 give rise to the subjective experience of the conscious mind experiencing the world. As this philosopher, David Chalmers, later wrote, we know consciousness far more intimately than we know the rest of the world, but we understand the rest of the world far better than we understand consciousness. In his play, The Hard Problem, Tom Starford expands Chalmers' question to such matters as why something like meaning or morality exists, what might be called even harder hard problems. The play The Hard Problem follows the fortunes of Hillary, a young psychologist working at the fictitious Kroll Institute for Brain Science, where she attempts to find scientific evidence to disprove theories such as those believed by her sometimes lover, a materialist psychologist named Spike, who believes that competition is the natural order of things, that altruism is always self-interest, and that the mind is nothing more than a computational result of three pounds of gray matter wired up like the London Underground with 86 billion stations and 300 trillion connections hardwired for me first. So now I'd like to introduce our panelists. Tonight's conversation will be moderated by Elizabeth Camp. Liz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Gives me time to remember to switch pages. She received her PhD at Berkeley and then spent three years with the Harvard Society of Fellows. She spent seven years teaching at the University of Pennsylvania before accepting her current appointment at Rutgers. David Chalmers is Professor of Philosophy at New York University and the Australian National University. As I mentioned before, he coined the expression The Hard Problem, which he then expanded in his book The Conscious Mind in Search of a Fundamental Theory and in Other Writing. And finally, something I've always wanted to say, a man who needs no introduction, but one of the most important writers, playwrights in the English language today, Tom Stoppard. At the end of the conversation, we will open the floor for a short question and answer period in order that everyone here and online can hear all of the questions. We're going to ask you to queue up at one of those microphones in the aisles there rather than force Liz and everyone to try and catch hands waving around in this thing. But with that, I will now hand this microphone off to Elizabeth Camp. So as Walter said, we're discussing the hard problem both in the form of Tom's new play and in the form of the larger, the hard problem itself with quotation marks and without quotation marks. So I thought a way of starting would be just to ask what is the hard problem supposed to be and what makes it especially hard. Do you think, I mean, there are hard problems. There's rocket science, right? There's, you know, people say it isn't really hard. So what makes a hard problem, a hard problem, what makes it attractive to you as someone, as something worth exploring in this kind of format? All right. I'm not going to, I'm going to sort of begin by derailing. But just see me, that we should take the phrase as being a phrase in philosophy and also a phrase in theater. And it would actually help me if it was OK with you guys. If David actually told us what it meant in his world. And then I'll explain why my play has that title. Is that OK with you? Yes. Yeah, the hard problem, as I understand it, is the problem of how do objective physical processes in the brain give rise to the subjective experience of the mind and the world? So neuroscience is telling us a lot about the brain and two very first approximation that's suggesting we're very, very, the brain is a very complicated computer, which gets certain inputs, processes them, processes them with its 100 billion neurons, calculates, decides, and then issues in some output. And when it comes to the science of behavior, which is what a lot of neuroscience has been doing, it's getting quite successful. But that's all still objective and in a way mechanical. But we all know that there's more than behavior to the human being and there's more than just processes. There's consciousness. There's what it's like from the inside. Right now I'm sitting here on this stage with visual experience of the two of you and an audience here, hearing my own voice, feeling my own body, the heat of these lights. It all adds up to kind of a giant movie playing in my memories. Yeah, a little bit of nerves sitting here talking about talking on this stage with Tom Stoppe out of all people. But this is all part of this big subjective inner movie. And the question is, why is there subjectivity at all? Why aren't I just a giant computer going on processing and behaving? But in the dark, as it were, without any subjective experience. And right now, as far as I can tell, nobody in neuroscience or the sciences has any kind of a conclusive theory of why this thing, consciousness, should exist at all. So this is a focus on, so your focus is actually on phenomenal consciousness or experience, right? Your characters grapple with that and with a whole host of other sort of related questions. I came upon the phrase through David, because the phrase then, like a dick, and you know it. For discovering the problem, it's true though that the history is really, in some ways, surprisingly recent. I mean, it's rather hard to find this problem in the ancient Greeks. Most problems in philosophy can find in the ancient Greeks, why not? The problem of consciousness. But René Descartes, in the 17th century, who had a version of the problem, got rid of Leibniz in the 18th century. Had started really just bringing towards the problem of how is it that these objective processes, he talked about the mill. The brain looks like it could be like a windmill. Where in this windmill do you find the mind? It's probably not until the 19th century though, that people like Thomas Huxley really come up with, Thomas Huxley says, the problem of how the brain produces consciousness, it's as mysterious