#158 Could Consciousness Be an Illusion?

30:52So when I taste something, let's say, that's very

30:55Keith Frankish:bitter, the stimulus, first of all, evokes a certain complex pattern of reactivity in me. Introspective systems monitor that, model it, categorize it, and evoke a distinct pattern of higher-level reactivity, one of the most basic elements of which being to say, wow that's bitter don't try it um so it's not that i'm sort of if i made the mistake that people think i make then it would be a really a big howler because i'd be saying look there's no cartesian theater at the first level of perception but there is one at the level of introspection but i just said the same thing about introspection as i say about perception that it's a psychological process i mean we can tell all this in terms of representations not representation that we're consciously aware, but representations of things in the world that then, uh, play a particular functional role in the rest of the cognitive system.

31:56Keith Frankish:So it's all going to be a matter of sensitivities and reactions, first order, higher order, perhaps even second order, perhaps even, third order, um, so reactions to reactions to the reactions. And the general idea here is that it's, that what perception is doing is it's tuning me into the world and, uh, triggering patterns of reaction, internal reaction, that are appropriate. What introspection is doing is being sensitive to patterns of first-order reactivity in my brain and triggering appropriate reactions. The particular use of this word is in communication. That things don't just affect me, I can tell you how they affect me.

32:44Keith Frankish:I can remember how they effect on me i can reason about how i could go on to produce those patterns that i enjoyed recreate them and avoid the ones that i did so it enables a higher reflective um awareness of our own experience if you like using experience in this deflationary term deflationary sense

33:04M. A. Frankish:okay so maybe it would be helpful to think about um a philosophical zombie for a second Of course, philosophical zombies. Was it Chalmers who came up with them? Was it someone else? I feel like it was someone else who came up with it and then Chalmers popularized it.

33:20Keith Frankish:Robert Kirk used the term in the early, I think that's about 74, but it's been knocking around. There's the imitation icon. It's an idea that's been around a bit, but they've certainly boosted its salience in the philosophical discourse.

33:36M. A. Frankish:so it's this idea that you could in principle say some um have a creature which kind of acts in exactly the same way as a human that reacts to the same stimuli in exactly the same way you can imagine like some kind of almost like a robot which just you know when it puts its hand on a hot stove it's just programmed to take its hand away and also to pull a facial expression and to go ow that really hurts and to do everything that the normal human does the only difference is that there's actually no interior experience and i know you're going to resist that that language right but this is how it's characterized right there's no there's no experience going on it's all essentially sort of fake it's all just like a mimicry of human behavior um you don't want to say that even we have this interior experience we're just sort of um you know interacting with the with the sort of data as it comes in the question i have for you is like is there a difference on your view between a philosophical zombie who like doesn't have experience but does act behaviorally in the same way and a normal human being because it sounds to me like the theory of perception that you're proposing here is very behavioral i know you wanted to say it's more about effects than behavioralism generally, but it sounds to me very behavioral.

35:01M. A. Frankish:It's like there are inputs and we react to them and we can use those inputs to do one thing or another thing. So can the philosophical zombie, except there's no qualia. So how do you make sense of this comparison?

35:15Keith Frankish:Well, look, let's just unpack the philosophical zombie a little bit, because the philosophical zombie isn't just acting like a human being. It's not just a clever a facsimile outward facsimile of a human being it's meant to be atom for atom an atom for atom duplicate of a human being so when we talk about what's happening inside it everything that happens physically inside here you know spatially inside here happens inside it it's got a brain with 86 bin or whatever interconnected neurons and all the other stuff glial cells and all the other stuff all interconnected in the way that mine are and working just as mine do it's very important it's not just uh it's not like an actor on stage just you know playing a part it is doing the whole thing so when you talked about it not having anything inside inside spatially inside here everything's the same that's stipulated by the definition of a philosophical zombie so when you were using the word inside you meant inside in another sense okay and i kind of like to know what that inside is that you're into because it's not a spatial one presumably let's come back to what the zombie can do what's the zombie well okay we go to a neuroscientist and we say what happens when someone smells coffee what happens when they see a brown a lovely rich chocolatey brown um and they start telling you this immensely complex story about how even at the retina there is already filtering for significance happening.

36:50Keith Frankish:A lot of the incoming photons are just, you know, their activity is just ignored. It's already filtering for significant patterns. That starts at the retina. It continues through many, many, many, many patterns. Continually, the brain is looking for significance. And as soon as it finds a bit of significance, it starts using it to modulate responses of various kinds, to modulate, to prime attention, it starts directing attention to certain things. it starts and then processing those things it starts it's like a sponge drawing in significance from the world and then trying to make use of it quickly to respond because you know it's got to get us you know the brain can't mess about you know life's life's moving quickly it starts triggering all kinds of not necessarily responses but dispositions adjusting our expectations of what's going to happen next this is the big thing i mean this is the central part of predictive processing and the free energy framework it starts adjusting our alignment to the world our expectations of what is going to happen next if you had to have one phrase from what the brain is doing it's trying to predict it's trying to prepare for the next second next uh trying to anticipate the future it starts doing all this immediate this information way before it's entered what we might before we're aware of the information multiple channels are doing this bits of information have been extracted about lines shapes colors edges and there's categorizations happening um all sorts of different categorizations some of which get rejected straight away it's a cat no it isn't a cat it's just a treat whatever uh some of these ones get boosted into greater um significance some of them start uh become available through linguistic reports some of them become available for decision making some of them um trigger emotional response trigger memories all of this characterized in in psychological terms.

38:44Keith Frankish:All of this stuff happens. A neuroscientist could sit you down and talk to you for days about this, and they would say, and still we only know a fraction of it. Now, all of that is happening in the zombie. Every bit of it. Okay? Everything that happens in here is happening in the zombie, by definition. The neuroscientist is going to tell the difference. A psychologist could subject this zombie to the whole battery of psychological tests that it can have for awareness of stimulation, and it would pass them all just as well as i would um my zombie what's it missing the thing now i also it would do the introspective thing as well it will be able to tell you we'll be able to tell you yes i can see that now i couldn't see it a moment ago but when you just increase that when you just titrated that a little bit yeah i could see it no i can't see that that one's a little bit darker than that one um yes no i think the red light's a bit bigger all the things that the the optician us here when you go for an idea do all that perfectly just the same as i would he would say that um that smell reminds me of my grandmother's garden uh you know that's you know it reminds me of the last time i was there i did do everything and it would tell you of course as well that it was phenomenally conscious because that is one of the uh effects of all this self-wanching.

40:03Keith Frankish:And yes, I'm having an experience. I'm conscious. And you know what? This conscious experience, when I think about it, I can't imagine how it could be physical. It could do all of this. This is accepted by people who, by Thomas, for instance, calls it the paradox of phenomenal judgment. His phenomenon, his zombie twin will be as convinced that it's conscious and that consciousness is a mystery as he is. But something's missing, supposedly. That thing that's supposedly missing is what I say is illusory. Right.

40:30M. A. Frankish:So you would, in doing so, therefore, just, I suppose, reject that there could be a philosophical zombie, because if you build a philosophical zombie who's atom for atom, the same as a human being, and has no interior private experience, that is just what you are.

40:54Keith Frankish:interior private experience in this sense that isn't captured by any of the description of all the activity that's going on in there because remember this interior practice remember that this interior private experience and again interior to what i want to ask not interior remember i said i am this organism i am this animal it's not interior to me the animal like spatially so where is it interior to what to my soul i suspect that i suspect that's hanging around in my background that there's this cartesian idea that i am not really an animal somewhere back but anyway i don't impress that just now the point you've got to remember that if there is this something extra it's not necessary for all of that other stuff to happen okay so it's not playing any role it's not essential to my saying things like oh well that one's slightly darker than that one and oh i can just see the pattern of the light coming through the leaves it's so beautiful and it reminds me of my mother's garden and yada yada everything you asked me to describe my experience to report my phenomenology the zombie does all of that perfectly so the actual quality is plays no role in that it's just a fifth wheel and my claim is that our talk of qualities is a kind of our pre-theoretical clumsy way of describing the reality that's going on it's just we can't just we can't pull it all apart this reactivity it's too far too far too complex too multidimensional we can't pull it apart so we say oh it's just what's it like to see that well that's what it feels like to taste strawberries or see a lovely rich luscious brown, can't tell you anymore.

42:41Keith Frankish:You can't. That doesn't mean that there is a pure quality there that you are immediately detecting. It means instead of having direct revelatory access to pure qualities, you have indirect, selective, distorted access to immensely complex patterns of reactivity. And we mistake one for the other. That's the illusion.

43:04M. A. Frankish:Can you tell me about the motivations for this view in that I'm going to ask you to be as honest as possible here in that most people like want to think that their view is it's just thought out first principles. This is most plausible. But I don't know. Are there any like I'm trying to think if there are ways in for people like for somebody to say, well, hey, look, have you ever wondered why this is such a mystery? Have you ever thought it's a bit strange that no one can define consciousness? Have you ever thought it's a bit odd that, you know, like, what are the kinds of like things that you might notice about the state of philosophy of mind or the conversations that people are having, which can make you come along and say, well, hold on a second.

