#160 Every Theory of Consciousness - Robert Lawrence Kuhn

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29:55And even panpsychism, Galen Strawson famously says that, you know, the real materialism is basically panpsychism. And that's not a frivolous point of view. I mean, it's a view that some people say that anything that's real is materialism or physicalism. And if you want to bring something in that you didn't expect, like, you know, proto-consciousness or something, All right, that's the new materialism. You want to bring something else in? Quantum theories, dimensional, that's physicalism. So you can get caught in that trap, which would then put everything under materialism. I try not to do that.

30:31I try to distinguish the big categories as something that is sufficiently different in the way of understanding. So non-reductive physicalism says there is something that is non-reductive. And to me, that's a huge difference. A huge difference. So everything in materialism that I would have— Sorry, what does non-reductive mean for those listening? Yeah, non-reductive means that it's impossible in principle to be able to explain behaviors or actions at a higher level of the physical world by the activities of the lower level. And so reductionism says that ultimately we can describe everything at the fundamental levels of physics.

31:20A classical example is the wetness of water. You take an H2O molecule, it's not wet, you know, you can describe it, etc. And you take a zillion of them and you have wetness. So where does wetness, how does wetness develop? And that seems so radically different. It's an emergent phenomenon when you have zillions of these molecules. But you can calculate why it feels wet by the bonding angles between the hydrogen and the oxygen, how these work together under different temperatures. And you can then predict, it's hard and complicated, that something like wetness could occur. So that's reductive. That to me is not a non-reductive.

32:04That would be strictly part of materialism. Sometimes we call that weak emergence. But non-reductive physicalism, say it's impossible in principle, another term is strong emergence, that no matter how much we learn, it will be impossible in principle to be able to ever explain mental states by the actions of the lower, the most fundamental aspects of physics. Whatever they may be, string theory, quantum loop, gravity, it doesn't matter. Whatever it is, it's impossible to ever go down to that. But non-reductive physicalism is still physicalism. It's not claiming anything other than something in the physical world that just has this impassable barrier in terms of explanations.

32:53And so anything I have in materialism can ultimately be reduced to its lower level. Now, the theories themselves constitute activities on much higher levels. Everything from subcellular to whole brains or extended beyond brains. And it was a massive task to organize this. And all these materialist theories, as I said, almost half of all the theories are materialist. I reflected why that's the case. And it's the case because if you have a non-materialist theory or a non-physical theory in some sense, you can describe it, and we have hundreds of those, but you can't make much progress beyond that.

33:40because by saying it's non-physical, it's then not subject in the same way or even at all to the scientific method. So you can't make much progress. On the other hand, if your theory is materialistic, it's all physical, then you can make progress. You may not be right, but you can use the scientific method. And so therefore, people have done that on various scales, and therefore there's a proliferation of theories that are materialist because you can make progress. You can imagine how things can happen to get down to be able to reduce it. But each one has the locus of where consciousness makes its big impact at different levels.

34:24I can give you some of these categories that we've worked on. The first I call philosophical, which deals with kind of the basic ideas like emergence, identity theory, functionalism. I'll do this really quickly. Second category is eliminative materialism or illusionism, where in some sense, not in a comic book sense, that consciousness doesn't exist. That sounds self-contradictory. People make fun of it. But if you really understand it, it's a serious idea. And I give Dave Chalmers, I originally had illusionism, Illuminated Materialism, as a subset under philosophical. And Dave, when he saw the paper, said, you know, that would be better in its own subcategory.

35:11And so on the website, it's its own subcategory. That was a really important decision. Then we go into neurobiological theories, which are biological naturalism that John Searle had, or Gerald Edelman's neural circuitry and Darwinian, which is an older neurobiological theory, which I had heard of, but I hadn't studied. But when I did study it, I was actually pretty impressed with what that did. So that, to me, typifies a neurobiological theory. Then a new area that has been developing recently is electromagnetic field theories. And there are a very interesting group of theories that have developed.

35:56Mustin Jones, Tam Hunt, and Jonathan Schooler each have, you know, they have general resonance theory. Earl Miller at MIT has a kind of an analog brainwave theory, which I think is very strong as well. And there are a number of other theories, Susan Pluckett, et cetera, McFadden, each one have their own electromagnetic theories. Then, you know, computational and functionalism is very famous. Hilary Putnam started that. Lenore and Emmanuel and Avram Blum have a very elaborate explanation of this. There are many different kinds of computational functionalism in that category. Then quickly beyond that, I have homeostatic and effective theories, which are basically emotion.

36:49Antonio Damasio famously has done that, where emotion is the generator of consciousness, not something that, you know, is a product of consciousness. It may be that too now, but it was the original generator and cause of consciousness. So those are theories which put this homeostatic approach as a very strong one. Carl Fristin with free energy and active interference are all in that category. Next category is still under materialism is embodied and inactivism. This is where you need a body in some sense. Inactivism, you need to have this interaction between the body and the environment. You can't have consciousness without that interaction with the environment.

37:35Neurophenomenology, Varela's original posting, Evan Thompson has developed this well. And then some philosophical categories, relationalism, where interesting people like Hofstadter's Strange Loops or a new Japanese researcher, Neo Tsuchura, has relations between qualia. Nicholas Humphrey has his work. And then there's a first order representationalism where the representation of the initial sense is the scene of consciousness. And then higher order representationalism where you have to have a thought about the thought. So it's a second level, like a second derivative or something. The second level.

38:24So you have the tension there. And then the second to last category, I had language. And language is an interesting one because I rejected language as a category in my original paper. I didn't, I knew about it and Tromsky's and other people's work and how it would affect it. But it didn't seem to me to have any real cause of consciousness. You could have consciousness without language. And so I didn't have it. But the peer reviewer who's anonymous, who was very helpful in terms of his analysis, or her, I don't know who the person was, obviously, said that I should have a language category. and so because I had rejected it mildly I put it back and I'm happy I did and and dealt with theories that people use that were languages is really instrumental in the nature of consciousness certainly human consciousness it's a weaker category in terms of the fundamental ontology of consciousness but it is important and certainly important in human consciousness the final category was a phylogenetic or evolutionary where you know everything is evolutionary in some sense But the final category puts evolution where you can kind of see it happening, and the mechanisms are an evolutionary process.

39:37So those are 12 subcategories under materialism, and each one has 10 to 20 different individual theories in them. And there's a lot of, you know, there's a million interesting ways how you can analyze them together. one of my favorites, I said, to plot where each works in the hierarchy of being, at what level each one is making that critical point. That's one way to kind of compare them. So you answered my second question of how you decided, roughly speaking, like sort of what goes in there. But the first question remains, which is, we've been talking about all these different categories and names and people, but what is materialism?

40:21Like, what actually is it? if you had to just define it in simple terms? It is that there, I can define it apophatically, as we say, in the negative. I can say it, materialism, is a worldview in which there is nothing non-physical. Now, that sounds tautological or circular, but I think it's not. It says, is there anything beyond the physical world as we know it, as we can know it. And there's a fuzzy boundary. As I said, panpsychism you can describe as materialist. If you define materialism as anything that's real, and a strict materialist or a philosophically committed materialist would say that, just like in alternative medicine, many kind of quackbusters say there is no such thing as alternative medicine.

41:19If something proves to have some legitimacy, say like acupuncture, then it's part of medicine. There is no alternative medicine. And so there is no alternative to materialism. It's whatever is real. That's not the definition I took. Not the definition. I take the definition that says the material world as we know it today, down to the quantum field level or below, is the structure of the world. and that anything that requires something other than that, in principle, irrevocably, no matter how advanced our science gets, say we can live a billion years and our science continues to improve, no matter how it does, it will never be able to bridge that gap.

42:07So anything that is of that nature would be outside of materialism. Anything that could be explained within the scientific method, I would say, is part of materialism. So it's not a simple answer. A simple answer would just say, you know, it's quantum fields and anything that explains quantum field theory and however that's generated. And whatever the implications develop from that through evolution or whatever, that's materialism. As I said, that's not quite the way I would do it. I would have this approach of excluding something that's non-physical. I always ask someone, if they say that they're a materialist, what is material?

42:56What is the thing that you think the universe is made out of? Because it's fair enough to say something like, look, we don't really know, or I'm not sure, or I can only answer that on a surface level, I can talk in terms of atoms and molecules and stuff, and that's totally fine. But if you're positing a metaphysical theory of reality, and oftentimes I think quite confidently, No, I'm quite sure that everything will ultimately be reducible to matter. I think you probably need something a bit more than just telling me what matter is not. And I'm not saying that of you, I'm saying that of the materialist, which is to say that it's one of those weird things that everyone kind of just seems to kind of know what we're talking about and we start getting on with things.

43:40but realistically, foundationally, matter is an impossible thing to define. Even for a physicist who says, well, we don't know if it's strings or if it's a quantum wave or whatever. Even then, it's not entirely clear what those things, even if one of them were correct, what they would be, what their essence would be. And so I kind of struggle to get off the ground with materialism. Now, sometimes when I say this, people say positing consciousness doesn't really help there because you've still got the question of what is consciousness and i typically think well i know what consciousness is because i'm experiencing it directly you know one of the most important philosophical threads from emmanuel kant through schopenhauer up until today that this idea is quite influential on me is that you know you only know the world as it appears to you in your phenomenology you only know the phenomena you don't know the noumenon you don't know the world as it is the thing in itself as kant might have had it.

