Panpsychism: Is Everything Conscious? - Dr Philip Goff, PhD
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- čas přidán 26. 10. 2022
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According to our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history (cosmically speaking).
According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. The view sounds a bit strange, but a growing number of philosophers and neuroscientists are starting to think it might be our best hope for integrating consciousness into our scientific story of the universe. Dr Philip Goff explains why consciousness poses such a challenge for contemporary science and why panpsychism might be the answer.
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Dr Philip Goff, PhD is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Durham University. Goff’s main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. Goff is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world.
Goff has authored an academic book with Oxford University Press - Consciousness and Fundamental Reality - and a book aimed at a general audience - Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. He is currently working on a book exploring the middle ground between God and atheism. Goff has published 45 academic articles as well as writing extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, The Guardian, Aeon, and the Times Literary Supplement. The interview with Goff by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gareth Cook was one of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020. You can check more of his work at www.philipgoffphilosophy.com and follow him on Twitter @Philip_Goff.
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0:00 Intro and Galileo's revolution
6:52 The hard problem of consciousness
10:48 Not just another scientific problem
17:32 What is materialism
18:58 Why accept Materialism
24:09 A descriptive limitation
29:53 Why physical science can't explain the qualities of experience
33:40 Arey socks conscious
36:30 Panpsychism Russell updates
40:52 Turning thw peoblem upside down
46:06 Clash with physics
49:07 How does consciousness connect to the physical world
51:51 Philosophical zombies
57:18 Two types of consciousness
1:01:43 Meaning zombie
1:09:56 Pilot wave theory
1:12:58 Pan-Agentialism
1:23:53 Consciousness is hard data
1:30:00 Aftershow Questions
As usual : our leading , cutting edge scientific institutes
are unable to provide visiting speakers with halfway decent
microphones / sound system ! Unbelievable ! !
I'm new to panpsychism (Thank you "In Our Time') and found this a fascinating lecture, despite the sloppy and incompetent camera work.
32:13 He starts to explain panpsychism here
Thanks for introducing me to the meaning zombie problem. I think the answer is clear but it makes you think.
Ernst Mach would agree 👍💯
ever since i've heard of it i've wanted to study this, shouldn't the simplest and most consice. i'm one who believes in the conscious of unalive matter, ALL matter and ALL possible systems of matter
It seems to me that the hard problem of consciousness could be concisely articulated as a question of why: why is there consciousness? This is problematic for science because science doesn't answer "why?" questions. It answers questions of "how?"
That's effectively Philip's position summed up. Science deliberately excludes why questions - it only deals with questions in terms of what things do and how with their reducible mathematical and casual structure.
To define the psychical world.
Consciousness IS THAT THAT IAM IN THE Omnipresent here now it is always Is-sing. Even when is still.
There is consciousness. That's the only truth you will experience. The good question then is " Why is there matter and spacetime in an outside world?" Listen to Bernardo Castrup
Why do you ask these questions?
Question. What prevents wave function of determining particles in the way that they do what they do? Why can the wave function decide not to determine the particles the way it does? Second. In what moment self-consciousness emerge? What constitutes it? Thrid. Why can an atom have consciousness? It seems that it's because atom's are made of electrons and quarks (this ones constituing protons and neutrons), fundamental particles that are conscious. But we are consciouss, wright? How do we get from electrons and quarks (conscious beings) to atoms (unconsiouss beings) to a cow (conscious being)?
Everything observed is conscious.
If the matter of my brain works in the same way of the rest of the universe, it seems to me a reasonable question to ponder whether everything observed can "feel" or "experience" some degree of "sensations". Just like the consciousness of a small insect is much more fundamental and less complex than a human's, so microscopic life forms experience an even more fundamental perception of reality, and so on until the elementary particles of nature and their fundamental interactions.
Your brain doesn't work like the rest of the universe. A rock makes fewer logical mistakes than you do. ;-)
@@schmetterling4477 How can he make a logical mistake when he is formulating his comment with "it sees a reasonable question to ponder..."? He didn't even make an argument.
