit our post-mechanistic models because we're still really hooked on what this metaphysics of stuff that we've got you know that the basic truth is something, I don't know, ductile or pervasive.

1:06:16Alex O'Connor:But is there a problem with that view? I mean, the panpsychist, of course, believes, like you do and like I increasingly do, that there is some kind of fundamentality to mental substance. And they say, well, okay, I suppose mind is a fundamental aspect of reality rather rather than just saying, as you have done, that you don't agree with that, is there something that's particularly wrong with it in your view? Yes. You read those parts of the book, so you're just asking this. That is very much a job description, is asking questions I suspect I know my guest's answer to. Well, I mean, there are any number of famous problems with this.

1:06:58William James is talking about mind dust, the combination problem. You know, how is this more plausible? The notion that it's sort of like a discrete physical process that grows in intensity as it's combined and yet still exhibits the fundamental phenomena of consciousness, unity, intentionality, consciousness. Part of my objection to it is that I do believe that mental agency is agency. It's an act. It can't be broken down into ingredient parts in that way and still be what it is. So unless we're really saying that every atom is a discrete personality and then every composite substance is two, or maybe we could be Leibnizians and just say the dominant monad in this system is operating.

1:07:49um but as just as a sort of second tier physicalism in which to physicalism we add the notion of some primordial property called consciousness i think that we're just ignoring what the phenomenon of of of mind of mental agency is it i don't think it can be dissolved that way so i think it's an implausible picture to begin with. And the more systematic coordination you get, the more problematic it becomes. The more life is a cooperative reality, the way mind reacts with the world out there in a harmony that's actually useful, if nothing else. The greater the systematic coordination becomes, the more impossible it seems to me plausibly to assert that there doesn't have to be, if this is what we're saying, there has to be some central, again, you get the same problem that you have with the Cartesian theater.

1:08:49Is there some panoptic module that's keeping it all going in the same direction or working together in these ways so that you have a coherent phenomenal realm and a rational realm, a causal realm, and all these things, and that they hold together. And I'm not talking about the mind of God in the Malabranchian sense of just all these things that really don't belong together or just are held together in a sort of mystical occasionalism by the will of God, because, again, that's just a terminal dualism. I don't find that explanatory. I believe that rather when you say mind is fundamental, it does mean that matter is more fundamentally mental.

1:09:27It is mind. It's not something separate from. It is one modality by which this universal reality expresses itself. And yeah, I mean, if I could add certain moral virtues and graces to say a Spinozan picture of things, I'd be closer to that. But yeah, I do believe that that's the end of the book, of course, those last chapters in which I bring in Blondel and Lonergan, but also Shankara and others, to argue that the experience, first of all, of representative unity in us, which is anonymously the same, that I think that even Kant talks about that's not reducible to mechanical causes, And that ultimate horizon of transcendental orientations of intentionality are participations in one great act of mind.

1:10:25Yeah, I mean, I do believe in the mind of God. Now, that doesn't—how anthropomorphic that you want to make that sound. I mean, I try to avoid, you know, I mean, obviously, one of the great—I don't know if it's a scandal or one of the great leniencies of religious traditions is you have the philosophical traditions. You have the schoolmen and the church fathers with philosophical training or the Vedantists or philosophers like Mullah Sadra or Ibn Arabi and so on, Surah Ardi and others, who think of God in terms of the high metaphysics of classical theism. And then you have a tier below that of sort of bhakti or devotional or whatever in which the imagery becomes more pictorial and more anthropomorphic.

1:11:10And this works its way all the way down to folk religion where God is like your next-door neighbor and you're really trying to persuade him to give you a new Maserati or something less. It sounds like heal a melanoma or something. And so where you should fit your picture of God on that continuum, I'm not going to say. But the level of that that I think is philosophically discernible is that level of classical theism, which I still find more convincing and compelling, but I also think logically solvent than the alternatives. So yeah, I think that we are all in him or her, or we live and move and have our being.

1:11:56But I will say this for religious consciousness, because of course you know I also work in a theological vein at times. I write fiction too, so I want people to buy that. gone by, and things like that. But the greatest Christian theologian of the 20th century to my name was Sergei Bulgakov, and he makes very good arguments about how everything we possess as a perfection, including personality, has to be more eminently present in the infinite real of which we're part. And so even the personal cannot be absent from it, even if it's almost infinitely analogically remote from how we understand persons as the little psychological critters that we are.

