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Nice chat. Thank you

the point of the zombie argument sean makes is that accepting the possibility of the zombie absolutely obviates the need to assume any of this supposed “consciousness” at the core level

What Does Physics Tell Us About Consciousness?...physics doesn't do consciousness... that is for the tin foil hat club but truth be told ... awareness is all that is going on in the brain.

Liuke has a good point about the relevance of the combination problem to all theories

Sean Carroll wiped the floor with Phillip and definitely won the debate. Philip’s argument is just so untenable. Team Carroll.

Sean provides examples and understanding and clarity to his side; whereas, Philip doesn't really provide any substance to his side and he waffles a lot and speaks defensively and he talks a lot but he doesn't say much. The win goes to Sean, for sure.

hey phil goff not sure if you read these comments. but iv ben playing your speeches on rpt every night when i go to sleep for quite some time now . i dont have a scientific background but i one hundred percent think youve cracked it. so please keep going and yeats from now youl he renouned like Einstein haha also the Cosmos emerged like evolution...iv often wondered about random changes in human evolution doesnt quite make sense. like how the little bone in ye ear was once a fish fin. why did I make that joirney from a gillbto an ear because any one step woulnt of made an evolutionary advantage .it took millenial to migrate. i feel there is an underlying conversation goin on like mother to the womb that helps design optimise. same with child from womb same with evolution and same with cosmic consciousness

If IIT is to be taken seriously then the consciousness of the US (phi value) would be less than that of it's nodes (people) whereas for people, their phi would be higher than their nodes (neurons). This is because even though the amount of information is greater it is much less integrated.

1:27:26 Goff wouldn't know dialectics versus metaphysics if it bit his arse! The absolute state of modern philosophy! Oh the Humanities!

50:46 What do you think Ezekiel's and Alex Grey's eye-monsters are, Philip!? They're zooming in all the way to the "pixels" of their fkn imagination! They're literally perceiving their own neural activity! I was able to tie my own eye-monster experience to my own neural activity, so there you go! QED! Goff's Error! Idealism is Bunk! 🤪

I love the way that Chomsky schools these two 'educated'' fools..nodding dogs ( pretending that they understand). That's what they are, nothing more...the Ant & Dec of philosophy...ha,ha!

"Before the action we are wise, and after the action we are wise, but during the action we are usually otherwise....." Raj Neesh. said, i think....Pan-psychism is just the latest '"slouching towards Bethlehem"...towards a belief in the "Almighty"....

Bloody hell. Trying to turn something imaginary into God....same old shit....pan psychism....good on you Noam.

Brilliant experience in the listening to, eh. Spot on.

I think one of the problems of panpsychism is that the idea is unfalsifyible . You can't interrogate the teensy monads and see whats going on in their teensy brains. It is like dark matter-it fixes the math.

That “something deeper” could be consciousness itself.

What would it mean for something to exist independent of a conscious observer?

I stopped listening after a while. Goff is great but the existentialist interviewer was going off memory of what Sartre told him 40 years ago. In other words, irrelevant. I'll stick to Goff on American podcasts

Does the universe have personal agency beyond just lifeforms having personal agency? If not, then our ability to predict some place like Venus and its weather shouldn't be affected by personal agency. That means the prediction errors have other causes that this free will argument isn't accounting for. The butterfly effect is ultimately about rounding errors in fine-tuned systems that make models inaccurate for predictions too far out. How can this free will argument differentiate between rounding errors and free will?

This Philips WHOLE argument is "bu bu but i feel a thing!!!" 🤦‍♀️🌏☮️

The problem is physics hit a brick wall...... We've reached the limit of what we can prove..... And we may never ever find the answer..... Right now it's like a dog chasing his tail

Fight nice kids😅

Something exists.... point blank.....call it God call it peanut butter and jelly.......but this whole existence didn't just pop out of absolutely nothing...... there's a bottom to reality for sure

What a fascinating subject that of consciousness. While I welcome the “thinking outside the box” efforts panpsychism brings to the table, - and actually admit a small bias toward liking the idea of something similar to it being the case - on this debate I feel like Sean was much clearer and concise in explaining his reasoning than Philip. Philip kept saying “we bridged the gap” or “we solved it” but never really explained how exactly in my opinion. I have purchased his latest book (Why?) to see if he is able to better present such ideas. The subjective experience of consciousness is very rich and layered, and engaging in practices like meditation and psychedelics really emphasize this in my opinion. So at this time my analytical and pragmatic mind sides with Sean, while my intuitive and spiritual sides see something worth investigating further with classically unorthodox approaches such as Panpsychism. The thing here of course is that like it or not, logic tends to have a much better track record than intuition. Would love to hear the thoughts of people who find themselves in a somewhat similar spot.