as how the gin appeared when 11 rubbed his lap. That's a beautiful statement of the problem. I wouldn't claim to have advanced on that one. Thank you. I mean, I do take the strands going back to antiquity. And yet the burden of my curiosity or my posseman was actually that it seemed to be a curiously neglected area when it became something that you got deeply interested in. There was a famous anecdote about somebody being said, yeah, you can get interested in consciousness, but get tenure first. And that aphorism originated around about the time that you got really interested in this. So my question wasn't entirely a red herring. My play is about somebody who doesn't know the phrase, the hard problem, until somebody explains it to her on page, you know, 12 or something. But she does have a problem, which I'll try and explain briefly. And then perhaps you can see why the three of us can participate in this and then diagram with this phrase on it, you know, essentially. She's somebody who is disturbed, I mean, worried, unhappy, frustrated, by a sense that the normal attempts to explain the difference between right and wrong and the foundation of moral laws and so forth, she's frustrated by the fact that these explanations seem to her to be incomplete, that you don't actually have a sense that there is a truly objective criterion for right and wrong, unless it's true for those people who believe in God. She has an emotional reason in the play for saying her prayers. And a colleague in a lot of positive ways says, you believe in God? And she says, well, I have to, because she's made an arrangement with herself. And what's, I guess, I have to say, this is just a parenthesis. You have no idea how thrilled I was to be told that David Charm was going to show up here and how utterly terrified I was when I was told that he and I would be on the same stage talking as though we were equals. If we were talking about dramaturgy, I'd probably do fine. But in philosophy and every possible branch of science, I'm going cautiously. And it's a good moment to ask as your philosopher, aren't you? You're flanked. Why is philosophy so deeply occupied with scientific explanations? Should we swap places? Not yet. You've made a bargain first and now you've got to stop. No, I'll talk about the play. Yeah. Is my premise wrong? I think that as, I don't know how this has happened, but I think that as a general characterization of, so I think a lot of Dave's work, a lot of my own work, lots of philosophers work, takes, in a way, takes on as its model, something like a scientific kind of mode of explanation or mode. But it's not philosophy, philosophy is not the same as science. And so there are, yeah, there are ways in which we have a freedom and precisely are defined in contrast to scientific explanation. It's worth noting that a whole lot of, almost all of science, in fact, started as philosophy. Isaac Newton called himself a natural philosopher. And then what gradually happens over time is bits of philosophy get carved out to become their own sciences. Roughly, once people come up with a methodology for studying them that makes them rigorous enough that you can get results that people agree about. Right. So what's left, the really hard questions that people are still disagreeing about after all these centuries, and hence the problem of consciousness is right now sitting right at that uneasy boundary between philosophy and science. But some people think we're now bringing it under control scientifically and other people are thinking, you know, maybe it's still on this side of the fence. Let me add two things that one is psychology is one of the later of those sort of peelings off, precisely for this reason. And as you said, consciousness is sort of at the verge of being peeled off. People, there are neuroscientists and other psychologists and cognoscientists who study and take seriously the question of phenomenal consciousness. But some of these other questions that your characters are grappling with that the main character in particular is concerned with are still more proprietary to philosophy. Free will, morality, spirituality and faith. So I'm in this, yeah, God. I'm in this odd kind of two step maneuver, speaking on behalf of my heroine who is in a psychology department in the play. The two step thing is this, that in the first place she believes that the notion of morality itself, the concept of morality, the concept of good and the opposite and so on, is unintelligible without consciousness in the first place. And the second place, the pursuit of trying to explain consciousness had resolved into the study of correlations between brain activity and behavior. As though, as one could map brain activity on a finer and finer scale, every, on every instance, both in the sense of moment to moment instances or general behavior patterns, that they could be related to something visible, well, sometimes actually visible but certainly ascertainable through electrodes. And this pursuit, you can correct me, I think it hit the buffers. It sort of, to change the metaphor, it sort of ran into the sands. And I haven't done really good homework for you, David. But I think that you're kind of conceding that latterly by saying that what is really needed now is a radical new idea. Perhaps you've got a couple you could mention. I mean, it's interesting that psychology actually got started in the mid-19th century as a science of consciousness. And they were finding correlations not between the brain and behavior, but between physical processes inside and outside the brain and states of consciousness. And a lot of this was done through introspection. Then early in the 20th century, people came along. The behaviorist movement got started. And they basically took the attitude that all this introspection, all this consciousness was too subjective. Science has to be objective. Consciousness is subjective, so science doesn't really have moved, have