1:12:43But so, yes, long answer to a brief and pointed question. Yes, the mind of God would be my final answer to this point.

1:12:54Alex O'Connor:Well, can I ask you then, in rejecting the panpsychist view that you've got these little sort of orbs of consciousness, billions and billions and trillions of them that make up the universe. Fair enough. But there is still this question of like, you know, if I hold something in my hand, I often use this microphone just because it happens to be in front of me. And I like start chopping it in half. It just happens to be in front of you. Surely you put it there on purpose. I mean, don't become an eliminativist on me now. No, I just have this thing attached to my body because I podcast so much these days.

1:13:30Alex O'Connor:So I just look down and there it is it is an object that's in front of me and it is something which i can break down and i can break down the metal into its sort of constituent atomic sort of makeup and it does get a bit murky right when you talk about quantum mechanics it's difficult to observe exactly what's going on down there but metaphysically speaking something must be down there and so if if our vision is like we are participating in a great big mind rather than there's mind at the bottom out of which we're kind of made. Those are kind of the two directions this often goes in. Oh, I would not have you think that I believe that there's ever any level at which matter is mechanistic alone.

1:14:14So yes, I do believe there's consciousness at every level. The thing is, what I don't believe is that it can be discriminated from all the other agencies of mind, and then treat it as a kind of physical property that then is combined in the way we combine discrete material ingredients. The nature of the unity of conscious acts is such that—but I believe that—and this is, again, why I'm, I suppose, sort of metaphysical monist with a high Neoplatonic or Rhineland mystic or Vedantic leaning when I'm being exotic and not writing just philosophy, is that I believe that whatever that mental agency is at those lowest levels, it too has a unity and an intentionality that may not be psychologically self-aware of the way I am, but that it is participating in this one mental act that constitutes all of reality.

1:15:12So I'm not denying consciousness of those levels. There's no level at which I say, well, this is just mechanistic stuff. To that degree, I am a dual aspect monist in that sense. It's just I think the dual aspect monism still always begs a question. When you look at what the ultimate reality is we deal with, you're still going to end up with a depiction of whatever that basic, whatever that lowest level reality is that tends either towards materialism or towards idealism. It just is. It's going to give a priority more to the top-down symbolic, semantic, syntactic causality than the top-up, which nonetheless is every bit as integral and every bit as original of, let's say, material, potential, whatever.

1:16:07And so I would still say that what I would reject is the notion that there's any conceivable way. And William James's arguments are good enough for me, to be honest, of treating consciousness as just like another property, and then, again, segregating it from all the other phenomena of consciousness. But I do believe levels of participation. I mean, I think that it really is. If you've ever studied hymenoptera, for instance, bees especially. The degree to which each individual bee is an integrated organic and intentional system can really be determined by that. They actually, you know, it's amazing.

1:16:49But there's a book, I can't remember the author, it's called The Democracy of the Bees or something. You look it up, fascinating the degree to which you have both a social and, I don't know what else to call it, personal level here, that extends both to the hive, but also to each individual member. And I think that, yeah, I mean, I think that there's a sense in which there are all these different levels of intentionality. I believe our cells are really intentional systems. I think that more and more, whether you, who's the fellow at Tufts, who is a friend of Dennett's, the scientist who is Michael Levin, I think, Michael Levin.

1:17:31Whether you see those things he calls xenobots as proof of this or not, nonetheless, since the 1930s or 1940s, we've known a great deal about how the individual cell edits its own genome and then learned more and more transposable elements and horizontal transposition and this systematic coordination. So this act of mental intentionality that's going on in all things at all times in us achieves a certain kind of consciousness. But that consciousness isn't the whole story, because things are also going on in our bodies below the threshold of consciousness. I'm not aware of what every cell in my body is doing, what every intellect—and well above it, I would say as well, that the mind can ascend, this mystical experience of ascending to that, if you like, noetic level is real as well.

1:18:23But in most daily consciousness, I'd say we participated in a certain way, and as individual psychological persons, this organism, we participate in it within a certain modality, and we have a certain psychological experience of our consciousness. But that's part of a flowing river. It's part of an ocean, and every part is in some degree part of this moving act of thought from the infinite oneness of God to the infinite fullness of God. There I went right off the rails right into religion.

