Episode #180 ... What if everything is consciousness? - Phillip Goff on Panpsychism
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Hello everyone, I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This, that's how the show keeps going. PhilosophizeThis.org for everything else. I hope you love the show today. So we talked about some general discussions surrounding consciousness last time. Let's talk about some actual theories now. If you were born into today's day and age, statistically, the most likely thing you're probably going to be when it comes to your thoughts about consciousness is some version of a physicalist or a materialist.

Meaning that you believe that consciousness is probably reducible to material or physical properties of the brain. Usually that would mean that you're a pretty big fan of science, too. Usually that would mean that you're probably going to be the kind of person that says stuff like, I think one day we're probably going to find that there were some internal mechanisms that are going on in the brain that if only we study them enough...

Let's be real, we're probably going to be able to know everything about consciousness one day. And if you said something like that, nobody in their right mind would be mad at you for it. They may disagree with you, but they'd understand the world you're coming from.

I mean, picture being born into the Middle Ages somewhere in Western Europe and not being a Christian. At some level, we're all byproducts of the cultures and time periods that we come from. And science is just how we get things done these days. When you got a problem, science is what you throw at it to figure it out. And if we have a problem when it comes to consciousness, why would that be any different?

But there's something else we always do these days, on account of the fact that we love science so much. And that is that when we're doing science, we love to construct theoretical models that help us understand reality. As a scientist, at least whenever I hear from the scientists that are in my life, as a scientist, you try to construct a model that's simple enough to explain the problem that you're trying to deal with. You try to be parsimonious.

No more simple than it needs to be. No more complicated than it needs to be. That's an example of a solid theoretical model. And maybe a particular theoretical model works out great. Maybe so far it explains 98% of all the phenomena that are out there that you're trying to study. Amazing. But when something's worked out so well for so long, a very tempting thing to do when that last 2% can't be explained in the theory, something like consciousness in today's world, a tempting thing to do...

is to stick with the model overall, but then try to tack on a bunch of additional things that can explain away that last 2%. You can understand why people do this. You know, we're so close. Just look at it. 98%. Sometimes it can be difficult when it's worked out for so long to think that the problem may have been all the way back with assumptions that we made at the beginning of the theoretical model.

Well, what if this were the case? What if, when it comes to the hard problem of consciousness that we talked about last time, what if the reason it's been so hard to explain consciousness using the current scientific model is because a long time ago, consciousness was removed from the sciences so that we could better compartmentalize and narrow our focus?

This line of thinking is eventually going to lead us to a theory of consciousness known as panpsychism. And you can just look at the two parts of the word panpsychism and you can venture a pretty good guess as to where we're going with all this. But something I want to make sure I say right at the outset here is that the panpsychism I'm talking about today is

It's not your dad's panpsychism, you know, where he has one too many mocktails on the back porch, starts talking about how the trees are watching him or how everything is conscious. There are very few serious people doing work out there that are really making a claim like that.

I'm more interested in not wasting your time talking about those today and talking about what I see as more of a good faith panpsychism that's been gaining a lot of popularity as of late in these conversations and the philosophy of mind we're going to be orbiting around for a bit. Now, within this intelligent brand of panpsychism that I'm talking about in particular, if there was a Mount Rushmore of panpsychism, one of the faces on that mountain would be a philosopher by the name of Philip Goff.

And to get us started on understanding where a panpsychist view of consciousness may be coming from, Philip Goff in 2019 wrote a book called Galileo's Error, where in it he talks about what he thinks is a fundamental mistake in the theoretical models we use to understand our reality. And it's a mistake that may have made science in its current form incapable of ever being able to explain consciousness fully. So how exactly did that happen?

Well, Goff says that a long time ago, Galileo, obviously known for all the work he got done in the sciences, was also someone doing relevant philosophical work. And Galileo was doing this work during a time where a lot of people that came before him believed that the things that we're looking at in our physical world are full of qualities.

For example, Goff says, "Colors, people thought, were on the surfaces of the objects we see. Smells, they thought, were floating through the air. Tastes are inside of the food that you are eating. These things are called qualities, and these things produce what we call our qualitative experience of the world." Okay, but then Galileo says, "How about we start from an entirely different theoretical model?"