@@louis71 He or she stopped reasoning when he or she used the word "reasonable". :-)
@@schmetterling4477 He didn’t reason at all, he just assessed the point the video made.
@@louis71 Poorly. A stone would have done better. ;-)
Dude, you need to have a sit down with Rupert Spira.... Put that meeting on video...
I don’t think that a materialistic approach to consciousness would be too concerned about subjective qualities of our consciousness per se at all. Its whole project is to merely reduce them to observable physical ones. I think that in doing so it would consider itself to have solved all the problems of consciousness. It’s a materialist solution, with materialist results that would satisfy a physicalist. Anyone not satisfied with those results would be looking for some thing non-scientific. It’s kind of odd to think about what that might amount to.
But then it is confusing materialism as an epistemology with materialism as an ontology.
I haven't read Prof. Goff's book "The Galileo's Error" yet. Interesting data at 38:28. Current data: physicalists (atheists): 51.9%, anti-physicalists: 32%, among anti-physicalists approximately 3/4 are dualists and 1/4 are panpsychists.
Is there a difference between Panpsychism and the view that consciousness comes from magic?
Sleepwalkers are meaning zombies are they not? They can carry out full conversations while, to dial up another analogy; the lights are on but no-one is home.
We love scientific animism
The intelligence of AI depends on both the quantity and quality of the knowledge it is trained on. AI currently is not trained by experience. The data it is trained on are not error-free.
A superintelligence uses self-supervised learning from self-generated experiences. It utilizes everything from particles, humans, planets, stars, galaxies, and beyond to experience itself. It is not limited by matter, energy, space, and time. What it lacks are experiences. The participants of any event experience the same event differently. For the experience to be authentic, each participant must have free will and be temporarily unaware that they are playing a role. This superintelligence has error-free experiences from all the participants. For "training" to happen, all experiences are recorded and accessible at any time.
There are 8 billion humans on Earth, compared with 2 trillion galaxies in the visible universe. There are several hundred billion suns in each galaxy. This universe is one of countless possible universes.
I watch convuluted CZcams videos, therefore I am
Same
The moment a particle is a wave; it has to be a conscious wave!
Gravity is the conscious attraction among waves to create the illusion of particles,
and our experience-able Universe.
Max Planck states: "Consciousness is fundamental and matter is derived from Consciousness".
Life is the Infinite Consciousness, experiencing the Infinite Possibilities, Infinitely.
We are "It", experiencing our infinite possibilities in our finite moment.
Our job is to make it interesting!
Yeah, it's very sad that Max Planck lost it...
What did he lose? Based on the new emerging sciences of mind, it seems as if he had far long already won As it pertains to remarking such a discovery... Dr. Dean Radin has scientifically also fallen upon statistically supportive evidence for pansychism whereas, consciousness continues to come up, especially in quantum physics, as fundamental.@@schmetterling4477
Every single one of you who think this are just lost in life thirsty for old shaman guide people
The only reason that a particle appears as a "wave " is because you have not designed a sterile and fast enough and small enough detector "instument" to observe the individual particle. Thus you rely on statistics and probability.
In the first 15 minutes of this video I felt my visual cortex being bombarded with a few billion neurons all attempting to communicate with each other that you must have put on your daughter's cardigan by mistake. Pleased to know my neurons have a sense of humour though.
Consciousness is nothing more and nothing less than response to a stimulus, as simple as that, and it is "fractal consciousness ".
Something having a state or interactions is not consciousness.
Consciousness needs far more than that. It needs an internal learned world-view into which it sorts and organises such interactions. Copule that with the ability to recurse the world-view to become self-aware and some basic survival goals and you might be half way there.
Consciousness is only "hard" to solve because we keep viewing it from within our conscious experience..