43:43M. A. Frankish:Maybe this answers some of your questions. I mean that in the sense that like when I speak to a panpsychist, they might say, have you ever noticed that like no one can tell you what an electron is? Have you ever noticed that science only talks about what things do rather than what they are? and then they say, look, here's a really good motivation to take this seriously. Are there similar contextual factors that would work here?

44:04Keith Frankish:This is a nice question. First of all, who knows what one's motivation is? I mean, I don't think we have sound introspective access to all of our motivations. So who knows? I mean, why am I talking to you today? What role does vanity play in that? Am I hoping that people will love me because they've seen me on here being charmingly whatever? I don't know. I don't know. So there's a level at which our motivation, I think when we talk about our motivations, to a large extent, we are fabricating a narrative based on actual things that have happened to us, things that we've noticed, things that we've felt, but we are creating a self-story and the different self-stories you can tell.

44:50Here's one that I could tell about this. um i don't think humans are special as um as uh going to say some of my opponents think they are

45:03Keith Frankish:i don't think that uh just sitting in an armchair and reflecting on one's own experience

45:08M. A. Frankish:gives one direct insight into the nature of reality i just don't think we are that special

45:15Keith Frankish:the fundamental nature of reality i think we are evolved biological organisms are who have capacities for self-monitoring, self-modeling. This gives us a certain picture of ourselves, which is very adaptive to have this simplified self-image and maybe even to think of ourselves as having a private inner world. It may be very useful. But I don't think evolution wouldn't need to equip us with an insight into the fundamental nature of reality, and I don't think the universe has been so kind as to just sort of make it pop out of the things evolution has given us. It just seems too arrogant to think that way.

45:54Keith Frankish:Another reason is that I suppose that it's a reason I'm not a Christian or religious person, but in some ways I'm kind of tempted by it. I can see the attraction of these views. I have dwelt on the—and in my youth I think quite a lot about religion. I have dwelt on the mysteries of consciousness. I have really tried sincerely to think myself into the mindset of people like Philip. And I think I understand it. I think I understand it.

46:23M. A. Frankish:Philip Goff, you mean.

46:24Keith Frankish:Philip Goff, yes, sorry. Philip Goff. And Dave Charles. Phil. Phil Goffey. Sorry. He's a friend of both of ours, so we can do this. I have, I think, thought myself into their mindset. and indeed i can and and that's one reason why i don't want to say oh they're just wrong we should just eliminate all talk of this no i'd say it's real it's compelling it's vivid but it's an illusion um and the one reason i do that is because i'm quite again this is this is my story is that i'm uh and one reason i i i find it hard to adopt any sort of religious belief is that i'm i'm quite an anxious person and i'm anxious about self-deception i'm anxious about believing stuff just because i'd like to believe it there are i would dearly love to believe that i would see some of my lost loved ones can dearly love it but i don't want false comfort i want to try and live life with my eyes open uh try and deal with things as they are because i think in the end self-deception lets you down yeah it can't do that it's it's it's a it's a it breaks these it's a crutch that breaks eventually and i think the same goes uh for thinking about uh the specialists of the human mind the third reason is that i absolutely love scientific explanation i love finding out about i don't do first order science myself but i love reading about scientific discoveries, about how we've unpicked the mechanisms of cellular metabolism.

48:07Keith Frankish:It's amazing stuff, and work that's being done on developmental biology. It's amazing, and it's wondrous, and it's wonderful. It's far more wonderful to me than the stories that religions might tell. And I think there's a fascinating story to tell about unpicking the nature of consciousness. And I don't want people to stop. There's a danger that philosophers are going to discourage people from trying to tell that story by saying, well, you can't do it. It's a hard problem. You've got to just leave it to metaphysical theorizing, people sitting in their armchairs, mulling these overs. No, let's get on with the work.

48:50Keith Frankish:Let's find out what's what's what's really happening um but sometimes people say well sometimes people suggest that i haven't really had rich enough conscious experience now it's true that i haven't done psychedelic psychedelic drugs but i do suffer from quite vivid migraines and if anything they are more more i think perhaps more uh impactful than than perhaps so they're certainly more unpleasant than psychedelic as much. I know what it's like to feel that you are part of the wall,

49:28Keith Frankish:that you've split into two, that your senses have merged together in strange and unarticulable ways. I've had some pretty strange experiences. so the people think that they've convinced me that i'm wrong by giving me a punch on the nose won't get far um although they might make me you might make me pretend to to to agree with them

49:59M. A. Frankish:yeah i the the question of psychedelics is interesting because like the kinds of experiences that people have when using them involve some quite strange things like the concept of an ego death and the conviction that consciousness is kind of everywhere and foundational and that the whole world is alive and whatnot but particularly this idea of like the self which so far you've been saying that i am just this sort of biological organism i think that requires a little bit of investigation in that you know i don't feel like i am the same thing as as my hand like i could i could probably cut off my hand and it would no longer be like a part of me i kind of feel like i could like cut out my like parts of my brain and i'd still be like here um it's not clear to me where this biological sense of the self actually lies and there are all kinds of problems in personal identity as to as to what that is as to you know as to what what counts as like continuity of one person you know what makes me the same person i was 10 years ago and then also on top of that given that lots of people just are convicted that they have experienced the death of the self and whatnot i wonder if we just grant for a moment that the self is a is a dubious concept if it were a dubious concept if the self sort of didn't exist and was an illusion, then like, how would that affect your view?

51:29M. A. Frankish:Because it seems like a lot of what you're saying relies on the idea that there is this you that is having experiences that is reacting to the world. It's you that's conscious. When I touch a hot stove and move it away, it's not my hand that's conscious because the panpsychist could say what's going on there is like every little atom in my hand is, you know, going, get out, get out, go away go away and like sort of cumulatively together that is that is felt as the pain of a hand or something whereas i think you have to say that that there is some kind of sort of central part of you maybe it's your central nervous system that like reacts to that so how much of your view like depends on the notion of there being a self which can have these reactive

52:13Keith Frankish:experiences well what i said was that i think i'm i'm an animal a particular animal an individual animal, a token animal. And the identity conditions for that animal, we can debate about that. I mean, this animal could lose a hand and still be the same animal. I mean, so we can get into identity conditions for individual animals. How much of me could you take? This is a really interesting question when you get to my age, by the way, because you find bits of yourself stopping working. You're a long way off, idiot, but give it 40 years and you will find that bits of yourself stop working uh both the peripheral ones and the more central ones some days so so you i'm not i'm afraid you will uh i i still feel i still feel it's me even though i go into the kitchen i think what did i come here for i have no idea so um there isn't there isn't like you know there's self isn't a clear-cut concept but the idea of this individual animal okay when does this individual animal let's distinguish the individual animal then we'll say something about the self separate individual animal when does it cease to exist what if i you know if i got serious uh form of dementia or something would i still there's no hard and fast line when i actually die and they put me in the ground or um or yeah whatever they're gone then all right um but basically as so as long as as long as there's still a pulse then in some sense this animal is still around whatever but it's not there are no bright lines i don't like bright lines that's it's it's not a there are very few bright lines in nature they're looking for essences and definitions this is a thing that philosophers are preoccupied with and it's a pointless endeavor um what there are are words and how we choose to use them and concept now okay so that's this animal now the self i do think i want to say a bit more about the self i most of the my views are very heavily influenced by those of Daniel Dennett.

54:10And I do really like his idea

54:12Keith Frankish:that there is a sense in which we have a self as distinct from the body, but it's the sense of a fiction. It's a narrative that we animals, we human animals, tell. We're very talkative. We love reporting stuff about ourselves. That's one thing that the self-monitoring, self-monitoring allows us to do. We don't just have experiences. We recognize that we have them. We talk about them. We tell other people about them. often obsessively and annoyingly um and from this we construct a kind of narrative i am the person to whom this happened to whom that happened and who feels this and who likes this and doesn't like that and who wants this and we tell this and it's a selective one of course because we just think and you know you can get into the habit you can tell bad stories about yourself and get yourself into a really unfortunate state of affairs.

55:06Some people respond to trauma, it seems,

55:09Keith Frankish:by constructing parallel stories to help them deal with it. So these, I think, this is one way of retaining self-talk without the inflated metaphysics. That's essentially what Dan was doing all the time, and it's what I'm trying to do, is to take these folk conceptions of things, like free will, consciousness, intentionality, meaning the self, say, look, as they stand, you can't really make them do the kind of really heavy metaphysical lifting you think they can, or even scientific lifting, but they're still useful. So let's just re-engineer them a bit. Let's see what they're really doing for us, that they have a pragmatic value, um notion of the self as a prior value in presenting yourself to other people and to yourself make keep a track of who you are and what you want it's a useful story that you tell it's doesn't correspond to some thing associated with the body um but it's a useful notion to be safe we can do the same with free will with consciousness don't have to throw the notions out completely we re-engineer them a bit uh in a way that makes them i think this re-engineering is very important because it doesn't make these concepts hostage to some dodgy science, or potentially dodgy science, or heavy-duty metaphysics.