room for consciousness. And they turned psychology for a long time into the science of behavior. But then, so it was really just one thing that did happen around fairly recently around the 1990s with psychologists and neuroscientists. Scientists finally started to really take consciousness seriously as a topic again. I mean, philosophers had been interested in it all the time, but at least sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground. But suddenly, sometimes in the 1990s, people thought, OK, we're ready for consciousness again. At least a few people did. I mean, one shouldn't overstate it. Scientists are still connecting brain processes and behavior and only willing to speculate about consciousness after many drinks late at night in the bar. But it is happening. And people are beginning to talk about it now, and they're all coming together. But I think one thing we are recognizing is that to actually, well, it turns out, actually, you can have a conservative science of consciousness if you're willing to leave it at the level of correlations. This brain process, this state of consciousness. And that's actually a lot of what's going on in the science right now. They say, for now, it's just going to be brain pain, brain, this brain area, this kind of experience of color, this brain area, this experience of happiness. But eventually, we want more than correlations. We want explanations. How on earth could you explain why there is pain and happiness and experience of color and all of that in the first place? And that's really where the crazy ideas start to come in. And there's a point in your play where the characters just enumerate these and dismiss these and quick fire one at a time. Panpsychism, everything is conscious. Consciousness is quantum mechanical. Consciousness is functional, and even a thermostat is conscious. And I'm missing one. And they say, all of these ideas are crazy. And I think one thing we're learning, though, is you need. But in fact, how crazy are they? Well, my stand is for craziness have gradually evolved over time. Face it, people, we live in a crazy world. The world is weird. Quantum mechanics tells us the world is very weird. So I'm prepared to tolerate some pretty weird hypotheses. For example, that consciousness is present at a fundamental level of nature, like space and time and math. Is as far as radical ideas go, is God too radical for you? Yeah, so this is when your character writes a paper called, is God the last man standing? And I think her reasoning is, well, okay, probability of God, the God hypothesis is not terribly high, but it's no lower than all these other hypotheses. So therefore, psychologically equivalent, we might as well consider God. I mean, I might have some philosophical issues for the argument that she makes right there. Can I interject one? So one thing that you might say, I don't know, is so it's crazy and then there's crazy, or there's unexpected or radical and there's non-scientific. So what, and I feel like some people would say panpsychism, we prefer not, but if we've got to go there, we're gonna go there. Multiverses, you know, wouldn't have thought it, but that's gonna help, I guess we'll go there. God, that's a different kind of, that's an ultimately non-scientific explanation. It's a supranational explanation. Right, and therefore, and sometimes spooky in a way that panpsychism understood as consciousness at a fundamental level might not be. I wonder if, I was curious about both of you, what you would think about, is there a difference there between some, is it mere radicalness all that makes the difference or are there some constraints, some kinds of explanation which allow something to be still a scientific explanation even if it's wild and unexpected and, you know. Okay, can I just very briefly come to the defense of my sort of stalking horse character? Basically, what was being said was that an idea like consciousness being universal, so that every molecule is in some sense potentially conscious, and that is true of not merely the sunflowers, but ashtrays, chairs, bacteria. I mean, literally the universe was, as it were, conscious. And what she's saying is that there are people who espouse this, and take it seriously, but it actually is undemonstrable. And that's an absolute, you know, the existence of God is undemonstrable. So what she's saying is that to espouse either requires precisely an equivalent psychological embrace, if you like, or acceptance. I don't think that's, I don't think that's, a disreputable proposition. Maybe there's a small disinality here. It's true that consciousness in other people is, as you say, undemonstrable. I can't prove that you're conscious, or that Liz is conscious, or that anybody else here is conscious, because all I can see from the outside is your behavior. It could be that all that is mere behavior and you're just a hollow shell on the inside. But I know that I'm conscious. That's the one thing that I'm certain of. Yes. As Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, I'm conscious. I know that's the one thing I'm certain of, and therefore I'm certain of my own existence. So we know that consciousness, the phenomenon, exists. Yes. At least one case, and needs an explanation. My case for me, and I presume your case for you. Yes, yes. God, on the other hand, as far as I'm concerned, it's a hypothesis. Yes. That people bring in to explain various things in the world, and I can ask the question, well, what really does it explain? And, you know, maybe there are various things that people out there think that God might explain, but does God really help in explaining consciousness? Well, God would have to be conscious, I presume, in the first place. So it's kind of, for me, at least in this domain, God just kind of pushes the question back and bringing God in doesn't actually help. Whereas it turns out the hypothesis there's consciousness at the fundamental level of the