Because as we know now in 2023, his ultimate goal was that he wanted to be able to understand physical reality solely through the language of mathematics.

And it makes sense. He thought, look, if you want to be able to understand something purely quantitative, just physical reality, descriptions of things like size, shape, motion, particles, fields, all the various dispositions of those particles and fields, if you want to try to understand all that, mathematics seems like a pretty promising direction to go in to be able to explain them. But

But as Philip Goff says in the book, this becomes a problem for Galileo because there's no way that an equation can ever capture something like the redness of a red experience. There's no blue plus yellow equals red. When you taste something, there's obviously no mathematical structure of the universe that can represent how spicy curry tastes to you. That's a qualitative experience. And Galileo knew this. It's

So what Galileo had to do to be able to get to the basis of mathematical physics in 1623 is he had to effectively cut out qualitative experiences from what the theoretical model was trying to understand. And then to explain the qualities, he says what we experience when we see, smell, or touch something is not inside of the object somehow. To Galileo, those qualities actually take place in the mind of the observer.

So we got to get rid of the qualitative realm of consciousness and stick with the quantitative realm of science. Put another way, his view of reality meant that we had to cut out subjective experience from what science is trying to understand and stick with things like particles, fields, mass, charge, you know, the things we're all very familiar with that science tries to study and understand today. What resulted from all this, Goff says, is that the physics we have today primarily explains the way that physical stuff behaves.

It doesn't tell us anything at all about the nature of matter in itself. Physics doesn't tell us what matter is, it only tells us what matter does.

And by the way, Philip Goff is far from the only one saying all this. This has been well documented all throughout the history of philosophy. When you're doing science, if you're studying volcanoes, for example, you're interested in how the volcano behaves. You're studying volcanic gas emissions. You're studying seismic activity. You're studying the way it erupts, how often it erupts. As a scientist, what do you care about the intrinsic nature of that volcano? What, are you going to marry it? No, you're just trying to understand how it behaves.

And compartmentalizing our focus like this has obviously been very helpful, from volcanoes all the way down to the realm of physics. The progress speaks for itself. But Philip Goff would say it is not a coincidence that if we find ourselves in a time where this purely quantitative theoretical model has done so much good for us, oh, but then there's this one little thing at the end, consciousness, that it can't seem to explain.

That's not really a coincidence. It's not that we need to tack on some more stuff to be able to explain away that 2% that's left over. To Philip Goff, mathematical physics has been so successful precisely because it started from a place where it excluded consciousness. It may be helpful at this point, and for the rest of the episode, for us to consider an alternative timeline of philosophical events that could have occurred.

I mean, imagine if back in the time of Galileo, Galileo comes up with this purely quantitative method of understanding reality. And then he goes to all his scientist and philosopher friends and he says, okay, guys, here's my new theory.

And imagine they look at it, but after thinking about it for a while, they're like, no, Galileo. In fact, what have you done? You've stripped the world of all its qualities. Look, this theory you've come up with, it doesn't account for the obvious existence of the details of subjective phenomenal consciousness. It's pretty good, but as good scientists, we can't ignore this giant self-evident piece of human reality called consciousness.

In fact, that may be the most obvious thing that we know exists. We can do better than this. And imagine Galileo still committed to mathematical physics as being the best path forward. Imagine he goes back to the drawing board. What do you think the theory that he returned with would have looked like if he left room for consciousness? Well, panpsychism is definitely one possible answer to this.

See, you hear the name panpsychism and you might think these people are saying something magical. But again, a serious panpsychist is not someone that believes that everything around you is conscious, like your lamp is conscious, it's watching you, your flip-flops are conscious, watching your feet. It's not like that. Panpsychists are not enemies of science or anything mathematical physics has discovered so far.

They just think that physical science doesn't reveal everything there is to know about physical reality because it's based on a theoretical method that's purely quantitative. They think we need to find a way to bring consciousness back into the models we use.

