Transcript

Video Rn0IT25cRhs

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· 20,923 words

This is the full transcript of "Video Rn0IT25cRhs", an episode of Unknown Channel published June 22, 2025 (about 20,923 words). It mentions 46 people, works and ideas, including Why: The Purpose of the Universe, AJ Jacobs, Bertrand Russell, Brian Muraresku, Christof Koch.

What this episode is about

In this episode, philosopher Philip Goff explains panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality present even in its most basic building blocks like electrons and quarks, and reflects on why the once-ridiculed idea has moved into mainstream academic philosophy. Goff connects its appeal to people's psychedelic and mystical experiences of a living presence in all things, while also laying out the intellectual arguments that make it attractive for solving puzzles about consciousness. The conversation clarifies common misunderstandings, distinguishing panpsychism from animism and from anthropomorphizing particles, and sets up deeper questions about trust, experience, and how we can know what's real.

Key takeaways

  • Panpsychism, once ridiculed in Western philosophy, has become a mainstream academic position taught to undergraduates today.
  • Consciousness may exist on a spectrum, from the rich inner life of humans down to the simplest building blocks of reality.
  • Panpsychism doesn't mean electrons feel existential angst; it means the most basic components of reality have very simple forms of experience.
  • Many people with psychedelic experiences find panpsychism intuitively resonant, sensing consciousness pervading the universe.
  • Panpsychism's name may be a branding problem, but its core idea is that consciousness goes all the way down.

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Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