universe, although as you say, unprovable, is one which might actually help us in explaining the phenomenon by coming up with a set of scientific laws, the fundamental laws of consciousness, which might then help explain why it exists in me, in you, and Liz. So that's really the, to me, I mean, the science is standard as one of something like proof or falsification or demonstrability. For a philosopher, it's a looser standard. It's something like, does this help in explaining the phenomenon? Maybe your character could convince me that God helps in explaining the phenomenon, but I'm not convinced yet. Are you convinced that the effort must be made, that consciousness demands explanation? It might be a brute fact in nature, which in fact has no, that it doesn't consist of other facts which you can, as it were, prize apart. It just is like gravity or something. There are brute facts in nature and standard scientific theories take space time, space and time and masses, fundamental properties of the world. They try and explain in terms of anything more basic, but then they don't give up and say we can't theorize about them because they come up with wonderful theories of these things in terms of the fundamental laws, the government laws of gravity or quantum mechanics or the unified theory that will unify all of these things. So actually my attitude to consciousness is very much like the scientist's attitude towards space. I think that it is in some sense a brute fact, one of the basic constituents of nature, not to be reduced to anything more basic, but I would like to think we can still have a science of it. Find the fundamental laws, the government consciousness and connect it to everything else. I mean physicists like to say we want to come up with fundamental laws in physics so simple we could write them on the front of a T-shirt. I'd like to come up with the fundamental laws of consciousness so simple we could write them on the front of a T-shirt. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Mm-mm. Hey, well, consciousness is a warm puppy, you mean? So puppy, use that to, so you are mostly focused on, this blue and pain. Another kind of consciousness, another aspects of consciousness that include feelings of hope and that your characters sometimes grapple with and wonder how easily explained they are, feelings of sorrow or hope, emotionally tinged feelings. And these seem like they're more on the way toward explaining moral response. They're more engaged with moral response. Maybe they have something more to do with sensitivity to moral reality. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, you know, so it's really a warm puppy, right? Yeah, but the thing is, it's all part of the same spaghetti I know, but just before that strand gets forgotten. What is sort of disappointing in a Darwinian, the conception of a Darwinian evolution of moral rules, what is disappointing in that for Hillary in the play is that is not really an objective. There's no Archimedean place to stand like Archimedes levering the earth. There's no way to stand where you can actually be outside this in order to define it. It's just something that biology gives you as a legacy of some kind. And what she's basically saying is that unless there is an overall moral intelligence of some nature, then we are grading our own homework. We're giving ourselves our grade morally. And I can completely sympathize with somebody who would like to believe that her choice of behavior where she chooses between what she conceives to be good behavior and contrary wise, I completely sympathize with somebody who would like some, as it were, authentication of that choice. And you, David, maybe, I don't know, maybe you would say, well, obviously that's why God had to be invented. You've just explained why the invention had to emerge as a kind of, yeah, as an emergent phenomenon from the sense of incompletion. I feel really slightly ashamed of myself for shoving this poor woman in front of me, saying, this is all about Hillary, but of course, I can't actually write her without having a severe degree of empathy. So let me ask both of you, just as a way of sort of pushing a little bit harder on that. So do you think that you could have a creature, somebody, a non-zombie, somebody, a being who experiences red and yellow and pain even, but is morally inert? So has... This is interesting. It does seem to me there are these two animating ideas in Tom's play, really the problem of consciousness and the problem of morality. And in both cases, you wanna be pointing at some limitations of science. Neuroscience seems to be having a hard time explaining consciousness. Evolutionary biology seems to be having a hard time explaining morality. And in both cases, that pushes you back to God, or your character back to God is the thing which is gonna maybe provide that explanation. I think we can argue about whether how much God helped in either case, but I also have the sense that you see them as kind of two aspects of the same problem, whereas I might be inclined to say, okay, there's two different problems. Both of them, very hard here. And so this is one way to get at the question, what is the link between, say, consciousness and morality? I'd be inclined to think there could be a highly conscious being who's nonetheless completely immoral, you know, the pure hedonist who pursues their own pleasure over everything else in the world. And I take it they could be as conscious in some sense as anyone, but enormously self-centered and enormously immoral. Yeah, but that's not a contradiction. You can decide to be hedonistic or self-denying. But you're still, as it were, operating out of something that we recognize as being a choice of some kind. And what I'm saying is that it's probably not a good thing if people who are out for themselves believe that they are justified by biology. You know, this is the thing about there being no Archimedean place to stand. You just