I found some interesting points here but as stated above, after the “meaning zombie” definition, I lost interest. He mentions that infants don’t have a conscious experience, but psychological science will suggest otherwise. Their brains are always working and in fact, they have more neuronal pathways than we do and pruning needs to occur for them to make sense of the world. I guess it depends on if we are assessing and defining consciousness from a cognitive/psychological or theoretical/philosophical perspective. He categorized consciousness by sensory and “understanding” experiences, including mentioning that we see faces and not shapes, but this is technically the field of cognitive psych and internal-processing models of cognition. I saw “Sensory vs Understanding” processes as sensation vs perception, and also top-down vs bottom-up visual processing. Additionally: Consciousness, to me, is based on brainwave activity and can be scientifically measured by EEG. While this is my own conceptualization of consciousness, his is quite different where he expresses that consciousness is not able to be empirically studied. He’s passionate about his own view and I like that, but he does seem naive to psychological science. I’m not stating that Dr. Goff is wrong in his beliefs. It was very nice to listen to his perspective and I was able to learn new ideas from this talk.
Did you even listen to what he said? He said infants do have consciousness but not the same level of consciousness as speaking human beings have.
They have a state, but I think theory of mind is required for consciousness as it is generally understood.
Consciousness without a stable worldview is meaningless.
What they are describing has been recognised in many religions. The Holy Spirit in Christianity, Ruḥ al-Qudus in Islam, Animus Mundi in European Paganism, etc
In the end, materialism is being proven to be false, and I'm very optimistic for the future of spirituality in the West
I think Goff said many things right, then i got to the meaning zombie problem and onward and it all became woo bordering on supernatural, totally unecessary/inconsistent to bring up, wtf
It's supposed to be a thought experiment against physicalism. I personally like the knowledge argument better.
@@JohnSmith-bq6nf my problem with it is that it just assumes that a non-conscious entity would be able to imitate humans so clearly if though isn't conscious. While Goff says that it's only a thought experiment, it still needs some correlation to reality in order to prove a point (i.e atleast a theoretical explanation of how a non-sentient entity could imitate even the subtlest aspects of a sentient one at all.) But perhaps evolutionarily consciousness was developed precisely so all these subtle aspects could be possible, so rather than simply being the objects of nature, we're also it's subjects (i.e homo faber.)
a zombie is what it is too lose your own machine language and permanently rely on others for theirs instead: The point is the phenomenological world is the mathematical reality of how the language of labeling what is outside of the domain of science can be summed up with how modern science begins a 170 years ago and the first psychiatic disorder was probably discovered more then 12,000 years ago or what is said as to be more then 20,000 years ago
Flynnbanynn661 Maybe you are an actual 'philosophical zombi' who fails to get the meaning of this lecture ? Dr Goff says consciousness is anything BUT supernatural (by referring to Russel's solution to the mind body problem).
What is the mother of invention? With endless invention of psyche ideologies it is rather fuzzy.
First principle: the universe is mental
I rather prefer to say: the Universe is alive.
For those upset by the quality of production values says a lot about your consciousness lmao
Natural selection 100% explains consciousness. I listened with an open mind, BUT NS 'cares' about more than just behaviour, it 'cares' about structure and ability to reason and function cognitively - superior ability to think, superior ability to survive and adapt. Worms are conscious inasmuch as they sense pressure, moisture, temperature, vibration, and it makes sense to me that consciousness would have evolved and become more complex as organisms developed more complex neurological systems. Philip believes a horse, for example, has less consciousness than a human, but this shows his lack of knowledge of anatomy, physiology, psychology and ethology and other animals. Horses are highly sensitive in ways that humans are not, one example being sensitivity to touch, sense of smell and hearing would be others, to assume their rich experience of their world is 'less' than ours is overly simplistic imo. Not to mention the fact that they are social animals. Different, yes, but not less. If you start delving into the complexity of the river dolphins brain, you start to understand that it may be humans whose experience is 'less' (I would say different as we have all evolved to sit neatly into our niches) than other animals.