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Full transcript

suppose I'm having this mystical experience it seems to me there's this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things would it be rational to trust that i think many of you would say well no it's just something funny going on in your brain you know it could be a delusion but James says well we all think it's okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences but you know that could be a delusion we could be in the matrix this could all be a dream you could say well we can test our senses but only by using your senses so it's kind of circular so all knowledge has to start with just a decision to trust your experience philip let's kick it off with a question about another interview which I very rarely do but in this particular case I think it will offer us perhaps a road into tying a few things together for people who are listening and this relates to an interview by Pulitzer Prizewinning author Gareth Cook which ended up being one of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020 philosophy can get very abstract it can really get out there it can become hard to grasp or in the minds of many hard to apply but let's begin with what made that interview stick what do you think some of the concepts or ingredients or lines anything was that made that resonate with so many people rather than anything I've done i think just consciousness and this strange view I've built my career defending known as pansychism it's a view that somehow resonates with people in all sorts of ways it's been an incredible journey because it's a view that 15 years ago was ridiculed in so far as it was thought, about, at, all, at least, in, my western philosophical tradition but in this short time period it's come to be a mainstream academic position that is taught to undergraduates and is widely published on in academic journals so it's it's been a astonishing transformation really and it's really been exciting to be part of that why does it resonate so much with people i mean one part of it is I think people who've had psychedelic experiences many of them have this sense that consciousness pervades the universe in a deeper sense than in the more familiar ordinary scientific view of things on the questionnaire for mystical experiences the proper psychological questionnaire one of the boxes you tick is do you have a sense that there is a living presence in all things mhm and so I suppose I mean this has not been from my academic starting point this was not the route I took to pansychism i think it's it solves a lot of the mysteries and paradoxes of consciousness there are coldblooded intellectual reasons to go for it but many people reading about my work who've had psychedelic experiences something about it makes sense and you know and I'm open to thinking about that too very much let's define some terms right because sometimes I think pansychism gets a bad rap or maybe just needs a rebrand like Patagonian toothfish being renamed Chilean sea bass maybe that's what pansychism needs i'm not sure but I want to talk about the cold-hearted intellectual reasons or arguments for pansychism but in simple terms because I think some folks can maybe conflate it with something akin to animism and add on a few layers that are perhaps unnecessary what is in simple terms for a lay audience pansychism that's a good starting point i mean in terms of the rebrand actually my good friend Anakah Harris who's very sympathetic to pansychism she's always saying "This is a terrible name we need to rebrand it." But I kind of think it's it's a bit laid it's kind of stuck but pansychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality perhaps a way into that is you know if you start with human consciousness that is incredibly rich and complex the result of millions of years of evolution but consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes you know the consciousness of a sheep is simpler to the consciousness of a human being what it's like to be a snail is simpler to what it's like to be a sheep and as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience for the pansyus this keeps going on right down to the fundamental building blocks with perhaps fundamental particles like electrons and quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature so it's a common misunderstanding people always think "Oh what are you saying electrons are feeling existential angst or wondering if it's Tuesday or something." That's human consciousness right don't be anthropomorphic about this for pansychists human consciousness is a sort of weird highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe so there's so many different directions we could go here and we may get into some rather gnarly questions quickly just to reiterate and to sort of clarify for myself or for listeners also so from human to sheep but all the way down to we can certainly go to quarks and so on with the way you described it but you would have a pool of water maybe the water droplets rocks trees the constituent parts of trees etc and so on how would you think about that just one small qualification though it is a kind of common misunderstanding that pans psychists think absolutely everything is conscious and and it's understandable that's actually what the word means pan everything psyche mind but pans psychist don't necessarily think literally everything is conscious the basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks are conscious in some very simple way maybe electrons and quarks like the example I just gave but maybe not i mean it's a question for physicists not philosophers like me what are the fundamental components of reality these days many theoretical physicists are more inclined to think that our universe is made up of universewide fields and particles are just local excitations in those fields so if you combine that with pansychism you get the view that the fundamental forms of consciousness underly these universewide fields this gets closer to a form of pansychism known as cosmos psychism that the universe itself is conscious although again we need to be careful that doesn't necessarily mean the universe is God it could be just the universe is just kind of this messy blobby nonsense consciousness right that's the idea that basic things are conscious and that many other things of course are conscious humans and animals and our consciousness is somehow built up from these simpler forms of consciousness but it doesn't mean every random combination of conscious particles makes something that has its own unified consciousness so it doesn't necessarily mean you know rocks and socks and tables and chairs are conscious i remember teaching this to our undergraduates and I had a PowerPoint slide up with socks on and saying your socks might not be conscious and and one of the students obviously took a photo of that put it on social media this is what we're learning in my classes but anyway I think it was lighthearted yeah although some pan psychists do think literally everything is conscious i just mentioned Anakah i think she thinks that my friend Luke Roloffs very good very downto- earthth scientific pansyus philosopher but he does think literally everything is conscious but even then it's not going to be a kind of consciousness a human being has that is a very specific highly organized form of information processing whereas if a table is conscious it's it's going to be just some meaningless fragmented disunified nonsense But yeah that's the basic idea so first things first I want to give a nod to Anakah Harris she has a very extensive audio documentary that relates to consciousness if people want to do a deep dive into these subjects but this word consciousness may be bothering people at this point in the conversation kind of like a pebble in a shoe because for most people wandering about going to Starbucks and watching Netflix and so on consciousness they may have not taken the time to define it precisely but the intuited sense is something along the lines of awareness maybe it's awareness that you are aware but there's some degree of awareness so when you talk about a table or socks or rocks I understand that you didn't imply that everything has its own consciousness but how should they think of this word when applied to what people would consider inanimate objects for instance it's a really important question cuz it is a little bit of an ambiguous word and I agree with you when I'm talking to the public people often think that it means something quite sophisticated like self-consciousness or awareness of one's own existence and Philip could I interrupt you for one second i thought what I might do is just kind of line up some support before we go too far into this and are there any physicists right i guess some people might think of them as the most refined plumbers of reality sorry guys if that's insulting i just came up with that on the fly but architects maybe deciphers detectives there we go choose your choose your label are there any physicists credible physicists who would more or less agree with some of the positions and theories that you are describing related to pansychism one person that stands out here is Roger Penrose who's Nobel Prizewinning physicist fascinating very interesting thinker i was lucky enough to have onetoone lunch with Roger Penrose once kind of by chance at a at a big consciousness conference that's lucky he's getting up there in age i was in the queue and one of the organizers sat him down and we just sat together and we had a lovely chat about our different views but he's defended a view that's very close to pansychism the quantum level quantum collapse is connected to the generation of consciousness i don't know how much we want to get into his view let's get into it let's get into it he's influenced by um Girdle's incompleteness theorem which not getting into too much detail you know roughly proves that for any finite set of axioms you're not going to be able to generate algorithmically all of the truths of mathematics this was the fascinating thing Girdle proved right and so that leads Penrose to think well there must be something non-computational about human mathematical thought because if it was just algorithmic and computational we wouldn't get all those truths of arithmetic that we are able to comprehend and then where that leads him is he thinks well it must be at the quantum level rather than at the level where we have classical physics and this led him in combination with scientist Stuart Hamarov to explore the less common position that consciousness is connected to quantum stuff in the brain in what we call the microtubules and yet that's absolutely fascinating position that that Roger has got into i mean I mean another question that might be more pertinent is what about neuroscientists because I suppose you know consciousness is in the purview of the neuroscience is the science of consciousness I think is part of neuroscience let's hop to that but I want to give you just a bit of trivia related to Penrose i have followed Penrose's work and Hamarov very deeply interested and I ended up by a number of lucky coincidences doing a week at Watom College where I believe he is a fellow and his book was in my room where I stayed and I asked someone about him and I feel like I just missed him by a week and I was very sad about this oh he's so open-minded so many areas of thought just a really fascinating figure so neuroscientists let's hop into that arena the first thing you should know about the science of consciousness is there is no consensus that is famously I don't know whether you've heard this 25 years ago the neuroscientist Kristoff [ __ ] bet the philosopher David Charas that this would all be wrapped up by now we would attract what we call the neural coralatess of consciousness those right aspects of brain activity that perfectly correspond to consciousness and he bet him a crate of fine wine and it was a public bet well last was it last summer or the summer before he publicly conceded defeat because there is no consensus but one of the major possibilities one of the major views that is disputed and debated is the integrated information theory and that gets us very close to pansychism or is even itself a form of pansychism because it entails that consciousness is more widespread than we ordinarily take it to be and is certainly goes into the inanimate realm there's two reasons this is getting thought about maybe psychedelics is a third reason but there's two reasons one is the newfound philosophical interest but also this interest in the integrated information theory but also just finally I mean I think from what we've already said it becomes clear with consciousness it is not just a scientific issue the science is absolutely crucial and and the experimental work but with consciousness there are so many philosophical questions we need to address and I think actually what we found is that's part of the reason we haven't achieved consensus because actually forget the big philosophical questions how you interpret the scientific data on the brain and consciousness depends on your philosophical assumptions there's there's a dispute among scientists about whether consciousness is at the front or the back of the brain and actually I think the split on that is something to do with the philosophical assumptions so we need scientists and philosophers working together so I want to get back to that because that is a very meta examination of science and the scientific method that I want to get into but since I'm a stickler for terms the integrated information theory can you speak to that for for one moment and I know I funded a fair amount of science also at Johns Hopkins and other places where I believe they developed the mystical experience questionnaire wow at least in part the integrated information theory could you define that for us before we get back to the sort of and for people listening don't worry I keep good notes and I have a good memory we are going to get to the definition of consciousness outside of the broadly lay person interpretation of say awareness haven't forgotten about it but just because that might take us down a bunch of side alleys I want to stick where we are for a second the integrated information theory what is that so this is one of the proposals of I mean I mean we can maybe distinguish the sort of scientific ific task of consciousness from the philosophical task that as I say it the scientific task is which brain activity goes along with which kinds of conscious experience and more generally in general what is required from a physical system to get consciousness and integrated information theory is one proposal and roughly it says that consciousness corresponds to integration you get a conscious system when the way in which information is stored in the system depends upon the integration between the parts of the system and they have a mathematically precise way of defining this they represent it with the letter fi and the proposal is that at the exact moment when a system has more integrated information in the whole than in the parts that's when the lights come on that's when you get consciousness that's when the lights come on i mean that is what is so striking about the brain in fact the parts of the brain that are associated with consciousness are not necessarily the parts that have the most neurons but they do seem to be the parts that involve deep deep integration you know each each neuron being connected to hundreds and thousands of others yielding trillions of of connections i mean maybe to connect to how computers work if the integrated information theory turns out to be true computers that are anything like what we currently have are actually not going to be conscious because the way in which information is stored in a computer is less dependent on integration if you take out a bit of you know a few transistors you won't necessarily lose that much information but if you take out a small part of the brain, at least, comparatively, you, lose, a hell of a lot of information because the way in which information is stored is so much more holistic and to do with integration and so the the theory basically says that is the hallmark of consciousness that's what it's all about