1:18:58Alex O'Connor:No, no, no. That's good because that's where we want to end up, right, essentially. But the questions that spring to mind for me for clarification here are you said, you know, there's consciousness at the level of ourselves. And then you said, but there's also stuff below the level of consciousness, like, say, the cell. Do you mean to say that those cells are sort of somehow made up of mentality but are not conscious? Or do you think there's some kind of consciousness in the cell? I mean, I don't know what consciousness is well enough. I think there has to be a level of consciousness. And I mean, that's what people like.

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1:20:36James Shapiro speak of cells as sentient, at least. Right. Sentient systems. And so they have intentionality. And what is consciousness? Well, they do respond and they do coordinate to a surprising – it's amazing. But also that coordination, of course, is in some communication with me because it's my knowledge of my environment, phenomenological but psychological presumably as well, which will be part of what instructs my cells for the need to adapt the genome to new conditions. Maybe use transposable elements. I mean, there has to be some level at which the awareness of grasshopper, awareness of a certain privation of available protein, makes the cells aware that they have to change the grasshopper into a locust because this is one and the same species, just in different gene expressions.

1:21:31different epigenetic realizations of one in the same genomic sequence. So I assume that there is a cooperation, a coordination of sorts with my own awareness that I'm part of this system. So, but do my, or my cells, is each individual cell conscious in some sense? You know, I don't believe that consciousness is univocal. As I say, I don't take the Cartesian view that it's all one thing that there are levels. So I much prefer something like the Neoplatonic notion of the one, the new psyche soul creating life and all that, or the Aristotelian notion of the rational soul, the vegetative soul, or Platonic notion of sort of the chariot driver of Themis.

1:22:20And so, yeah, I don't, again, I'm not a Cartesian in any sense. I do believe there is a cooperative continuum here and that every level participates to some degree in this mental act that is consciousness, intentionality, unity, finality.

1:22:37Alex O'Connor:I guess in trying to place this in a context - I think that explains life systems too. I think Robert Rosen and James Shapiro in their different ways are onto something, and Dennis Noble, and in a different way, Evan Thompson, I disagree with him on - Yeah. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask, like, you know, being sort of in a sort of context of being sort of contra panpsychism here, still, if you were to fundamentally cut down into reality, into what we call material objects, right, and keep sort of digging down in there. And you said, I want to be clear that there's no point of digging down where mentality or consciousness isn't present anymore.

1:23:21Alex O'Connor:What I wanted to ask is, do you think, and maybe the answer is just, I don't know, but maybe you have a hunch, do you think that you would hit some kind of rock bottom, that there is some kind of foundational unit of stuff? And if there is such a thing, what would you suppose it to be? You know, in the way that a string theorist says it's a vibrating string and somebody might say, oh, it's just a fundamental particle like an electron or a muon. would you say given that there is no point at which consciousness is not present although the universe doesn't sort of come out of these individual conscious units would you still be looking at in the sort of super ultra microscope would you still be looking at something like a fundamental unit of consciousness or something else well i don't think a microscope would be able to see the actual consciousness the metaphysical microscope you know i mean at the At the lowest level, the dreams of God, I don't know precisely there.

1:24:17I just know that, let me put it this way, just as when you phenomenologically take apart mental agency or perhaps the systematic coordination of organism as opposed to mechanistic, I mean, replicating organisms especially, or the structure of language, you can identify a syntactic or a paratactic or a material level. But at no point does it exist in abstraction from the total act that has that intentional finality, that antecedent finality in that formal structure. And so at that lowest level of whatever physical reality is, I would say the same thing, is that whatever the mentality there is, it exists by virtue of its participation in this already or super eminent downward causation.

1:25:07And so it is first and foremost an act of mind, even if it's also material. Now, I'm not anti-panpsychism. I want to point out I don't reject panpsychism as such because it's a huge term. I mean, in that—I'm having horrible trouble with names today. Forgive me, Jim.

1:25:38But panpsychism has been used to describe the dominant philosophy of antiquity and the Middle Ages and everything up to modernity. So all I'm rejecting is a panpsychism that's become just, as I say, captivated by the metaphysics of stuff to the degree that it's re-mechanizing. It's trying to get past mechanism by, again, just creating another mechanistic picture. I think the paradigm is defective. It's always going to turn into an infinite regress if you do that. But, I mean, do I understand the mind of God? No. But I think we have more than enough good reason to think that what the mind does is not an epiphenomenal froth on the surface of a vast ocean of pure, mindless material energy.

