McGilchrist: I think I’d call myself a panpsychist, so can you explain why this is an important approach to the idea of consciousness.
Goff: Very roughly, panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the physical universe. So it’s a question for physics — what the fundamental building blocks are — but for the sake of argument let’s say they’re particles like electrons and quarks. Panpsychists think those fundamental particles have very rudimentary forms of conscious experience, and that the very complex consciousness of the human or animal brain is somehow built up from these simpler forms right at the base of reality.
For decades, we’ve been trying to explain consciousness in terms of physical processes in the brain — and that has gone precisely nowhere. It’s not just that we don’t have the full story yet, we haven’t managed to explain a single experience in terms of patterns of neural firings.
I like to give the analogy of Copernicus. For centuries, people started from the assumption that the Earth was in the centre of the universe, and tried to understand astronomical observations on that basis. But it couldn’t be done. Then Copernicus sweeps all that away: by showing that the sun, not the Earth, is the centre of the universe. I feel that way about consciousness. If you turn our assumptions upside down, if you start from consciousness being foundational, then try to make sense of physical reality emerging from that, it suddenly all makes sense.
McGilchrist: I agree that our attempts to explain consciousness as something mysteriously secreted by matter have failed. You said that putting together these particles somehow results in higher levels of consciousness. Can you gloss that a little bit?
Goff: People get a bit confused by it, because they’re thinking about human consciousness, which is incredibly rich and sophisticated, the result of millions of years of evolution. But consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes. The consciousness of a sheep is much simpler. The consciousness of a snail, if a snail has experience, is simpler still. Do bed bugs have experience? And, as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. So the panpsychist’s view is that this keeps going down to the basics, the fundamental particles having ludicrously simple forms of experience to reflect their very simple physical nature. So it’s not like the electrons are thinking or feeling existential angst. It’s just that consciousness is a highly evolved form of what fills the universe.
McGilchrist: I wouldn’t want to dismiss the idea of AI consciousness. But I think we ought to be very aware of the fallacious reasoning that allows us to liken things to consciousness. I think the word “experience” is really the best. The term comes from “experiere“, which suggests a degree of danger. So the “peri” bit is cognate with “peril” in English and “gefahr” in German. They both come from the same Proto-Indo-European roots. The idea, I think, is that experience is fundamentally dangerous, but also that you can’t be certain of anything. I sometimes say the only thing that’s certainly true is that people who say that things are certain are certainly wrong. In a way, I can’t quite avoid this blanket term. But experience is something that is threaded through, and if one uses that instead of the word “consciousness”, maybe that helps.
Goff: I think it’s unfortunate that we’re stuck with this word “consciousness” because people always think of it as something very sophisticated, like awareness of your own existence. I don’t think a rabbit can do that, but I do think a rabbit has experiences. It feels pain, it feels hot, it feels cold. This is what scientists and philosophers are interested in. We know a lot about the basic chemistry, how chemical signals are sent, how neurons fire. But where does experience come from? Well, nothing in the neuroscientific story of the brain seems to have anything to do with feelings and experiences. If aliens came from another planet and looked in our brains they wouldn’t know if we were conscious, just from the outside, in the same way we struggle to know if fish are conscious.
McGilchrist: I bet they are. The difficult thing is that we feel we have to explain consciousness. That’s different from accepting its existence. Now, it does seem to me extraordinary that there are presumably intelligent people occupying university chairs in philosophy who actually deny the existence of consciousness. To do that at all, they have to be conscious. For it to be an illusion, it must necessarily be an illusion in consciousness. So the thing that we should be concentrating on is understanding: what the hell is matter? Why did we decide that it was primary? I mean, very obviously, no human being can deny having a knowing consciousness, but we don’t really know what matter is. Nobody has ever seen or experienced it. We’ve only had experiences in consciousness of things that we describe as material.
Goff: The contemporary panpsychist community draws inspiration from the work of Bertrand Russell. I think of him as the Darwin of consciousness. His central insight is that physics is just pure mathematical structure. Much later, Stephen Hawking said that physics doesn’t tell us what “breathes fire” into the equations. Physics doesn’t really care what’s going on at the base of reality. All it cares about is that there’s the right mathematical structure. Panpsychists exploit this: our hypothesis is that very simple conscious entities, interacting in predictable ways, are at the base of reality. Through these interactions, they make certain structures, ultimately what we call physics. In other words, physics emerges from this underlying story about consciousness. I don’t think we can get consciousness out of physics but certain members of the philosophical community have become very angry at panpsychism being taken more seriously.
McGilchrist: Actually, my impression is that there are many people in academic philosophy who do now espouse panpsychism. It’s become almost commonplace and not at all heretical.
Goff: Absolutely.
McGilchrist: I’d like to reflect on the idea of complexity, because it always strikes me as something like a miracle. We get so complex and it’s not conscious — and then suddenly you reach the stage where, by a miracle, there is consciousness. I don’t think this is likely, and there are various reasons why complexity in itself cannot be the cause of consciousness. If you want to retain the idea of complexity, the way I’d do it is by talking about the system as a whole, and ultimately the whole universe. I think, indeed, that the whole universe is conscious, and that consciousness is an ontological primitive. You can’t get behind it and find something that causes it, and that is in keeping with the traditions of many cultures, particularly in the east, that consciousness is something primary.
It’s very difficult for us to imagine that something like a stone is conscious. But what would you say to the idea that it is part of a bigger conscious system? In other words, panpsychism can mean two things: either that psyche is in everything, or everything is in psyche. My way of thinking of it is that everything is in psyche and partakes of its nature. Matter, for its part, is a form of psyche that provides two very important elements if the universe is to be creative. The simplest thing that you can observe about the universe is that it’s creative. And for that creativity, you need two things that matter gives: resistance and persistence. Without resistance, my thoughts can go anywhere; there’s no form, there’s nothing to get purchase on. And without persistence, they come and go, but there is nothing that can take part in the unfolding of the panoply of the cosmos. So I see matter as a kind of phase of consciousness, and vital given persistence and resistance. What do you feel about that?