44:39And so, yeah, the world might be an illusion and whatnot, but the thing that I do know directly is the nature of experience. And so I actually do think you get off the ground by, like, if you have some good reason to think that consciousness is foundational, you've kind of got a starting point because you have this direct access, you have this starting point, this touch point to know the kind of thing we're talking about. But with materialism, because anything material will necessarily present itself to us through our phenomena and we won't ever know the thing in itself, when we posit that as the basis of our metaphysics, I find it really difficult to even know what we're talking about.

45:16And that's why consciousness is so probative of ultimate reality, because it forces you to think that way. And I think that's terrific. Now, it is explainable. I mean, we can take an evolutionary approach to the nature of our sense state and phenomenology. And people have used this and abused it against materialism because our brains evolved to escape jaguars and leopards or whatever on the plains of Africa, not to solve differential equations or create string theory. And so our brains can be missing something. We have a lot of those theories under challenge in the landscape. But I'm not an advocate of our brains are not able to understand.

46:10I think what we understand in terms of getting back to what the first 10 to the minus 36th or 39th second in the Big Bang or prior to the Big Bang with inflationary theory, and we're able to understand pretty certainly how heavy elements are made in stars, how the universe is structured. It's really remarkable how much that we know. So I'm not so willing to push off what science can discern about materialism. And that's a separate question from, is materialism all there is, then can you explain consciousness with materialism? Because I skew, no, I skew that there would be some kind of non-physical element, if you asked me my ultimate thoughts myself, not that that's very important.

47:03I always say when people ask me, I say, what I think is really not important is to understand all of these theories and how they work. That's important at this stage in human history. We shouldn't be excluding any access to reasonable theories about consciousness because it's so important to understand ourselves in reality. So tell me what is the meaningful difference in your view as somebody who has spoken to all of these different people and had them sort of throw their worldview at you in the way that they best understand it. Tell me what the difference is between, say, the physicalist or materialist who says, okay, I know there's this thing called consciousness, but really it's just the same thing as this physical matter swirling around in your brain and saying that the material is sort of primary versus the person who is a panpsychist or an idealist who is seen by materialists often as like woo-woo, you know, crazy people who essentially say, yeah, there's this thing called consciousness.

48:06And look, it's essentially the same as what we call physical matter. What we call physical matter is just the same thing as this conscious stuff, at least the conscious stuff of the brain at the very least. It's kind of the same thing as the experiential states. It seems to a lot of people, I think, that if you push particularly panpsychism, which says that the smallest components of reality are essentially consciousness or conscious or made out of consciousness, and you get panpsychists who talk about, as you mentioned earlier, are proto-conscious properties. It's like, okay, maybe an electron isn't conscious, but it has the proto-conscious properties, which if put together in the right way, produces what we call conscious experience.

48:49And I feel like the materialist begins to look at that and goes, well, yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying too, right? It's just that I think that's a physical property. As you say, Galen Strawson says, yeah, I'm a physicalist. I just think that material and matter is sort of made out of consciousness, but it begins to look a little bit like these different theories, so to speak, maybe just sort of semantic differences or kind of differences in like the imagery being used, the way someone's thinking about it, rather than like anything about the ontological claim about the nature of reality. Yeah, look, I think that's entirely valid.

49:25And the conversation is extremely probative, not just about consciousness and all these things that are derivative from consciousness, like is there life after death or is AI conscious, but the nature of ultimate reality itself.

49:39Robert Lawrence Kuhn:So I think it's extremely important. But the difference to me, though, is discernible. And that is, again, in the negative. Is there something that we would classify as nonphysical that needs to be part of the story. And something that's non-physical, I would define further, maybe this is not permanent or not right in some sense, but I think it is. And that is anything non-physical I define as something that's not 100 % subject to the scientific method. Non-physical things are subject to logic and ways of organization, etc. But they're not subject to the physical, to the methodological approach of naturalism and physicalism, which is the scientific method of experimentation, observation, repetition, falsification, all the basic properties of the scientific method.

50:38So that's the distinction I would make, that does the theory have any element that is ultimately not susceptible to the scientific method. If it does, if it has elements that are not

50:54Robert Lawrence Kuhn:in principle subject to the scientific method, it's outside of materialism. If it says that all these weird things, but ultimately science can discern them through the scientific process, then it is materialism. So if somebody were to convince me or us that the panpsychist view that, you know, the real materialism is panpsychism because every element has, in addition to the four fundamental forces or whatever is below them, an element of proto-consciousness. If that idea is subject to the scientific method in some ultimate science, then I would classify it under materialism. You know, but frankly, I don't think it is.

51:36It may be, but therefore I would keep panpsychism and others as a separate theory that's non-materialist because there is an element to it that's not subject to the scientific method. Can you tell me, I guess I have a number of questions which are often thrown at me, and I feel like I can answer them to the best of my ability, but I feel like you're so well-placed to answer these that I want to workshop them with you. People have heard me talk about panpsychism. People have heard me talk about idealism. Both of them seem to be some kind of view that says that consciousness is metaphysically foundational or primary, but what's the difference between them?

52:17I think there's overlap, and I'm always fascinated by the fights, the intellectual fights between theories that are closest to one another. This is a human tendency. As I put it in

52:30Robert Lawrence Kuhn:geopolitics, Peru and Thailand never had a problem together because they're not close to each other. If you look at the history of, I don't know, any religion, Christianity, you look at the different sects and how they fight with each other, and you look at the different or the ideological difference, I mean, you can sometimes hardly discern the difference, but they fight and they have wars. We see the same thing in consciousness studies with the human trait. Whenever we're close to something but slightly disagree, we have these intense battles. I agree with you. I think that panpsychism and idealism have a lot of similarities together, and even dualism in some ways have similarities to each of them.

53:13Robert Lawrence Kuhn:But yet they are, they have a distinction to them. I mean, the simple distinction, panpsychism basically has the physical world as equally real and that consciousness and proto-consciousness is part of this physical, of the, I don't want to use physical in this sense, but is part of all reality. So a proto-consciousness element is part of all reality, as well as the fundamental forces, whatever they are. We know four fundamental forces today, but clearly it's not a final theory with particle physics, a standard model. There has to be something significantly below that, but that's still a physical theory.

53:54And so this is a critical distinction.

54:00Robert Lawrence Kuhn:Idealism says that consciousness, in some sense, is everything and everything other than consciousness is either derivative of consciousness or an illusion. So a derivative of conscious means somehow instead of consciousness being the product of matter, that matter is the product of consciousness. Now, how that occurs, you know, everybody has a different theory and we can talk about a lot of them and they're all fun to listen to. As I put it one time, people asked me which is my favorite theories and I said, you know, I'm in love with the last girl I kissed. So when I'm working on these theories, I totally immerse myself.

54:42Robert Lawrence Kuhn:I pretend and get to fool myself for a day or two that this is my theory and I want the world to know it. So I'm really struggling to explain it and show how it works in every sense. And there's truth in that. And so when you take that approach to idealism, then you see, as I said, the physical world is secondary in some sense. Illusion, if the physical world is just an illusion, as Vedic and Hindu others have said, then that's a complete answer to your question. If it's an illusion, it's illusion. but more interesting is if the physical world is real in some sense but is derivative of consciousness you know how that occurs and and what would that mean uh and then there's subsets of what consciousness is is it a a non-personal cosmic consciousness that somehow is uh programmed or you know from from time immemorial to generate consciousness or generate complexities there are theory that there's this movement towards higher complexity that's built into reality, or is there something like a god that would be kind of, in one sense, a subset of consciousness or a sub-theory, although people who, you know, believe in the Abrahamic god would have god as preeminent and independent and god sort of creating consciousness.

56:10So that's a separate kind of philosophical issue. But the distinction is that idealism would have the physical world as derivative or illusion whereas panpsychism would have the physical world at an equal level of ontological reality with consciousness. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for$15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made$15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

56:59And do you think that it's also got anything to do with, like, I sometimes think of panpsychism and idealism as zooming in versus zooming out, as if for the panpsychists, they kind of dig into the table or the chair. It's always the table and the chair, isn't it? Because there's always a table or a chair. they sort of dig downwards into the atom into the electron and sort of find consciousness down there somewhere very simple and sort of rudimentary whereas for the idealists they sort of put the table and the chair together and then they put the room together and they put all of ourselves together and they put everything together and sort of zoom out and this one great big thing that you're left with is the big sort of conscious mind in which everything arises which is why like idealism is more associated with religious ideas or spinotes or people like this because it's the sort of one great big mind, whereas the panpsychus retains the atomism of the scientific revolution and just sort of places consciousness down there.

57:54So I don't know how much you see this in your investigation of both worldviews, but to me, they're often kind of getting at the same thing. But the key difference is, do they, as I sometimes say, do they account for the crumbs in terms of the cake or the cake in terms of the crumbs? Yeah, look, I think that's absolutely right. And it's very similar. But I think there is this distinction, that in panpsychism, the elements of the crumbs would have, the physical properties of that would have an equal ontological status as the proto-consciousness. So in the crumb, it would be that. In idealism, you wouldn't need that at all because idealism is completely comprehensive in, I don't know, use a quantum analogy, a wave function of the universe, that you have this one big wave function.

58:48And that's this kind of, now under panpsychism, you have, you know, cosmopsychism, which sort of says that the main property is, you know, so between cosmopsychism, which is sort of a subset of panpsychism and idealism, Those are really, you know, challenging. Yeah, what is cosmo-psychism? Sorry? It's like a version of pan-psychism, right? This cosmo-psychism. I've heard people talk about this, but I've never quite been clear on what exactly it is. Yeah, well, that's because you understand it too well, you know. I mean, it sounds like idealism, surely. Yeah, it's very close to idealism. And again, we're putting linguistic categories on ideas, and so that's very natural.