simply as social animals who have to make a go of things together, the best we can, we need to have some, as it were, validity to what we promulgate as desirable attitudes and behaviors. Now, Do you think God validates us? Look, oh, listen, that is so unfair. Just a chronic question, Tom. No, it's, you know, this play contains the sentence, it's tortoises all the way down. And this is how I feel about that question. It isn't, no, that's a fair question. I think that since you brought it up, you poed a lot of philosophy departments, a lot of them on a number of questions. This is so great. Blanca told me about this, the only little book shop in Philadelphia. And I was there, Fox's book shop. And I see this book and it's a book of your society lectures, isn't it? And you're there. And I was reading this this morning. It wasn't about what we're talking about really, but there was this one thing in it which I was, it was incredible. Really interesting, which is that David polled a lot of philosophical departments on about 30 questions. And one of them was, as it were, atheism stroke theism. And I have been kind of talking to the actors and people here as though the theists were this tiny fraction of people who work in science and philosophy and so on. And it turned out that the atheists were 75%, not as I would have thought, 98.8, you know. But that surprised you. There were a lot of philosophy departments in Catholic universities and colleges. No, it didn't surprise me. Actually, I was surprised the number of atheists was quite as high as it was. I certainly would have expected a majority, but 73% atheists, 13% theists and the rest in various ways on the fence. There's a very big religious tradition in philosophy. Many of the great philosophers of the past have been theists who oriented their philosophy around God. Now, certainly true that the tradition now is much more to the focus around science. There are still a lot of philosophers who give God a very big role. And the question is always though for me, but for many of us, what does God help to explain? So you said you want God, we need something to validate us, but in the next question always as well, you've got God there, who validates God? What is the tortures standing on? Yeah. If God decides that torture is okay, is that all right? No, I don't think that's all right. We need something else to validate God. There's also, I believe, Eric Triscable, another philosopher who did polls, I believe discovered that ethicists steal books from the library at a slightly higher rate than other books. So that gets back to the question. I mean, you might study and have deep reflective beliefs about the nature of morality and it might not engage your action in the way that one might have hoped. I don't know. Have they considered that the books on ethics may be stolen by non-ethicists? I don't think the study was that fine great. I'm gonna be stubborn about this because it's somehow my home ground in a talk which is about the hard problem in my sense and the hard problem in your sense. And the home ground is that there is something inadequate, disappointing about the foundation of our moral rules being ultimately the playing out of, as it were, a strategic self-interest, a tactical self-interest. In other words, that it is a sort of empirical matter rather than a transcendental matter. And all I want to really say about it is that it's not that I think I can demonstrate anything. I don't even actually know whether in an objective way I feel I'm right about these things. What I do think, however, is that our society, whether we're talking about big S or even in this room or family, it's just not worth having without unquantifiable value. And this is what my poor woman is desperate about. How do you save the appearance of unquantifiable value? We all know, we're not interested in measuring value when it's quantifiable. We don't care. Virginia Woolf was the tallest writer in Bloomsbury. Yeah, of course she was, but Virginia Woolf was the greatest writer in Bloomsbury. That is a totally different proposition which has no finite answer. And it's just a small fragment of a whole kind of spectrum of undemonstrable, unassetainable, necessary attitudes. And if you like beliefs in big, scare quotes, is that okay with you? So some people think, I guess, once you've quantified something, you've domesticated it and maybe somehow diminished it. It's not actually quite my attitude. I mean, I started out as a mathematician. So I quite like quantifying things. There are people out there who are trying to quantify consciousness in some ways. And I think there's a guy, Giulio Tononi, who has this quantity phi that he thinks measures consciousness. You've got enough phi, you're conscious that consciousness is high-fi. Yeah, cool. Yeah. And I think it's possible to develop that kind of theory of consciousness without necessarily reducing it to something it's not. So I guess I'd take a similar attitude towards morality. There'd be, there are theories of morality that at one place where I think we're very sympathetic is the idea that consciousness and value are very closely connected. I think that consciousness probably serves as a source of value, maybe the fundamental source and ground value in this world. Without consciousness, there would be no value. You know, if we were all unconscious zombies and call us or don't, it wouldn't make any moral difference. So it's the fact that we're conscious that grounds value and morality in the first place. But once it's there, I'm not averse necessarily to quantifying it. The great utilitarian said, what we ought to be doing is maximizing the amount of happiness with our interactions and minimizing the amount of suffering. Now happiness and suffering at least can be regarded as states of consciousness. And if you like, you could see all that as using a measure of consciousness to quantify measures of value and ultimately measures of morality. You