So it's actually quite the contrary. A panpsychist is typically trying to find a way to preserve the work that's been done in mathematical physics by finding a way to incorporate what they think we left out at the beginning. And one way to do that, if that's what you wanted to do, would be to imagine consciousness as something that is fundamental and ubiquitous, something that lies underneath physical matter as we know it. Imagine, at the fundamental level of reality, there are just networks of very simple conscious entities.

These conscious entities go all the way down, that's the term philosophers like to use in these conversations, they go all the way down to even something like an electron or a quark. That these very simple types of entities have a very simple type of internal experience. Imagine that's possible. Now, couple things real quick. Obviously we gotta be careful at every stage of this conversation about consciousness of projecting our own human type of subjectivity onto the definition of what it is to have an internal experience.

Obviously, these subatomic particles would have a very different type of internal experience than you or I do. They're not watching football on Sunday. They're not worried about paying bills this month. But what if, in a very monistic sort of way,

A lot of panpsychist theory is based on a form of monism originally talked about by Bertrand Russell. What if there is a single substance that underlies all of what we know in physical reality, and that substance is consciousness? As Bertrand Russell says, what if consciousness is what he calls the causal skeleton of the world? And physical reality, all those particles, fields, and dispositions of matter are really just networks of consciousness. Now, it's pretty easy here for people to misunderstand this as a type of dualism.

Where what a panpsychist is saying is that there's a physical reality and then these physical particles have this weird consciousness substance embedded into them. That's not what a panpsychist is saying. What someone like Philip Goff is saying is that the particles and fields that we study are constituted of consciousness.

They are forms of consciousness. When physics is able to map the reliable mathematical structures of reality, they're able to do so maybe because these simple particles with very simple types of internal experiences can be predicted in that way. And then under panpsychism, what if these more simple networks of conscious entities somehow coalesce into greater and greater levels of complexity? You walk up that ladder of complexity far enough, and eventually you get to what we know as our type of subjective consciousness.

Starting from that set of precepts, think of how much that changes. Just as a simple example, think of how much it changes in the conversations we have about free will. Maybe the more complicated these networks of consciousness become, maybe the more complicated it becomes to predict the causal relationships between their behavior. That we'd love to believe, as good materialists, that everything is simple enough to be causally predictable, like particles are. Where people are that way, where everything you do as a person is deterministic.

And again, as a committed materialist living in today's world, you may be willing to make a lot of assumptions in that direction if that's what you wanted human beings to be. You know, they're just like matter. They're like science projects, these people. But as we'll talk about soon, maybe that's just not the case.

Now, if panpsychism sounds ridiculous at first, consider a few things for a second. First, Philip Goff would say that a lot of scientific theories that are widely accepted today are actually completely counter to common sense. Quantum mechanics, relativity, natural selection, just to name a few. Second, consider how little we know about the nature of any of the physical objects we're studying the behavior of.

He actually says at one point, "In fact, the only thing we really know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it, specifically the stuff in our brains, involves this mysterious kind of internal experience that we can't yet explain with our models."

In light of the philosophical zombie thought experiment that we talked about last time, could we know if anything else had an internal experience if it did? Because again, let's try hard not to project our conscious experience onto what consciousness is overall. Remember Helen the monkey. Things can appear to have an experience of phenomenal consciousness, but not actually be having one.

And on the other hand, things can appear to be unconscious, but actually may be a truly conscious creature. Like when my daughter wakes me up at four in the morning, for example. Look, in all seriousness, consider plants as an example. If you were somebody looking around you, trying to find other things that are conscious at any level, and you run that experiment looking for something that's similar to your own human type of consciousness, you'd look at a plant and think, there's no way this thing's conscious.

But anyone who's been around plants for a while knows that these things are not just randomly sprouting growth algorithms. I mean, these things make plans for the future. They make adjustments. They're competitive with each other. They just move way slower than people do. So if we were looking for something that only resembles a human type of consciousness, we might be missing out on something big. Just saying, if you saw an article tomorrow saying that scientists discovered that plants have a rudimentary type of consciousness, would you be that surprised?