let's perhaps make a contrast of styles because I don't want to hold out and tease people for too long will try to take a stab or I will I'm using the royal we I will ask you to take a stab at just giving us a working definition of consciousness that doesn't depend on a table asking itself why am I here what's going on before we get to that though contrast and styles perhaps the integrated information theory seems to imply and this is something I have zero familiarity with so I could get this wrong on consciousness as an emergent property so things are simple they get more complex and when they reach a requisite level of complexity where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole as you would expect it the lights turn on right and maybe I'm misinterpreting that but I'm wondering if that is accurate if you as someone who has looked at this very deeply through philosophical lenses would agree with that or does it start from the very beginning with the smallest constitu ituent parts does that make any sense i'm not sure I'm asking that as a coherent question it does make a lot of sense and here you're focusing on a key big question here you know chicken or egg which comes first mhm the physical world or consciousness and you know the standards scientific assumption is well it's the physical universe that's first you know particles forming complex systems brains and then in in some of the complex electrochemical signaling in brains consciousness pops up it's emergent as you say whereas the pansyist actually turns that on its head and says "No no no consciousness some story about very simple conscious entities is the foundational story." And in fact physical reality emerges from that more basic story about consciousness now you asked about integrated information theory or they call it IIT for short and I've always been a little bit unsure you know the key figures here are Julio Tenoni and Kristoff [ __ ] who I mentioned earlier we had a conference recently in Sweden bringing together philosophers working on pansychism and leading proponents of integrated information theory and we really wrestled it out and I actually was pleasantly surprised to to realize we're actually on the complete same page as this, i, think, at least, the, leading proponents of integrated information theory those neuroscientists are like us philosophers of the view that it's consciousness that's fundamental actually and everything else flows from there everything else comes out of consciousness is that a close cousin or does it rhyme with what Max plank icon German physicist said so long ago i have never had the full context of this quote and this is as good a time as any after you answer this just to give us a working definition of consciousness that can be applied in the way you would like to apply it so Max plank I regard consciousness as fundamental i regard matter as derivative from consciousness we cannot get behind consciousness everything that we talk about everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness so Max Plank 1852 to 1947 Nobel Prizewinning German physicist and the father of quantum theory was he referring to more or less what you are discussing or did he say this in a different context it's fascinating what you point to and it's not just Max plank it was a fairly widespread view among many physicists at the time a colleague of mine who works on the history of philosophy tweeted something recently that was a quote from a physicist from the 1930s oh god I can't remember now who it was saying of course all physicists think consciousness is fundamental now just like what I think something happened in the postwar years where this all went out the window and we move to dominance of what we call materialism roughly that the physical world is fundamental we can leave it to the historians perhaps to work out what was going on there but what was the interest of Max Plank i mean I I'm not an expert on plank but I suspect it might be something to do with quantum mechanics and some of the mysteries that have emerged since those early days of quantum mechanics i mean the weird thing about quantum mechanics is that if we just take the core bit of mathematics what we call the shreddering equation it seems to describe this weird world of what we call superpositions and don't ask me what a superp position is cuz nobody knows but it's something to do with the particle is not in this location and not in that location but sort of in both and neither at the same time or you know captured with the famous shredding a cat thought experiment were if you just apply the Shreddinger equation you'll find that the cat before we open the box the cat is living and dead and there's many cats all some of them living some of them dead but of course that's that's not what we ever observe right whenever we actually observe the particle it's in a definite location mhm whenever we actually open the box and look at the cat if we were cruel enough to actually do the Shreddingers cat experiment we'd see a definitely living cat or a definitely dead cat what on earth is going on there what the early pioneers of quantum mechanics said is well when you make an observation things change and a different bit of mathematics what we call the Bourne rule comes in and tells you what you're going to observe or at least the probability of what you're going to, observe, so, it's, a, sort, of bridging principle that takes you from this weird world of superp positions to the definite reality you're actually going to observe and you know the early pioneers of quantum mechanics like Niles Boore they didn't want you to ask questions about that niles Boore you know people talk about him people who knew him just say he was this incredibly charismatic figure people compared him to Jesus or Socrates but he also ruled like a communist dictator in crushing opposition if you ask questions about what what is going on in reality to make quantum mechanics make sense your career would be over right they didn't want you asking those questions but you know one answer that some people reached in the 1960s Nobel Prize winning quantum pioneer VNA well maybe it's consciousness that's making the difference right mhm maybe that's what's the difference between before you're observing the particle and it's in many locations and when you observe it or before you open the box to see what's going on with the cat it's the interaction of consciousness that changes reality from this wacky world of superp positions to a definite reality and that's been somewhat neglected over the years but actually some friends of mine David Charas who I mentioned and Kelvin McQueen have actually taken that view and explored it in rigorous detail they don't necessarily think it's true but they think you know there's value in just analytically exploring this position laying it out rigorously looking at the pros and cons so maybe that natural connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics was something to do with it but I'm not totally sure all right we go down a number of different paths from here of course what is a good placeholder definition of consciousness for the purposes of how you've been using it in the context of pansychism the way the word consciousness is standardly used I think in both science and philosophy it just means subjective experience mhm your consciousness is just what it's like to be you mhm so you know right now you're having a an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you visual experience of the room around you you know if you pay attention you'll notice the subtle tactile sensations of the chair beneath your body this is just all part of what it's like to be you and that's all we mean by consciousness so now we can start to see that it may make a little bit more sense that this could exist in very simple forms because we're not necessarily talking about conceptual understanding or awareness of your own existence we're just talking about experience and you know maybe bed bugs could have experience maybe something even simpler could have very very simple forms of experience thank you and if people want to impress or confuse their friends at the next cocktail party could they call those things qualia would that be a word they should throw around perhaps or qualia a different thing entirely no no that's the philosophers's lingo I suppose to mean I guess the qualities we encounter in conscious experience and some people think that's really at the heart of the challenge here these qual the colors the sounds the smells the taste consciousness seems to involve rich qualities you know the smell of coffee the taste of mint the deep red of a sunset and maybe it's that that physical science struggles with so much because physical science since Galileo has aimed to be purely quantitative purely mathematical purely objective and third personal and so it's hard to see how you can bridge the explanatory gap between that purely quantitative world of physics and physical science and this subjective qualitative world of consciousness and in fact one final thing physical science kicked off with Galileo taking consciousness outside of the domain of science for this precise reason because he thought correctly I think you can't capture those qualities in purely mathematical language if we want mathematical science we got to take consciousness out and I think that's really I mean this is my book Galileo's error i think that's really at the root of our current predicaments of consciousness we need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated 400 years ago this may be a naive question but if we can explore quantum mechanics in mathematical form and if we move from kind of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum mechanics if quantum mechanical effects at least, in, part, explain, consciousness it's a big if I suppose but if couldn't we then reinccorporate it into mathematics or do you think That's a fool's errand i mean you're making the case I suppose that the materialist will want to make the person who thinks "No no we can do this." I mean I suppose everyone agrees we haven't done it yet here's your case of wine we haven't got even the beginnings of an explanation of of how electrochemical signaling can somehow make a feeling but yeah I mean I think a lot of people inspired by the success of physical science think come on we can get there in the end we just need to keep pushing at this but I suppose that's why I think we do need to reflect maybe on this the intellectual philosophical starting points of science with Galileo how did Galileo strip consciousness out was it incidental was it very deliberate because it was just like Okay this is the misbehaving kid in the classroom we need to put him in the corner how was that done what was the error so to speak galileo wanted and this was such a revolutionary innovation wanted science to be just purely mathematical that had never been done before but he understood that the problem is the qualities we seem to encounter in our experience the colors the sounds the smells and the tastes so he said you know how do we get rid of them can't capture them in mathematics you can't I mean you can capture a lot right you can capture with color experience you can divide up color into the dimensions of hue saturation and brightness right and you can map out a three-dimensional space there but you can never convey to a blind from birth neuroscientist with that sort of information the redness of red right what it's like to see red actually there's a great neuroscientist Nut Norby the late Nut Norbby's passed away now who was an expert color scientist who had cones missing from his eyes so he could only see black and white and shades of gray he was interested in the philosophy talked in wonderful rich ways about how he he understood the structure of color experience but he couldn't quite get at the colors the qualities themselves so Galileo said "Right well we need that to be outside of the scientific domain." So what he said he stripped the physical world of its qualities he said you know the colors they're not really in the objects you know this Batman mug I've got here you know the bless and the yellowess that's not really on the surface of the cup that's in the conscious experience of the observer looking at it or the the spiciness isn't really inside the curry it's in the conscious experience of the person eating so he strips the physical world of all these colors and sounds and smells tastes where are they they're in the soul right they're in the soul that's outside of science and once he'd strip the qualities away you've free reign to capture everything else in mathematics now that was a good move cuz it was the start of mathematical physics and it's led to incredible technology and you know consensus on this body of information but I think we're in a period of history where it's gone so well people now think that's everything we found the way forward but we need to remember it's gone so well because it was given a limited focus because consciousness was put outside of the domain of science so I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about these challenges of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science he'd say "Of course you can't do that i designed physical science to exclude consciousness." If you want to bring consciousness back in the scientific story we need to rethink those foundations we need to bring together what Galileo separated and I think that's what pansychism gives us a way of doing it's not telling us to do science differently it's telling us to have a more expansive scientific method that brings consciousness back into the story oo I want to explore that last part and I would just say I mean for folks listening and please excuse me I'm operating way above my pay grade here so I'm probably going to make mistakes but Newtonian physics for instance works fantastically well for so many things right but once you have quantum mechanics introduced it becomes very clear that it's an excellent toolkit but it has it doesn't have a complete range of applications let's just say and if you talk, to, any, good, doctor, I, don't, know if this joke exists in it's not really a joke I suppose but sort of a philosophical epistemological quip which is you know 50% of what we know is wrong we just don't know which 50% if you talk to any really good doctor they'll tell you that so there's no reason to believe that we have anything approaching complete understanding of the physical world through the tools that we have available how do you now you said expanding if I'm recalling correctly sort of expanding the scope of science to include pansychism do you have any thoughts on how that might be done i think come back to this question of we just need to explore different explanatory projects for many decades now we've been pursuing the following project trying to explain conscious experience in terms of utterly non-concious processes in the brain and that project despite a lot of time and energy and money has gone precisely nowhere which is not to say the science of the brain has gone nowhere we've made incredible progress but on that particular question of how electrochemical signalings on the brain could make a feeling you know we haven't even got the beginnings so the pans psychist says well let's just try it upside down let's try that the reverse of that explanatory project right let's see if you know we start with consciousness can we get physical reality out of that and I just think it's turned out that that's a much more fruitful explanatory project i think actually the mysteries have been solved essentially and I think a lot of the resistance is it just kind of feels weird you know it takes time to adjust to these things but look I would just say just contrast these two expand projects right starting with physical science trying to get consciousness out starting with consciousness trying to get physical reality out which works and I I think the latter we've just made much more progress on it you know I was just doing a little bit of searching on perplexity for people who are interested which AI tool I am using which tends to focus a lot on avoiding or minimizing hallucination i thought you were metaphorically referring to front and back of the