1:26:33Alex O'Connor:yes i i can agree with that um and in i suppose because you know you've taken a lot of your time here but there's there's just one more sort of question or like body of questions that i i just have to get your thoughts on i think to give a complete picture to the viewer here which is that okay so maybe we're we're dealing with a with a kind of idealism or a kind of pantheism or a kind of panentheism and in some sense you know our selves are just these consciousnesses that are participating in a great big consciousness and in the same way all physical matter is really somehow part of this big sort of mental act you you still are left with i think two important questions one is this if one of the sort of characteristics of mentality and consciousness is it's like unity.

1:27:25Alex O'Connor:The fact that, you know, when I have a conscious experience, it feels unified and singular to me. It's not made up of parts. It's like this one sort of thing altogether. If we are all existing in the mind of God, then why do we not all exist in this one great big sort of abstract sort of singular thought? Why does it feel like there's a me and there's a you and there's a him and a her and like there's all this distinction going on within this mind yeah but why wouldn't there be modalities within it because my contention would be that we aren't psychologically circumvallated by by our individuality that that even the premises of what our thinking is as i said before when you retreat to that representative unity that Kant talks about, but which I would prefer to call, you know, Luce or the Funklein or the Adnan or whatever, you find that it's perfectly anonymous in a sense.

1:28:26It isn't your psychological self. You can distinguish your empirical ego from the pure, I think. And also, if my description of intentionality in the book is correct, and don't tell anyone, but it is, the ultimate horizon of intentionality exceeds, again, anything that's characteristic of you simply as a self. Why there shouldn't be modalities or sort of these prismatic reductions to, well, wouldn't that too be part of an infinite thought? An infinite thought in all its possible facets would express. I mean, there I do have the sympathy with Spinoza's thinking, yeah, infinite substance and infinite modes is necessary.

1:29:14You can't separate the many from the one if you make the infinite devoid of the richness of diverse experience. So I assume that there's not really—again, at this point, though, I'm not going to take the preposterous sort of Hegelian position that I can actually know the real in a full rational and encompassing thought. And if that's a caricature of Hegel, I apologize to his guest. But there is that tendency there. I'm not trying to build a system with anything quite like that architectonic fullness, but I have no problem seeing the subjective experience of consciousness at my level, and at a different level perhaps of the cells in my epigastrium or in cerebral cortices, as participating in different ways.

1:30:18Because I think that we again and again happen upon grounds of unity that we share. And again, And I do think the experiences of contemplatives and mystics are illuminating here, or perhaps persons on psychedelics. These all may be derangements, okay? But there is a certain uniformity and unanimity to this experience of the loss of self in a greater self, the loss of finite empirical horizons in a more embracing experience of the infinite.

1:30:57and to me it would be an impoverished infinite so to speak infinite simplicity that that whose rational content were not also infinite

1:31:09Alex O'Connor:diversity um i think that that makes sense and i suppose to really make this clear i want to ask and my final question am I God? no although Kugev's argument about Hegel wasn't it? that if you follow Hegel to the end he's actually saying that he's more Jesus than Jesus was yeah quite I actually kind of want to go in the opposite direction and say okay so I've talked about that enough that without going into too much detail I hope our listeners will understand this idea that maybe this sort of individuation of the self that we're talking about as being this slight mystery is not even real there's not like a real distinction between selves there's it's just sort of a an illusion well it's certainly not absolute i mean i think it's real in that it's a real phenomenon that we are yeah you know i can't i can't taste the coffee you're drinking um but i don't think it's absolute uh i mean i think there are experiences where we break through those boundaries.

1:32:18Alex O'Connor:There is something weird, and it takes us right back to the beginning. Before anybody has ever thought about consciousness, there is something that everybody notices, which is like, you know, I've got a book here. It's a book by Rodney Stark. I use it to prop up my laptop. And I maybe... Poor Rodney. I know, poor Rodney. Maybe, oh, before Christ, actually, there's a picture of him on the front that's probably a bit blasphemous, but it was unintentional I don't like the sociological arguments in the book all that much. Some of them are true, but they're too deflationary for me. Yeah. Well, there's a lot to be said on Rodney Stark, and perhaps that's a podcast in itself.