know, maybe you would find that diminishing or not doing justice to the richness of morality. But I think that would at least utilitarianism. This is a system that says, maximized happiness in everyone, not just in me. So it's the poor altruism that's opposed to selfishness. And actually, David, you obviously believe that the brain causes consciousness. If, just if, if that happened not to be the case, and what was occurring in front of your eyes was that the brain was registering consciousness. It was as it were that the arrow had been reversed. Would that spoil the picture for you? Well, the one thing we can all agree on, I think, is there are at least causal links or a correlation between the brain and consciousness. I'll give you a few drinks, Tom. It will affect your brain and it will affect your consciousness. It will affect my behavior. My experience is, if you drink, it will affect my consciousness quite robustly as well. Maybe you're a bit more robust than us all is. But I'll give you certain drugs. They will affect your consciousness. So affect the brain. Mushrooms will expand your consciousness. Affinious gauge got to happen. Tool went through his head. It seriously affected his consciousness. And the standard line is that at the very least, brain processes cause consciousness, but not averse to thinking about it necessarily being the other way around. But if you go for the idea that there's consciousness involved at the basic level of every physical process, which is something I at least take seriously, then in a way the whole physical world will be constituted at some bottom level by tiny little amounts of consciousness and included in those bits of the physical world will be my brain. My brain will be constituted somehow by little bits of consciousness in there that somehow add up to my consciousness. Now nobody knows how this happens. So it's not as if this view suddenly solves the problem. How on earth would all those little bits of consciousness in my brain give a conscious experience like mine? But I think we should at least take seriously the idea that maybe consciousness comes first and somehow organizes itself in a certain way into physical processes. Yes, I was being provocative, but yes, we should take that very seriously. If it's all right with you. At this point, I think we should move to questions from the audience. Let me remind you, there are two microphones, which I can dimly see over here. So there's one there and one there. If you're interested in asking a question, if you could cozy on up, if you could make your way to the microphones, that would be great. I realize it may take a little bit of time. No, I'll just, I'm just gonna wait a second. You've made it. Yes. Consciously, no doubt. Hello. I have two favorite Zen coins or pronunciamentos that give me sustenance. And I'd like to share them with you and perhaps you could comment on them relevant to the discussion this evening. And one of these is form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. Second one is, if you understand, things are just as they are. If you don't understand, things are just as they are. If you understand, things are just as they are. If you don't understand, things are just as they are. Well, I have absolutely no problem with that. Second one, the first one's interesting, emptiness is form. And form is emptiness. And do you know the work of Rachel Whiteread, the sculptor? There's a sculptor who does that. But... I don't actually get anything precise from the formulation. The second one follows from a more general principle which is things are just as they are. But I mean, maybe the crucial question is whether things are just as they were. Sometimes when you come to understand, things are not just as they were. Of course, you understand now. One thing that I'm gonna unfairly use this as an opportunity to ask a bit of a question that I was tempted to ask before, which is, so one thing that's suggested by both of these things is these questions is, might there be something about understanding, how we get a feel for, how we hook up to a phenomenon that goes beyond having just the fundamental laws, it has something to do with getting it. And you might think that that's something that, the reality is there with or without you. The question is, can you find the right engagement with it? And you might think that, so what I was curious about was sort of, you might think a scientific way of sort of getting it is different from a sort of artistic mode. And that there might be, so what's the difference between you grappling with the hard problem and you grappling with the hard problem? Well, very little. Qua philosopher and qua artist. Yeah, but I would have thought that philosophers and artists are very close together. Philosophers, artists on the one hand and physicists perhaps are probably less close. I mean, I don't know how it is with philosophers really and truly, but I do know that writing in the sense of the writing, kind of writing which I do myself, it is not a mechanistic process. You can't find it in that way. I don't monopolize the time. This is wonderful thing, Belinsky, the Russian critic, 19th century. He was a wonderful critic. He couldn't, he was a terrible play. And he said, I'm not an artist. I'm not a poet. Do you know this thing? Do you know this? It's just wonderful. He said, you can watch a poet sitting at his desk with the pen in his hand and he pauses. And after that pause, then the pen moves again. And he's saying, when did he go in that moment? And it's a very good question because you kind of go somewhere and obviously it's the subconscious that you go to, but you're not as it were in charge of what you find. And I think if I were writing philosophy, which I very much like to be able to do, something like that would happen in the thought processes, I believe. Very much, I think, either when you're writing philosophy or a ticket when writing fiction and somehow in