brain when you were discussing how your philosophical beliefs or what would we even call this sort of philosophical undergirling would affect your scientific exploration or interpretation but I put in question what do neuroscientists believe is the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness and the first thing that pops up so IT is here integrated information theory but global neuronal workspace theory man they could use some branding on that but that's okay G&WT this theory championed by Dr stannislas dahin I'm probably pronouncing that incorrectly suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of sensory information in the frontal parts of the brain the front of the brain acts as a sketch pad where sensory signals are combined with memories and emotions and this information is then broadcast across the brain iit posits that consciousness emerges from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the brain and it goes on and on and then there are many other many other theories right the phalamus and its interaction with the cerebral cortex the ciptotemporal area the colostrum that one has come up a bit with neuroscientists I've spoken to at a few universities thin sheet of neurons connected to the neoortex okay so what do you think of the let's put IAT aside side for a second but just this general pursuit right the pursuit of some neuroanatomical seat of consciousness because the answers we get are only going to be as good as our questions and while science is excellent scientific method for testing hypotheses it doesn't always give you a great set of tools for generating the best or better questions so do you feel like this is worth pursuing or is is there something that scientists have as a blind spot that perhaps dooms this question from the very outset the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness absolutely we need the science we're not going to make progress on consciousness without science and what you've pointed to is a really important debate i mean maybe just touch on another way of seeing you know why this is so hard to make progress on and the reason is consciousness is not publicly observable i can't look inside your brain and see your feelings and experiences i can't look inside a fish and see you know does he have feelings you cuz and this has leads to all sorts of ethical problems i mean what you can do if you're dealing with a human being is you can ask them right while you're scanning their brain maybe you can stimulate a bit of the brain so what did that feel and that's that's really essentially the tool for doing the scientific task of trying to mirror together the invisible world of consciousness and the visible world of the brain it's very hard but that's what we try and do but really I think that's where the limit is with science in regard to consciousness because consciousness is not publicly observable that is all you can do it's very important but that is all you can do try to get those correlations in the human case and then try as best you can to extrapolate to the non-human case but that will always leave open the why question why does brain activity go along with consciousness why should brain activity have anything to do with consciousness and I think at that point you need to turn to the philosophy and just look at the various possibilities that you know that we've discussed well maybe the physical world is fundamental and consciousness emerges maybe consciousness is fundamental and physical reality emerges maybe maybe they're both radically different this is what's called dualism maybe consciousness is in the soul and that's just separate from the body and the brain and this has actually for what it's worth been the most popular theory in human history of consciousness you know that consciousness is somehow se but the scientific data on consciousness important as it is is just neutral on all those possibilities this is this is what I'm so passionate about getting across to people and I understand why people find that frustrating and they think no can't we do an experiment you know can't I mean maybe you should say well we just don't know yeah all we know is the correlations we just don't know or we can try and do some philosophy can we evaluate these different options maybe in terms of simplicity okam's razor maybe that would get rid of the soul or how well their explanatory aims have gone and I think when we do that pansychism just looks more plausible i've talked a bit long if I could say one more thing about how we make progress I think it might get to the point where what we need to do is fragment the discipline a little bit into communities of scientists and philosophers that is to say scientists doing experiments under certain philosophical assumptions and that's really actually with IIT and global workspace theory that is kind of already going on but not explicit but maybe we just have to do that and see what bears fruit and some neuroscientists I know don't like that and they think oh we're not we're not going to be taken serious as credible science we won't get funding and I see that I feel that but unfortunately if you're going to deal with consciousness for all the reasons we've discussed it's not publicly observable science was set up from taking it out the picture you just need to do some philosophy so maybe what we need to do is just get society to take philosophy more seriously and to see the role that has to play in the project of finding out about reality and then I think we'll we'll make progress on consciousness so if people want to get really squirly and explore consciousness as something perhaps non-loized or not limited to the brain they can read a collection of different writings called mind beyond brain which was edited by David Prey now if David Prey were just playing singing bowls and swinging copal around the public square walking around in rags it would be one thing but he's a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley where he taught in the department of molecular and cell biology for nearly 20 years still teaches and also has worked as a clinical psychologist in the treatment of addiction and PTSD and so on at the department of veteran affairs medical San Francisco and SF very interesting not all chapters in my opinion are strong but a few will definitely provoke some very bizarre questions so that's something people can dig into if they'd like let me ask you about the hypothetical situation which is if we made another bet all right so let's say that you bet me you're like you know what 20 years from now we're going to figure it out cradle wine your choice it's like fantastic and it gets figured out we somehow determine maybe it's with the help of quantum computing and harnessing the power from other universes by the way if people haven't listened to the discussion of quantum computing I had with Steve Jervson quite a while back now go back and listen to that if you think what I just said is strange it is but let's say it gets figured out what is the payoff this might sound also like a very dumb question is it trying just to resolve some deep angst and the not knowing as it relates to consciousness or is there more to the the potential payoff if we were to somehow figure it out you know I actually think there are very important practical ethical concerns here i mean one thing we've touched on slightly is animal consciousness which animals are conscious which and I mean actually the direction of travel has been going more and more things are conscious as time has gone on there was recently a letter written by dozens of neuroscientists arguing that we need to at least take seriously the possibility that insects are conscious i mean there was a time people didn't think babies were conscious and used to do quite horrible things on babies yes surgery without anesthesia without anesthetic yeah god and that was not that long ago this is not the 1400s we're talking about it's only recently people are thinking birds and fish are conscious so you know us pans psychists have taken it all away and we're just waiting for everyone to catch up i'm I'm being slightly ironic but you know plants I don't think people are at the stage necessarily where they are well there are some biocschists who think well they're not pansy but they think all living things are conscious but we have learned incredible things about plant intelligence that plants can be subject to conditioned learning which was incredibly surprising that the extent to which trees communicate under the ground and share information and between species there's cooperation and sharing of food and nutrients and there's just some incredible buzzing community beneath the ground so I think you know as we learn more about animals and plants it is leading people to prescribe consciousness more and more widespread but look I mean this is a very serious ethical question which things are conscious people often think I'm going to be a vegan but it makes it harder if you're a panist if you're not a pans psychist or a biocychist you've got a nice easy ethical dividing line you know plants aren't conscious i just won't eat things that are conscious but I think trees and plants are conscious you know and I got to eat something so it just there really is ethical issues here the other one is people in comas who we can't communicate with in the normal way at least, are, they, conscious, can, they hear us you know I mean one of them fascinating was maybe 10 or 15 years ago now that scientists were able to communicate with somebody in a coma through asking yes or no questions and saying you know for the yes question I can't remember the details now you know think of playing tennis and then they scan the brain to see if the motor region was activated and communicated with someone through scanning their brain and found out that they did have meaningful thought so I mean those are the two big ethical questions I suppose but look I I don't think we should underplay questions that just don't have practical significance but are part of what it means to be a human being in the sense of the noble project of trying to have our best guess as to what reality is like i think human life isn't just about you know building bridges curing disease working on the economy as important as those things are I think we want to know what is this world we're living in and how do we fit that into our own understanding of our meaning and purpose in this life and so you know consciousness is important for that purpose too and there's also often times practicality on the further side of something that seems impractical or at least not immediately practical that happens all the time in science happens all the time in medicine all the time in pharmaceutical development absolutely i could give you two good examples of that actually please where blue sky thinking has gone in well the Reverend Thomas Bae was annoyed by the atheist David Hume in the 18th century with his argument against miracles that we should never trust miracles because it's always going to be more likely that it was deceit or error rather than a break in the laws of nature thomas Ba Reverend Thomas Ba is like "What's going on here?" And he wrestled with this and he came up with a little bit of mathematics that we now call Bae theorem yeah base theorem which is our core mathematical way of understanding evidence it was very important in tracking the COVID pandemic it informs you know a huge bit of neuroscience we call predictive processing another quick example I mean Bertrren Russell my hero and got Frager were wrestling with the very abstract question of can we reduce mathematics to logic why the hell would you be worried about that but can we just explain all of maths away philosophers worry about numbers what the hell are numbers what the hell is where are numbers you know Plato you know back in this dawn of western philosophy Plato thought numbers are really out there some philosophers think I don't I don't want to believe in this magical world of numbers platonic heaven maybe we can just get it all reduced to logic and they wrestled with this and it didn't really work out but they came up with predicate logic which is you know been hugely important in you know computer science and god it's huge loads of areas of science so yeah so look we need to worry about just focusing on the practical questions you know we need space for blue sky thinking and trying things out because you don't know where it's going to end up i'm going to come back to Bur and Russell which I was planning on hitting regardless but first I thought we could explore a little bit your experience with virtual reality and this was in the seven pages that you sent to me oh yeah some other reading related to the present moment which we don't have to go to in depth but specifically the experience you had with VR if you could just speak to that because part of my hope with conversations like this is just to point out to people how what we take for granted as the ordinary is so [ __ ] crazy on so many levels that it's worth taking a pause every once in a while to revisit it and I thought your experience was a very eloquent way of putting that into perspective thank you yeah this was a funny one i suppose just you know when you first try VR goggles it's just like oh my god this is in this is world and I can interact with it and unfortunately I was with my two little kids and they wanted their turn and obviously I I only have like five minutes and I was like it's not fair why do they get to do so then I was think you know I was just I wasn't going to have another go cuz my kids are playing with I was ah back to boring reality and suddenly it dawned on me actually normal reality even this kind of mundane living room I was sitting in is so much richer than the best VR we have right you could you know the subtlety of touching a leaf or stroking a carpet or breathing the air if you pay attention to the air going in your nose and you know I mean there's just so much richness in every present moment The only problem is for some reason I don't know it's something to do with evolution probably humans are sort of set up to get bored of it very quickly and we just want the next thing that we want to get me a Netflix drama get me you know get me a drink to just sort of drown my sorrows and you know but I just think that really dawned on me in a deep way the importance of just trying to calm that restless boredom you know and just get back to the richness that the present moment has to offer i just want my kids actually that I didn't say this in the pages you kindly read but I found actually engaging i've got a four-year-old and 8-year-old actually playing with kids can be kind of meditative like a spiritual experiment i mean I've got a friend I remember a colleague when they first had kids and they said "It's really boring isn't it playing with kids?" And you know in a sense it is but at first it's boring you know playing role playing teacher one of my kids wants to play teachers all the time but and it's boring at first and you want to I want to do something else I want to do something more but then if you just bear with it and you let the you know you let the restlessness calm and then you absorb in it and you see you know the wonder of the weird way they're thinking and the strange expressions and their unusual behavior and the richness of the present moment and I suppose it's just a different way of thinking about the value of meditation or mindfulness or just trying to calm yourself in the present moment that's the beginning of happiness I think isn't it just getting yourself settled in the present moment all right as promised Bertrand Russell and this is going to take us into some fun territory I suspect why is Bert Russell one of your heroes and maybe you could speak to William James as well and answer that same question yeah Bert and Russell I think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness i think he in very important work in the 1920s he sort of solved all the mysteries and it got actually sadly forgotten about for a long time and it's only in the last 10 or 15 years it's really been rediscovered not that it was literally forgotten about but it's been examined again and this has led to this new wave of pansyus thinking in