1:32:56Alex O'Connor:But he's serving as a useful placeholder here. Not talking about Rodney Stark, I'm sure that he's conscious just as I am. But I mean to say the book, right, I will notice that I, even though maybe I am just this thing which participates in a great big mind. Likewise, this book being made of matter is really just something which is participating in a great big mental act. And we're all just participating in this mental act of God, the mind of God. And yet I've got something that this book doesn't have. Right. And it's not just like in the way that I've got something you don't have. you know i've got a singular mustache and you you're wearing glasses that kind of thing but i've got this extra thing which typically we associate with something like the word consciousness now we want to say that's a that's maybe a mistake oh no no it's not a mistake consciousness just don't separate it from the other aspects of the of the mental act it is consciousness yeah so what is it in if if we're if i and this book are both just these things which exist in one great big mind.

1:33:58Alex O'Connor:What is it that I have that the book doesn't have, that you and I share that the book doesn't have? Well, I guess a rational and an animal and a vegetal nature, a soul, if you're going to be Aristoteleian about it. But how does the book exist, though? What is its ontology? What is the book? It exists as atoms. It exists as a composite of pulp and and polymers and other things and of inks. But the book also consists in its intentional content, right? Which exists only because it's in relation to you. So it's a medium, it's a form of uttered word of intentional communion and communication. And in that regard, there's a level even of the book that exists outside its physical calculus that exists instead in this hermeneutical or noetic space.

1:34:56Again, for a panpsychist who's materialist, that's more of an issue, I would think, because they're thinking the atoms of the book have to add up into something. Whereas I don't think that. If there's a level of consciousness of the level of matter as part of the greater whole, and it serves its part there as the physical vehicle or platform by which a spiritual, using that in the sort of geistlich, you know, the German sense, spiritual or mental reality of Rodney writing down, you know, communicating something and you communicating it and you receiving it hermeneutically at the level of semiotics and intentional meaning, it participates at many different levels.

1:35:42It's part in the whole, it's not that of an organism, no, but it's certainly part of the whole continuum of the mental agency that composes all things. Again, if you think about panpsychism in terms of metaphysics of stuff, yeah, I think that's an interesting question, but that's not how I'm thinking of it. um yeah i mean i get what you're saying about the book and the language of the book but suppose it

1:36:14Alex O'Connor:was just like a rock or uh or maybe a leaf from a tree or something yeah a leaf is very complex a brain is very complex the materialist typically says that there's something about the complex organization of the brain that gives rise to consciousness your view seems to be no that like consciousness gives rise to something like the brain consciousness also gives rise to something like a leaf is it just a difference in the complexity of like the arrangement of consciousness is it is it well intensity but but consciousness isn't arranged i mean again you're talking about a materialist at that point you're talking about how does the composite work but that's not that's you know um the reason i was talking about honeybees earlier it's a good example of what i mean.

1:37:01There is a hive mind. There is such a thing, curiously enough. It works, again, at a profoundly semiotic level, but also at a level that involves decision and debate. You know, when a colony gets to the side where it wants to have a—which it needs a second hive, All right. Certain bees go out and search and take in the lay of the land. And then they have a sort of coded way of communicating this that's choreographed and apparently audible as well, that communicates what the differences are. Now, what happens is that bit by bit, as this parliament undertakes its deliberations, more and more bees begin sharing the dance of the bee, ultimately, whose choice is the most useful and the one that they agree on.

1:37:59Right. Well, you know, on the one hand, bees are more conscious, I believe, than the cells in their bodies. And yet, in a sense, the hive has a kind of mental agency that depends on some, I would say, also unified ground and unified. And so, you know, I have no knowledge of where the difference between the singular and the collective has to be drawn, how consciousness unfolds itself. I do know what the phenomenon of consciousness is to some degree in myself and others. I can observe it, I can describe it, and phenomenology is a very useful thing. And in doing so, I discover, again, these what seem to me indissoluble symbols regarding unity and intentionality and so on and so forth.

1:38:52What I'm not proposing, certainly, is that, again, it's like, you know, consciousness is like a light in the room, and the more photons you have in the room, the brighter it is. I think that there are all sorts of integrations and integrities and systems at work, all different sorts of interweavings. I like Dennis Noble's talk of the music of life. He's a violinist as well, and the special fondness for the contrapuntal tradition. But the question you're asking, I think, is, again, it's taking us back to a model where I have to account for a composite phenomenon built up from smaller things that would be like particles of consciousness.