Maybe you would be. And maybe you're somebody who's on board with panpsychism in theory, but you still got some reservations. You're still wondering, why would anyone work so hard to reincorporate consciousness back into a theoretical model that's already working so well? I mean, we already can explain particles and fields without having to add in this consciousness underneath. The purely quantitative method is working.

But a panpsychist might respond and say, "Well, it's not working for consciousness. It actually never has from the beginning." And more than that, imagine a scientist in the 1800s working under Newtonian mechanics who hears about a crazy theory from one of their fellow scientists talking about an entirely separate quantum realm that plays by a totally different set of rules than macroscopic objects,

They might similarly be skeptical of that. And they might also say, look, we can already explain particles without this magic quantum realm where electrons are in two places at once and things are quantized. They could say all that, but it wouldn't say a thing in the world about the validity of quantum mechanics. And magically, towards the end of that era of that scientific paradigm, scientists felt the need to construct new theoretical models to explain things that were still mysterious.

But still the question remains, why work so hard to bring consciousness back in when the current model is so good? And this is usually the point in the show where I might quote the philosopher we're talking about to help make a further point. And usually the philosophers we talk about on this show are dead. But the good news about this particular arc of the show is that these topics are recent. Philip Goff, not dead as it turns out. In fact, I sat down and talked with him about panpsychism and what it's like to be a philosopher on the front lines today.

Instead of reading quotes, I'm going to be splicing in relevant pieces from our conversation that we had. And if you don't like it, don't worry. We never got to do it again. But I thought it might be an interesting way to make this arc of the show better to hear from the actual people. And look, just as a general rule on the show, I always try to sustain quality. I'm not necessarily trying to do the exact same thing over and over again. I just hope you guys like what I'm doing.

Anyway, right here, Philip Goff is talking about why we, as a species, would ever work so hard to bring consciousness back in when there's so much good we're arriving at in the quantitative realm of science. He says it here. You know, if there were nothing more to reality than the purely objective quantitative facts that physical science postulates, I don't think there would be subjective qualitative experience.

And so we're at a funny period of history where our official worldview is incompatible with the thing which is most evident and the thing which gives life meaning and value. I think consciousness is at the root of everything that matters, from deep emotions, complex thoughts, beautiful sensory experiences. Without consciousness, nothing would really have any importance.

Now, first of all, it's an interesting point what he's saying there. We, of course, spend a ton of resources in our societies in this massive project studying the physical world. And that's great. But no matter how much of that black and white physical scaffolding of reality that we uncover, at some other level, it's the qualities of our conscious experience, feeling love, having a great conversation, hearing a great song. These are the things that make our lives more full of color.

At some other level, our conscious experience of the volcano matters in a different way than anything about volcanic gas emissions or seismic activity. Our qualitative experience of the world matters too.

But now that we've established that, remember at the beginning of the episode, most of the people listening to this are probably going to be materialists of some sort. And I'd imagine there's a lot of materialists out there that hear what Philip Goff just said and are a bit confused. Like, wait a second, as a good materialist here, I got to ask, don't we know the chemicals in the brain that produce these conscious experiences of love?

or the chemicals inside of food that produce a certain reaction in the brain. There obviously is a connection between the physical world and our subjective experiences. Why are we separating the two? Philip Goff would say, "Of course, and all that's valid. But materialism still does not explain consciousness fully." And this goes back to the hard problem of consciousness. Even if we can explain the exact chemicals that are present that produce a certain piece of our qualitative experience,

There is still this entire other piece of consciousness that it can't even touch. My individual subjective experience. The fact that it feels like something to be me. And I think Philip Goff would say, maybe materialism will be able to explain it all one day. But he's highly skeptical of that. And we're certainly not there yet by any means. And until that day comes, if we're going to be taking consciousness actually seriously and not just writing it off to materialism...

we have to consider the possibility that maybe it's a problem with the overall worldview we're approaching things with. See, again, on one hand, he's trying to preserve all the good work that's been done with science so far. But on the other hand, he cannot ignore this glaring mystery that hasn't been solved yet. Now, part of me wants to sit here all day and keep making the case for panpsychism as an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. But like we talked about last time, at a certain point, none of these answers are going to be perfect.