contemporary philosophy another figure to throw in from the same period the 1920s is Arthur Edington who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity and that made Einstein an overnight celebrity and it was a big moment actually because was it between the wars I think and it was an English experimental scientist confirming the theory of a Swiss German scientist and and a Swiss German scientist not only confirming their theory but their theory that overturned a couple of hundred years of Newton right Newton had the theory of gravity Edington's observation showed that actually Einstein's slightly more nuanced theory did better than Newton's but they worked together and they thought about these questions around consciousness in a really fascinating way and without without wanting to get into too much of the technicalities I think I think their essential insight was that physical science doesn't really tell us what matter is and when I first heard that I I honestly thought this is ridiculous what are you talking about you know you read physics you get this rich story about the nature of space and time and matter but their point was well of course important and rich as that is ultimately at base physics just gives us mathematical structure right and so in a sense physics doesn't care what matter is it doesn't care what physical reality is it just cares what its mathematical structure is if you get the mathematical structure that's all physics cares about and you know Steven Hawking famously captured this on the last page of a brief history of time when he said "Even the final theory of physics won't tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe." M so really I mean the way we conventionally think about consciousness people tend to think oh we know what matter is we know what the brain is but we don't know what consciousness is we don't know what this weird consciousness thing Russell said it's precisely the other way around we know what consciousness is by being conscious you know what pain is when you feel it it's the brain it's physical reality we don't know what it is we just know it's it's abstract mathematical structure we don't know what fills out that mathematical structure and so building on these insights I don't know how much you want to get into this building on these insights philosophers have worked out ways of you know if we started with the postulation of simple networks of simple conscious entities so long as through their interactions they had the right patterns the right mathematical structures we'd get physics out of that we could get physics out of consciousness from Russell I think we know that can be We don't know if we can get consciousness out of physics but we know we can get physics out of consciousness so that's mean pans why are we still banging our head against a brick wall thinking you know how can we get consciousness out of physical stuff when does it we know it can be done the other way round we've made sense of that let's just at least run with that as an option i know it feels a bit weird but you know that's just a cultural thing where does William James fit in to your life and why is such an influence i think even more than Russell William James is my big hero i think just something about his intellectual character i think if you read James he feels like someone in the present moment he's just so upto-date and sharp and reasonable in his thinking but I mean on all sorts of areas i mean he wrote wonderful things on pansychism in terms of the challenges to pansychism actually I mean the big discussed challenge of pansychism you know how do you get how do little conscious things come together to make big conscious things is become known as the combination problem but William James was actually the first person wrestling with this but I also like you know the stuff he wrote on religion you know people talk about religion they talk about Pascal's wager it's interesting Pascal's wager but you need to read James if you're interested in that kind of stuff and his great paper the will to believe which he later thought I think rightly should have been called the right to believe and he was challenging this idea that a contemporary of his Clifford put forward but later Bertrren Russell on the other side put forward you know that in terms of belief you follow the evidence all you need to do is follow the evidence and you've got to strictly anything beyond the evidence you can't go for and James refct And they say "Well look it's a bit complicated you know the worry with going over the evidence is well you might believe false things but there's another risk isn't there you might not believe true things." And so there's to some extent he tried to justify to some extent we can we can tentatively in certain limited circumstances where there is uncertainty where our rational argumentation and experiments can't settle matters maybe it can be rational to choose to believe and he made a real case for that and it was absolutely fascinating and and you appreciate you're taking a risk and you know you're not making an intellectual error cuz you know you're taking a risk you know you're going beyond the evidence but in your right mind prepared to take that risk it's just a beautiful discussion and all sorts of wonderful analogies and explorations everyone should read William James he's a patron saint of great intellectual thinking if people needed to start with one or if they were only going to read one where would you have them start i would suppose the most recognizable of his writing, for, at least, an, American audience would probably be the varieties of religious experience but would you start there or would you have people start somewhere else i think well the one I just mentioned will to believe if that sounded interesting to you is fairly readable but yeah the varieties of religious experience that is still one of the best explorations of mystical experiences the chapter on mystical experiences which is you know a lot of it's a psychological study and an attempt to define mystical experiences and his definition still stands to this day but at the end actually it's interesting he asked the question would it rational to trust a mystical experience suppose I'm having this mystical experience that seems to me there's this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things would it be rational to trust that i think many of you would say well no it's just something funny going on in your brain you know it could be a delusion but James says well we all think it's okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences but you know that could be a delusion we could be in the matrix this could all be a dream and you could say well we can test our senses but only by using your senses so it's kind of circular so all knowledge has to start with just a decision to trust your experience so James says it's a sort of double standard if you say it's okay to trust ordinary sensory experiences fallible as they are but it's not okay for someone having a mystical experience to trust what that seems to be telling them about reality there's a sort of double standard what justifies that and I mean there's a big debate but you know it is a really important and challenging point in foundational thinkings about knowledge highly recommend William James also if people want an adjunct to that there's a book called the varieties of spiritual experiences the newer book 21st century research and perspectives by a scientist named David Yeden y a deen out of John's Hopkins and that is also worth taking a gander at if you are particularly really interested in mystical experiences what that means and the different I suppose flavors of reality that can entail let's come back to Bert and Russell and the way I'm going to make this segue is I'm going to read something from your notes that you sent me as possible exploration for this conversation and so your last book why explored the middle ground between God and atheism now I'm going to paraphrase this just to make a third person or a second person i guess you came out as a heretical Christian which caused a big reaction a heated discussion within the philosophical community the traditional Christians saying you weren't really a Christian because you didn't have the correct beliefs quote unquote and atheist philosophers saying that you'd lost your mind okay and Burton Russell has a book called Why I Am Not a Christian and I'm wondering you can edge into this however you would like but I'm curious what you think he gets right or wrong in that book since you see him very familiar with his work and then I would love for you just to explain what it means for you to be a heretical Christian yeah that's an excellent question into this well maybe I could just do those the other way around sure let's do it the other way around because it might sort of help you see where I'm coming i mean this has been quite a journey really i didn't think I would return to religion i mean I was raised Catholic actually you know going to church every week i was an alter I was a terrible alter boy i was always forgetting to ring the bells at the right time and anyway but by the time I was 14 I decided God didn't exist and I refused to get confirmed upsetting my grandmother my mom sent me to see the priest who tried Pascal's wager on me but it didn't work anyway I spent the next 30 years an atheist but I think I've always been a spiritual person you know I've always talking about mystical experience in some sense had a sense that there's a deeper reality at the core of things but you know I engage with it in my own way through engagement with nature meditation yoga classes you know and so on i was a part of the ever growing grouping of spiritual but not religious but just I suppose as a more recently I suppose I guess at least for me I've come to see the value of the things I had in that religious community in my upbringing you know I think for all its faults you know I think religion has a unique way of bringing the community together you know through rituals that mark the changing of the seasons and the big moments of life you know birth coming of age marriage death through rich tradition you know going back thousands of years and so like I suppose at some point it seemed to me that being spiritual but not religious you know I'm just talking for myself now was starting to feel maybe a bit lonely a bit unstructured almost aimless and I guess I've come to think over time that and this is what my new book I've just started this week is on there are ways of engaging with traditional religion could maybe get into that avoid some of the real worries that people have with religion about dogmatic certainties or you know things we could go into but which also allow you to gain some benefits like a community structured practice a rich tradition and you know I suppose what I'm interested is just I've come to find that works for me and I suppose I'd just like to raise that possibility for others so I'm not here saying oh this is the one true faith you've got to believe i'm just saying look I'm interested in different experiments in living and I think there's a way of engaging with religion that perhaps not everyone is fully aware of and so that's what I'm trying to do there but anyway Bertrren Russell yeah I've talked more about the sort of personal things there but on the intellectual matters you know there's this bloody perennial debate between believers and atheists you know and you know we find people say "Whose side are you on Richard Dawkins or the Pope?" You know who's right which team are you on and I've just come to find over time I think both sides of getting something right and something wrong i think there's things traditional believers, in, God, at least, the, you, know western gods struggle to explain like the horrific suffering why the hell would God allow cancer and earthquakes and all that but I think there's also things that atheists traditional atheists struggle to explain one thing I've focused a lot in recent work in my why book is the finetuning of physics for life this surprising discovery that for life to be possible certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range such that it's actually incredibly improbable that a universe like ours would have the right numbers for life just by chance and so that's something it's hard to make sense of on a normal atheistic picture so what I tried to do in the Y book really is just that let's just have a think about middle ground options you know maybe there are elegant middle ground options that can avoid the difficulties on both sides i'm now coming to Russell you might think I'm like a politician dodging the question but well this fine-tuning of physics for life wasn't there when Russell was alive it's just since the 70s 80s I mean the late ' 90s the cosmological constant which is to do with dark energy and the acceleration of the universe that was only 1998 I think so this just wasn't there for Russell and I annoy people on X i've really wound people up by saying that you know Bert and Russell would probably believe in cosmic purpose now because he followed the evidence where it leads but you know the evidence wasn't there in his day you know but I think he would have followed that evidence it's it's just it's hard for human beings to do isn't it to sort of you know you get used to one thing and the evidence changes and the economist Canes there's a famous incident that a journalist said to him "You didn't used to think that." And he said "Well, when, the, facts, change, I change my mind." What do you do sir that's really hard for human beings to do but uh yeah that's where I'm up to with that all right so let's talk about Bert and Russell following the evidence and cosmic purpose because I want to explore this i know very little about I suppose how you might describe cosmic purpose and I would like to hear more so when people hear you perhaps refer to the constants for life on Earth right the 30 or so fundamental constants i mean there is an argument to be made that well life would only appear if these things existed therefore yada yada yada but we don't need to delve into that what I'm curious about is when people hear you say that and that it is incredibly unlikely to happen by chance they might take that to imply some type of primary mover aka a god of some type does cosmic purpose require someone to be a theist to believe in a god or gods no I wouldn't go for the very traditional idea of god as all knowing all powerful perfectly good because then you've got the problem of suffering mhm so I'm bothered by what both sides struggle with and this is why I annoy everybody sorry you know cuz I'm annoying both sides of this debate but yeah I think there are options middle ground options that can deal with the finetuning in terms of some kind of cosmic purpose or goal directedness without going to the very traditional god and getting to suffering so in in the why book I explore a few different possibilities one is maybe laws of nature with purposes built into them so we don't have some kind of mind behind the universe setting things up there's just a sort of fundamental tendency in reality towards certain goals maybe the emergence of life now this sounds in itself a bit wacky and mystical and but actually a couple of our most rigorous philosophers Daniel Nolan and John Hawthorne have actually given a very detailed rigorous mathematical account of what we call teological laws so tilos from the Greek purpose laws with purposes built into them would look like so I think like it ends up being you could just have a scientific proposal of just a different way of thinking about laws of nature it's it's a very weird one it's I mean it's weird in a cultural sense but that is one option i mean another option is something closer to the traditional god but a tweak on it i've explored the idea of a maybe a god of limited powers who's you know just not able to do whatever they want and you know I think we could be quite precise about what those limitations might be to yield the world we find or the simulation hypothesis Nick Bostonramm's famous for exploring and David Charas in his recent book reality plus you know maybe we're in a computer simulation and there's some you know random software