59:33Robert Lawrence Kuhn:But this is one of the most interesting elements of really digging into consciousness, to look at theories and compare them. Cosmocycism versus idealism is one. Another one that I find fascinating is non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism. That's also a really interesting way to understand how one thinks. These are kind of epistemological, more than ontological. I'm going to describe what that means. but you know it's it's a fascinating subject yet there is a difference whether it's a you know a distinction without a difference or a distinction with a difference I think it's a distinction with a difference although it's challenging with cosmopsychism it still has in cosmopsychism it still has that the whole it has the whole universe as the primary conscious element.

1:00:29Robert Lawrence Kuhn:So it's not the proto-consciousness of the tiny thing. It's the consciousness of the big thing, but it still has the material world with equal ontological status. And that's the key difference, I think. Whereas idealism would not have the physical world, it would have it as derivative or illusion. Cosmopsychism would have the physical world with equal ontological status. That's the difference. Sometimes when I talk about consciousness, I say, you've kind of got three options when you look at the fact that consciousness exists and the fact that there seems to be this world of stuff that isn't conscious and those three options are this first is to say there are two types of stuff and this is dualism there's mind stuff and there's body stuff or physical stuff and they're just different kinds of things that somehow interact with each other option two is to say there's only one type of stuff and that stuff is the physical stuff and we call that materialism or physicalism option three is to say there is one type of stuff but that the one type of stuff that there is is conscious or mental and that is where you get idealism or panpsychism and yet looking at your map you've got the header of like idealism for example and idealism says that sort of everything is made out of mind or emerges in mind and as a separate category, you've got monism.

1:01:54And monism is the view that there's one type of thing. So I kind of want to say that idealism is maybe a form of monism. Indeed, materialism is a kind of monism. So why does monism have its own column here? Very, very good question.

1:02:09Robert Lawrence Kuhn:And I can give you feedback I've had from many theorists who see their classification. And everybody wants, I'm exaggerating. Everybody wants to be a monist. Yeah, right. It has sort of a characteristic, and there's a very large overlap between panpsychism and monism and the different kinds of monism. But I made a category of monism to highlight the point that you just made, that there is the idea it's one kind of stuff and it has two expressions. But I tried to be extremely strict on who I allowed into that category. And people, you know, you know, Russell and Monism is the classic one. And then there are very particular theories that are that are based on it.

1:02:59Robert Lawrence Kuhn:Donald Davidson, that's a very interesting approach. He called his kind of, what was it, not reflexive, but anomalous monism. So Donald Davidson called anomalous monism. So he had three premises, axiomatic ideas. Number one, mental events cause physical events. Okay. We give you that as a possibility. Second, causation requires laws. There has to be a process by which things work. And third, there are no psychophysical laws. And those are his three premises. Now, you look at those, that's contradictory. It seems like that's a null set. There's no way you can articulate those together. Psychophysical laws, meaning like laws relating the interaction between the physical and mental.

1:04:01Right, right. So it seems contradictory. You need the mental causes the physical on the first premise, second physical, second principle.

1:04:10Robert Lawrence Kuhn:You need a causation law. It's not just going to happen a random thing. And third, there are no such laws. And the only solution to that logically is that the mental and the physical are the same. So it's a radical identity theory. David Pappenau also has a radical identity theory where the mental and the physical are exactly the same in the strong sense that the morning star and the evening star are both Venus. You take away one, you automatically take away the other. uh, Superman and Clark Kent or Marilyn Monroe and Norma Jean Mortensen, whatever her name was, original name, that you can't separate one from the other.

1:04:51They are exactly the same expression. Um, and to me, there is a, a strong logic to that. Um, whether it's satisfactory or not, that's a different story to me.

1:05:01Robert Lawrence Kuhn:It's not satisfactory, but at least it has a logical coherence to it. So there are monisms that are super focused on that one point. And so I try to highlight that. But, you know, the critique is valid. I mean, this is a two-dimensional toy model, if you will, of what reality is supposed to be. So there are many different facets. As I said, non-reductive physicalism versus property dualism. They both say that there are irreducible mental states that can't be explained by anything in the physical world, but there is only one kind of stuff and that stuff is physical. It's not a dual aspect. It's a pure physical stuff, the physical stuff that we know.

1:05:42And so how are they different? Well, they're different in an epistemological sense in terms of property dualism, saying that the mental property itself has ontological status,

1:05:55Robert Lawrence Kuhn:that it's real, whereas non-reductive physicalism would take the process of emergence. Again, if it's in a strong sense, it can't be reduced, but emergence is the way that you just top-down causation. So by comparing different theories that we use, you begin to really luxuriate in the problem of consciousness. You understand all of these aspects, which is why I love it and I'm not disturbed that I don't have an answer, a final answer, because I just love the process. You know, I've heard you say before that you attempted as best you could to respect what people said about their own views. Like if someone comes along and says, I'm a materialist, even if they sound very non-materialist to you, you try to respect that and count it in materialism, right?

1:06:51And so there must be some extent to which you are granting people divisions and distinctions that maybe you don't think are necessarily sensible, but you're sort of going with what they say. I just wonder, you said there are 444 different theories of consciousness here. As of today, yeah. if you had to kind of take a guess at it like in your view in the way that i think a lot of these views kind of collapse into each other they're kind of saying the same thing maybe just using different terminology like do you do you suspect that there are really that many different theories of consciousness or like if we really were able to like nail down a precise dictionary where everyone was using the same terms and meant the same thing by them like how many theories of consciousness do you think there would actually be because i yeah i think there's a good argument I'd say that there would only be maybe three or five or ten, but we have hundreds of them because people just can't agree on their terms.

1:07:46Yeah, look, I think that's entirely valid. I come at it from a different perspective because I'm not trying to solve the problem. I'm trying to unpack the problem and to tease it apart, to see the workings of it.

1:08:01Robert Lawrence Kuhn:And each of these theories, by emphasizing something different, helps us. Certainly in the materialist theories, they are very different from each other. They're under the materialist rubric or category. And so they have very different ways of working. I mean, just to take an example in quantum theories, you have the Penrose-Hameroff where it's the collapse of the wave function within microtubules. And then Helmut Nevin has the view that it's the formation of the wave function. So one has the collapse, one has the formation. Now, if that's the right theory, one or the other is probably correct.

1:08:45Robert Lawrence Kuhn:I mean, I don't see how it, you know, each one is making a different claim. They're both very, you know, confident that it's a quantum process, which is obviously a minority view in general. But where it occurs, and if you go through each one of these, it's really important. I mean, electromagnetic field theories make a very specific point that consciousness is this electromagnetic field in some sense. I mean, that's very different than a neurobiological theory that would have neuronal circuitry and Darwinian, as I said, Gerald Edelman's approach to it. There are many other neurobiological theories or the theories that emotionists, Antonio Damasio and others, have generated.

1:09:27Robert Lawrence Kuhn:So these are very different kinds of theories. So it depends, you know, the granularity by which we want to look at it. Certainly there are commonalities. I think we've, you know, between panpsychism and idealism is an excellent one to explore that, that you could probably reduce the number of theories. But again, I'm not looking at theories in some sense that these are mutually exclusive, but are different ways of exposing the problem and of deeply understanding the problem. So it's an epistemological approach to understanding it. In terms of, you know, if I really had to go through these and then reduce it down to some different categories, again, under materialism, there are very different explanations because they occur at different levels of the hierarchy or different expressions of how things work in the brain.

1:10:23And they are very different from each other.

1:10:25Robert Lawrence Kuhn:So there is some mutual exclusivity. more mutual exclusivity within materialism, if that's what your view is, versus panpsychism or monism or idealism, even dualisms. Those have a lot of similarities. And that's natural because there's on each one some kind of non-physical component, which is my favorite term to use because it's very, very neutral, a non-physical aspect or component to it. And when you have that, there are natural commonalities that kind of blend together. So that's why this conversation is really so informative to understand because I, you know, one of my missions, if you will, is to make people realize that these big questions we ask, AI consciousness, life after death, nature of free will, personal identity, are dependent upon your theory of consciousness.

1:11:16Robert Lawrence Kuhn:And if you don't think so, you're doing it anyway. You just don't know what you're doing. hmm can you tell me i mean i gave these sort of three options and we spent a long time talking about monism so we've spoken about what if everything's sort of made out of consciousness what if everything's just made out of matter but there is this third option which weirdly it feels like it doesn't get much philosophical attention because most philosophers and physicists have kind of largely abandoned this view but in like the sort of popular understanding dualism the view that there are just these two different things that interact with each other is quite popular, really, even just in common parlance, the way we talk about having a body.

1:11:55I would say, my body is hurting, as if there's a me, and there's a body, and they're separate, or my brain, like there's a me, and there's a brain, even though I'm kind of the same thing as my brain. And okay, so Descartes, in the Western tradition, kicks this off by kind of saying, I can conceive of my mind without a body, and my body without a mind, so they're probably two different kinds of substances. But you mentioned earlier this thing called property dualism, which is another kind of dualism that's a bit more specific. Could you just tell me what the difference between those two is? Yeah, there's a radical difference between property dualism and what they call substance dualism, which also has its different categories.