Why not take the next step? Consciousness and energy are the same.
57:49 I disagree with the position that there are two types of consciousness "Sensory." and "understanding". The fact that "something is an elephant" is just a combination of the senses. The auditory and visual sensation of the word elephant is connected to the senses associated with the experience of an elephant. Understanding is just an emergent property of complex sensory experience and memory.
Shortly after an example of a baby is given for a consciousness without understanding. The fact that babies develop understanding from a place of only sensory is further evidence that the latter emerges and is not separate from the former.
I asked my teacup what it thought. I would describe it's answer as vague at best.
By contrats as the last of my tea went down it's thoughts seemd very profound - but unfortunately didn't catch it all as it got washed away as it swished around my tum. Perhaps liquids have greater conscsciousness?
Hard problem indeed !-- all's I know is my tin foil hat needs go on no later than 6pm sharp - otherwise it goes soft.
📍1:23:34
I am a Monist, Panpsychist and Hard Determinist. So Neoplatonism is a spot on philosophy, that combines all ancient philosophies (Stoicism, Platonism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Scepticism), and is millennia old. Check it out. The movie Matrix was based on Neoplatonism.
I am also a deeply spiritual person and I like a lot the “awe moments” wondering about the miracle of existence.
Nevertheless, i still like religions and their rituals. We are social beings and connecting in a spiritual manner and setting is nice.
I prefer the ancient Greek polytheism. It is just so much more entertaining to have a plethora of Gods for every aspect and concept of life (eg love, wisdom, war, arts, entrepreneurship, family, home, the sea, etc.) and these Gods and deities to have personalities and weaknesses like humans do. The very graphic and artistic Underworld is also pretty cool.
The dying-rising Gods are also very cool, like Dionysus and Adonis, or the concept that you can metaphorically die (visit the Underworld), while still alive, and bring some kind of knowledge from the underworld. Dying and rising concept is key to philosophy, too. Plato said that the Eleusinian mysteries (dedicated to the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone), in which they used psychedelics, meaning by experiencing psychedelics you died and you resurrected with a new understanding of the world, is similar to the philosophical path, where you metaphorically die and get resurrected with a new understanding.
This makes sense because the philosophical path involves the learned ignorance and by experiencing the natural inner nothingness. This inner nothingness is what we mean by being metaphorically dead.
I agree with you, except I'm not a Hard Determinist. Also I think The Matrix was more Gnostic and less Neoplatonism
@@emZee1994 , i do not have strong opinion about hard determinism and the lack of free will. Maybe free will arises from consciousness. Maybe…
Determinism is for people who think that logic and causality are behind everything. Hard Determinism is for people who think that, but think about it more deeply. Panpsycism fits well with Determinism because it means we are moved to act in no more spooky a way than a billiard ball is when struck. So if we have no choice but to move, and the ball has no choice, then we and the ball are governed by the same laws. People who believe the billiard ball has thoughts are not thinking deeply enough.
Get over yourself.
@@karnliberated Hard determinism is getting over one's self, by definition.
Step 1. Say that scientists have a typical response to the hard question.
Step 2. Say "they're wrong".
Step 3 say "it's not a scientific question.
Step 4. Claim that your idea is superior.
What an original approach.
Step One: Recognize anomalies in fundamental theory that underlies all science
Step Two: Highligjt how these anomalies can never be explained away by science
Step Three: Introduce your working theory
Step 4: Highlight how your working theory solves the anomalies and expands up previous scientific theory
philosophical zombie sounds like materialism with extra steps a bit
I basically agree with him but don’t think his arguments are the best. Bernardo Kastrup has a much more convincing argument for idealism.
Panpsychism is the ultimate and desperate attempt to save materialism and reductionism after the killing blow of Aspect's Nobel winning experiment.
Idealism is the future.