engineer who set it all up Very finally I've talked too much already i mean the view I explore in most detail in the book is the idea that the universe itself is conscious which again sounds a bit extravagant at first but actually you know if you're already a pans psychist I think that's already a plausible view and you already think perhaps that the universe is conscious because you think fields are the fundamental physical things then it's perhaps not too much of a step to think that this fundamental conscious thing might have certain goal directed states even if it's a very alien strange mind very different to us so yeah there are few and I just think we get stuck in these dichotoies let's just explore these different options mhm so question for you on the intersection of your childhood with where you are now I suppose or maybe the trajectory how did you decide to become an atheist at age 14 was it the omnipotent benevolent contradiction with suffering in the world was there something else that triggered it how did you decide on that i think it was a mix of things yeah the problem of evil and suffering was part of it on the intellectual side also ethical things you know I thought Christianity had backward views on women and sexuality and you know time I was questioning my sexuality and also I think fundamentally I just thought Christianity in particular was very unspiritual you know I thought Buddhism is spiritual but Christianity is just about sort of doing what the old guy in the sky wants so you get to heaven what I've discovered more recently and this is part of why I've returned to this slightly non-standard form of religion engagement with religion is the mystical traditions of Christianity mhm which have always been there right back to the start but are perhaps more prominent in the Eastern Orthodox Church where there's less emphasis on sin my childhood Catholic it was all about sin and but for the Eastern Orthodox Church there's nothing to do with God wanting to find someone to punish for our sins that's not a part of the picture at all in fact that was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago a lot of people in the US think that's the essence of Christianity anyway but for the Eastern Orthodox Church that it's the fundamental story is about God and the universe becoming one entering into a deep state of unity and that's really the core of it and I mean this I had nothing about in my Catholic upbringing but it's something that deeply resonates with me and you know makes sense of a lot of my deeper spiritual experiences i suppose you know it's those elements of mysticism I thought were in just in Hinduism Buddhism but are actually present not just in Christianity but you know you've got Cabala in Judaism you've got Sufism in Islam that's what I'm researching at the moment these wonderful Islamic traditions i'm reading a book a classic book connecting um looking at the exploration between stoicism that I know you're interested in and Sufism in Islamic that the mysticism of Islamic philosophy so I think there's always been that mystical component and a way of engaging that's you know less dogmatic and certain maybe you don't know it's true maybe it's something you hope is true maybe you take it as a beautiful metaphor there are these ways of doing it right and I think you know churches and synagogues would be a more interesting place if they were full of people more full of people engaging with it in this way i love you know I like conservatives i don't hate conservatives and traditionalists but I think there can be a natural balance of progressives and conservatives you know the conservatives saying you know let's not throw everything away too quickly and the progressives saying hold on we need to update a bit and in religion it's gone a little bit too much dominated by traditionalists and I think it would be nice if we mixed it up a bit and that's what I'm trying to press in the book I've just started we're going to come back to some of your deeper spiritual experiences i'm wondering if you could share one or two but I also want to say that a lot of people listening or watching probably associate me with stoic philosophy stoicism but I actually have more books and more poetry related to sufism in my house than anything related to stoicism i have quite a bit on stoicism also sponsored a statue here in Austin in a statue garden and this particular statue is of St francis of Aisi and we could talk about Merin yes I mean there are mystical origin stories that involve mystical/direct experience in most if not all of the major traditions people listening would recognize and the immortality key is actually quite interesting read for people who haven't checked it out Brian Murescu but let's come back to your deeper experiences are you willing to share one or two of those yeah well I'll have to get some recommendations from you on supism sure let me think i mean I suppose what I found what I've been thinking recently is what I like about this Eastern Orthodox way of thinking about mystical experience is that it's very close to certain things we find in Hindu mysticism like advite vanta but the end goal that you're aiming at still involves love and sociality mhm i mean I was watching something by very good Hindu mystic who I'm actually going to be in conversation with in a few months talking about you know a metaphor that the ultimate goal is with the analogy of an ice cube melting in the ocean you know you just lose your identity you're sort of absorbed in the divine right whereas in the Eastern Orthodox conception of Christianity the ultimate goal is still involves unity but still difference right it's unity with God with other people i mean I I suppose what I see reflected in the Eucharist and it's a sociality a mystical sociality that is a deep sense of kind of binding people together and to something bigger so I suppose that's part of what's really resonated with me and you know this is not some big overwhelming mystical experience but it's making sense of those experiences that have always been there at at my more spiritual moments i find actually that the soft light of first very early morning or dusk I find somehow most spiritual i don't know why that is making sense of these experience actually just one more thing it was just Ash Wednesday this week it was the start of Lent and uh I'm in a Anglican church where you get the ashes and it really touches me what they say when they say remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return and that really I think what it does to me is you know I've had some worldly success in academia to an extent in public stuff and I think it moment of that being done I think it was maybe last year I think I had a very vivid sense of how my sense of myself was getting a bit reliant on that and dependent on you know success and you know my sense of who I was and that just being told you know kind of brought me a bit to tears that you are dust and to dust you I've been reading actually the great Christian mystic who was tried for heresy Meister Ehart and you know I always thought I guess the focus on sin that was always from my childhood i thought like again for Lent you know abstaining I thought that's about sin and punishing yourself and you got to feel sad but the way Ekard sees it and the way he interprets passages from the Bible about sacrifice it's just about getting away from your reliance on these things your sense of yourself your sense of happiness getting down to something more real and fundamental at the core and so these are some of the ways in which through engaging with a rich tradition I've I've delved deeper into and explored my my spiritual experiences I suppose so you said the next 30 years as an atheist so it seems like you've in some form come back into the fold maybe you have some sunglasses and a fake mustache but you've come back into the fold in some sense what triggered that what was the I mean maybe the straw that broke the camel's back isn't the right metaphor to use but was there a conversation a moment a period of difficulty what catalyzed that i'd say again it's as with leaving it was a mixture of things i could talk about the intellectual stuff the intellectual stuff we've already touched on I suppose was starting to think both sides of the god atheism debate of something right and something wrong and there's got to be more to it though there's got to be more like direct experience that was the intellectual stuff that was the intellectual stuff and that's what led to my why book which was earlier at least when I wrote it it was earlier to all this but then on the spiritual level well I guess it's what I said learning more about just from conversations with different kinds of Christian thinkers joanna Lidenhag is a young pansychist theologian who writes on how pansychism fits much better with a spiritual conception of reality and actually I should say there's a bit of a divide on this many pans psychists like David Charas Luke Roloffs Angela Mendelichi a very secular atheist i think Charas is a bit annoyed that I'm getting into religion he's like "We're trying to get this taken serious science." You know people are going to think it's all just religion but other pansy heterasi do see a conssonance with pansym so learning about the mystical traditions learning about these conceptions of God where God and the universe are not totally distinct i'm not even sure I want to use the word God you know but I've started now tricky one that Yeah maybe there's some overlap maybe like a ven diagram you know there's God on one side us on the other and the sort of overlap in the middle i interpret myster as holding something like that maybe that's why he got in trouble so that was part of it and I don't know so I mean one final thing I don't know, how, much, of, interest, this, is but I mean I always have problems with the resurrection because I mean it's not just there being miracles although that's part of it but my answer to why there's suffering is if there is a God in whatever sense they can't do anything about it right or just there isn't a God who's letting that happen but if there's a God who can raise people from the dead you know then we're back to well why don't you do that more often but anyway reading one of my favorite biblical scholars guy called Dale Allison he's a wonderful freethinker he's always exploring both sides of a position and ending up places he wouldn't like to be maybe on a certain point of biblical interpretation he'd like to be more liberal and he ends up having a slightly more conserv anyway but he's got a wonderful recent book on on the resurrection exploring non-standard versions of the resurrection were for example that the resurrection experiences of the first Christians were visionary almost mystical experiences rather than seeing and touching a body and I was debating that it's been a busy week i was debating that on Wednesday with I don't know if you've heard of William Lane Craig no who is perhaps one of the biggest most influential Christian philosophers but he's very very very very traditional you know i mean if you're not a Christian you're going to hell you know very traditional and we had a lovely very very fiery debate this week where as I knew he would be he studies his debating opponents and he he was straight in there pansychism is you know incoherent unscientific this view of the resurrection is unhistorical doesn't make sense i responded in kind of way that's not out yet but um maybe it will be out but but yeah so so I suppose it was those three things has been a bit long-winded it was the intellectual stuff that these middle ground options between God and atheism it was the spiritual stuff discovering these mystical traditions that resonate with me deeply it was this weird view of the resurrection it was discovering actually there's there's been a big movement in philosophy of religion thinking about the nature of faith reading actually Karen Armstrong a wonderful historian of religion who has argued that this focus on belief being so important in religion is like a modern corruption she traces it back actually if we look at the word pistus in the New Testament that we translate as belief it actually doesn't mean belief in the modern sense it has connotations of trust engagement commitment and interestingly when we first translated the Bible into English in was it 15th 16th 17th century the word believe the English word belief was closer to that it's close to the German word believe to love it had connotations of commitment engagement she quotes from a Shakespeare play All's Well That Ends Well I think there's a character Bertram who's looking down on Helena cuz she's lowborn and he's told "Believe not thy disdain believe not thy disdain." So that means sort of don't have your heart in it so actually then the word believe changes meaning with the Protestant Reformation and the scientific revolution now it means just sort of intellectual commitment to a hypothesis about reality right so now you read the New Testament and you feel like Jesus talking about belief and you think oh he really cares about you know what propositions of reality you believe that's what salvation about whereas actually it was more about commitment having your heart in things so I think realizing there are the you know ways of engagement you don't have to think this is definitely true I felt that was like in my Catholic upbringing this is the answer it's definitely true you can you can be highly uncertain you can take it as a metaphor you can take it as a hope you can trust it you can be a bit heretical and so yeah all of these things opened up this way of engaging and once I went down there I've just got so much out of it it's the structure the community the depth of engagement has really worked for me so let's dig into that just a little bit i would love to ask a few more questions because a few things to mine the first and I haven't fact checked this I am no religious historian so my apologies to anyone who's offended by this but I recall someone credible I won't mention their name saying to me they're like you know it's really a shame there's so much friction often times, at least, in, the, Middle, East between Jews and Muslims because they have a few things in that are quite similar and the way it was positioned to me was in Christianity it's very important what you believe but in Judaism and in Islam it's more important perhaps what you do and heavily ritualized that can also be true in Christianity of course and I've thought about that and then I'm going to make an awkward transition to my friend AJ Jacobs who wrote a book called the year of living biblically in which he tried to follow all the rules of the Old and New Testament it's intended to be a funny but also very informative read i learned a lot about religion from that book but the way he put it when he was describing his upbringing he was raised Jewish he said and I'm paraphrasing I was raised Jewish but I am to Judaism as Olive Garden is to Italian so that Olive Garden is of course just this fast food chain here where you can get free bread sticks oh I see so he was socially and culturally Jewish but not ideologically religiously Jewish at that point and this is going to be a whole word salad of things I'm throwing out but I wonder then how well you can build a community or have that social fabric that religion provides which I am often hungry for if I'm being honest right i think there's uncontroversially an epidemic of loneliness and there are a million reasons for that only some of which I'm sure we're even aware of but mental illness diagnoses of chronic anxiety treatment resistant depression etc all seem to be in some type of sort of parabolic incline and I think connection is I don't want to say the antidote but one of the strong kind of counterveailing options for addressing that and religion is appealing on that level my parents started going to church maybe 15 years ago after never going to church precisely for that reason but I'm wondering how well you can cohhere as a community if you don't truly believe and there's an article I suppose an essay called why strict churches make strong churches that talks about this and the freeloader problem and things like that but what has been your experience in terms