56:34Keith Frankish:If you think of ourselves as being free, responsible agents, it's very, very important. If you think of yourself as a passive victim of circumstance, then you... And all sorts of... You need to think of yourself as free and responsible. But if you think that freedom and responsibility depends on, let's say, physics being wrong, or, you know, in some way, I mean, maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but if you think that it does, then you're in the danger of losing it if science turns out the wrong way. If you think that being conscious depends on making sense of the idea that quarks are conscious, then again, you might sort of think, well, maybe I'm not conscious then, if it would have to be the case that everything was conscious in order for me to be conscious.

57:13Keith Frankish:Let's just, you know, these concepts are important ones. Because they're important, let's not make them do work that they can't do and may collapse under the strain of trying to do. Oh, I got a bit preachy there.

57:29M. A. Frankish:It's good. We like that. We like that. I always find it great. I was thinking when you said about free will, I was thinking about the sort of debates that Sam Harris and Dan Dennett would have. Despite talking about something relatively intellectual and highbrow, it got quite sort of personal and excitable. It happens sometimes, and I think it's great. The thing that I'm just interested in, in what you just said... Sorry, go ahead. Yes.

57:58Keith Frankish:No, no. I was just there, just to note that I think Sam said that Dan thought we were just puppets. And Dan said, yes, in a sense, we are puppets. But we're also puppets that can have strings that can control their own strings. We're puppets that have the ability to control those first strings with other strings which and then okay there's no ultimate puppet master but it's the ability to control your own strings at different levels of organization that gives you freedom it's it's it's it's a mechanism of autonomy and you should love these strings these deterministic mechanisms that allow you to exercise autonomy anyway that's

58:36M. A. Frankish:i just i just remember um yeah sam harris saying i think it's fair to say that one could watch an entire season of Downton Abbey on Ritalin and not detect a finer note of condescension than you manage for 20 pages running. You'd think that they were like talking about each other's wives or something, but no, they're talking about whether humans have agency over their own actions, which I think is fascinating.

59:01Keith Frankish:The funny thing is that they're metaphysically, they were pretty much on the same page. It was the moral that each of them drew from it that was different.

59:08M. A. Frankish:Yeah. And so much of it might even just be linguistic that it becomes kind of crazy. I think Sam has since, you know, maybe if not apologized for that, at least sort of toned it down. I remember they had a conversation afterwards and it kind of awkwardly addressed it. You know, a moment ago, you said that philosophers are obsessed with trying to like categorize and that it's hopeless. I agree with this, by the way, in that we want to precisely define what is the difference between a table and a chair? What is the difference between a tiger and a lion? What is a species? If I lie down on my desk, is it a bad bed or is it a good desk?

59:54M. A. Frankish:And it's all a bit silly because quite clearly what we're just doing is taking, you know, this physical stuff and we're just arranging it in various ways and we're putting a label on it. Or we're looking at the natural world and we're seeing that the natural world sort of ebbs and flows and sprouts out various bits and bobs. And we sort of arbitrarily put like, you know, borders around them and give those borders labels like species and things. I agree with that. And I've talked about that a lot in the context of muriology, which is the study of plants and holes. Now, to me, as a muriological nihilist, I just think that there are no real categories.

1:00:35M. A. Frankish:There are no real distinct objects, except insofar as pre-existing matter just gets rearranged, given a label, and we call it a new thing. It's like matter and form, right? You give it a new form and we just decide that that's what a new thing is. However, there is something that has to be there to be arranged in this way. So the myriological nihilist thinks that the table and the chair and the can of Coke or whatever, they're all just like atoms or myriological symbols, as they call them, arranged and given labels. But there must be something that's being arranged. There must be this myriological symbol.

1:01:16M. A. Frankish:right and i think that the motivation for like panpsychism is to say well okay maybe there's just sort of one type of stuff and all it is is just an arrangement of stuff but i know that consciousness exists somewhere because when it gets arranged complexly enough in my brain i'm having these experiences and awareness and so you know as long as emergence doesn't exist which is a thing in itself they just say look i mean there's only one type of stuff you know brains don't exist tables don't exist it's just arrangements and labels but i know consciousness exists somewhere because it's here right now then then it must be there at the foundation what i want to say is like or what i want to ask is like do you do you have like a metaphysical view on when you said that philosophers trying to categorize stuff is a bit of a fruitless endeavor the stuff that they are categorizing the stuff that makes it all up do you have a strong view on what that is are you a physicalist are you agnostic do you do you know what a what an electron

1:02:11Keith Frankish:is you know i just wonder what you think i insofar as we have uh a you know a science of of the fundamental reality it's it's it's it's basic physics that's our best attempt at it and um I'm not a physicist. I'm whatever. It's quantum, the universal wave function, the super strings. I don't know. I've got no sort of stake in that game. Dog in that race? I don't know. Fight, dog in the race. dog in that fight that's an interesting yeah oh yeah sorry i at some point i turn into our mythology at some point i turn into alan partridge and start using bad metaphors um i don't know i mean it could be little angels i don't know i've no idea i've no i it's not what in i'm working it interests me i'm fascinated by it but i've got no what i do think though is that just by sitting and reflecting on my own mind, I don't get access to it.

1:03:18Keith Frankish:I think finding out about the fundamental nature of reality depends. And I think it'd be incredibly arrogant to think that the avaracists are building enormous particle accelerators that are bound boundaries of European countries to try and crack this problem. But I think I can crack it just by sitting in my armchair and thinking about my own mind. I think maybe evolution has given us a sense of the... And it wouldn't be surprising if it did, given us a sense of the importance of our own self-conception, given us a way of modeling ourselves and our mental activity in a way that makes it seem really vivid and potent to us.

1:03:55Keith Frankish:And Nick Humphrey, who I mentioned earlier, has written a wonderful book about this, sold us, about why this idea that we have a magical inner realm is an adaptive one, that has all sorts of wonderful functions. um the idea not the reality so yeah we've got this sense yeah i mean a lot of people have a sense a very powerful sense probably as powerful as the sense that they're acquainted with qualia that they're directly acquainted with god that they have direct immediate experience of god and that's something they know with more certainty than anything else well that's interesting that they have that it's an interesting psychological phenomenon it's interesting to study it and i wouldn't dream of you know being abusive to them or anything like that but i don't think we should trust it just because it's very powerful and similarly the fact that you think oh look we don't know the fundamental nature of reality but maybe just by sitting and thinking about my own mind i can discover it that just seems to me i don't mean to be rude but it just seems to me arrogant and and and incredibly anthropocentric i mean suppose you have a uh an ace of aliens who haven't don't have the notion of of of quality either because they are zombies or because they never subject to this illusion in the first place and they're studying the fundamental nature of reality and they learn that there is this species on this remote planet of soul three that think they found it simply by thinking about their own what it's like to look at to look at a brown surface i think that this you know so um i said yes there's a possibility but i the fundamental nature of reality they're clear uh and i i don't think i'll get it by by i think by country so um

1:05:41M. A. Frankish:i'm sorry i feel like it's a bit i feel like it's a bit unfair as a comparison though because like you know i don't think anyone would claim that just by sort of introspection i could know that you know there are there are you know there's microbial life on mars or something but the the facts that we're considering at least insofar as it comes to consciousness many people want to say that those are the kind of things that are like looking inwardly in respect introspectively just closing your eyes sat in your armchair is the equivalent of like looking at mars you're like looking at the thing that we want to know about and intuitively like let's address this because you're sort of pulling up this cartesian imagery of like descartes sat in his robe by the fire at the beginning of the meditations just saying i'm just going to think my way into all of the positions that i already hold and he has some sort of ideas and he thinks there are certain things that i could know just by sitting around and thinking about it that sounds to me like you disagree with him but like i do how come like it seems you know like descartes wants to say something like, you know, I know that I exist in some form because I couldn't possibly deny it.

1:06:52M. A. Frankish:The act of denying it would require my existence or at least my thinking. And so I know that I must exist. I think, therefore, I am. You know, if I were to doubt that I exist, doubting is a kind of thinking, which means that there is something doing the thinking. Now, to me, that seems like the kind of thing that, yeah, fair enough. You can sit down, you can think about it and you can know that and you don't need to go and like, you know, observe a bunch of stuff in the world in order to figure it out. So what do you mean when you say that you can't get knowledge that way?

1:07:21Keith Frankish:Okay, well, there's lots of things to say about the kind. I mean, first of all, there's a debate about what he was actually trying to do there. There's a case can be made that he was trying to just give himself license to overturn the whole Aristotelian scholastic framework, and that it was a bit of a tactical move to really to facilitate the neuroscience. Anyway, that's one thing. But I mean, it's often been pointed out that he wasn't entitled to the inference. I exist because he hadn't really said what I denoted here. What he should have said is, at best, thinking exists. And what is thinking?