1:12:37And basically what you said, dualism has two different kinds of stuff that is ontologically primitive. That's dualism. And I should say that, you know, I've always had a soft spot in my brain for dualism. Even though it's extremely unpopular among physicists and certainly scientists,

1:13:00Robert Lawrence Kuhn:the interaction problem is a problem. Everybody has a problem. You know, panpsychism has the combination problem. How do these little proto-consciousness make a big consciousness? Idealism has the decombination problem. You have this giant, you know, world consciousness, cosmic consciousness. How does some little piece kind of bubble off or squeeze off? And I have my consciousness and you have yours. And we don't find them, you know, intermixing at all. I've never had an intermixing with anybody. My, you know, closest family, wife, et cetera, I've never had this, that feeling. So, you know, how does that happen?

1:13:36So every theory has its problem. There's no question. And dualism has the interaction problem, which has to do with the closure of the physical world, that the physical world is as a closure, every effect has a cause. How do you get in there at the joints, so to speak, to have a non-physical response? It's a valid point. You know, I'm not totally, I don't find that to be a knockout argument. I think it's a strong argument, but just like the others. So as I said, I've had a soft spot in dualism. I should tell you a story, if you can give me two minutes, that's kind of important to me. Because people ask me all the time what I believe.

1:14:18And I always say, it doesn't matter what I believe. I want each theory to live on its own. And they say, oh, well, you got to tell us what you believe anyway, what you think. And so I, and this happened in the paper, the original paper. And I didn't have my view. when it came out accidentally, people said, you know, I looked through the whole paper and I didn't see what you believe. And I said, you didn't see it because I didn't put it. Because it doesn't matter what I believe,

1:14:46Robert Lawrence Kuhn:and I don't want what I believe as minimally confident that I am in it. I don't want that to color these theories. I really put my life into each theory as if it were my own. I want each theory to live on its own without colored by my view. But people then said, oh, yeah, but then it looks like you have a hidden agenda, that you're just subtly trying to maneuver it. So, you know, rocking a hard place. So what I did in the paper is I put in 33 words of my own opinion and then a footnote that had another 39 words. So 72 words out of 175 ,000. And I said that's the confidence level I put in my own theory.

1:15:25Robert Lawrence Kuhn:and it was basically the first level was some kind of a dualism that there is some non-physical component that you do need but then I had a footnote where I said if that's not true I might go to some kind of quantum theory which I had for many years on Closer to Truth rejected and not made fun of but really thought was not right but having studied all these different quantum theories I actually changed my mind on that in writing the paper that I gave more credit to that. And then finally, the third, to be totally, seemingly contradictory, if non-physical or dualism is not right, and if quantum theory is not right, maybe I would go to some sort of illusionism with representational or neurobiological.

1:16:18Robert Lawrence Kuhn:So, you know, my smorgasbord of ideas were very fluid. But here's the story I want to tell you. Because when physicalists change their mind and become non-physicalists, and there are very, you know, a lot of examples, some are well-known, many individuals. When I talk to them, the reason in almost every case, maybe in every case that I can recall, is because they had some kind of experience. It might have been an out-of-body experience, which some very sophisticated scientists have told me they have had, a near-death experience, and that changed their view. Psychedelics have created that in some people.

1:17:00I certainly believe that psychedelics give you a different image, but I don't put any ontological foundational reality into what comes out of that. But other people do, and I respect that. religious experience. I've had very distinguished scientists tell me of their religious experiences, mainly, you know, and from the Christian perspective, that they've had these experiences, and therefore that's their foundational belief. And I understand that. Now, I too have had an

1:17:34Robert Lawrence Kuhn:experience, but it's an experience that has moved me more towards materialism than towards dualism. Now, how is that possible? How can you have an experience that makes you more physicalist? I didn't say totally physical. I said, just move me slightly, and I'll tell you the story quickly. And my daughter, Daniela, has given me permission to tell the story. She got married late at 45. Her husband was significantly younger, tried to have a baby, and they got pregnant, which was kind of a minor miracle, but it had severe genetic problems and had to have an abortion. So that was very traumatic and couldn't try again.

1:18:17But she had frozen her eggs when she was 34, you know, roughly 10, 12 years before. And so they defrosted the eggs. They tested them. And two were what they call mosaics in which that has a chance of being good, but there are a chance of being not sure. But that was their only choice. Her husband, they were in New York. Her husband flew to New York, fertilized it in vitro. and it took and it grew to what they call a blastula, 128 cells. And they tested it, didn't seem to have any defect at that point. So then they refroze the blastula for another two years while my daughter wanted to carry the baby herself.

1:18:53She didn't want a surrogate for her body at age, I don't know, 48 at that time to carry the baby herself. And her body had to be prepared. You know, my wife and I were not happy with that because of the hormonal treatments, but she did. That was her body and her decision. And, you know, the bottom line of all of this is that six years later, my grandson, Louis, is bilingual, plays ping pong, chess, and the piano, and is extremely social. Now, for all I know about biology and my doctorate's in, you know, biology, neuroscience, I am still flabbergasted that that process, I lived through that process

1:19:37Robert Lawrence Kuhn:literally every day for years and to see that happen. And it made me realize the latent strength in the physical world beyond that we appreciate. It's an emotional, it's an emotional thing. As I said, this has moved me a few percentage points, if you will, you know, back towards materialism because of the latent potential in the world. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting story because I think I can understand why that would be the case. Because, of course, it's an extremely sort of physical, scientific procedure. And although materialism is very difficult to define, it's sometimes defined as something like, all that exists is that which science can study or something like that, that which physics can make sense of.

1:20:25I like that. And so you've got this extremely scientific process, and it's to do with the sort of genesis of a new consciousness. And so I can understand why that would be the case. But then at the same time, I mean, it strikes me as just a sort of really slow version of what happens anyway, which the idealist or the panpsychist will say that, you know, during conception, no new consciousness is exactly created in the same way that a physicist will say that there's no new matter exactly or no new energy it's sort of you know energy from energy and matter from the parents from the mother once the baby is born from the food that it eats and the sunlight that it gets and all that kind of stuff that all sort of sort of amalgamates into this new physical being and so the panpsychist for example would say the same thing about consciousness there's no new conscious matter it's just a new complex arrangement and the fact that that those sort of like conscious building blocks were frozen for some time and then unfrozen uh it's no more mysterious for idealism or panpsychism as the fact that you could put me under general anesthesia and my sense of consciousness would disappear for a time but the idealists would just say yeah that's because the thing that's disappeared is is this particular arrangement of conscious activity or something like that so what was it about this experience that and i know you said before that if it shifted you in any way towards materialism, it's from like 98 % to 92 % non-physicalism.

1:21:56So, you know, it's not like you've been washed over by this. Yeah, I'd say from, you know, maybe, that's right, but I have different numbers. I'd be maybe, you know, 65 % to 61%, something like that, towards materialism. Look, the point I'm making, it was it's entirely emotional it's entirely an emotional reaction but it is no different in a sense than people who've had an emotional reaction in the other direction with a near-death experience out of body or psychedelics or whatever i i don't i you know i i would put them in the same category

1:22:33Robert Lawrence Kuhn:that's not to dismiss it because i don't dismiss my own i mean i'm really telling you the truth I really had that feeling that there's more in the physical world latent possibilities than I had appreciated. It's purely emotional, but that certainly doesn't turn me over. I still believe that consciousness does have some non-physical component, and I'm not comfortable going more specific than that, And that would subsume dualism, panpsychism, idealism for sure. So you said a second ago that you don't think in the opposite direction when people have other kinds of experiences. When people take psychedelic drugs and they experience ego death and consciousness and being everywhere and all this kind of stuff, you said something like you don't give any ontological significance to those experiences exactly.

1:23:34Whereas I think that I do, because I think at the very least it shows us that the way that we perceive the world is not the way that it has to be perceived. And so if we've mapped on a metaphysics based on how we perceive the world, then maybe our metaphysics could be utterly wrong, because that's not the only way to see the world. for many people this is one of the most profound things and they don't just say it's emotional in the sense of like you know I just had such a powerful experience I can't really put it into words so I guess there's something weird going on but quite specifically like no I like I felt like I was part of the universe I felt like myself was an illusion and I began to really just experience that directly so given that why not give it any significance I say this because you know philip goff recently said at the royal institution on a panel with william lane craig he started talking about his recent experience taking a kind of toad venom derived psychedelic drug and the look on william lane craig's face was hysterical uh because he's talking about this experience he had and and the panel and the audience were all basically saying to him look man that the the experiences that you had were under the influence of a psychedelic drug and Philip Goff was like, okay, yeah, but the drug doesn't give my brain anything that isn't already there.

1:24:53If anything, it reduces particular activities that seem relevant to our present discussion. And if I can look at my hand right now, as G.E. Moore did, and say, look, I can't prove that there's an external world or anything, but I just so strongly perceive my hand in front of me that I'm just going to believe that it's really there. And most people are totally fine doing that. When I had this experience, I experienced consciousness foundational, whatever it was he experienced. So why can't I trust that just because my brain is in a different state to what it normally is? So a long-winded question, but to inform the question, I wanted to ask you why it is that you said a second ago you don't give any ontological credence to psychedelic experiences.

1:25:35A very valid point, and I have been criticized, you know, most of the time politely by many people that for exactly this reason. I don't claim to be a consciousness practitioner. I've not taken psychedelics. I don't meditate. I've not had a religious or out of body or near death or any kind of experience. uh i i joke that i said i play intense table tennis and that sort of gives me an emotional high but my critics say that doesn't count um and so but uh in all seriousness um i i i said in in the paper when i have the section on psychedelics that uh i i gave the arguments why i think that This is, you know, very important for treatment of PTSD or whatever different depression.