of the benefit you derive from a community and the degree of belief in scripture because man oh man like if we're talking about Deuteronomy Leviticus I mean if you start taking all that stuff literally it's paints a pretty rough picture for things so how do you think about that like is true belief in scripture a prerequisite for adherence to the type of rituals and so on that help bond a community or is that not the case these are great questions that I'm I'm still reflecting on and I'm still thinking about and I think you're certainly right that in the present moment, at least, in, the, Jewish community there's more of an openness to to this being a cultural phenomenon and and belief being less important i remember what was the context now a young Jewish woman tweeted at me maybe when I was talking about this religious stuff oh yeah my rabbi said when I was going to have my bar mitzvah I said "Well I don't believe in God." And the rabbi, said "No, no, no, the, don't, have, any gods but me." Right so it's a negative doesn't matter if you don't believe at all just don't have any other gods that was a nice choice i suppose what I'd like to see is just a little bit more openness to that in the Christian community and to what extent is it possible i mean certainly Karen Armstrong thinks that this kind of focus strong focus on belief is a more recent adaptation so her book her great book The Case for God which is a bad title i think that's a strong title yeah i think it's, going to, be, some, proof, of, God, or something or maybe aggressive it's not at all yeah it's a history of religion and she divides religion into two epochs part one which she calls the unknown god which goes from 50,000 BC to 1500 AD and then what she calls the modern god is from 1500 AD to the present moment so she thinks there is some radical shift in this focus on you know with the scientific revolution and the protestant reformation on belief which propositions do you believe of course it has always been true in Christianity from the early centuries, at least, we've, got, you, know from the 4th century when the Roman Empire under Constantine became you know he got this council and we have the official creeds but it's another question it's a subtly different question did you have to believe them so there was a big fight about which are the correct ones but do you have to believe them armstrong thinks if we're to be more accurate historically what believe should mean is commit so you should be saying instead of saying I believe in one God father almighty you should be saying I commit i engage with that i have my heart in that that's really what they meant by those terms the emphasis on the nonliteral you know with the mystical traditions that have always been there they would look at an allegorical understanding as in some sense deeper i mean origin who I've been researching for this new book when's origin 2nd century I think he was in a sense a bit of a heretic but he was sort of before it was properly defined but he's one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the early days one of the fathers of the church and he had this idea of the three levels of understanding scripture the first level is the literal meaning what people did if there's miracles and so yeah that's okay then the next stage is the moral right what is the moral meaning and then the deeper and higher stage he thought was the allegorical and what is going on here at a spiritual allegorical level what would be an example of an allegorical understanding of a portion of the Bible or a story well let's just take the central idea of Jesus right i mean what has always resonated with me with that even when I a long period of not being any part of this was the almost sort of turning upside down of worldly values that were identifying God not with the king in the castle you know but with the naked executed peasant right the guy who hangs out with outcasts I mean there's wonderful recent book Dominion by Tom Holland which is again the history of the influence of Christianity what a bloody radical idea that was it was ridiculous some of the earliest critiques of Christianity very very early were sort of the figure of the crucified Jesus with a donkey head on it was just ridiculous that this was the most humiliating punishment and what this is supposed to be God whether that's literally true but what it stands for to me it reveals something deep and ultimate whether or not it's literally true deep and ultimate about what is important and what is of value you know another thing the first shall be last the last shall be first and I don't know sometimes with Christianity at the moment in the US it seems like this is a little bit forgotten but I mean Holland talks about what an impact it had on the Roman Empire that suddenly you know the poor and the weak had moral value like to Roman aristocrats this is like wait what are you talking about another thing he talks about here I've always thought you know I don't have a traditional view on sexual ethics in Christianity but he talks about actually how valuable no sex before marriage was in those early days because we're talking of a time when slaves and women had no rights obviously and to an extent obviously a limited extent it prevented rape because if you were going to be a Christian Roman you had to wait till marriage and you know obviously this didn't work but you can see a role for it maybe it's a role that we don't need to so much cling to that original meaning I mean like in the way here here's a good example of what's changed with Christianity it used to be totally universal you couldn't charge interest that was a sin usery right yeah usery these days no Christians that I know of you know hold that because of our understanding of the modern market economy we reinterpret these things but what about being gay right why haven't we reunderstood that i mean many Christians have but many Christians haven't in the modern understanding of sexuality i think that's because there are fewer liberals and progressives in the church now you know I mean it has changed it has in my church we have we haven't got all the way to gay marriage but we got blessings on gay couples and but yes so what my aspiration really is you know get more liberals involved in these thing not to get rid of the traditionalists but to have that beautiful healthy equilibrium that has always been that you know there's always been radicals there's always been progressives that have been mixing it up and moving it forward you know Aquinus was bloody radical at the time now it's the official Catholic church philosophy you know so I think there's possibilities that are unexplored here without your childhood experience with Catholicism do you think you would have returned to in some form or re-entered Christianity or do you think since you mentioned at one point at least you felt that Buddhism or Hinduism were more spiritual do you think you would have perhaps ended up in a different camp slightly different camp one thing I will say just to preface that is it's not obviously wrong to me that you will choose what you feel culturally comfortable with because I think these matters are very uncertain right i mean it if you get to a point where you think no this religion this other religion different to the one I was raised was definitely definitely true then you know okay probably the rational thing to do is to convert but if you're like in a situation where it's very uncertain whether any religion is true it's very uncertain which and I think it makes sense if you know you're from a Muslim background that that's fits with your identity and it would be such a shift to become a Christian maybe even if you think if you happen to think I'm not saying they should think this but if they think Christianity is a bit more likely to be true but if it's still so uncertain you know I think it could be rational to just stay with what's going to really work for you and fit with your community and your identity i don't think God cares that much which which William Lane Craig would would absolutely kill me for saying that that but uh I suppose it matters i suppose it matters if you think you're going to hell if you're not Christian he's got a good answer i was I researched him a lot for this debate we had this week and I discovered he he's got a good answer to the question of what about countries who've never heard of the gospel right and so don't become Christian you know more so in history but even to the present day his answer is well they wouldn't have turned to Jesus anyway because God knows what you're going to do and God set things up that they wouldn't have become Christians anyway so it's okay that they're going to hell yeah anyway he's a great philosopher very bright guy and probably the most influential Christian thinker at the moment so we need to we need to balance things out a little bit that's a tough one i mean that type of like sort of theological determinism raises questions about the value of all those missionaries that have been sent about or then we get into free will and like all sorts of stuff he's got a complex story he does believe in free will he thinks he thinks it's compatible to say you've got free will but God knows what you're going to freely do this is part of what we debated actually I don't think that makes coherent sense but anyway just to answer your question I mean who knows it's partly cultural but I mean this Eastern Orthodox way of mystical tradition makes a lot of sense in my spiritual experiences i think at the moment for me more so than the Hindu stuff I used to believe in for me personally at least and I do love the teaching and character of Jesus i did a talk, recently, i, don't, know if, I, should say, I, did a, talk, recently, at, a, very, very right-wing audience in Oxford on this stuff and I said for those of you who haven't read the Bible Jesus is pretty damn woke i just try to wipe people up but it's a hell of a Molotov cocktail of an opener for that audience you heard a bit of a gasp you know the story of the good Samaritan people don't always appreciate that you know Jesus told that story because he was asked who is my neighbor right and why did he tell a story about a Samaritan because they were the hated ethnic group of his listeners right i said to this audience if he was telling that story today you know the good Samaritan would be I don't know a Muslim immigrant or a trans woman but then I added I thought try and have a bit of going against polarization or maybe if Jesus was talking to a load of liberals maybe the Good Samaritan be wearing a MAGA hat who knows i don't know but you know basically he's saying look the people you hate or the people who are different you know they should be so but that's just like radically light years ahead of its time i mean Tom Holland makes this good case that this the ideas of human dignity which shaped the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement were rooted in these radical ideas of equal human dignity so I do think there's you know there's something very special for me there but at the end of the day these matters are very uncertain i have to ask again forgive me but aside from the beauty of the liinal spaces during the kpuscular hours of dawn and dusk and the beautiful red of a sunset have you experienced anything you would describe as a mystical experience i would say not full-blown the the two terms I like to use, i I, suppose, I, think, a, mystical experience is the more full-on thing but then there's this wonderful term numinous that's a great word to mean this sort of a sense of maybe mini mystical experience mystical light i mean I did psychedelics when I was a teenager and Mhm you know had some very deep experiences i don't know why I didn't sort of in my 20s and 30s but now I've got young kids it's hard to find time to do some psychedelics the 17th dimension or have a 10day meditation retreat anakah Harris is always telling me I've got to do a 10day meditate i wish, I, wish, I, don't know, why, I, didn't actually do that when I had the chance but yeah I mean as I get older actually before I proposed to my wife she didn't know I was going to propose i was talking about like when I retire what do you do when you retire you don't play golf or I want to have a sort of semi- monastic existence you know kind of long periods and she was like why are you telling me this i don't know i just wanted to know she's like [ __ ] what did I sign up for here well I wanted her to know this before I asked her we were in the mountains in Austria and then we went outside and they said "Do you want to marry me?" Anyway but yes so I think I would like to you know maybe the kids are all as I get older you know I don't want to carry on trying to be what am I trying to do i don't know be successful in whatever I'm trying to do for the rest of my This is one thing actually that religion has helped me with the thing you know you never find happiness that way do you like you know it's it's never enough you know you want to sell more books or get more views or get more money or you know so I kind of I have an idea that I want to as I get older slowly lapse into monasticism I don't know maybe a bit better help from some or something but yeah so maybe I'll have more mystical experience at that point but I think at the moment I would say I'm confined to the numminous and to that extent you know it's evidentially it's not that significant you know I'm open to it could be a delusion but I'm choosing thanks to William James' inspiration I'm choosing to trust these numinous experiences and to trust this Christian mystical way of understanding them and to work with them and engage with them and and I'm loving it i'm getting a lot out of it and people think religion is all about the afterlife or something but I've found living in hope of a greater purpose has made me less bothered about my personal success and has just really opened me up a lot more to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer friends family and so on mhm so I want to explain something I said earlier which was related to the number of books on Sufism oh yeah and the reason for that is not a particular interest in Islam although I do think there are interesting aspects of that to explore and if you're interested in Dune the book and not the movies although I thought the movies were very well adapted but they basically stripped all Arabic and Islamic influence from the book like Lisan al-gib the one of the many Arabic phrases the tongue of the unseen right so digging into some of the etmological origins of the words used in Dune adds another layer of fascination to it but the reason for these books is because I enjoy the poetry and I find the poetry to be beautiful and capture for me the I suppose essence of mystical experience which I've been fortunate enough to have myself on a number of occasions incredibly well without using the G-word or other words that I rightly or wrongly have developed somewhat of a mild allergic reaction to right so Christian mystics have some beautiful writing but it tends to be a little heavy on God and Jesus for my and not for my taste it's just that these strong connotations lead my mind to wander when I want to be immersed in the poetry itself and so if we're looking at say Haliza Gapor's relatively new translations of Roomie as an example Mhm or much of the poetry of hes both of which I would recommend i can work with taverns i can work with getting drunk on wine i can work with many of the metaphors that are used the caravan i mean many of these evocative phrases are enough to immerse me in the language and I think what's trying to be transmitted without pulling me into some type of political distraction or childhood experience that subtracts rather from adds to the experience so a lot of it is poetry not all but a lot of it is certainly poetry and then broadly speaking I suppose mystics and I'm sure people would disagree with this but accounts of firthand experience with what they may consider divine these make for fascinating reading for me and certainly if you really take a microscope to the origin stories of a lot of these religions I mean it becomes very plausible that most if not all of them started with direct experience of some type that rhymes with