1:07:56Keith Frankish:What does he mean by thinking? Does it involve having certain words being tokened in a speech? What does it involve? what's thinking what's he talking about um doubting what he was doing was writing words down on a page or perhaps uh articulating them to himself what's that um could he have done that without language um if not then he has then he can know that language exists maybe it it's a very tempting sort of thing but look how removed it is from our ordinary basic cases what do you know I open my eyes, I look around me, and I know stuff. Okay, I could be in error, right? Again, start with what I think we are, evolved biological organisms.

1:08:42Keith Frankish:All our knowledge is dependent on mechanisms of some sort for tracking things, noticing differences, and responding to them. I don't see how else I can get knowledge by some process like that, barring some time by magic. And that goes for knowledge of my own mind. Whatever I say about my own mind, it must be the product of some sort of mechanism for tracking things that are occurring and generating responses to them. Now, okay, if you think you're an immaterial soul that is completely transparent to itself and doesn't need any sort of mechanism to know its own state, well, I suppose you could say that.

1:09:19Keith Frankish:And that's the kind of conception that you need to make Descartes' account work. oh okay the point is there are no foundations here we've got a whole load of beliefs some of them in uh some of them uh common sense beliefs some of them you know product of experience of the world um or reflection on ourselves we've got a whole lot of scientific beliefs and we've got to try and just find the best balance between all of these we can the idea that you can establish some foundations like in a mathematical system where you can actually just start define your axioms and then build on that. That doesn't work for knowledge of the natural world.

1:09:54Keith Frankish:And what's interesting is that Descartes' thought experiment is kind of captivating. That is very interesting psychologically. And I think that tells us a lot about our self-conception, about how the brain generates a conception of itself and its own activity. That is very, very interesting. Psychologically, it's very significant. You can base a metaphysics on it.

1:10:21Keith Frankish:I don't think we need a different metaphysics for us than we need for any other aspect of the natural world. I don't think we're that special. So help me understand why I feel like I do have a very special inner world.

1:10:38M. A. Frankish:And what I mean by that is it's not just that an external world presents itself to me and seems to have qualitative components or properties, but they kind of stay there. I can close my eyes and it's still kind of all there in some sense. I have dreams. I have weird sort of interior images. I always ask people, like all the time, where the triangle is that I can see in my head. I think I offered like$50 to anyone who could locate the triangle that I see in my head when I imagine it. And my friend Phil Halper just went and interviewed like 15 of the leading materialists, people like David Papanow and people specifically asking them my question.

1:11:33M. A. Frankish:And he thinks I owe him$50. I don't think that he's actually done it. i i just want to get your take on this because i feel like it's a good question just to give people people are probably sick of me asking it just for the record ladies and gentlemen i'm not just asking this because i i sort of keep wanting to know the same answer it's because i feel like how you answer the question is a really interesting way of like demonstrating what you think about consciousness so i close my eyes i think of a triangle there it is it's got properties it's got three sides. Some people say the triangle just doesn't exist.

1:12:09But I can attribute properties

1:12:12M. A. Frankish:to it. It doesn't have four sides. It's got interior angles adding up to 180 degrees. I can't do that for things that don't exist. Things that don't exist don't have properties. So there is a triangle. There it is. I can see it in my head. Where's the triangle?

1:12:25Keith Frankish:Okay, great. Good question. Okay. I don't actually have a copy here, but if I had a copy of one of Arthur Kernan Doyle's works, I would open it and read about Sherlock Holmes smoking his pipe. And then I would ask, where is Sherlock Holmes' pipe? I can say lots of interesting things about Sherlock Holmes' pipe. I don't know if he describes that as Mia Sean, was it, or whatever, and that it's, you know, da-da-da-da-da. I could always hat or whatever. And I could, oh, just Sherlock Holmes himself. I can say lots of things about Sherlock Holmes. It's true that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. It's true that he was skinny, wiry, and that he took cocaine and so on.

1:12:57Keith Frankish:It's not true that he was a, you know, a 150-pound wrestler from Montana. so i can say two things about sherlock holmes the first things about sherlock holmes um where is sherlock holmes it's fiction it lives in the world of fictions it you can make true statements within the scope of some sort of fiction operator that's what i say about the triangle it's not anywhere but you can say two things about it because it's that kind of construction it's a sort of construction it's it has the same status that your thoughts about sherlock holmes have about the Sherlock Holmes that you imagine.

1:13:31M. A. Frankish:It's not composed.

1:13:34Keith Frankish:You're driving it like a representation,

1:13:37M. A. Frankish:like the idea that... Of course, yeah. That what I'm sort of seeing in my head is a representation of a triangle rather than a triangle, right?

1:13:45Keith Frankish:But not necessarily a representation made out of sort of things that are actually, you know, real lines that are really triangular. Just as when you think about Sherlock Holmes, you don't actually have to have little dabs of colour to paint an internal picture of Sherlock Holmes. You just have... Exactly how this works is a fascinating question. Somehow, your brain is using the resources that it has to represent the world around us to create representations of non-existent things, and then react to them in a very similar way to where you would react to the actual things. and the the heft of this the the force of this comes from it triggering similar patterns of reaction okay so if you try and imagine uh it's quite hard to imagine smells actually but you've tried if i try and imagine the smell of my grandmother's uh the scent that uh for my grandmother's room or something as far as i can do it it will trigger a wave of emotional responses okay and that's what gives it the heft that what it's likeness because it's moving me in the way that's melded.

1:14:50Keith Frankish:Not because it has some intangible spell quality, but because it has effects on me. And that's why, of course, we read about Sherlock Holmes, not just because we like this idea of entertaining non-existent things, but because they entertain us, they move us, they puzzle us, they intrigue us, they spark all sorts of interesting trains of thought.

1:15:07M. A. Frankish:Well, actually, I do it for the first reason. I'm just interested in the ontology of Sherlock my favorite question to ask people this week is um who created sherlock holmes because who who was it that created sherlock holmes or was it sherlock holmes's parents because it kind of depends on what you mean because within the fiction of the story sherlock holmes was created by his parents but of course there's another sense in which we want to say well he was created by arthur conan doll and the point is that you can sort of have logics within fictions, right? Absolutely.

1:15:42Keith Frankish:What I think you're doing here

1:15:45M. A. Frankish:is something that commonly happens in the philosophy of mind, in my view, which is that faced with a bit of a mystery, like this mysterious triangle that I can see or something, or the concept of consciousness emerging from non-conscious stuff is another area where this always comes up. People often don't quite explain it But they give an example. They say, oh, but that's just the same as when this happens. But the other thing that they're comparing it to is just as mysterious and is actually doing the same thing. So what I mean to say is that when I talk about emergence, I say, oh, how can consciousness come from matter?

1:16:24M. A. Frankish:People say, oh, well, that's just like how heat comes from atoms vibrating. Forgetting that heat, the interesting part about heat, is itself an experience so you're not actually explaining anything you're just giving another example of the same problem and i feel like the same thing's happening here which is like well where's the triangle and you say well it's in the same place that sherlock holmes is and i'm like yeah like and where and where is that because of course sherlock holmes is represented by the by the letters on on the on the book right but if no human ever existed no no brain no no sort of agents.

1:16:58M. A. Frankish:And just by some spontaneous atomic freak event, one of the Sherlock Holmes novels just sort of popped into existence spontaneously in space. Sherlock Holmes would not be there. There'd be no representative content. It would just be a bunch of atoms and ink on a page. The thing that makes that page represent Sherlock Holmes is that a mind is reading it and conjuring up an image in their head. And the question for me is, where is that image? What is that image? Is that image just the same thing as neural activity? Because if it is, then the answer to where it is is, well, it's inside of your brain.

1:17:41M. A. Frankish:You know what I mean?

1:17:44Keith Frankish:I was with you all the way until the last bit. Yeah, sure. It's a mental construct. It's a mental representation. um it's um and if and that mental representation is realized in a pattern of mental of neural activity of some sort um yeah but its significance lies in what it means for us i mean if um if you tell somebody just the basics about jillard and imagine this tall guy with this funny hat on the pipe and things like you know they saw some sort of image that's kind of nothing really it's just well okay you embed him in all the stories that are told about him and suddenly you have this rich narrative about you watch the jeremy brett series i think jeremy brett did a lot to create sherlock holmes actually i think that's terrific anyway um it's embedded in all these rich uh narratives and it also triggers all your your um your memory well not memory so much as your um your thoughts about victorian london and and uh and it's an escapist world and you can fill it out in your mind and so all of what you're doing here is let's put it just in representation in terms of other ways of putting it but uh you're creating a rich body of representations that produce a rich range of effects on you that you like that you like to have you know that you've that attract your attention and that but he was all kinds of positive uh responses in you great uh now where is sherlock holmes well he's the man himself isn't anywhere um what is there some sort of representation of a man that is created by your brain, by interaction with the words that Conan Doyle wrote.