1:26:37I mean, a lot of great research being done and I support that entirely, but I don't give it ontological status. I mean, what's the difference between getting, you know, to be crude, to get, you hit your eye on the refrigerator and you see stars. It's a physical insult to your optical system. And psychedelics, which is doing something more complicated with the neurochemistry there. I don't know that. Look, in doing the paper, in the past, I was 98 % sure that there's no ontological status to psychedelics. having done the paper and have read the people who believe that, very substantial people, you know, I put some comment that it has put a hairline fracture in my bone strength rejection of ontological status of psychedelic experiences.

1:27:38So, you know, I've been moved a little off a kind of a hardcore physicalist approach to psychedelics, but not much. There are some studies that show there's a preliminary that under near-death experience, for example, there's a flowing of extra flowing of serotonin in a neurotransmitter that a very high percentage, I don't know how scientifically reproducible that has been because you can't do that in humans, obviously, but in animals. You know, it's a neurochemical reaction. And when people tell me to take psychedelics or I should have a religious experience, my reaction is if I did and if I would, I wouldn't trust it.

1:28:33Why would I trust that? um you know in my present state i i i wouldn't that so many people do and have had and have made the comments similar to what you've said i i i deeply respect and again i've kind of you know shifted my view from being you know really hard-nosed about it to being a little bit softer nosed um that no it's not impossible but you know i'm still i'm still not a um i'm still not a fan that psychedelics gives us a window into a deeper reality. Yeah, I think, you know, I never really like to, I speak to people about consciousness, and a lot of them say, look, I've never taken psychedelics.

1:29:13And I don't like to say things like, well, do you think you have a word? Or maybe you should, because, you know, it's like, it's an intense thing. Not everybody wants to do it. Fair enough. And so I never like to say that. But at the same time, when I hear you say, if I were to do it, I wouldn't trust it. I understand that. But at the same time, I think people might want to say, well, try saying that afterwards. Only because I have a vivid dream, right? And after I wake up, even though during the dream, I was totally swept up by it, afterwards, I'm quite aware that what I just experienced was a hallucination, essentially, that it did not really happen, that it is not a part of the reality I'm currently inhabiting.

1:29:52Whereas I think with the psychedelic experience, it's not so much that reality changes in front of you but rather that reality just begins to reveal itself how it really is and to me it's profoundly interesting that after years of philosophizing and being led down this sort of path of like yeah maybe we just have to accept in a way that i can't quite understand or see the consciousness is foundational i don't know what that would mean an electron conscious i i've got no idea but philosophically i've just i've just been led there and then you take this psychedelic drug and suddenly it's like oh you know it like fills in that experiential gap it's like mary stepping outside the room for the first time and seeing blue because a moment ago when you said you know it's just a neural chemical sort of process that's how a materialist sometimes describes consciousness they say you know it's just like neurons firing and the and the the idealist or someone goes yeah but isn't that like weird so for me i think i see it as like in the same way that aldous huxley did that the brain is a is a tool for focusing the mind a kind of like valve that that organizes consciousness in a particular way it might be artificial the way that you can change the way that that valve works but if i if i had like some some water that was slowly dripping through a gap in a in a pipe and that's all i knew of the nature of water so all i knew of water was that it was sort of unified into droplets and that it was quite weak and quite small and didn't have very much for all that kind of stuff and then i could artificially just grab like some pliers and rip open a hole and suddenly this this this torrent of water starts pouring and suddenly water is strong and intense and and and i experience it like i see it in front of me i'm like wow this is a property of water i didn't know existed and then i plug up the gap and somebody said yeah but you only think that about water because you've artificially changed the structure of how you're interacting with it.

1:31:44And I'm like, yeah, but even though that's true, I've experienced something undeniable about the nature of the thing. You know what I mean? I think that's how I've experienced psychedelics in my view. I'm not sure if that's sort of common across psychedelic experiences that people have had, but it's something a bit like that. It does seem at least, let me put it this way, at least as informative about the nature of reality as my current experience of the world, which I haven't had to take a drug to experience, but I have had to eat food and get sunlight and maneuver about the world in a particular way.

1:32:18And I'm not sure if I have any more reason to trust it. Look, it was a very valid point. Many people make it. I appreciate it. As I said, I appreciate it more now than maybe I did originally. My same daughter just told me that she did psychedelics the first time in her life recently and had some similar things, and she's giving me advice that maybe I should do it too. And so I appreciate it. I appreciate the view. you know I still I still you know really don't put a lot of foundational value in it and again even if I did it myself I you know it would be kind of a fun experience but I don't see it as given anything maybe I'll do it maybe I'll come back and tell you you know Alex you were right I have a whole new view of the world and you know throw out all this material take out the whole first category you know no more materialists, get rid of half the theories.

1:33:22Robert Lawrence Kuhn:I don't know, maybe. You know, it's funny though, because at the same time, like, most of the time I spend talking about psychedelics is with people in this context. But like, you know, when I was at university, I know people who took psychedelics essentially as party drugs. And I don't think these guys, like, have ever, like, sort of been even interested in the nature of fundamental reality or metaphysics or whatever they just took this drug went to a club and were like well as you know the colors are kind of cool and then just got on with their lives right so there is a sense in which also we might be like you know imposing our own expectations of an experience onto the experience that the reason why psychedelics are so profound for these consciousness researchers is because they go in almost like expecting to find it there whereas if you just if you're like the beetles who were first given psychedelics they were spiked they were given tea without being told and they just sort of got in the elevator and thought that it was on fire there's this really funny story of them having no clue what was happening to them and for them it was just like well this is this is pretty cool and they wrote some some great music i'm not sure if they maybe maybe george harrison did but you know i don't know if they suddenly were like wow what a profound insight into the fundamental nature of what electrons are made out of you know so i i also sort of share your skepticism that it necessarily has to be this window into the nature of reality i just think it can provide it and i think perhaps validly so But, you know, I'm interested in, you mentioned at the beginning, we were going through these categories.

1:34:50We've sort of taken a look at materialism and idealism and monism and panpsychism. This one at the end, challenge, you mentioned it earlier, but what does that mean? What is that category? There's a category that classifies approaches to consciousness that take a radically different and orthogonal view to this linearity between materialism to idealism, these eight categories that we had. And it could start with Colin McGinn's famous Mysterianism, where it is fundamentally, you know, I think he wrote in the 1980s, very early, that said, you know, isn't it time we give up trying to solve consciousness because we're never going to be able to do it?

1:35:40and that approach said that for some reason we're not we're not capable of doing it not that there isn't an answer he wasn't advocating some non-physical stuff at all that's not his worldview at all but he would say you're just not capable now many have told me uh that perhaps the human brain did not evolve in order to understand consciousness uh it evolved to you know survive on the plains of Africa escape, making, you know, group tribes to hunt animals, whatever it did. That's what drove the nature of our brains. And just like we have a craving for sweets and fats today, which are built because of prior pressures during ice ages or whatever that today maybe is counterproductive in terms of our health, but then was absolutely necessary for survival.

1:36:36So we have different pressures on us that cause, and our brain was made in a certain kind of pressure by these evolutionary factors. That's the view that says we're not capable of doing that. You know, I am not in favor of that view. I mean, it's possible, but it would have to be a pretty fine line where we can understand quantum field theory and what happened at the 10 to the minus 36, 39 seconds, as they've said, at the Big Bang. We can understand all of these things with pretty high confidence levels, some of this, and yet not able to understand consciousness. It's possible. It possibly could be that excluded part of the Venn diagram where we can understand everything, all these things, but not consciousness.

1:37:23Because if consciousness is indeed part of the physical world, then it should be susceptible to these same sort of methods. And that's why, you know, I classify the distinction of this non-physical aspect that is something not susceptible to the scientific method. If that's the case, then science will never be able to understand consciousness, and therefore it has to be some other kind of element, some non-physical component of some kind. And, you know, that's as far as I can really feel confident in going in terms of the distinction. So it's that these are not so much like theories of consciousness.

1:38:09They're more sort of just like ideas pertaining to the unintelligibility of consciousness or its nature, its relation. to that at least. That's, yeah, that there is, it's a recognition that all of the approaches that we took, the materialism, the idealist, the pantheist, all of that is just not satisfactory. And all of them have problems. And so what's the answer to that? The answer to that is maybe there's something systemic that we're not, we're just not capable in our current brain development through evolution of understanding that piece of reality, whatever it may be. We're just not. That's one part of the challenge.

1:39:00And there are lots of different expressions of that. David Eagleman has possibilityism where each possibility has its own kind of ontological status and we can't make a distinction between them. So, I mean, there are different approaches here that look at the problem in different ways. Let me tell you one interesting one that I really like, and it reflects two of my intellectual heroes, actually, that are Raymond Tallis and Peter Van Inwagen. Raymond Tallis is, you know, started a neurologist and great participant in the health system and became a humanist philosopher, just wonderful thinker, and really one of my favorite thinkers.

1:39:58Peter Van Inwagen is a Christian philosopher, perhaps the leading metaphysician in the world under some classifications and a Christian philosopher. And let me tell you each one's theory and why I have Raymond classified in challenge. Ray is a absolute atheist, does not believe in God in any sense whatsoever, a firm atheist, but yet he is a non-reductionist about consciousness. He calls reductionist theories of consciousness a neuromania as opposed to neurophilosophy that, you know, Pat Churchland would, you know, coined. But Ray is neuromania that an attempt to reduce consciousness to material is just impossible.