And in this larger series that we're doing on the big questions of the philosophy of mind, the real conversation begins when we start talking about the implications of accepting panpsychism. What sort of things may happen to a society if we all more or less accepted a form of panpsychism to build our personal and social policies around? I asked Philip Goff this in our conversation, and he thought that there are several ways that our entire perspective may shift.

He says this: "I think panpsychism has the potential to radically change our relationship with the environment and the natural world for the better. If you're a materialist and you think a tree is just a mechanism, then its value is only indirect. It only really has significance in terms of what it can do for us.

either looking pretty or sustaining our existence but if you think a tree is a conscious organism albeit of a very alien kind then a tree has moral significance in its own right chopping down a tree even is an act of moral significance and i think for example when we see these

Terrible images of forest fires in Brazil of late, a few years ago now. If you see that as the burning of conscious organisms, that really does add a whole different moral dimension.

See, where he's coming from is that we typically see consciousness as this uniquely human domain, that it's something that makes us special. Conscious things become something that it's important to protect in our societies. And that the fact that we are conscious is used to justify doing any number of things to the natural world around us on the basis that these things are not conscious and we are.

But if we're living in a world where everything is ultimately constituted of consciousness, then all of a sudden it becomes a lot easier to float the idea that we're all on more of an equal metaphysical playing field.

All of a sudden, as Goff says, human consciousness. There's nothing that special about it. We're just a highly evolved version of what's going on everywhere else in the universe. And under that way of looking at things, think of how that changes everything. A forest fire, as he said, starts to take on a whole different sort of moral dimension. How about other things, though? How about the way we treat animals? We farm them so that you can have a beef tartare with your lemonade.

The entire attitude, very recent in human history, that the natural world is just a bunch of supplies so that we can light them on fire and send a rocket ship to Mars one day, that whole way of thinking about things starts to look like it may just be a byproduct of modern economic and political systems. And then this attitude goes hand in hand with the also very modern, purely quantitative method of breaking down reality.

You know, when we try to understand reality in the sciences, we break things down into their component parts. This is what we do. Plants exist in the world of biology. A laptop exists in the realm of solid state physics. But it can be easy to forget that on another level, everything is just sort of existing holistically as well. There's no reason to assume this stuff is not all interconnected in some way. Ourselves included in that.

It's just if you were looking at things in a purely quantitative sense, it can be easy to start feeling alienated from that connection to everything else. Philip Goff told me about how he sees panpsychism as a possible way out of that whole attitude.

I think it's part of what Max Weber called the disenchantment of nature, this sense that we don't fit into the reality, the picture of the universe that science is painting for us. And I think what panpsychism has to offer is a picture of reality able to accommodate

both the objective quantitative facts of physical science, but also as it were the human truth, the evident reality of our own feelings and experiences. It's able to bring both of these together into a single elegant unified picture of reality.

It's interesting to consider the possibilities here. Maybe in an alternative timeline, in a totally different society that could have emerged, maybe we would have structured things in a way where we have more respect for the metaphysical worth of the ecosystem that we're living in. Maybe we would have found a balance within our own ecosystem the same way every other animal out there finds a balance. What I'm saying is, in the same way technological progress is a huge goal of our current society, maybe symbiosis would be one of the main goals of a panpsychist society.

Now, using this as a foundation, consider how, in a hypothetical panpsychist society, this might not just change the citizen's relationship to the environment. This perspective shift may have the ability to change their relationship even with themselves. Because what does a self even start to look like in a panpsychist society? This is another one of these questions from the philosophy of mind: if what you are is fundamentally a network of conscious entities all working in coalition, what are you at that point?

It's not unreasonable to think that the people living in a panpsychic society like this might start to see themselves as just temporary concentrations of conscious complexity. You know, bright spots on a larger unified network of consciousness that's all interconnected. Where you live your life out, and then when you die, the component parts that make you up are dispersed and go on to serve some other role in this larger conscious network. Anyway, part of me wants to stop talking about this right now. I...