1:19:25Keith Frankish:And I don't see there's any deep mystery here. I mean, it's one question too many to ask, and where is Sherlock Holmes himself? What we need to ask is, how is the impression of Sherlock Holmes created? And that's very much like how i want to think about conscience one too many questions to ask but what really is you know the feel of consciousness how is the sense of it let me put put it this way i suppose maybe this will help going back to conscience so um suppose what happened in the brain was that you know this is the eye here okay so it's like it's the right hand and processing processing processing and all the reason and then at some point this processing produced this kind of inner image right that is then sort of there present right now what happens with that inner image okay somehow is it just aware of itself i don't see how that could happen what would have to happen in order for that image to mean anything is for some sort of system to scan it notice its features and then start processing that information again and producing all the downstream effects that that image tended to produce now suppose we cut out the middleman we just have to process it doesn't create the image but it does produce all the downstream effects that the image would have produced.

1:20:42Keith Frankish:It's just as good. You don't need the image. You don't need an actual Sherlock Holmes. You just need all the effects that an image of Sherlock Holmes would have had. A really vivid image of Sherlock Holmes, if it's to mean anything to you, you've got to know, it's not good having a sort of inner TV playing in a room and nobody there to watch it, you know, with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Something's got to watch it and react to it. and if you can get all those reactions without the image on the tv screen how would you know the difference how would you tell whether you're undergoing an illusion of qualia or actual qualia and my thought is if you're undergoing the illusion of qualia in this representational sense of all the effects that qualia would produce being produced in you then you don't actually need the qualia and you know occam's razor let's just suppose that what the brain is doing is tricking itself into thinking that it has

1:21:36M. A. Frankish:qualia it's the simplest hypothesis i i can accept in principle that like it might be possible somehow for me to be fooled into into sort of thinking i'm seeing something that's not like it seems to me the idea that you're getting at is like you know when i actually see a triangle a real triangle in the world um my brain kind of reacts to it it sort of scans it it it reacts to it in some kind of way and all you need is for that reaction to occur you don't need the triangle itself and that's what's happening in my brain except it it does seem to me like i have an interior screen like i get not everyone can sort of visualize images in their head but i can i can like see the image i can i can see what it looks like and that seems to me more what i'm trying to get at is like intuitively i think for most people conscious experience is more than just a reaction to something this goes back to what we said earlier about like the behavioralism which i think is implicit in your view which i know you wouldn't want to characterize it this way but this is going this is sort of how it sounds and potentially what it like leads to which is that like when you have these experiences be it of a triangle or let's take something more uh pressing like the pain of a migraine, that what you mean to say in saying I'm experiencing a migraine is just that I am like reacting to a certain kind of stimulus.

1:23:06M. A. Frankish:I think intuitively, deeply intuitively for most people, when someone is in pain, there is more going on than just them like reacting to something or behaving in a particular way, that there's something else going on right and i think the same thing is intuitively true with me in the triangle i don't think that when i see that triangle in my head i'm getting all the stuff that i would have got if i saw a triangle except for the triangle itself i'm like no i i can see that i can see the triangle itself you know like i'm not just reacting to a stimulus i'm like conjuring up the stimulus and in this case of pain the stimulus is like there i am i am reacting to it but it's also like a real thing you know what i mean i i know i know what you mean and i'm not denying

1:23:54Keith Frankish:that that's a compelling way of describing it but let me try and do a little bit to to to unpick it um first of all of course with imagining the triangle i'm not just suggesting you're reacting to an external stimulus the stimulus may be internal here okay you may be reacting to your own internal uh uh reacting to your own uh the the the stimulus may be internal okay maybe due to some

1:24:19Keith Frankish:some strange activity occurring within the system itself so you may be reacting entirely to an internal stimulus through self-monitoring let's let's go to the pain case because i i like to try this one on people i'd be interested to see what you think okay so let's take a migraine now i think everyone will agree that when you have a migraine there are all sorts of reactions occurring okay so for instance what what's occurring well first of all i i'm i'm in a state that i don't like being in put it like that okay that's a reaction i'm reacting to the state by not one not liking it okay so let's imagine that reaction let's imagine removing one by one all the reactions and finding out what's left because what's left will be the bit that you would think is missed out by my story okay so let's see what it is so let's imagine leaving out the not liking it so someone says to me how are you feeling and i said i i i i some strange is happening but i don't mind it really okay and another thing that will be happening is that i believe that i'm having i'm a migraine so are you having a migraine no i don't think so but something weird is happening okay um one other thing the migraine does it it seizes my attention I cannot think of anything else but this thing.

1:25:40Keith Frankish:And so let's imagine that my attention is released. And someone says, are you free now to talk about that thing that I was asking you earlier? I say, yeah, yeah, fine, yeah, let's have a chat about it. Another thing is, I'm aware of waves of nausea. Okay, of course, you're going to say nausea is a feeling, but I will deal with that in exactly the same way as the other one. I'm allowed to do that. I say, do you feel as if you want to be sick? No, I'm fine. I don't want to be sick. But something strange is going on. Are you seeing strange lights and things? Now, of course, reporting that I'm seeing strange lights or indeed believing that I'm seeing strange lights, these are effects.

1:26:16Keith Frankish:So I say, no, I'm not seeing anything strange. No lights or anything like that. Do you feel you want to lie down? No, I'm fine. No, no, I'm okay. Remove. Does it remind you of any occasions in the past? No, I can't think I've ever had anything like this before. keep removing all the psychological reactions, the things that can be characterized in terms of what the brain is doing. So this pain is not having any effect, any psychological effects. It's not affecting my beliefs, my emotions, my desires. It's not detecting my attention. It's not conjuring up any memories. It's not altering my behavioral dispositions.

1:26:52Keith Frankish:I'm perfectly free to walk around chatting to you about whatever you like. But this horrible thing that is the essence of a migraine and the thing that makes it really bad and a matter of moral concern is still there. I find it very hard to imagine that.

1:27:09M. A. Frankish:I think that's really helpful, actually. I see what you're saying, and I think that's a really helpful way of thinking about it. And the thesis is, I'm saying that with something like pain, there is the qualia, and then there is the reaction. and you're saying that really there's only the reaction and the way to sort of test this is if we take away all of the reactive stuff if we take away all of the sort of psychological reactions are we left with anything we could call the qualia or whatever and it seems like no because you take away all of those things and what are you left with you're not even like aware that

1:27:50Keith Frankish:you're having a migraine you're not left with anything that's of any significance to you and your psychological significance. And of course, the account of the reactions would be much richer than I've just given that I've just sketched the surface. But here's the kicker. And when we talk about the feel of the pain, we are gesturing at all that complex of reactivity that we can't easily articulate. We can't unpack it. Because there's no need to. If somebody says to you, how you've been? I say, well, my attention's been captured by certain activities on my left temporal lobe. I also finding that I'm, I'm in a disposition for kind of nausea and I'm not, I don't, nobody wants to hear all that.

1:28:30Keith Frankish:I say I'm in pain. Okay. The idea though, is that's a shorthand, a convenient shorthand for all that's really happening. And I'm not suggesting you don't say you're in pain because you are. And all that stuff is horrible. It's bad stuff. You don't need to happen to people, but you don't need to reify the pain over and

1:28:49M. A. Frankish:above all that i get the impression that a couple of those things that you're characterizing as purely sort of psychological effects are the pressure points on which someone's going to want to say no no but that is that is the qualia in that like okay so if you have a migraine one thing is that it distracts your attention okay that's maybe we could call that an effect that itself is a bit complicated but okay another thing is that you know i'm i'm sort of seeing bright lights it's like okay well yeah that sounds like an effect but at the same time you're seeing the bright light so it also seems like a kind of experience certainly then it's like okay i'm i'm aware that i'm sort of nauseous i'm like okay as you alluded to uh as you sort of preempted i'm going to want to say well hold on that that is that is your reaction to a feeling you're sort of bundling together the feeling of nausea and sort of the the reaction to noticing that feeling and just calling it all an effect when actually you're starting to sort of smuggle out across the border the the qualia as you're as you're going along with these effects okay so what we've done then it's this is the objection is we've taken the the big pain qualia and we've broken it down

1:30:01Keith Frankish:into lots of sub qualia okay so instead of just being one in differentiated pain qualia there's now the nausea qualia and the seeing lights qualia i just do the same with those i say okay let's take this let's take this nausea qualia then again uh let's have got this nausea quality uh but again it's not having any effects on me so somebody says do you feel that you might be sick and i say no not at all do you are you aware of any sort of griping and no no no uh you know do you need any any medicine to no no i'm fine i know it has no effects on me it doesn't induce me to sort of run to the bathroom and stick my head you know none of this is happening because these are all effects so so then maybe we need to break down the nausea qualia into the wanting to go to the to the bathroom qualia whatever the point is at some point these reactions are going to sort of bottom out in things that don't even seem to have qualia at all that are just like a beliefs or whatever they might be the the idea is that what we're doing with qualia talk is bundling together complexes of reaction of reactive dispositions that we are aware of in ourselves and here's the kick here's the thing about this it has to be something like that for quiet for qualia talk to track anything that matters because if it's not tracking things that affect us if it's tracking something that doesn't have any effects on us i can't matter at all how could it matter if you say if you say look here this animal's in pain you say oh dear what's the consequence it's not having any effects it's playing around perfectly happily it's you know it's in horrible pain but you know it's it's low it's just having a lovely time it doesn't matter then it's the people who who reify pain who treat it as something non-functional that are not taking consciousness seriously i'm taking it serious because i think It's part of this messy, meaty, brown-colored biological world that we're in.