the grip and in the service of your music, those ideas have to come from somewhere. It's like, hey, I'm waiting, give me another one. But we're also both, I think, in the business of telling stories. It's just that you guys do it a whole lot better. We do this, the stories are a whole lot more interesting. But in a way, they're both fiction and philosophy and it's very engaged with the process of narrative thought experiments come up with a scenario and think about it and think about what flow is and your play is really one thought experiment here after another. The emphasis is in different places and philosophy. The setup might be a paragraph and then we'll reason and argue about it for pages or for a whole book whereas in fiction, I think the narrative and the arguments are much more intertwined but really in philosophy, the arguments might be more explicit whereas in fiction, they might be more implicit. But when I read a lot of fiction, including yours, also many science fiction authors are wonderful at this. I kind of find philosophy really throughout. Let me turn to the next question. I had a question for Dr. Chalmers. Do you see any practical applications for solving the hard problem? Because I see the easy problem. There'll be some easy applications. You could see a pathway, you could fix it if they have psychosis or something like that. But if you were to solve the hard problem, what do you see as something that would benefit like objectively for society that we definitely have to see as something that we want it for? Just so we have those fundamental laws of consciousness that said, when you have a certain brain process, then you have a certain state of consciousness. We could actually then apply that to just so we knew enough about any given brain, we could somehow predict and know the state of consciousness associated with that. So this connects to something, for example, in clinical practice right now that people are just beginning to think about. Patients who have been diagnosed with vegetative state coming out of a coma. And we just don't know some of the time whether they might be, is there any consciousness on the inside and nothing that's revealed in their behavior? But we know there can be phenomena such as locked-in syndrome where there's a lot going on on the inside and very little going on on the outside. I mean, some of the classic cases, many of you all know the case in the book and movie The Diving Bell and The Butterfly where the guy communicated with his eyelids. But I wonder if, well, what happened if there was someone like that who couldn't move the eyelids? Then we just wouldn't have a sign. So people are now beginning to use brain scans to at least come to some kind of conclusions about what might be going on. But once we had that fundamental theory of consciousness, we might be able to use this in principle everything about a person's state of consciousness and even to communicate. Of course, as with all practical applications, it could be used both for good and for evil. I mean, I was once invited to give a talk about this stuff at the Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, and you can see why, it's not too hard to see why they might have a pretty serious interest in this kind of stuff. I saved them a lot of trouble with waterboarding. I don't know what to say. All right, next. I first have a comment about the history of consciousness and then a question for David. You mentioned that consciousness wasn't really a concept in ancient philosophy, but what they had in a lot of the similar function, that is defined, I read your conscious mind book, the word they used was life. So they were concerned about, well, how does life happen? And how does it extend down to plants? And they talk about heliotropism and having some sort of what we would call consciousness, but they would call a life principle that for platinus, for instance, it actually, that life principle comes from the soul. So it's a type of hand psychism that goes down to at least to the plant level. That's just a comment about that. The other is concerning your own work. You define, in that book, you define the problem of consciousness, you clarify it, but you also take a position. And it's been a few years, but from what I remember, you call yourself a natural dualist. So you take a type of, or you consider yourself a type of dualist, in my mind body dualist, that it's not like the one, things aren't reductive to the brain states. Consciousness isn't just reductive. So my question is, do you see any moral implications of taking that position versus taking another position on the problem of consciousness? Is there any particular moral positions that can emerge from that? Boy, that's a great question, and I don't know the answer to it. I'm inclined to think that consciousness is the source of all value, as I meant. I think views where consciousness is not reducible to physical processes are at least very much consistent with that view and suggestive of that view. If consciousness is just another physical process, then it becomes much more continuous to the rest of the natural world. And you might want to then be inclined to look for a view where the grounds of morality are much more natural or reducible. So that's one implication. But implications for substantive moral theories, would it favor, for example, as far as I can tell dualism is consistent with say the hedonist view that I mentioned, where we should all just maximize our own pleasure. It's consistent with a utilitarian view where we should be maximizing everyone's happiness and it's consistent with many other views. So I'd have to think about positive directions at my go, but for Tom, on the other hand, one of his characters comes out in the play as a Cartesian dualist. It's threatened with losing her job around now, but it's very clear that this is partly because it seems to have moral implications for her. So do you have a sense? Yeah, she