1:39:42And that I don't believe. I believe there is this, I guess, since we have to talk in metaphors at this point, I guess it would be rather like light pouring through a prism in which the simplicity of the undifferentiated light becomes plural. But then ultimately, again, merges into the whole in a different way. But, yeah, I don't know if I can give you an answer more than that. I mean, I think you're an organism and the book isn't. What's interesting to me about the book is even it exists within hierarchies of ontological hierarchies. It exists as what your cat might make of the book. It's a different object for the cat than it is for you.

1:40:29Alex O'Connor:That's true. What do you think makes, say, the brain a special instrument? I mean, the brain, whether you're a materialist or an idealist or anything, quite clearly the brain is like the center of my ego. There's got to be something that's important about it. And yet we want to say, but, you know, consciousness is not the same thing as the brain. That's a materialistic reductionist view. But the brain's got to be doing something special. What do you think is the role of the brain? It is a form of matter, a modality of mind that is specifically appropriate to the complexity of the sort of mentality, the sort of organism you have.

1:41:19is. I don't think what's special about it is that it is formed by, that's the funny thing, you say it's the center of your ego. Well, maybe the center of your psychological ego in some sense, but the I think in a different way I think is the center of the brain. It creates, it forms. And it's interesting, isn't it, that one of the things that's very odd, I found this when reading David Chalmers' last book, you know, these fantasies of uploading consciousness onto a digital platform and all that. They don't seem to take into account the degree to which mental agency actually shapes the organism.

1:42:00You know, that it's not. This is odd sort of inverted Cartesianism in which the mind is just code and the physical vehicle is simply, you know, fungible. It could be silicon. It could be—well, no. We know a lot about neuroplasticity. We know a lot about laying down new neural pathways, and that's often the result of conscious agency, so that we know the mind forms the brain at at least that level of dynamic organization in the course of the history of an organism. in a more primordial sense mind is always doing that the brain is the form taken by that which is formed by mind for human mentality yes but we keep inverting it's funny how we always this is the the uh heritage of the 17th century what is the stuff what is the mechanical process that allows for the seemingly more than mechanical reality rather than the way I—and Hephaestus in my book, I think, poses that as well as I could make him do.

1:43:06And he doesn't give up in the end, I will point out.

1:43:13But to me, the inverse of that question, the one that the ancient world asked, for them, matter and embodiment was stranger than mind because they could see the structure of mind in everything. Everything seemed to have a finality and to be coordinated with other realities and to be available to mental reflection in a way that seemed more than accidental or extrinsic. For them, the question would be, how did mind become this? How did this reduced, prismated, or congealed, or coalesced form emerge from this primordial reality, which is mind and all things. And I, reversely enough, I guess I'm just pre-modern in this, I regard that question as ultimately probably the one that starts from a better rational intuition.

1:44:05Alex O'Connor:Can I ask you, I promised it was the last question, but it just sprang to mind and I think it's unavoidable here. What then, and this might help to really get at this mistake that you think i keep making conversationally here but that society oh it's not a mistake it's uh it's it's a bondage of the reason but not a mistake yeah it's yeah it's it's my intentional materialistic uh devil's advocate coming out um but what do you think so so given that consciousness sort of precedes its individual manifestation in like a human brain or something and people typically think that, yeah, people typically, a materialist thinks that consciousness is reducible to the brain such that when I die, you know, my brain is going to rot and then my consciousness will switch off.

1:44:55Alex O'Connor:Presumably, in your view, when we die, consciousness doesn't exactly go anywhere. But this thing that the brain is the center of, the ego, the I am, the self, what do you think happens to not consciousness, as people often frame this question, where does consciousness go after death, but the consciousness that I have as opposed to the consciousness that you have, the fact that I can taste the iron brew that I've been drinking and you can't, what happens to that when my biological organism shuts down? You notice you said my ego, my I am, myself, as if these were all synonyms. The ego and ego sum are two different things.

1:45:33And self, there's a contested question. Do you mean psychological or spiritual self? Do you mean jiva or otman do you mean you know but your question is much simpler than that so i won't try to get around it with uh pete and trees um uh the i am i think is primordial no i obviously i think it persists i think that that uh you know um not because i have a pathetic desire for immortality i'm well i'm 60 years old now i know i look much younger uh 35 at most but believe it or not, I'm 60. And when you reach a certain age, the idea of oblivion is less appalling than it is when you're young. You have more pains.