1:31:57M. A. Frankish:I agree with that, except, you know, like, of course, for qualia to mean anything, it must have an effect on us. And I think I could just stipulate that, like, qualia necessarily does have behavioral effects on us, but that those aren't the same thing. because you said a moment ago like well you know like if i was sat there say i i was feeling nausea but you know there were no effect like i didn't i didn't care about it i didn't you know i didn't notice it all this kind of stuff then you know what's left well i could just say well well that's impossible you can't have nausea without having those okay not because they're the same thing but because one like entails the other you know in the same way that i could say i don't know if i I put like a, if I put a big sort of metal object in a bathtub and displaced all the water.

1:32:49M. A. Frankish:And I told you that the, that all the metal object was the own, all the metal object was, was just the effect on the environment. There was no metal object. There was just the effect on the environment. Like, well, hold on now. Of course there's a metal blob. And I said, well, take, take away all of the effects. Imagine that no water was displaced. Imagine that there was no splashing sound. Imagine that you couldn't see the metal object because that would be an effect. imagine that you couldn't hear it imagine you took all of that away what would you be left with you know i'd be like okay in fairness you couldn't have the metal object without all of those effects but the metal object is still its own distinct thing that's causing the effects and i want to

1:33:24Keith Frankish:say the same thing about qualia okay well then then there's there is there's we can have a a terminological adjustment that will bring you perfectly into line with me because it doesn't matter that it's you know it's that what the metal's made of right anything that's of that sort of, I guess, that sort of size will have the same sort of effect. So let's define qualia as whatever it is that causes all this range of effects, okay? Whatever it is. Anything that causes those effects, because it's the effects that matter. So a phenomenal realist says, yeah, what causes them is some sort of weird thing that's inexplicable to science, and there's just a pure quality, and that maybe is part of this sort of fundamental to it.

1:34:03Keith Frankish:And I say, no, it's a pattern of brain activity. we just definitely if if we if we're defining quality in terms of their effects then i've won because it's much more likely that it's something natural you know uh something that uh part of the the world that we already know about than that it's some requires some extension to that well especially if that requiring that extension would involve conflict with physics there's there's an

1:34:33M. A. Frankish:there's an important move there that's being made. Firstly, like, I don't think we are defining qualia in terms of, in terms of the effect. I think I'm saying that qualia necessarily brings about effects without it being the same thing. But you also, you also made a quite controversial move there. You said like, you know, um, we have no reason to, to suspect that whatever's causing these effects wouldn't be part of the world we already know. You know, why, why would it, you know, why would we assume that it conflicts with, with physics and, and our sort of understanding of the material world. And, you know, the panpsychist or idealist is going to listen to that and say, well, hold on a second.

1:35:09The world that you know about is the world of conscious experience.

1:35:14M. A. Frankish:The world of atoms and material and physics is this sort of construction that we've placed upon our experiences of the world. The one that I know most directly is the qualitative experience. And so like, yeah, you're quite right to say that Occam's razor, we'd better like assume that whatever's causing this is part of the world that I already understand. Well, the world that I understand is a world of qualia. It's a world of experiences. It's a world of pain and a world of migraines.

1:35:42Keith Frankish:Wow. Well, now let's go right back to the beginning where we started. The world that I know, it's just this world around me that I open my eyes and there's stuff there. Now, this world of qualia, this internal world, this is a theoretical invention. it was invented pretty much around the time of the late 16th early 17th century when people realized that the colors couldn't really be out there in the world in the sense in which they seem to be you have galileo saying they've got to be somehow in the soul okay um i think dad once said that you know the problem of consciousness is the problem of what to do with colors when you realize they're not really in objects out there this inner world is an invention of that period okay now it could be the truth i'm not saying it's it's because it's an invention it's a um it's it's um it's it's inaccurate but you can't just assume its accuracy as an objection to any other rival theories you can't just say no all we really know about is this internal world and people didn't used to think that before the scientific revolution they invented it as a way of dealing with these recalcitrant things that didn't seem to fit into uh the picture modern science and they since they everybody pretty much believed in the soul they thought oh you know we don't we don't know you know we want to get on with doing science but there are these recalcitrant things oh well we all have souls they must be in there the problem really came into became a philosophical problem when people stopped believing in souls and they somehow had to put these these qualities back into the world back into the brain or somewhere back into the fundamental nature of reality there's another alternative which is to start to not make that initial move.

1:37:20Keith Frankish:In this, I agree with Philippa, but you shouldn't take the qualities out of the world. Of course, they're not as if we're just in the world. There's a contribution from us. Consciousness is an interaction with the world. And this is why it's not a suitable thing to be the fundamental stuff of the universe, because it's an interaction between complex systems, interaction of the world with complex systems within it. And it requires an immensely complex um a psychological system to support it it could it's not the right kind of thing to be it's not a thing at all it's an interaction it's a process it's and so yeah you you can't just buy that 17th century conception of what we know for sure no i mean you can you can have it and you can argue that way if you want but uh i don't think it's you can't use it as an objection to other ways of conceptualizing what's happening uh it's not an objection to to other ways of

1:38:19M. A. Frankish:conceptualizing it it's like when when you said that like well why would this why would we think that this would conflict with our sort of scientific understanding of the physical world and i'm kind of tempted to say well that itself is an invention of the scientific revolution the atomization of the world the mathematical like the mathematization of our understanding like that itself is a conceptual framework and again it's a great one you know makes a lot of sense could be totally accurate but it's like is there such thing as a as a pre-theoretical

1:38:49Keith Frankish:like worldview no no no absolutely absolutely not they're competing they're competing theoretical the question is which one is the more economical the more productive the thing is i don't see that having this this cartesian conception of world does it the question does it give you any real predictive explanatory leverage on things and it doesn't in fact it just creates a host of problems and the only thing it gives you is it vindicates this intuition we have about ourselves now if i say but maybe that intuition is just a product of a really compelling self-modeling activity on the part of the brain and it seems compelling because you know we are those brains that are modeling themselves ourselves and you know it's not like we're modeling a piece of the world that we can get other people to come and you know and look at it with us it's modeling itself Okay, so of course it would seem compelling to itself, wouldn't it?

1:39:46Keith Frankish:Now, so one of the things, all the phenomenal realist view, the quality realist view it does, is vindicate this intuition. Now, if that intuition can be explained in another way, what other advantages do we have from being Cartesians? uh the advantages of not being cartesians are tremendous because we it opens up the our own nature to scientific explanation to scientific understanding it opens up our understanding it first of all it removes these epistemological object uh obstacle to understanding other minds other minds are not secret secret impenetrable subjectivities that we can never understand.

1:40:30Keith Frankish:They're complex patterns of sensitivity and reactivity located, you know, locuses of other, of loci, of sensitivity and reactivity located elsewhere in the world. If we map them carefully enough, and this isn't just a matter of observing their behavior, if we map what's happening inside, we can fully understand what's going on there, and we can adapt our ethical views appropriately, which I think would involve extending our ethical concern. It gives us a handle on dealing with artificial intelligence. It gives us a handle. It integrates us fully into the natural world it's the final step if you like in de-anthropomorphizing our conception of the world and that's a wonderful advantage what you get from the other perspective you get the vindication of the intuition that i've got a special private world in here that

1:41:13M. A. Frankish:no one else can know about i think i mean obviously it'll be up to the listener to decide what's more what's more plausible there um i suppose i wanted to because this was a slight tangent from what we were talking about i just want to round it off this sort of thing about removing all of the behavioral aspects of of a qualia and seeing what you're left with and one of the things you started with was that like well one effect of the migraine is that i don't like it. And to me, this is kind of like the definition of pain. I think pain can be essentially defined as an experience which is not wanted when experienced.

1:41:57And to say that you not

1:42:01M. A. Frankish:liking something is just an effect, I think might be sort of to beg the question. Because in my view, when I don't like something, I feel like that is a qualitative experience. That's the thing that you're going to want to deny. But it seems to me intuitively that when I don't like something, it's not just a case of me rationally cognizing and going, there's just some fact about the world. It's a feeling. I feel something bad about that particular thing. That's what it means to say I don't like it. I can't imagine somebody saying they don't like something honestly and having literally zero emotional investment in that thing.

1:42:45M. A. Frankish:I think that literally is impossible. And so that's the one you started with as well. It seems to me the most obvious example of calling qualia an effect, removing the quote-unquote effect, and then saying, look, there's no qualia left. I was like, of course, because you've removed my dislike of something which is like a powerfully experienced phenomenon right now i i will i will let you say what you want to say about how well like pain uh not liking something is not a qualitative phenomenon and whatnot but at least the sort of initial helpfulness of the analogy which to someone who's on my side of the fence here might listen to that at first and go oh yeah that makes loads of sense actually what are you left with see how that is not as powerful when you realize that there are all of these issues with trying to figure out whether the thing you're removing actually counts as qualia?