Honestly, I feel like if I keep talking about it, I'm going to summon my yoga teacher or something. It's going to appear next to me. I'm just saying, imagine the differences in the way the average person would see the concept of self and other. The lines between ourselves and the rest of the universe start to become a lot less clear in that world.

And I guess from that place, maybe the fact that it's so hard sometimes in our society for people to find a way to feel connected to everything around them, maybe as Philip Goff alluded to, that has something to do with the purely quantitative mode of understanding that we're accepting as the most important. I'll stop talking, but if you want more on it, I think the episode we did on Max Weber back in the day goes into it pretty well. But how about something else? How about science in a panpsychist society? What would that look like?

Well, let this be a shining example in this series of something that's going to be recurring. That whenever you come up with a theory that does a good job of solving the hard problem of consciousness, it always seems to create new problems in other areas. Because what do you do in a field like science that relies on empirical observation if you want to be able to study something like consciousness that, as Philip Goff says, doesn't seem to be publicly observable? Those two things at some level just seem to contradict each other.

One of the big problems that an experimental scientist in a panpsychic society would instantly have to dedicate some time to is what's become known as the combination problem. Put very simply, the problem is: Okay, so networks of consciousness somehow coalesce together. How exactly do these networks of consciousness combine from simpler forms of consciousness? When does it happen? Why does it happen with some simpler forms of consciousness and not with others?

As the philosopher Keith Frankish put it one time, "How do the micro-experiences of billions of subatomic particles in my brain combine to form the twinge of pain that I'm having in my knee?"

These are big questions that would have to be answered. And whether or not they're falsifiable in a scientific setting seems like one of the first things a panpsychist scientist would be facing when trying to answer them. Now it should be said, there have been things in the sciences before that seemed very difficult to falsify, and then either a new technology comes along, or a brilliant experimental scientist comes along and figures it out. Falsifiability would certainly be a challenge, but it may not be impossible.

But another angle to consider is that maybe in this alternative panpsychist brand of science that would exist in this society, maybe they'd have to abandon falsifiability as their primary goal in order to make progress based on some other metric. Maybe they'd see the way that we do science as being overly obsessed with quantitative falsifiability.

Either way, when you consider rethinking science through a panpsychist lens, you can see the same trends start to emerge over and over again. Panpsychism on the surface is extremely exciting because it has the potential to give us a whole new perspective on tons of different things that are mysterious in the current model.

from mental health to the origins of life. The possibilities here are endless. But as you can imagine, in basically every one of those cases, you always find yourself back at the combination problem. Take the origin of life for example. Oh, it's exciting! So this is how it goes from a primordial chemical soup into something that looks like simple life. Okay,

But then as soon as you get there, you're just right back at the other mystery of how exactly does that happen? Combination problem, by the way, extends to other scales of the universe as well. For example, if consciousness combined somehow into networks at the smaller level of reality and then into brains in our own subjective phenomenal consciousness at our reality,

Can our subjective experiences collectively combine into a larger network with other people's? In other words, can a society be a conscious entity? Is the world a conscious entity? Whatever the science looks like in a society like this, you have to find a way to make some theoretical headway on these questions.

Which is not to say that it's impossible, but one thing's for sure. If we never try to look at things from a panpsychist perspective, we're never going to be able to solve something like the combination problem. When I asked Philip Goff what he thought would change the most in the sciences, he said he thought one of the biggest changes would be that scientists would probably focus more on the actual inner workings of real human brains. He says, you know, despite all the great work that's been done so far in neuroscience, despite how much faith people seem to have in the results of brain scans, it's

He says every pixel on a brain scan corresponds to 2.2 million neurons. Your whole perspective as a materialist can potentially change once you realize the extent to which we don't yet know about the nature of the brain and how it works.