I think people like you who over-interpret scientific facts in an attempt to validate your point of views don't really realize what science is. Science is a collection of algorithms that we extract from experiments. Nothing more nothing less. You can't extract fundamental and absolute truths from it, but only up to the precision of your experiments. And there is nothing to guarantees us that quantum theories are absolutely correct. Our particles accelerator can only reach so much energy, not even close to test quantum gravity, matter in black holes, and the very first instants of the Big Bang.
Could you let me know what you're referencing? Trying to leanr
Yes , you are right. We should instead have a vitalism, a general notion of life with consciousness being the creating at the core of life which is the limit of science . Materism is the refusal to see a limit to science while consciousness is this limit , the limit being its source .
🦋🛸🎼🪷🌈💎🙏🧩🌟🤩
If every human can be aware of his own consciousness, then, by definition, consciousness is publicly known, I would think!
Publicly "known" but not publically observable. This is the crux of his point, No-one can deny consciousness and yet no-one can scientifically explain its origin.
This points to a metaphysical mistake that has befallen scientists: materialism. Science describes the behavior of matter very accurately, using concepts such as particles, quantum fields, space-time and so on. But describing the behavior gives you no clue as to what the thing is!
Therefore, materialism is a belief based on nothing. Idealism - the belief that consciousness or experience or observation is fondamental and causes all the rest - falls into no hard problem and is confirmed by quantum physics.
You have no way of proving your consciousness to me nor mine to yours. Hence the philosophical zombie argument.
Right, physics emerges from Consciousness, but is not an "entity" separate from Consciousness since the latter is eternally present and fundamental as the Ground of Being. The question is, can we experience Consciousness "In-Itself", and not just think about it? Yes. Access "Mahamritunjaya mantra - Sacred Sounds Choir" and listen to it for 5 min per day for at least two weeks. Enjoy it.
Contrary to what Mr. Goff keeps repeating, Consciousness is not publically observable. When Mr. Goof smile, everyone is conscious of Mr. Goff happiness. We experience the pain of people in pain and only a few would be able to ignore it and be a torturer. Even 6.month old baby can distinguish between what is alive/conscious from what is not. So it is false that we are only conscious of our own consciousness. We evolved to be empathic and evolve to express our feelings throw our voice, facial and body expression and our language. How can Mr. Goff be blind to this most basic fact of life and be an ''EXPERT''.
Actually, when you see Mr. Goff smiling, you are not conscious of his happiness, because he could be pretending to be happy. And secondly because a behaviour (smiling in this case) is not the same as consciousness. There lot of behaviours that are unconscious.
Perhaps you misunderstood what Dr Goff intended to mean by saying we have no access to the experiences of other consciousnesses. As I understood, he was referring to the fact that what you experience as consciousness is fully real, measurable, memorable etc. whereas what other people have and you are aware of them having consciousness is *never* as accurate or reliable as data like what you experience your self. It is important to realise this fact when we want to approach consciousness with a scientific method.
Yes, Our mind reading empathy is'nt 100% accurate but it does not follow that consciousness in general is'nt public; as adult we develop lying capacities of hiding our real emotions and faking other emotions, poker player are good at that but it is very diffucult to be a convincing actor or lyer precisely because we naturally express our emotions and reveal our consciousness to other and as lying develop, mind reading can develop as well so a good lyer will not fool very perceptive people.
@@louisbrassard9565 Agreed that lying about emotional states is possible and has advantages as well. That said, the only thing I disagree with in your post is your claim that it's a skill to lie. The unfortunate aspect of life is that we all tend to believe faked emotions more than real ones. Some people get addicted to the effect their exaggerated emotional outbursts achieve in others and tend to become more and more aggressive in emotional manipulation. This only proves how unreliable our knowledge of other people's consciousness is, but I agree that we can learn to have a good understanding of the consciousness of others.
The point he is making is this- we both see a blue table. We agree that it is blue. But how do I know that the "blue" you experience is the same that I experience. Maybe your blue is my red. But you still call it blue so there is no way for me to observe your experience of blue. Not publically observable.