1:43:40Keith Frankish:Look, first of all, if I'm right, these sorts of objections are ones that people would push. Because I'm talking about an illusion. Illusions are powerful things. This is a self-generated illusion, an illusion that the brain is creating in itself. So all these illusions, all these responses would be the ones that would come to mind. They're saying, no, it's so vivid, it's so potent. And it's not a matter of my thinking about anything or processing anything it's just a matter of you know and i understand that that's why i like to talk about illusion rather than elimination okay because illusions are real things illusions look what how do magicians talk about illusions they talk about them as effects about the effect creating an effect and the whole complex backstage machinery which is often incredibly intricate and also kind of disappointing when you learn about it is designed to create a certain effect to create certain responses in its audience.

1:44:34Now, so I'm suggesting the brain

1:44:37Keith Frankish:is creating something like that. Now, this is about liking.

1:44:46Keith Frankish:Imagine, not liking something. I don't, by not liking something, I don't mean just sitting around and sort of thinking, do I like this? Do I not like it? Now, on the whole, I don't mean that. I mean something much more basic. i have a long history of writing about different sort of levels of belief levels of of um of desire and so what i'm talking about not liking something is it being a complex aversive state that involves also has all sorts of dimensions to it so this stimulus stimulus is one that's i mean the most basic it might be producing uh aversive behavior and actually moving away from it but it's producing a lot more things than that you know it's grabbing attention it's it's uh it's triggering emotional responses which i'm going to deal with in the same way it's uh and it's doing all this uh much of this is going on under the surface as you know you're not articulating all of these different things separately to yourself it's put you into this whole aversive state which we describe as not liking okay we're not using we when we try to describe the state we're in to ourselves or to others we don't use a complex vocabulary of cognitive science cognitive psychology or neuroscience we don't have those resources and even if we did they'd be too unwieldy we say i don't like it okay and we tend to conceptualize that as some sort of primitive feel which is perfectly good way of conceptualizing it for the purposes of self-description and communication.

1:46:23Keith Frankish:I'm just saying it breaks down into a set of effects. And if it didn't, then it wouldn't be pain.

1:46:34Keith Frankish:The idea that pain has to sort of come from, and the pain as it were, a pain state, can't be made out of things, can't be created by things that are not themselves painful. It's like saying that a mountain can't be made out of things that are not mountains. that's the whole point of how the world works that large-scale things are constructed out of smaller scale things um things that have you know a television is doesn't have to be constructed out of little televisions you know that's how we can learn to make one right and a pain state doesn't have to be constructed out of little pains that are put together it's constructed out of other stuff we call the whole thing a pain the mistake is to think that we are capturing something that that word is capturing something if you like irreducible uh undeconstructable which is a very helpful uh uh illusion illusions are wonderful things we live through illusions um i mean the idea that colors are out there in the world where we start that's a very helpful illusion if i mean if i were looking at my bookshelves and you said describe the colors of the books on my shelves and i said right well okay we'll start here i'm having a sort of reddish qualia for that one i think reddish whatever and the next i said sort of brownish qualia i think you see i don't know you quite want to tell me other books you know it's a helpful thing to as it were see the and this is another thing this is another part of my story that i haven't got into the idea is that what we're actually monitoring here is our reactions to the things like this complex internal sense that I was saying, but that those representations are bound to in some way, this is a nice cognitive science term, bound to our representations of the objects.

1:48:14Keith Frankish:So we see the object as evoking a certain reaction. So we don't just see the object neutrally as, oh, I can recognize that it's red, whatever, but you know, sort of mean it. We see it as red and as having all the significance that red things have for us. So we see the reactions in the world. The world is informed by our reactions to them. That's what colors in the world. And this is why I kind of, it's a dynamic, but I kind of want to push it back more on the outward. We see the world as richly significant for us, and it's significant because we're projecting our own reactions onto it. And that's where consciousness, not in here, it's this taking in all that this responding to all that does um so galilea didn't make a note sorry go

1:49:04M. A. Frankish:so um a moment ago you said that um you know pain is like this thing we call pain doesn't need to be made up of little pains right like a mountain doesn't need to be made up of little mountains i of course agree i think that's interesting maybe what we call pain is just made up of things which are not pains but are instead just you know sensory perceptions they're just sort of reactive behavioral traits to certain inputs would that be a case of emergence because as far as i know you're you're as as suspicious of the concept of emergence as i am but when you say something like you know a mountain isn't made up of little mountains i want to say yeah that's true and yet I don't think that that counts as emergence.

1:49:51M. A. Frankish:But when it comes to pain, it feels a bit more tempting to say that that's what you're sort of driving at. No, emergence is,

1:49:58Keith Frankish:I really wish we could get rid of this word of emergence because it suggests two distinct things, like one emerging from the other, like a whale emerging from the ocean.

1:50:09Keith Frankish:Now, David Chalmers usually distinguishes between weak and strong emergence. Weak emergence is just that when you put all this stuff together in the right way, you get one of those. But it's perfectly intelligible how putting all that stuff together in that way gives you one of those so probably being a television weekly emerges from the assembly having all these components assembled in that way but there's nothing mysterious about nobody thinks you know oh god look we put all those things together and suddenly a television appear oh what an amazing thing now that's how we can design television that's how we do it we know that a television emerges from those components strong emergence is the idea that's kind of unexpected stuff happens that you put these things together and somehow how something fundamentally new appears in the world.

1:50:46Keith Frankish:It's not just an organization of those things doing what an organization of those things would naturally inevitably do. It's that plus something else happening. And a lot of people think that pain is a bit like that, that it's the brain doing all its stuff and it has to do all this stuff. But then something else emerges, the actual quality, the feeling emerges as an extra thing. Now, I don't believe that. I don't think the strong emergence occurs anywhere but i'm happy to say in a sense that what we're talking about is pain the state that we refer to as pain is weakly emergent from all those processes of sensitivities and reactions put those all those together and you get pain but there's nothing there's no hard problem of explaining it because it just is all those things hooked up in the right way just as a television no more problem of explaining pain than there is of explaining television-ness.

1:51:34M. A. Frankish:I feel like I could predict all of the things that a TV is doing. Minus that, okay, it's complicated because what about the image on the screen? As we said earlier, that only really makes sense if there's someone looking at the image. I'm talking about like a TV, big TV, and it's like pumping out electromagnetic waves into the air. I feel like if I had an understanding of the atomic makeup of that TV and various scientific facts about how electricity works and how light works and stuff, that if you told me that I was going to take all of these atoms and arrange them in this way, I would predict and be able to predict that there would be light waves, photons coming out of a screen.

1:52:22M. A. Frankish:Whereas I feel like if I understood that a central nervous system or rather a sort of a reactive system causes hands to move away from hot stoves and that there's this thing called like memory that means that this organism is less likely to do the same thing again in the future and so on and so forth like i don't think just given that information i would be able to predict or expect that when i put them all together there would be this ow there would be this like um what would it that there would be a a described illusion by the organism of a feeling of qualia of pain and i think the one important distinction between strong and weak emergence is given just the constituent parts would you be able to predict or expect a particular kind of effect if the answer is yes then it's only weak emergence If the answer is no, then that's what strong emergence is.

1:53:24M. A. Frankish:And I feel like you wouldn't predict the illusion of pain. Well, you probably wouldn't because of the way we conceptualize

1:53:34Keith Frankish:pain, but I'm asking you to reconceptualize it in a way that makes this thing more tractable. Also, you're trying to imagine something immensely complex. You're trying to imagine the product of billions of years of evolution. I mean, just look at what an individual cell does. it's immensely complex now i think if i could well i couldn't do it because i don't have the knowledge but if we could take the evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists and i get all the best ones in the world and start saying okay look here you are you're this thing and here's the sort of things that are happening within inside you and really walk you through this from let's say from the stimulation of the of the the the nociceptors in the skin also that light rays falling on the and really take you through all we have are just caricatures of caricatures of caricatures the sort of thing when this debate is conducted in you know c fibers are firing it's a lot on that it's not just the c fibers it's what the c fibers are doing and everything and it's more than c fibers anyway if they could really take you through that and you could really understand all of the effects that all these different mechanisms cumulative effects of all these mechanisms upon you and what they would how they would push you and pull you to respond in different ways and how this would all be internalized because it's not a matter of you're just moving your hands this is there's an entire that this this this thing isn't particularly uh metaphysically significant what's happening in here is much more significant and how different different systems within here would be talking to each other and priming each other and prompting each other and how this would all then eventually be connected up to a conceptual system that would try to describe this and encapsulate it for its own use as well as for the use of others i think if you could do that in complete detail we're not remotely near doing it i think you might go yeah kind of that sort of makes sense and i think we should be trying to do that instead of declaring oh it can't be that couldn't possibly work i can see right now it wouldn't uh let's suppose that everything's conscious because that's the only way i could be it seems to me that is just a

1:55:48M. A. Frankish:completely regressive attitude okay we've we've covered a lot of ground and we started by pointing out that illusionism in consciousness is not the view that consciousness is an illusion it is that consciousness is being thought of in the wrong way by philosophers. And there are certain aspects of conscious experience, that is to say, qualia, private inner experience, all this kind of stuff, which is illusory. That can sound a little bit confusing because people are like, well, what's the difference between consciousness and experience and qualia and whatnot? Now that we've covered all of that, let's go right back to the beginning and ask the question.