1:46:18You've lost more people and pets along the way. You've become more keenly aware of the sufferings of this world and others and children and animals and the innocent. And so I don't think that's it. I've just had experiences that convinced me that that it goes on. I don't mean a near-death experience. The one time I was nearly killed, I don't recall anything else happening until I woke up again, but I don't think I was ever actually clinically dead. I was just hit by a car. But I've had other experiences that, here we get into the fantastic in many people's minds. If I started talking about them, people So that's autobiographical.

1:47:07Some of it's private. But yeah, I mean, I believe it goes on. And I do, you know, when I take off this hat and put on the other, when I write books of theology, that's based on a set of other convictions, based not only on logic or philosophy as I understand them, but on what I believe about certain historical events, certain personal events. And so, short answer is, yeah, I believe, and I guess what you'd call the immortality of the soul, to the degree to which, though, the ego that you are.

1:47:39Alex O'Connor:That's what I wanted to ask. Well, I mean, there's the I am that is still finite, longing to become infinite, I think. I mean, I think that's all the acts of our reason and intentionality do stretch out to a desire to be one with the infinite. But that it's still an individual experience that, if my favorite fourth century thinker Gregory of Nyssa was right, expands ever towards the infinite. But, you know, that's just one picture of the, you know, all of our pictures are children's dogs. Well, yeah. But I think there are aspects of your ego that you'd want to be freed from too, right? I mean, you're also a psychological self.

1:48:23How old are you? I'm 26. Okay. That's old enough to have done things that you regret. Hurt people perhaps you didn't want to hurt, been selfish in ways you didn't want to be selfish. I'm not accusing you in particular, though I've heard some awful things about you, just absolutely old. But there are presumably aspects of which you want to be liberated. I mean, there's a part of the self that is a transient psychological phenomenon that I like to think is, if not probationary, that's part of the crucible in which we're immersed in nature and time and history and self, and that not all of that persists and that what we shall be has not yet been revealed.

1:49:10But I don't think that there's a point where you, as this I am, that is this pure point of perspective with this history, is ever extinguished. I think it moves on, though, from glory to glory, ideally, even if it has to go through other things to that. to that. And there, however, we're straying beyond the realm of philosophy. I'm not like Ficino. I think Kant is right that you can't, from recognition of the irreducibility of the I am, get to the traditional arguments for the immortality of a soul substance. There, I think, philosophy has very little to say except to say that there are plausible ways where it would be consistent with our experience of consciousness.

1:50:05We're not bound to a mechanistic view of consciousness. But beyond that, I don't think there's a philosophical argument that's worth pursuing.

1:50:15Alex O'Connor:It wouldn't have any specific shape, in other words. It's like, look, some good reason to think that mentality or consciousness or maybe even some semblance of the of the i am well no maybe who you are maybe who you more truly are you know the degree to which what you are who you are is dispensable obviously shit is different from tradition to tradition within even bhaktic hinduism not vedanta a great deal of what you would consider to be who you are is just a vehicle for who you truly are, the true self. The Atman is not bound even to one lifetime, right? If you're in the Jewish or Muslim or Christian continuum, you might think, well, no.

1:51:05There's also a web of particular relationships, that who I am is actually bound to the history of the life I've lived here, who I truly am, And that that web of communion and relationships is not going to be just realized in some impossibly remote future in which I've been many other persons along the way, but that there's a depth to personhood that persists more obdurately or more beautifully than that. And again, I don't pretend that philosophy can adjudicate here.

1:51:36Alex O'Connor:So speaking as a philosopher, you might say something like, I do believe that whatever it is we're talking about there goes on in some sense, but what sense that is in which it goes on is an ungraspable aspect of reality. That's a perfectly fair statement. That's a perfectly fair pricey. I think that's fair enough, and perhaps also a good and relatively optimistic, which is sometimes, I think it's quite rare for this channel to end on a relatively optimistic note. It might be a really boring afterlife. It might, you know, just be. Endless. You run of bad British comedies from the 1970s. Are you being served?

1:52:21Well, okay, Marty Feldman, you know, maybe. Okay. but all right.

1:52:26Alex O'Connor:Well, I guess we'll, um, I guess we'll find out when we get there. David Bentley Hart. Thank you so much for your time. It's good to meet you. Thank you.