What if consciousness is a human myth and there is no need for humanity and the rest as they exist to have no consciousness
The problem with popular panpsychism is the absurd notion that it is a universal collective phenomenon that connects all things. This is a spiritual psyop being spread by the real adversary, BORG, and their hive mind queen operating in this universe, Lilith.
Consciousness is a quantum phenomena, and the only way all things are connected is in their lineage of creation leading back to the first conscious soul, God, whose most important idea was the multiverse we are all co-creating and testing. Other connections are always voluntary, unless they are to the BORG, who seek to assimilate all souls into their hive mind automation program.
All the religions and antireligions of "oneness" - from monotheism to New Age cosmic oneness to materialist communism and scientism - are psyops designed to turn human-incarnated souls into rabid dogmatic partisans of their echo chamber hive minds.
This is how the adversary has gotten previous chosen people and species to self-destruct before they could attract and fully awaken a real Messiah - the fully awakened incarnation of God to his full 12D merkaba awareness and approval of the 12D version of the real Great Goddess, Karma. This is what the Gaia experiment has been all about - a grand social engineering experiment to develop the most perfect government for souls of all ages, levels of consciousness, and light and dark passions.
dude, chill out...the trip will be over soon so don't stress, just lie back and take it all in....
Someone has been reading /x/ too much lol.
@@LordOfFlies Someone is an insulting ass. Happy Karma, beast! Your "one" is going to love milking your passive aggressive energies in the "heaven" you're bound for
Someone should take away this guy's internet.
>panpsychism is spiritual nonsense
>and that's why Lilith the God queen of the multiverse is ACTUALLY the conscious
I’m 45 minutes in and, frankly, I’m bored. Is it worth continuing? I came for a explanation of good reasons for panpsychism but so far it’s just been “materialism is bad”. Not sure I want to spend another hour listening if that’s all he’s going to offer.
1 hour 8…. I give up. This zombie stuff is just bizarre and honestly seems barely relevant. If you’re reading this and wondering whether to continue, don’t. I came here hoping to hear some good arguments as to why panpsychism might be true but came away with nothing.
@@cardinalscience2600 Because you don't understand it.
@@ManForToday Possibly, though I’m suggesting that the failing is in the explanation. All I’m saying is that if this is the best advocate panpsychism has, then it doesn’t stand a chance of mainstream attention.
@@cardinalscience2600 Well, popular audiences are always behind academics. And academically, panpsychism is more of an option now taken seriously than 20 years ago when it was practically unheard of.
This is probably the most discursive lecture to listen to on it by Philip, but he has numerous other shorter videos were the view is explained punchier and convincingly.
@@ManForToday True. I suppose my general frustration was that I came to this as someone who’d barely heard of panpsychism with the desire to understand the basic tenets and associated arguments, but instead spent a long time listening to a critique of materialism/scientist (which I was already willing to dispense with) followed by a strange metaphor that just didn’t make sense to me. I’ll check out the shorter videos if you think I’ll find what I’m looking for there. Any specific recommendations?
Sorry to say it was very weak 😒🙄
do more drugs: "consiousness is obvious" is not a given whatsoever
there is little material and constant repetition which is so disappointing and sheer waste of our time
Don't think too
much❤
Happily enjoy
life be given by
God❤
Cats don't think philosophical
problems
and happily enjoy their
Lifes ❤
yeah but dogs do, they are incredibly dogmatic, and cats have a religion called cat-holicism
So... don't think. Just follow religion? Just... follow.... blindly? Without thought? riiiiggghhhhttt
I have to hardly disagree here. Humans are curious to know the truth by nature. We always were, and we always struggled to reach for answers since the dawn of our time. Your point of view rejects an important aspect of our nature.
@@jeffwhite2511dogs are incredibly subject to in-dog-trination by felines performing the eu-cat-ryst
This is some of the wost philosophical work I've encountered in a long time
no, everything is not conscious. philosophers are so silly
Correct.