Goff: It’s the job of physicists to tell us what the “fundamental things” are, and we tend to think of them as particles, little billiard balls. But actually, many theoretical physicists are inclined to think that universe-wide fields are those fundamental things. And if you combine that with panpsychism, we reach what’s sometimes called cosmo-psychism. Meaning? The fundamental thing is the conscious universe. This gets us on to the other thing I wanted to ask you about: God. If the universe is in some sense conscious, would that be God? Is there any connection to God? Or are these just entirely different?
McGilchrist: No, I don’t think they’re entirely different. When I was writing The Matter with Things, which is an unconscionably long book, I knew I was going to talk about the sacred. I was having conversations with various philosophers who were reading the book as I was writing it, and they almost all said: “Please don’t include this chapter on the sacred, because you’ve done some good philosophical work here that deserves to be read. But if you talk about the sacred, nobody will take you seriously anymore.” I have a cussed streak in me, so I decided to do it anyway. I expected to get a little flack from atheists, but in fact didn’t get any. What I have got is flack from Christians who asked why I didn’t talk more about their religion.
I can see what they’re getting at. But I didn’t want to appear to be proselytising for a particular faith, though I happen to think that the mythos of Christianity is the deepest and richest of any religion in the world. I also didn’t want to seem to be going towards a particular preconceived idea of God. But I did want to take very seriously the idea of the divine. You probably know that I have written a great deal about the difference between the two brain hemispheres. The important thing is not to accept the left hemisphere’s “version” of God: which must be something that is certain, demonstrable, reproducible. It is like the left hemisphere itself. This God has to be a controlling God, a divine engineer who winds up the machine, all this awful 18th century stuff. Deism, in other words. I don’t see God as remotely like that, and I wanted to get that out of the way fairly early on. What do you think?
Goff: One thing that drew me back to religion was discovering the mystical traditions that are found in all the Abrahamic faiths. For example, there is much less emphasis on sin in the Eastern Orthodox Church. God isn’t interested in finding someone to punish for our sins. That was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. That has never been part of the Eastern tradition. The fundamental drive in the Eastern tradition, the fundamental purpose of existence, is for God and the universe to become one. So linking back to the cosmo-psychist view, I think this fits quite well with a conscious universe. If your worldview is that what’s at the base of reality is what physics talks about, then it’s very hard to make sense of God and the universe becoming one.
McGilchrist: I find there’s a parallel between what I think we both understand about psyche and panpsychism, and my view about God, which is effectively panentheistic. Many Christians are panentheists. The idea of panentheism is distinct from pantheism, which is the idea that the sum of everything is God, and God is just everything that exists. This is very much like my feeling about the pervasive psyche, and it may be no coincidence that it has that structure. I take the view that everything is in process. Everything is becoming nothing is final, and that even God, in a sense, is discovering the potential within him. I have to use the word “him” because “it” is no good.
Everything that exists, that we can know and experience, exists in the relationship between an individual consciousness and something other. Each alters the other, each has an effect on the other, and I’ve come to see that everything is resonant and interactive and coming into being between two entities. That “twoness” is important, but they are also one. There’s not just the objective and the subjective in a dualistic way. They are distinguishable, but not wholly distinct or divided, and that’s a distinction we’re not used to making in the modern world. We tend to think that if we can make a distinction, it implies a division. But it doesn’t. And what is apparently distinct goes through phases of being more united and then more unpacked.
Goethe has this wonderful saying that dividing the united, uniting the divided, is the whole work of nature, and I see this as a very important reciprocal motion. Now, what this is leading up to is a Whiteheadian view of God, and that they’re engaged in a kind of cosmic dance.
Intuition and imagination are vital for our being able to understand anything, and understanding is much more than an explanation. An explanation is getting stuck in a causative mode. But I’m not saying that anything causes anything. I’m not saying that consciousness is caused by or causes anything. I think consciousness exists — and I think God exists too.
God never ordained the details of anything, just the general direction in which things are going, and because it has freedom in it, things that look pretty grim do turn up. But one thing about evolution is that, generally speaking, when people want to talk about how ghastly nature is, they have to go down to the Newman wasp or the North American shrew. But, generally speaking, as evolution has gone further, it has produced something rather more insightful into the nature of the universe: namely ourselves. And while we are capable of the greatest evil, that’s because we’re capable of great good. If it’s about winning the race to survive, then the best key to surviving a long time is never to have been alive. If you’re a rock, you persist for eons, whereas a living thing is fragile. And what’s more, over the course of evolution, we’ve become more short-lived. At the base of the ocean, there are examples of very primitive creatures called Actinobacteria, single examples of which are a million years old. They do very well on that particular account. So why spend so much energy kicking against entropy to produce these complex beings?
This divine essence requires a resonant relationship in which its goodness, beauty and truth are perceived, and in which the beauty and goodness and truth are further developed by the lives of those people who perceive it. And I think that is what we are here for, if you like: to amplify, to help to flourish things that are good, beautiful and true. A North American shrew, with all respect to it, can’t do any of these things. And that is why we are here. That is why we can suffer, but it’s also why we can do immense good. We are creative, spiritual beings.
Frankly, we don’t know what’s possible in this cosmos and in life. We cheer ourselves up: “Just a few more experiments, we’ll understand everything”. But actually, the more sophisticated our understanding, the more we realise how little we actually know. So I’m not prepared to be dogmatic.
Goff: We can agree on that.
McGilchrist: We can agree on that.