And that if we ever got to a place where we understood brains at the level that seems possible to him, he thinks amazing things could happen. He said this. I think we need to get more into the actual workings of real human brains. And I suspect if we did that, there would be empirical observable markers of humanism.

human consciousness because we'd find that certain uh where we find emergent consciousness unified consciousness at the level of systems of the brain those systems would behave slightly differently to how we'd expect from um underlying knowledge of known laws of chemistry and physics i think that must be the case otherwise it's a total mystery why we would have evolved consciousness

Now, it wouldn't be an episode of this series if we didn't talk about AI a little bit in relation to the philosophy of mind. Let's talk about some ways that the conversation surrounding artificial intelligence might change in a panpsychist society. First of all, if consciousness is something fundamental to matter, and it's not something that just emerges in complex information processing systems, then what does that mean for AI? Does that mean that artificial intelligence can never become conscious?

that no matter how intelligent artificial intelligence gets, it's only ever going to be intelligence. It will never be conscious. Under panpsychism, we have to ask the question: can conscious experience only ever be produced biologically? And if that's the case, is our entire conversation about AI these days and the impending singularity, is that actually incredibly naive?

Maybe it's just dumb for us to think that we could ever write software that even comes close to the software updates of millions of years of natural selection. Well, if that were true, then the moral considerations we'd have to be making surrounding artificial intelligence, those would have to change as well. Because in that world, all of a sudden, the moral concern is not about identifying exactly where something becomes conscious so that we can protect its rights as a conscious being.

The biggest concern in that world is that AI now becomes just yet another powerful civilization altering technology that's not unlike a nuclear weapon. Now this technology can be wielded by anybody if we're not careful. And now the moral dilemma becomes trying to find a way to deal with the banality of evil and the metaphorical person that's going to drop this technology out of a plane.

But then again, considering this from a different angle, in a panpsychist society, if we solve the combination problem, we found out how these networks of consciousness form, maybe we could recreate the conditions of consciousness artificially. And in that world, all sorts of interesting questions start to come up that we'll be talking about on this series, even when it just comes to potential forms of alien life from another planet. Like if a silicone-based life form was able to be conscious,

The question's been asked, could it feel pain in the same way that a human being feels pain? In other words, is pain just a particular signal that's based on the specific structures of our brain in particular? Or could a silicone-based brain feel pain in the exact same way that we do? And more than that, if our brains were structured in very similar ways, could two different beings made of completely different materials have similar psychological experiences?

I think we can learn a lot about our own conscious experiences by asking questions like this, and I can't wait to get a couple more episodes into this series so I can share some pretty cool thought experiments with you. But in closing, panpsychism offers us an answer to the hard problem of consciousness. And it does so from a place that says that physical science in its current form is incapable of ever being able to explain consciousness fully. But there's another theory out there that starts from this exact same place that arrives at almost a complete opposite conclusion.

What if consciousness is actually an illusion? What are the arguments for why that is the case? How would that reality go on to affect things? In particular, for the next episode of the podcast, how is that argument related to all sorts of other things people have said may be an illusion in these conversations about the philosophy of mind, that the self is an illusion, that free will is an illusion, that time is an illusion? We're going into more than just consciousness next episode, so be ready for it.

I want to thank Philip Goff for having a conversation with me and allowing me to use it on the podcast. He's on Twitter at Philip underscore Goff. He has a podcast. It's called Mind Chat. He co-hosts it with Keith Frankish, a guy that we've quoted twice so far on these episodes. If you're into consciousness, it really is like if LeBron James and Steph Curry had a podcast talking about basketball. Two of the absolute greatest ever going at it head to head. He's also on Substack. So search for Philip Goff on there if you want that.

Check out his book on Amazon, Galileo's Error, referenced on the episode here today. Also maybe check out his new book when it comes out in November. It's called Why? That's the title. Subtitle, The Purpose of the Universe. Sounds big. That said, to the people out there listening from me, I just need to say something real quick. 10-year anniversary of Philosophize This is coming up on June 4th. I don't have much to say. I just want to say to anybody who's ever made this show possible on any level over those years...

Thanks for letting me do this for people. Thanks for letting me help people know more about philosophy than they did yesterday. Thanks for letting this be my purpose in the world. I have an AMA that I'm going to release on Patreon around that time. You know, I guess if I'm going to ramble about it, I'll try to ramble on there instead. Thank you to all of you for 10 years of this. And as always, thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.