1:40:49So Ray is an atheist about the nature of reality, no God, but a realist about consciousness in terms of being non-material, non-reductive. Peter Van Inwagen is a Christian philosopher, so deeply believes in God, a very specific kind of God. But he is a materialist about consciousness. So he believes that consciousness is entirely physical. Then he has a different problem because he believes in God. He believes in a resurrection. So if the person is physical, how do you get a resurrection? It's a completely separate issue, which is an interesting one, which I have classified under non-reductive physicalism.

1:41:35Because there are Christian philosophers like Peter Van Inwagen or Nancy Murphy who believe in a purely physicalist explanation for the person, for consciousness, but yet believe in non-physical realities. So, you know, this is the kind of nuances we see with very sophisticated people who take, you know, contradictory eyes on both sides. If you compare Ray, an atheist, but a non-reductionist materialist, Peter Van Wagen, a strong theist who's a materialist about the body. And the arguments of each one are deeply probative, and I just love them. and yet it shows different ways of thinking. That's why Ray is classified under challenge theory because he's very clear that he's not saying what consciousness is, but he's saying what consciousness is not and it's not reducible to the physical world, cannot be explained neurobiologically.

1:42:43um uh famously um uh uh uh ralph uh um naters nagel's view tom nagel's view of consciousness is you know famously what is it like to be a bat but but he has taken that further that uh there is something about the world and tom is equally a very strong atheist i think his famous quote is It's not that I don't believe in God, it's that I hope there is no God. A world with a God would be a terrible place. And yet he is a non-materialist about the nature of consciousness. And so we have the, and so those are the kinds of people who are thoughtful within the challenge category or challenging either our capacity through the kind of brains that we have or that there is something that we can't even know what it is.

1:43:47But I'm very confident in my feeling that, you know, there is that the reductionist approach is not going to work, but I have no confidence in what it actually is. And then there are teleological explanations. Paul Davies famously, and he's also one of my intellectual heroes in terms of his approach where, you know, his approach is that That explaining the universe by some externality, like God, doesn't work, but claiming consciousness is all material and is kind of a late accidental development is also wrong. He takes consciousness seriously. And the way he develops this is that through quantum histories of the universe, in some sense, sounds like retrocausation, but it's not.

1:44:41It deals with quantum histories based on John Wheeler that because consciousness will emerge at some point, it then can back choose the quantum histories in some sense that have brought about the consciousness. So Paul, again, an atheist, but believes that consciousness is fundamental and is somehow brought about by a selection of quantum histories by what will happen at a later development. And so these are unclassifiable ideas, and therefore they're in the challenge category. so that's the second time and perhaps lastly this is that's the second time that you've mentioned the quantum um you've mentioned it in the context there of a challenge sort of category you also mentioned earlier when we're talking about materialism and saying well you know different people have different ideas of what counts as material some say it's a a quantum wave function or something and so okay that makes sense but then you also have this category of like quantum well quantum and dimensions but let's isolate the quantum bit like famously roger penrose who i i saw walking down the street of oxford the other day um you you think he was 20 years younger he's just sort of walking along with his coffee and i was able to to shake his hand and i've heard him once say that that i i heard him once at some point say i'm sure he said something like about how once he started talking about consciousness it's all anybody wanted to ask about and he almost regretted it so i i held my tongue i managed i managed not to ask him anything about it but you know famously has this idea that consciousness resides in the quantum um twofold question here one is that why is it its own category isn't quantum just a theory of what matter is fundamentally and secondly you said a moment ago that you used to kind of not take it seriously almost ridicule it and then you change your mind, what accounted for that?

1:46:40Okay, well, I'll answer the first question, that quantum certainly can't be considered materialism in its sense because it is part of the material world. Likewise, non-reductive physicalism and panpsychism, all these kind of information theories, which we haven't talked about, where information is fundamental, integrated information theory, Giulio Tononi, Christoph Koch, these are very important theories that put some foundational ontology into the nature of information. Now, that also can be part of the physical world. But I separated them out, non-physical reductionism, quantum theories, and information, because they are dealing with each in such a sufficiently different way than the traditional materialism theories that that we're used to, which are both neurobiological or electromagnetic or philosophical approaches to theories.

1:47:41There are, you know, I'd be totally happy with different organizational structures, but I broke those out, even though they can be considered materialism in some larger superset, because they are sufficiently different and sufficiently strong in terms of the feelings of its advocates, sufficiently different than the traditional materialistic theory. So, it's just a kind of an organizational approach. And if we dig down, yeah, I mean, I could say they're materialism in some sense if you say everything that is real is material. And so, this is just giving scope to a set of theories that are based on quantum theories in radically different ways.

1:48:24And I don't know how many I have under quantum theories, but at least 20 or 25, and they're radically different of where the quantum effect occurs. You know, as I said, the microtubule, the formation of the wave structure, some people say in the cell, some people say in a larger kind of entanglement in the brain, all different theories of quantum. So when we say that, I think it's important to recognize within that quantum world, there's lots of different kinds of theories that are largely seemingly mutually exclusive in terms of where it works. There's also a dimensionality, that there are different dimensions of consciousness.

1:49:07Bernard Carr has some theories along those lines built on some theories and some credibility of parapsychological things. So these are physicalists, could be physicalists in some sense, but so different than the traditional materialism, I wanted to have them in a separate category. As to why I gave it more credibility, as I looked at each of these theories and just began to understand it in terms of the quantum field aspect to it, there's sufficiently interesting possibilities there in terms of, and as quantum computing has developed and we see the quantum supremacy being able to on certain kinds of questions, factoring of large numbers, where you can achieve in minutes or hours something that would take regular computers a lifetime of the universe or more to do, that there are certain capabilities in quantum that are radically different than the neuronal impulses or the philosophical maneuvers in the brain with representationalism or relationalism or something else, sufficiently radically different that it deserved its own category.

1:50:26And as I said, I, as opposed to, you know, I hope I never ridiculed it, but taking it much less seriously, I would take it more seriously today than before I started the study. You want to get your backyard summer ready, but you don't want to break the bank? Wayfair gets it. Planning on dining al fresco or relaxing poolside? Wayfair has everything you need to prep your space. Shop now and save up to 70 % off during Wayfair's 4th of July clearance. Score huge deals on outdoor furniture, area rugs, and more. We're talking thousands of products for every style and budget. Plus, surprise flash deals July 6th.

1:51:00Don't wait. Shop Wayfair's 4th of July clearance now through July 6th at Wayfair.com. Wayfair, every style, every home. $47 ,000. That's what the average engine customer saves on business travel every year. That's a 26 % savings. all with no booking fees. Up to 70 % off hotels, zero booking fees. Free to start, total control. Find a hotel that meets your team's complex needs. Did we say no fees? We did. That's Engine. Teams travel, spend, managed. Get started at engine.com slash savings. I know I said finally, but just because you mentioned it, under information is one of the most, I think, maybe one of the most commonly cited ideas about consciousness in recent years, which is IIT, or integrated information theory.

1:51:57What is that, and why is it suddenly so popular? So this is a very probative question to the current status of consciousness studies, because integrated information theory, originally formulated by Julia Tononi, who was a sleep researcher, neuroscientist, very good in sleep research and psychiatry, et cetera, and supported strongly by Christophe Koch, who famously developed the neuronal correlative consciousness, assisting Francis Crick in 1990, which really opened the whole field. So these are very strong people. And it's a radically different approach. It takes consciousness fundamental. I shouldn't say fundamental.

1:52:42I take it in a serious way, starting with consciousness and then explaining it. And basically, it is a structural analysis of consciousness that is not based on specific neurobiology, but is based on conceptual ideas about consciousness. And it becomes, and they have a test called phi, which is the amount of consciousness, and then a kind of a structural approach. It's a little vague. They're often accused of being panpsychism, which they reject, but their criticisms say that they're a panpsychist theory. famously 124 philosophers scientists called iit a pseudoscience this was a scandal in the field some say because it's a call it pseudoscience is the the worst thing i can say about about some somebody i mean there's nothing worse i can say you're ugly and you're stupid to say pseudoscience is worse than that um so why did they think it was pseudoscience because as you I mean, that's quite a big deal, like over 100 professionals.

1:54:00Not just that they thought that, but that they felt the need to publicly affirm it, right? And we can tease this apart very well. Why they felt the need was because IIT was getting such very substantial prominence, and there was a so-called adversarial collaboration between different theories of consciousness, famously IIT versus global workspace theory, which to me is kind of a neurobiological theory that competed against each other with a very well-funded program with independent testing, you know, extremely interesting process and results. And it, you know, some things favored one, some things favored the other.

1:54:45IIT predicts that the consciousness would come because of integrated information in the back of the brain, global workspace, say it should occur in the front of the brain. And so this was tested. It seemed to favor IIT a little bit, but not totally. There were some that favor global workspace. But anyway, this became a public matter and it was covered nature, science. I mean, the major publications were looking at this. And a group of people, you know, felt this was a, I wouldn't say a publicity stunt. It wasn't a stunt, But it was excessive publicity and gave the impression that IIT was the leading theory.

1:55:25And then there were, you know, others that were strong, two or three others, when there was this huge number of other theories. And many people had different theories, particularly higher order representationalism and materialism. And people felt that the public was being misled because of the prominence of this theory. because of the prominence of this adversarial collaboration and the prominence of the individuals. It was giving a misleading view of the field. So that was the approach. My approach to it was different. I did not like the label of pseudoscience. I've seen this very similar kind of accusations against string theory, against the multiverse, which are either 20 orders of magnitude with string theory able to be subject to experimental testing or impossible in theory in the multiverse to even get access, although there are some possibilities of interacting brains.