People sometimes bring up Frank Jackson's conversion to physicalism as a point to weaken the knowledge argument, as if the argument was so bad the creator had to abandon it. So, it was interesting hearing that he switched to illusionism, and he still thinks the knowledge argument needs to be taken seriously by physicalists. I wonder if the deeper disagreement isn't between physicalists and anti-physicalists, but between those who take the epistemic gap presented by qualia seriously, and those who don't.

Psychedelics are a great litmus test to see whether a philosopher is actually interested in learning the truth about reality or whether they would rather just have an academic career or appear clever to others.

Very helpful! Thanks!

Take this from a child of the Haight Ashbury and the Summer Of Love; I personally witnessed and experienced the power of psychedelics. ‘67 was magical. ‘71- not so great. Lots of tragic cases that had nothing to do with the actual substance responsible for release as the actual substance of what was released. Abuse, mental illness, fear, social isolation. I saw a lot of situations where I understood that the gamble a person had taken for personal enlightenment didn’t pay off. I had genuinely good experiences with psychedelics but the most profound experience I have ever had was giving the sweater off my back to a homeless person and he became Jesus Christ right in front of me. His face was beatification in real life. I will never forget that.

@philip. Your microphone is popping. Very distracting. Do not speak directly into it. Search: microphone popping.

I did Psychedelics when I was younger and it was an amazing experience. The way I did shrooms was on pizza, l also did LSD. I had a bad trip when i took overdose on LSD and that was my last time. Would love to try them out again.

You don’t release a podcast anymore?

Great episode. Great guests!

1:04:02 The horror, says Keith of being “No longer confident that the nature of your experiences is completely revealed to you.” This is the crux, isn’t it? Are you really “open” to a new reality or not? Or are you just putting a psychedelic cover on the same album?

Absolutely phenomenal! 😄

Aiden looks like Shoenice's son

Welcome back gents! Aidan seems to be something of a mystic -- albeit perhaps covertly. I'd love to hear from more philosophers like him! Keith, so sorry for the loss of your good friend. Happily, the evidence (collected by scholars and scientists over decades) that you'll meet him in the afterlife is overwhelming. Please have Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove on the show to discuss that evidence, and its implications for philosophy :)

So tired of videos wirh sound volume levels that inaudible

Goff's ENTIRE argument is just one giant appeal to ignorance fallacy. Again, like sean says, his argument explains nothing. He believes that because physics cant explain consciousness, it must be fundamental. In his last rebuttal, he mentions that we "need" a connecting theory, and because physics can't connect them at this very moment, his theory must be right. The absence of current physical evidence does not prove ANYTHING about his claim. A whole debate about nothing 😂😂😂

Y de Fock are the Sounds so friggin low ?

What deletes my comments, and why?

Nice conversation.Carroll misunderstands both the knowledge argument and panpsychism. He makes a great attack on a strawman. No violation of some physical law is needed because panpsychism is not some type of dualism. It is not physical laws + consciousness. It is that the powers underlying the physical processes (which are described mathematically as "laws") are identical to-or grounded to-conscious qualities (or some type of proto-quality), which produce the regulaities in physical behavior (described mathematically, with formulas etc). So at a basic level, panpsychism provides an ontology of powers. The real problem is how these "combine" or lead to the emergence of macro-consciousness found in animals etc. Not that it is not doable in principle, but my hunch is that some crucial info is missing here.

Philip reminds me of Christian apologists. Such utter conviction behind such gasious foundations.

1:42:28 Not sure why it's hard to conceive of a zombie, because we have them since we have AIs. Apparently conscious beings that are not conscious.

1:08:40 This is the crux of it. Goff says consciousness is fundamental. Carroll tries to dig into the experience of red to find the cause of it, but he's frustrated, because he cannot locate a mechanical cause of that (fundamental) redness. _Because_ it is fundamental! -- that's what Goff is trying to tell him. He will be able to find all sorts of correlates of that experience in the brain, but he will not locate the cause, because the qualia is fundamental. Carroll will not be able to accept this answer because for him, The answer to a "why" question has to be mechanical, which is to say, mathematical. He says that knowing that consciousness is fundamental, simply produces a "warm feeling" but nothing more. He calls it a warm feeling in order to belittle it, but actually, the warm feeling that signifies direct contact with the fundamental ground is actually a starting point for the introspective investigation of consciousness. But if you are not willing to respect the territory, then there is no way that you are going to make any progress in it.