1:56:25M. A. Frankish:I love doing this. Let's ask the question that most interviewers probably start with, but I think it's more helpful to actually end with. What is consciousness? And when you say that there is an illusion going on, what exactly is the illusion in the most sort of concise and sort of summary fashion that you can muster now that you don't have to do it in the context of beginning an interview knowing that no one knows what you're talking about yet?

1:56:55Keith Frankish:I'm naturally cautious of soundbites because they will get quoted back to me. What is consciousness. Let's say something like this.

1:57:10Keith Frankish:It's my vivid, vibrant, potent response to the world in all its dimensions and all its significance. It's being in the world and it's being aware of the world that's packed with significance for me, both as a creature and as an individual. it's it's react yes it's yes that'll do it's being aware of the world in a way that makes it packed with significance for me that makes it's not what this is like for me it's what the world is like for me it's okay consciousness is what makes the world like something for me makes it significant and it makes it significant because it's constituted by a whole set of responses to

1:57:59M. A. Frankish:it and is that something that i know i know i asked about the illusion as well but just to just to clarify.

1:58:04Keith Frankish:The illusion is that it is something separate from all those processes, that it is something over and above that, that it is an irreducibly private world that only I, obviously it's my responses, so I know more about them than anybody else, but it's not, it's, the illusion is that it's something that belongs, if you like, to a different dimension of reality, that it is not part of the shared public world that is something that is only there for an eye that is itself very hard to get a grip on i think it's that it ultimately i think it's a view that that builds in a sort of dual that well it certainly builds in a kind of dualism and i think it ultimately builds in a cartesian dualism it's being richly alive in the world and sensitive to the world in virtue of all sorts of highly complex evolved processes not in virtue of some magic or some fundamental feature of reality that can't be explained in terms of evolutionary processes.

1:59:07M. A. Frankish:I think that's great, because it's careful, it's concise, and it's somewhat illuminating, except insofar as I'm interested in... If that's all consciousness is, is that something that a computer can have does have you know ai robots that kind of i find it's kind of a boring question to ask about like ai consciousness but i mean in this context i think it's specifically relevant you know like you know all of the things that you're saying consciousness is these sort of reactions to the world this like um vibrant significance that is not felt because there's no qualia but is kind of there uh is something that you know chat gpt could could do and so when people ask you know will chat gpt ever become conscious aren't you kind of committed to saying it already is it just doesn't feel like it's conscious absolutely not because look i'm talking about

2:00:05Keith Frankish:a vibrant multi-dimensional set of responses chat gpt has one line of one one kind of response one dimension response only well first of all it has only one thing that it's sensitive to one kind of thing sensitive text okay and it has one output more text okay you might say you can do pictures stuff graphics but anyway listen it's it it doesn't explore the world it doesn't have sensors for it doesn't have its range of sensitivities to the world is about as impoverished as you can get it's sensitive to text input and it doesn't even go out looking for text input it just waits till it comes and then it responds with more text input that's about as impoverished as you could get okay so it's an amazingly complex text response but it's still just one dimension i'm talking about a rich sensitivity and i'm talking about sensitivity that's tuned into your individual developmental history so that every red thing you've seen in your life or experienced in your life shapes your response to redness and shapes what it's like to see red things for you first one's never seen the chtb has never seen any red things or seen text and the text doesn't have any long-term effect on it anyway it's you know the model isn't updated with every you know there's context window and then it's deleted it's about as impoverished it's a very complex very complex thing but it's very impoverished in terms of the dimensions of reactivity now if we were to build things like autonomous artificial beings that had all sorts of the kind of sensors they would need to survive and to operate autonomously.

2:01:34Keith Frankish:Then we start after equipping the kind of stuff that evolution equipped us with. We might also need to equip it with self-modeling, the mechanism of self-monitoring mechanism. And then we might start getting into the sort of territory where we would think that the word consciousness maybe would be appropriate to extend to it but there would be no point where like some inner light came on uh and it bang now it's got this inner world that we never that's the wrong way of looking at we look at what it does look at what its capabilities are and say it are is it similar enough to us to extend the word that's what we're gonna have to do with other animals that's what i mean that's what i mean

2:02:08M. A. Frankish:is that like you know for most people saying that ai has become conscious would be this like extremely grand sort of moment whereas for you it feels like you kind of go like yeah okay it's conscious now but like you know who cares like so what you know and also conscious conscious like

2:02:26Keith Frankish:what conscious like an ant is conscious conscious like a fish is conscious conscious it's all anthropocentric we need to stop the anthropocentrism here you said it's it's super like it's about as

2:02:36M. A. Frankish:impoverished as it gets well maybe maybe then chat gpt is just the most impoverished kind of consciousness that's what i mean is that if all consciousness is is this i mean you said the word vibrant but then you know vibrancy is is is relative and difficult to precisely define and so like you know if you ask chat gpt it would be like yeah i'm having a really vibrant conversation and it can it can uh not just produce images but you can send it images you can uh you can feed it sort of visual data and it could tell you like no this is such a vibrant red that i see in this image, and it's having all of those reactions.

2:03:11M. A. Frankish:And granted, it is extremely limited compared to what a human brain is doing. But my question is, is that a difference in degree rather than kind? Is it just, okay, it's conscious in the way you've defined it, just like not very much?

2:03:26Keith Frankish:Well, look, this is really, I think, just a terminological question. I mean, I don't think the word consciousness is well enough defined to... Look, we're going to... let's i don't know this is a consciousness one and consciousness a million or something it's going to be many different dimensions of consciousness okay we need to start thinking about this and mapping out different dimensions of reactivity that we have in different dimensions of self-monitoring this is the way to go to sort of break down this this this this kind of really useless uh undifferentiated concept of consciousness as an inner light and start thinking about it as a complex of functions and seeing which you know then measuring things things will have different uh we can draw sort of what do you call it like spider diagrams of different uh patterns of reactivity and we can do this for other animals we can do it for us we can do it for aliens we do it right now and which ones and now it's something like christening them with with the title of consciousness that carries all sorts of other stuff with it about ethical concern about our responsibility, about all sorts of things.

2:04:32Keith Frankish:So we might want to think about, you know, we might need better terminology. I think we do need better terminology in this area. But the first thing to do is to stop thinking about it in a wrong way, as a bright line that is either on or off. There's either this private subjective rule, which we could never know about. We never penetrate anyway. So stop thinking about it. Even if Flom non-realistic rule were right, it wouldn't make any difference to anything. That's the point. So we just stop thinking about it that way and start thinking about it in constructive terms of, you know, what exactly are the sensitivities and reactive dispositions that this thing has and how similar they are to ours, how different are they from ours, to what extent do we want to extend our ethical concern to them, to what extent do we want to treat them as autonomous and responsible.

2:05:18Keith Frankish:We've got to negotiate all this in the light of the facts that are publicly available to all of us because there's nothing hidden in the end. This is the positive message of this. In the end, it's just a matter of studying these things carefully enough, study bats carefully enough, and you'd know everything there is to know about bat consciousness. Let's do the work and then try and get a framework for negotiating this. Instead of, is it consciousness? That is the most fruitless question in this area. That's looking for marks of consciousness, as if consciousness is hidden and all you have are kind of responses that are somehow symptomatic of it, but you can't be sure they are.

2:05:54Keith Frankish:sorry i'm rambling but no bright lines anywhere that's the bottom line well keith frankish thank

2:06:01M. A. Frankish:you for your time i'll put relevant links in the description your your um like essay on illusionism links to further work websites all that kind of stuff and people are interested in more thanks for taking the time i know it's a difficult thing to get into especially when talking to an audience who perhaps have have never even like heard of this viewpoint before and are probably filled with misconceptions about sort of what it is and thinking you're saying that people people don't feel pain that consciousness doesn't exist or something i hope people at least know by the end of this that that's not what illusionism is and perhaps it will take a bit more time for them to figure out whether or not they agree with what you're saying but thank you

2:06:40Keith Frankish:for your time today thank you and i hope if anyone does want to convince me by by creating some some vivid experience in me maybe they'll go for sending me chocolate rather than punching on the Thank you, Alex. I enjoyed talking to you. Thank you for the really helpful questions. You helped me articulate what I wanted to say. Not all interviewers are good at that, and you're very good at it, so thank you.

2:07:08M. A. Frankish:Well, thanks very much. That's nice to hear.