1:56:33Those also have been accused of pseudoscience, and I think that's unfair. That science, because of the nature of it, is dealing with so many different orders of magnitude, of level that if things have a coherence to them, that have explanatory powers to it, we should listen to all that. Certainly, I'm one who accepts a lot of different possible theories to include. So, I was against the pseudoscience accusation. However, I also made the point that if you compared IIT with global workspace theory, each had a prediction, that the prediction of IIT was, again, the prior, the back of the brain and the front of the brain.

1:57:12But from my point of view, that prediction was not an indication of its fundamental ontology of each theory. In global workspace theory, it was sort of, as Dennett might put it, fame in the brain and which circuitry becomes the most prominent and that recruits others to be part of it. whereas IIT has consciousness as some sort of a structural element, maybe in some sort of n-dimensional space, some kind of an equivalent of Hilbert space for a quantum mechanic. Maybe there's some kind of a consciousness space where there is these different structures that occur in some dimensional sense that are part of the IIT.

1:57:59That's the fundamental ontology of each theory. One is a brain circuitry and the other is an ontological structure. And where it predicts something, you could reverse them and say, oh, the global wake space theory predicts the front of the brain, the back of the brain, and IIT predicts the front of the brain. And it wouldn't change the fundamental ontology of each one. So I didn't feel comfortable that that adversarial collaboration would, no matter what it said, would yield a fundamental result. Maybe a fundamental result is in principle not possible through scientific explanations. But you would think these two could be subject to the scientific method because neither one is posing anything directly non-physical, although IIT may be on the fuzzy border between something non-physical and physical.

1:58:54Yeah, I find it funny that on the Wikipedia page for IIT, under the criticism section it says that john searle has criticized has given a critique of the theory saying the theory implies panpsychism and it's like i i can kind of understand where that's coming from a lot of people will think that it sort of implies this sort of crazy view about consciousness but as someone who's quite comfortable with panpsychism it just doesn't sound like much of a critique but it seems like the main criticism was that it was either it was sort of outside of the proper remit of science rather than being like false it just wasn't properly scientific um thing is for me The reason why I don't have a problem with IIT, but I kind of don't find it very interesting, that began when I realized that it's not so much a theory of consciousness and that it doesn't try to explain where experience comes from or something like that.

1:59:51it just begins with a certain set of axiomatic assumptions and like the zeroth assumption is that experience exists it assumes that experience consciousness exists and then tries to talk about it's like structure i suppose and that's great that's interesting that's cool but for me it's always been a little bit outside of what i'm interested in because i'm interested in what consciousness is where it comes from what accounts for it and so i don't know to what extent do you think that IIT can be called a theory of consciousness if it begins with the assumption that, well, consciousness is just a thing that exists?

2:00:26Good. Well, I like the structure where they have their premises and then they have deductions and scientific, but I want to tease apart two elements of it. One is the scientific approach to the presence of consciousness where they use this phi test. And that's a very innovative and important idea. It has clinical applications in terms of coma patients. I mean, there are serious elements to it, and they've been developing it. So as part of IIT, the phi explanation of the presence of consciousness, how do you judge it in terms of the integration and how you assess it through brainwaves, et cetera, that's very scientific and very, very useful.

2:01:10The other part about what consciousness is has this, as I said, this different dimensional structure to it. So, and that's, they're very cautious about that or cagey because that's sort of not part of the physical world. So, they do have an explanation. But by blending those together, I think does each each part a disservice. I think the work on phi in terms of the presence of consciousness, using the idea of integrated information and how that works, is a very legitimate scientific approach to the nature of consciousness, again, with great clinical applications. But as to what consciousness is as a result of it, this structure, a way where every conscious precept may be some kind of a unique structure in this other kind of reality, that is what they say is an inference from their basic axioms.

2:02:16But I radically distinguish that between their work on phi, which is scientifically, from their concept of this structure, which can look like a panpsychism. it can look that way although they would reject that. I guess the assumption of consciousness is a starting point for many. It kind of depends what you mean in that I could say that idealism or panpsychism starts with the assumption that consciousness exists because you have to. It's there. It's real. And then the next question is, well, what's it made out of? What's its structure? I think I always saw IIT as sort of unduly beginning with the assumption that it seemingly would be interesting to try and prove but i guess it's quite valid to just begin with the fact of consciousness and then start looking at its nature but i've also just found it so difficult to understand i guess because i'm i'm not as perhaps scientifically minded as i'd like to be or something like that i've i've i'd never quite managed to fully wrap my head around exactly what was going on um so i was just interested in your take and to what extent you see it as a theory of consciousness, you know?

2:03:27Yeah, again, just distinguishing between their presence of consciousness, this phi element to it, versus what consciousness is, which is a product of it. So you're absolutely right in terms of it starts with consciousness, just like panpsychism and idealism would, and then it takes a very different approach. It looks at systems and the nature of information and how it's integrated and, you know, they're ridiculed, like, you know, can a thermometer then be conscious because it has some kind of information? By the way, John Searle's classic remark about panpsychism is that it's like a thin layer of jam over the whole universe.

2:04:08I mean, that was his metaphor that he liked to use. um but why a thin layer of jam over the whole universe that was just john's way of uh describing panpsychism uh because i think i literally don't understand what he means oh well i mean it's uh because you have consciousness being part of everything uh that it's that it's this adding something to the physical world john was a materialist biological naturalism and And, you know, he was a realist about consciousness in terms of its ontological status, which to me, you know, never quite, I could argue with that. But he was a realist about consciousness, but a hardcore physicalist that biological naturalism, I mean, that, you know, consciousness is the product of the brain like urine is the product of the kidney, is not something that he would eschew.

2:05:04I mean, that would be something that he would use. it's obviously much more would be much more complicated but his approach to panpsychism was that if every little part of the universe has as consciousness to it it would be like this thin layer of jam over the over the universe because it's part of every little thing so you have to have it and you know it's it's a small part of everything so that's why it's thin and jam just makes it funny uh yeah yeah i think perhaps a slightly unfair characterization but i see what he was driving at you know we've we've done we've done so much here and it hasn't been in order exactly but we've talked about materialism and all of the sort of almost ridiculous number of subcategories that exist within there um we did talk a bit about non-reductive physicalism which you know like call it a kind of physicalism if you like but it's it's importantly different in that it cannot be reduced to the purely physical, or at least it sort of seems that way.

2:06:03We talked about the quantum stuff. We did a bit of information on IIT, panpsychism, monisms, dualisms, idealisms, some of the altered state stuff with psychedelics and challenge. I think we have not covered everything, of course, but we've given some kind of overview of at least one of the important parts of every single one of the categories that you've put together on your map. And I think, at the very least, people should be able to see from this. It's a lot, you know, it's complicated. And to be honest, I, when you said at the beginning of this, you said, you know, when I when I started putting this together, I realized it was going to be a lot more work than I expected.

2:06:39I don't know what you were expecting, to be honest, because this is always an infinitely deep and complex topic. So I can only say that I'm grateful that you didn't give up once you realized how complicated it was going to be. Well, it's the old story that if I knew ahead of time what I would have to do. I never would have started, but each step was one step at a time, one theory at a time that I can do. Uh, and so looking back, I'm happy I did it, but, uh, I, I, you know, I, I never would having done it and recognize what, what it was. I mean, it was, uh, it's, it's been a huge amount of work and mostly, mostly at night because of other responsibilities, but it's, uh, it's, it's, it's been a great, uh, a great personal gift to be able to explore these things.

2:07:21And I give credit to the people who've developed all these theories because that's the richness of what the human mind has developed. You know, what we haven't touched on, which I'll just mention, is theological approaches to consciousness, which are part of the human experience, maybe more historically than they are today, Certainly believed by a lot of people today, but even historically by very important thinkers. And they're very diverse. And it was very important for me to include it. So I included Hinduism, where consciousness is very significant in the original Vedic scriptures and Buddhism, the Tao Te Ching.

2:08:05And Hinduism has many, many different expressions. We have maybe five or six there. There are literally hundreds, but I picked five or six very specific ones in Kashmirian and Shaveism and Sri Aurobindo and Sri Ramana. These are all expressions of the core idea, but each one very different in their very interesting ways. And then the Abrahamic religions, Judaism and Christianity and Islam, each one has a different aspect to the nature of the soul in some sense. And whether you believe these things or not, they are part of the human desire to know and to me were very important. And again, a short story, when I submitted my first draft to the Journal of Progress, Biophysics, and Molecular Biology, the reviewer, who again I appreciate very much, made some very important suggestions that helped the paper enormously, said that, look, the scientific theories you have are great.

2:09:07We want to, you know, we accept it. We want to do it. But you have these, you know, philosophical, even theological theories. And, you know, the readers of progress in biophysical and molecular biology, I'm really not interested in that. So, you know, why don't you just take those out and add some of these other categories, as I said, you suggested language, that are important for our readers. And I wrote back and I said, appreciate everything that you've been telling me. And I agree. Make changes. Thank you. And I said, if I were you, if I were in your place, I would have already rejected the paper because it has these extraneous theories, you know, pan-proto-psychism to, you know, immortal soul theories.

2:09:46and I said, but as it happened, you know, I wasn't planning to do this. I've now put a lot of effort into it and I realized I'm going to do this one time in my life and I have to do it where it satisfies my own sense of what the totality of human thought is on the nature of consciousness. And so I have to include the philosophical and indeed theological theories. I have of folk religion theories of consciousness from Africa and China, because that's part of the human experience. We may not agree with that. It may seem pretty scientific, but it's part of the human understanding. And people today believe many of these things as well.