32:36 Sean seems to think that "red photons cause red" is actually an explanation. This is like saying that apple atoms make up an apple. Why does he think like this?

Frank Jackson who came up with the Knowledge Problem, later retracted it and believes in physicalism.

My internal examiner for my PhD in 1996 was Howard Robinson, and the external was Prof. E.J.Lowe. They both seemed quite happy with my insistence that qualia really exist and need an adequate account. What we are witnessing here is a throw-back to JJC Smart being able to distinguish between lettuce and cabbage leaves, but unable to explain in what respect. If conscious experience is just an illusion, we need an explanation of how that illusion works.

I suspect that Goff was being overly accommodating to the others and their materialist position. We know that someone seeing a colour for the first time will find out what it is like. How could that not be true? Now it seems unfashionable to admit it. The physicalists' dismissal of intrinsic experiential qualities needs to be defended more explicitly and more rigorously. The visual illusions they fall back on show that we can misjudge what we are looking at, but not that there is no conscious experience of vision. That would take a very strong demonstration, and one that I cannot even imagine at this stage. Pain is an illusion? Go on ...?

On the subject of controlled hallucination vs direct experience via sensory inputs, I suspect, based on several pieces of evidence, that we hallucinate all the time and that the hallucination is created by predictive models. These predictive models are constantly being updated by sensory information but our conscious self does not receive the sensory information itself, only the updated model. The first example I will give is the one of fly swatting, where we never hit the fly because the fly is not where we last saw it. Because of the delay in processing visual information, we can never see where a fast-moving object is at the actual moment, our brain has to make a prediction. This is an essential life skill, especially in hunting. So, our conscious mind doesn't actually see the object directly, what we see is a hallucination of it in the place where it is predicted to be at that moment. Most fast-moving objects have a predictable trajectory, because of their momentum, so the model matches reality. A fly doesn't. So, what happens is the fly changes direction but we don't see that, instead, we see the fly where it was predicted to be. Often, the fly was never in that place at all. This is what can also cause a fly to mysteriously disappear, like it just quantum jumped through space. Another example is dreaming. If you've ever been lucky enough to experience a lucid dream (I've had a few over the years) you'll know just how realistic the dreamworld is. The visual appearance, and other sensations, are as real as being awake. This is how I know my mind can create the whole life-experience, faithfully, without any connection to the outside world. That seems a remarkable ability to have if it's only used when I'm asleep and dreaming (a tiny fraction of my life). Easier to believe is that it uses this ability all the time I'm conscious and the only difference between being awake and dreaming is the updates to the models. The final one is accounts of people under the influence of Brugmansia (Angel's trumpet). This plant contains a toxic alkaloid that works as a delirium. Unlike psychedelic drugs, it does not cause hallucinations in the form of colors and geometric shapes, and it does not seem to actually cause hallucinations directly. It's toxic to brain cells and prevents them from functioning correctly. People under the influence of Brugmansia hallucinate but the hallucinations they experience are just like real world experiences. They see people and hear people who aren't there. They fail to see and hear people who are there. They often don't know where they are but they think they do. One example is someone sitting on a bench in the center of town talking to themselves, while their experience is that they're sat on the sofa, in their living room, talking to a good friend. These are not simple hallucinations caused directly by the toxin, they are like dreaming while awake. It seems that although they're awake, their model is not being updated. It's not that it can't be updated, it can and they can experience the real world, rather it's like the threshold for updating has moved and it requires a greater mismatch or stronger stimulus for an update to occur. Not exactly proof but I find these examples quite compelling.

On the subject of free will, I have to agree 100% with Anil. To believe that free will is real I would have to invoke a belief that has no basis in science/real world evidence. It was with great resistance and reluctance that I finally accepted determinism and that free will does not exist. After much thought, I found that this conclusion was simply inescapable (I did try). However, the processes that contribute to making decisions can depend upon so many factors, internal and external, and can be so complex and unpredictable that to all intents and purposes, it looks like free will. One factor that makes some decisions particularly unpredictable is their reliance upon memory. Not just a single memory but often multiple memories, some recent, some years or even decades old. Memories of events, feelings, etc. I guess that's about as close as you can get to free will in a deterministic universe.