many of the descriptions you would find and the books that I'm looking at on my bookshelves as an example so stoicism can be a little sterile i'd say stoicism for me incredibly helpful incredibly powerful as a tool for reducing suffering but it doesn't to my reading of it give you a whole lot in terms of increasing joy and subtraction alone doesn't add the good so for that I tend to stray from stoicism into epicuranism and different types of mysticism and so on so that's the background that's all absolutely fascinating well I'd love to get some of those recommendations for this super literature and poetry and yeah it sounds that is really working for you and and that's wonderful and yeah I think you're definitely right that the great religions do seem to begin with experiences i mean you know in the Christian case it seemed to be what they called the resurrection seemed to be this explosion of strong experiences that the early Christians had after Jesus had died and you can make that what you will i prefer to think of it as visionary rather than seeing and touching a body but there does seem to have been some historians thing i mean even atheist I mean Bartman is our best atheist Bible scholar will certainly concede that there were these radical experiences by people like Peter and Mary Magdalene that kickstarted the Christian movement so I think you're right it comes back to experience but I mean I share your issues with the connotations of I mean the word Jesus the word God and you know first of all what I'm trying to do is shift things i'm actually in one thing I wrote on this when I had my uh going public as a heretical Christian I wrote this thing for Eon magazine people might be interested in and I borrowed something from another writer who whose name escapes me now rather than using the word Jesus use the Jewish word Yeshua just to kind of just to diffuse it a little bit yeah just because I think of a certain kind of US Christian a certain kind of very distinctive which is not what I'm talking about and not my experience and the word God as well yeah well what do you think I should use for God in this book oh that's a tough one should I just talk about the transcendent actually do you know William James used the term the more with a capital M i like that i like that or the divine or Yeah I don't know so I'm still wrestling with divine's tricky too i like the more do you call God a he you know I'm going to get a bunch of angry posts on social media i have nothing I don't intrinsically I don't have anything against on some fundamental level the word God or anything with Jesus either it's just that oftenimes God is not defined well enough to justify the life or death debates and fighting that happens around the term if that makes sense and there are a lot of words that cause trouble in life if not defined i should also just qualify when I mentioned the direct experience i was not referring to necessarily the stories in the Bible but also the possibility that for instance the acacia tree is prevalent in parts of the Middle East the root bark of which it might be the leaves actually somebody could correct me here i would be mixing things up contain DMT NDMT and then also the prevalence of Syrian RU which contains monomine oxidase inhibitors what else is a combination of those two things iawaska as an example so the point being to render the N&DMT bioactive it is entirely possible that people in the ancient world as people and animals by the way have figured out that certain psychoactives can be sort of orally bioavailable this comes back to Brian Murescu and some of his writing if people want to explore that but it's definitely a clear and present topic on my mind you know the place of religion and the seemingly I mean people might come after me for this also but like evolved instinct for something resembling religion I don't know if it's functional if it's vestigial but could be that and this would be my position I don't think humans are unique at all in being conscious but I do think we may be unique in our awareness of mortality and ultimate death and that presents quite a quandry and religion offers some at the very least salve for that anyway that isn't a very pointed question it's more of a a rambling but no yeah I mean fascinating possibilities the role of psychedelic substances in formation of religion and you know I would say that wouldn't undermine it right I think that doesn't mean these experiences are delusions or you know and I've got hope I think as as we have engaged more with psychedelics and there is more of an openness actually you know I mean I wrote this book I modestly titled why the purpose of the universe a similar book was written more than 10 years ago 15 years ago nearly by the uh great philosopher Thomas Nagel yes Mr bat called Mind and Cosmos and he got absolutely destroyed in reviews people saying "Oh he's he's lost his mind." Whereas now this sounds like I'm boasting i Thomas Naggler's a better philosopher than me but I'm not saying this is a better book but it had a much warmer reception it got a five-star review in Popular Science magazine i'm honestly not saying this to boast it's a sign of cultural change most of the reviews said "I don't agree with this but it was a good book." But anyway I think that's a real sign of that there's a greater openness to some of these things that are going it's certainly a greater openness to spirit i think new atheism is a bit p now isn't it and I think there's a great openness to spirituality i suppose I'm exploring whether that can connect with traditional religion in a very uncertain mildly heretical way and whether for some people could get something out of that and I'm just trying out that option I suppose if you like but yeah I I think something interesting seems to be happening I think for sure and I remember a few years ago I was at an event and the topic of the table we were organized into small groups for every dinner and you would have set topics and somebody would try to facilitate the said topic or question and The topic was something along the lines of what are your predictions for the next 3 to 5 years this was I guess two or three years ago and one of the people at my table was one of the strongest figures biggest figures in the evangelical Christian movement in the United States and we all had a fantastic conversation i ended up going first or second and my answer was I think there's going to be an explosion of interest in religions that have seen an exodus on some level over the last few decades and there's also going to be a proliferation of new religions new churches to meet the hard to verbalize needs of a populace who is struggling with pervasive and acute loneliness right and that the ability to absorb the kind of mass communication through social media and the separate the signal from the noise from a sort of scientific like rational materialist worldview is going to become so hard i'm not saying it's not a worthwhile objective but so hard and really impossible for the vast majority of people who are not trained to filter through those things and don't have firsthand access to scientists that there will be for all of those reasons and more a return to religion and if you look at also then adding the accelerant of psychedelics to that which I have very mixed views on these days by the way which is just to say like the elucinian mystery is okay if you have a handful of people after a long time are inducted into consuming some derivative of urgot which would be similar to say LSD that's one thing but when you have the potential of tens of thousands hundreds of thousands millions of people taking these substances nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of humankind so we'll see what type of mix blessing that is but it's been fascinating to see how many new churches have been established in the US which on some level I think are largely created to provide constitutional protection if you are using psychedelics as a sacrament right it's a legal protection but how you know once the horses are out of the barn and people have formed these churches and religions they actually become interesting in and of themselves as religions even without the added psychedelic sacraments since you see say former conservative Mormons in Utah splintering off and creating religions that incorporate both Christianity and psychedelic use and I mean there's some itch that these things whether the sort of Abrahamic traditional religions or the newer religions scratch that is it's difficult to put a finger on but it's also pretty hard to refute it seems to me i don't know anyway yeah well I don't know what's going to happen i mean there's been an increase in paganism here and you know my wife was thinking about my wife's not religious you know I take the kids to church on my own and she was thinking of exploring wicker at some point I would have loved to say in church you know oh where's your wife say oh she's a witch so but um yeah I don't know I just I think spirituality is important and I think more and more people are appreciating that there's a role for something that structured that brings people together you know there are powerful forces in the world maybe powerful forces showing hatred division you know something at grassroots that brings people together connects them to something greater i suppose that's what I believe in and that's what I would like to encourage i'm trying one way of doing that engaging in a slightly different way with the traditional religions but you know I'm excited if other people are trying different things and um let's see where it goes let's see where it goes indeed two last questions these are pretty quick ones I suspect this is the billboard question oh yeah so if you could put anything on a billboard metaphorically speaking to get it in front of millions hundreds of millions of people take your pick can't be anything commercial of course but it could be a quote an image doesn't need to be your quote anything at all something you'd want to convey to a lot of people do you have any thoughts for what you would put on it as always I'm torn between the sort of the more intellectual things the drier things all the things to do with kind of meaning you can do a grab bag you can give a few options if you like i mean on the former I suppose I'm more passion about the importance of philosophy and we need to sometimes you can't just do experiments sometimes you need to make judgment calls but that's kind of boring and dry i mean I suppose in terms of more meaning of existence kind of things I think touching on what we said earlier I suppose I think one of the things I feel I've learned as I've got older is the importance of trying to not start from what do I want what's going to make me successful to try and orientate yourself to what contribution can I make you know how can I make the world a slightly better place because I think if your fundamental life goal is making me more successful you know that's not going to end well you know it's never enough it never you know I mean I think I'm kind of lucky that I'm not that bothered about money i'm not into power really but I do have a bit of an ego do you know what, I, mean, i, do, want, to, be respected philosophers but that it's never enough right you're always sort of jealous of someone who's doing better so I think the more one can try and it's not easy right to just continually orient your life to reality outside of yourself and just trying to make a contribution that's what I do in prayer actually i pray late last thing at night and meditate first thing in the morning talking to God at night listening to God in the morning and you know I think in prayer I just orientate myself to sort of try and it never never works perfectly but try and make your life goal making some kind of contribution and I find that just takes the pressure off you for sure and does really just free you up to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer so yeah so I suppose remind me I was trying to think you talking about billboards you saying about this in before we get and I I was thinking it made me think of these signs you used to have in the war saying don't ask what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country you know that's in a sort of spirit of nationalist war effort that's not I'm getting at something like don't ask what do I want don't start from what do I want start from you know how can I contribute and I I sort of think happiness flows from that so something like that a bit more i need an editor don't I so it's sharpened up a bit we'll be on the billboard we'll take it to Madison Avenue we'll figure it out and uh Philip where are the best places for people to find you is it philip gooffy.com is that the best place to point people yeah that's my website that I try and update regularly he's got academic stuff and um popular articles and lots of videos and complete archive of the media stuff I've done that yeah I try to keep up to date i spend too much time arguing on well it used to be X and then all the liberals have gone to blue sky and I'm doing both i kind of worry about this bit of a divided community so I'm I'm arguing on both and it's interesting the different reactions you get on but yeah I spent too much time arguing on that's been really useful actually for learning this thing you know I think when my book first came out and I was on sort of Joe Rogan and stuff and I I didn't really know how to I think he didn't know what the hell I was talking about it's like my fault part of what's helped me communicate with a general audience I think is arguing with ordinary people on X and Blue Sky and yeah so if you want to have an argument I get I can't keep up with it these days but have an argument with me there if you want to I have a substack I just started I try and do you know something every month on a substack but yeah that's about it really if you want to pick a fight and have an argument with Philip then I suppose X is the best gladatorial arena for that oh the books Galileo's error and why check them Oh they're a great read I hear and as far as the our great place to argue goes the dose makes the poison folks so just be careful with your dosing philip this has been so fun thank you for taking the time to have such a wide-ranging conversation i really appreciate it and took a bunch of notes for myself i'll be revisiting the show notes when they are put together and is there anything else you'd like to say or point people to any formal complaints you'd like to lodge publicly anything at all you'd like to add before we wind to a close just to say thank you i think you're right it has been a wonderful We had a good session on the pansychism and a good session on the religion stuff and I've learned a lot actually we about Sufism and lots of Yeah I've got a lot of things I want to follow up there that going to be very useful for this book i've just started that hopefully I'll write if I can spend less time arguing on X phip_goff but yeah thanks so much absolutely let's stay in touch yeah thanks Philip and for everybody listening as usual we will have show notes with links to everything we discussed and probably more at tim.blog/mpodcast and until next time be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself thanks for tuning in

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Video Rn0IT25cRhs"?

Tim Ferriss (Host), Philip Goff (Guest).

What is "Video Rn0IT25cRhs" about?

In this episode, philosopher Philip Goff explains panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental feature of reality present even in its most basic building blocks like electrons and quarks, and reflects on why the once-ridiculed idea has moved into mainstream academic philosophy. Goff connects its appeal to people's psychedelic and mystical experiences of a living presence in all…

What is mentioned in this Unknown Channel episode?

46 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Why: The Purpose of the Universe, AJ Jacobs, Bertrand Russell, Brian Muraresku, Christof Koch, Dale Allison. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Video Rn0IT25cRhs"?

The transcript transcript is about 20,923 words.

More from Unknown Channel

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated June 22, 2025.