2:10:33And I said, so I have to do this. And if you don't want to publish it, I completely understand. As I said, I would reject it if I were in your position and asked to review it for that reason. But I have to do this. And And if you don't want to publish it, I can understand. I'll try someplace else or worst case, publish it myself in some way. And to their credit, they said, you know, we'll allow any, you know, all of it in. So I really give them credit for allowing me to do that. And there are some very interesting theories. Like under dualism, we haven't mentioned. There's something called emergent dualism.

2:11:10and that's the theory that says that everything is physical, but when there's a certain level of complexity, like in brains, it's somehow due to some meta-psychophysical laws of the universe, produces a non-physical element, sort of pops out, some sort of a non-physical element pops out when you have a certain degree of complexity. So that's a very different kind of dualism. Richard Swinburne, who's obviously a very well-known Christian philosopher and has dealt with this and has dealt with substance dualism independent of his religious views and is one of the major defenders of a classical substance dualism, believes because of his religious training in the traditional soul or whatever.

2:12:00But he said if he were wrong, he would not be rejecting an emergent dualism. He believed strongly that even from a non-religious point of view, dualism is a proper explanation for consciousness. But if it turned out to be an emergent kind where there was no immortal soul, no God, but it kind of emerged out of complexity, that would satisfy his non-theological arguments for dualism. And so that's a variant of dualism. And I think it's a very interesting category. We say dualism, we generally think very simple or interaction, physical and non-physical, rejected by the scientific community. I think, you know, certainly less than 10 % of philosophers would believe in dualism.

2:12:47It's probably 5 % or less. But the richness of the different kinds of theories of dualism, both theologically, philosophically, are, to me, one of the most interesting categories. Because it's not generally appreciated, the sophistication and the different ways of thinking about dualism. It's usually characterized overly simplistically and either accepted or rejected on that when it has all this richness to it. Yeah, and I appreciate you including those religious dimensions. I mean, like a lot of the time, the worldview that a religious system takes on as pertains one aspect of reality like consciousness can be defended independently.

2:13:31Like you say with Richard Swinburne, you can be a dualist and a Christian and not be one because of the other, but sort of encompass one into the worldview of the other. But also there are things that we call religious philosophies, like Advaita Vedanta is a tradition within Hinduism, which is a religion, but Advaita Vedanta is kind of a philosophical system rather than a religious one. You don't need to talk about the pantheon of gods and the scriptural tradition exactly. It's sort of revealed through the Upanishads and whatnot, but in terms of the narratives and the characters and stuff, that's kind of not so relevant to the philosophical stream.

2:14:11so it can all kind of be separated out and gets a little bit sort of uh complicated but as you say like worth a mention that for most of history philosophizing has been predominantly done in the context of religious worldview in the context of like filling in the understanding where faith kind of leaves off and in the modern era especially since the scientific revolution we've kind of separated those out but your map isn't an attempt to say here are all of the views that i take seriously or here are all of the views that i think are plausible but just to say here are all of the views that i know of that people in fact believe and to leave those out i think would have been uh would have been quite the quite the blind spot and quite the gaping hole even if not everybody noticed it at first i'm sure the religious would have noticed it but maybe not i completely agree with what you said and i have grown to as i said appreciate the sophistication of the various religious communities over the years in dealing with philosophical approaches to consciousness and its richness.

2:15:16I've learned a lot from that, and I think there's some very, very, very strong thinking. People make fun of the philosophical approaches during the Middle Ages in Christian philosophy or Islamic Judaism. It was really an interesting, flourishing time when very sophisticated thinkers were dealing with consciousness as the only thing that they could do in the pre-science world. And there are ideas that are worth contemplating. Oh yeah, a great depth of thought. And as I say, if people want more information on these views, visit the map. It's in the description. It's free. I should have mentioned that at the beginning.

2:15:57This sounds like we're selling some super-duper expensive expensive crazy that you could probably charge hundreds of pounds it's not it's just on the internet it's free truth is the universal possession of mankind as whoever it was that said that said and uh you can just you can just click on it and check it out and at least use it as a springboard to go and and find even if you already have a theory of consciousness that you like that you're on board with just go on like the there's like one of the visualizations is like a kind of it's like a literal map where everything's kind of connected with different wires and stuff like go and look at the different theories that are like in orbit around your present theory because you might discover something new you might discover uh something that you like even better or sort of better reasons to to stick with what you've got so i'll leave it in the description and yeah i can only thank you again so much for putting it together and of course for taking the time to come on my show today and talk us through it it's been a pleasure landscape of consciousness it's loc.closertooth.com but landscape of consciousness, you can find it very quickly.

2:17:01And it's a collective project. As I said, many, a large percentage of theories have come from people who have suggested theories, either their own or something I left out that they're very passionate about. So it's really trying to make a collective effort. It's more than a personal one. Yeah. And of course, to Alex Gomez, Marin, is it Marin? Is that how you say the last part of his last name yeah yeah alex yeah he's great i met him once and um had a had a had a fascinating conversation with him at philosophy festival it was amazing i actually walked into his talk by mistake uh i think i was i was trying to find a different one and we went into this tent and i was sat with i think i was sat with annal seth and some of my friends so and phil halper who's uh yeah he's like a proper proper physicalist as well and and on comes alex and he starts he gives this incredible talk about the weirdness of consciousness and altered psychedelic states and how consciousness is everywhere and i was i was there the whole time just like that was absolutely fantastic i turned to my left to annal and turned to my right and phil and and i don't think they were quite so convinced but it was it was almost sort of comical the way that this this room of people at a philosophy conference were kind of listening to him with this sort of this sort of furrowed brows and raised eyebrows but but there was something about them all which which they really enjoyed it they were sort of like yeah okay i you know what you know what fair enough i thought he was great so um yeah i agree the role that he played in putting this together as well um i i i thank him for but yeah it's um it's been fun and of course your other project is closer to truth one of the other great things about this is that like a quite significant percentage of the names on this map you have sat down and interviewed in person and got to ask every question that you wanted to ask them so like chances are that if there's someone on this list who's still alive and you know you're interested in that that you know you probably interviewed them so go and check that out as well um i'll link closer to truth in the in the description too but yeah thanks for the work you do and thanks for thanks for the conversation today man really a pleasure alex a great you're making an important contribution to the world and uh I follow it.

2:19:12We all should follow it. And it's, you know, let me just end with one idea, which had nothing to do with my original desire to do closer to truth or the landscape of consciousness, is that over the last five or so years, really since the pandemic, COVID, we've seen more and more people from diverse parts of the world writing into us with their ideas and suggestions or, you know, praise or criticism. and they come from real diverse kinds of peoples and countries. When we started, we were 100 % American because we were driven by public broadcasting where our television show was. And now we're less than 40 % U.S., 60 % from other parts of the world.

2:19:59And we've noticed that from the Islamic world, from the Hindu world, there are very many people. And oftentimes, we'll have people writing to us from different regions, nations, religions, races, ethnicities that are in conflict in what I call the superficiality part of humanity that we read about in the news every day. But on the questions of consciousness and raw existence in the universe, everybody is united in terms of the people who write in. They self-select because they're interested in these things and their personal of superficial affiliations disappear. And everybody is saying the same kinds of questions that you and I are talking about.

2:20:49And to me, that is now kind of an exciting thing that maybe if more people would really explore the depth of what human beings are in terms of the nature of reality or the nature of consciousness, there'd be less concerns about our superficial differences. We really see that in terms of people writing it. You probably have the same experience. Oh yeah, for sure. I think so. It's fascinating how similar the questions are that crop up throughout history and around the world. The fact that every new discovery of an area of philosophical interest that we discover in the West is preempted by Indian philosophy, in particular has has recently sort of astounded me and i found that incredibly fulfilling to to look at because it's like the same problem in a different language and because so much of philosophy is about linguistic disputes in my view like so much of it is often about language and you can confuse that for metaphysical uh conflict having literally a different independent corpus of thought on essentially the same question is incredibly useful to really getting down to the nub of what we're like really talking about you know goethe said of language he who knows one knows none and i think the same is true of a philosophical tradition because you you literally cannot recognize the air that you're breathing if you don't know what it's like to you know breathe something else for a change uh and i feel like that's often the case like that the assumptions that go into western philosophy because they're assumptions you don't even notice that they're there so it's also incredibly informative to realize that the same questions are being asked even if the language is, I mean, literally the language, but also the conceptual language is quite different.

2:22:40So I've definitely found the same thing too, yeah. Great. Well, as I said, it's been a wonderful journey and I appreciate everyone who has written in and given ideas and have participated in the process. What I try to do on the landscape of consciousness is for each theory, for those who are still alive, I sent it to the theorists themselves after I put it together and ask them to critique it or edit it. And so it's not a large percentage, but the original paper, maybe 25, 30 % had been edited or given feedback by the theorists themselves. And then, so on the website, we put where it's been verified by the individual.

2:23:24We put a note on that because it's important. And most of the time, the corrections are small. there were a few where I had big corrections and I said, oh, I'm sorry. I got the theory wrong. He said, no, that was what I thought five years ago. Those are the papers you read. Here's what I think today. So, uh, the, the website is, is currently, uh, designed to be, um, uh, constantly updated. Uh, when people have a new reference or have a new idea, they can add that, uh, it's not, it's not a wiki where people can do it. We have to curate it. Uh, so that people not making, random changes and to keep it relatively consistent.

2:24:01But it's been a collective process and I appreciate it.