does, but she's, as it were, accused of coming out as a Cartesian dualist. It's not a reputable position, probably in the modern university or any kind of academic environment. Yeah, this takes us back to what she was saying about undemonstrability. But I think that it's interesting just what you two were going on with. Can you actually act unkindly to some person who is without consciousness? Can you, you know, is it intelligible? Without, I mean, someone who's asleep, certainly, someone who's in a coma, certainly, someone who never has the capacity for consciousness? Well, Liz, like many philosophers, has found it helpful, perhaps, to conjure up the idea of the zombie who is kind of, like, indistinguishable from us, except it so happens in this hypothesis. It has no consciousness. And so if you actually hacked off one of its legs, is that an unkind action still? I once did some polls on this, actually, and I did some surveys, and I surveyed philosophers. It's one of these cases where a trolley is going down a track, and on one side, there is one conscious being, and on the other side, there's five zombies. Which way do you go? Most people said, kill the zombies, save the conscious being. And I pressed it a bit further. One, on this side, one conscious chicken. And on the other side, a whole planet of humanoid zombies without consciousness. Then intuition started to split. At least a couple of people were like, kill the meat. If they're not conscious, they're just meat. At some level, I've got that intuition. The consciousness is the ground. Consciousness is what grabs and demands moral respect. Would you pull the lever if it was David Parfit on the railway line? Is he conscious? Where? One thing that might be useful to sort of pull apart here is, I mean, that the chicken might help to pull apart, is you might be thinking that there are, in fact, creatures that have consciousness. They have feeling, pain, maybe other kinds of, richer, plain pleasure, other kinds of consciousness in that sense, qualia, but who lack agency in the sense of having a body of desires and goals that they are there to somehow, at least somewhat distinctive to them and that they would like to pursue. That might be, so would it be okay to kill the sentient non-agent? It might be another way of asking the, I'm more of a fine question. It depends on the. In fact, do we do so much of the time when we have our steak? If he caught me in the wrong mood, I think. I mean, it depends on my consciousness then. I mean, the thing is, if I may say so, are we any nearer to being told whether we're any nearer to solving the hard problem in your context? Are we getting any closer? Put it another way. Let's say that there's going to be a pretty much complete understanding of consciousness, how the brain is conscious. Do you think that we might be 10 years away or 50 years away, or what do you actually think about that? The problem is hard and progress is slow on hard problems. So yeah, the last 20, 25 years, there's been a lot of progress on the easy problems of behavior, also a lot of progress on the correlations. And that's been really great to see the scientists actually coming back to consciousness even at the level of correlations. There are a few theories of the hard problem itself, explanation, but potential explanations of consciousness. I'd say it's pretty clearly early days. So I don't think it's going to happen in 10 or 20 years. If it happened in 50 years, I'd be pleased, but a little bit surprised. It'd be great if it happens in 100 years and it wouldn't totally surprise me if in 200 years we've got a complete theory of the brain and all the stuff it's doing and people are still arguing about how on earth does that explain consciousness? I hope that doesn't happen. I think it's entirely possible that we'll get there sooner. But I think that's the kind of timeframe we're talking about. It's not possibly a century or two. You know you were talking about the sign number. If you score a certain amount, you're that conscious. And if you score more, you're even more conscious. Is there actually a frontier acknowledged between, I don't know what example to suggest. You know, I don't know, an oyster or something. I mean, is there a frontier between the natural being, creature, which is conscious and the one which is not conscious? If there is, then nobody knows where it is. I mean, some people want to put the boundary to humans and humans only, but that view is increasingly unpopular. Most people are willing to say that apes, probably dogs and cats and mice and quite a few mammals have subjective experience and many people are willing to go down. There is a big debate about fish. I see the academic article on whether fish really feel pain and if so, what difference that should make to our practices. So I think it's very hard to settle that question. But I think there's a gradual groundswell in favor of a fish being conscious. And I think it's gradually, it's like there's an expanding circle here. And there are certainly people who take seriously the idea that consciousness goes all the way down to the bottom level. This does actually kind of connect with our moral practices. I used to think that I shouldn't eat anything that was conscious or could be conscious. But if the more things you start attributing consciousness to, then you start getting, you're gonna go hungry. Some people think plants are conscious. So the fact is, yes, it's a wide open question right now. And we need some, what we'd love to have is the consciousness meter. We could just wave at the fish and see what's in our consciousness. I can wave at you and see what's in your consciousness right now. But of course, consciousness seems to be so inherently private and subjective. All we have is indirect ways of getting out. And don't you think that the word consciousness is a kind of failure of vocabulary? That we... It's really a horrible word, like I can't shush. I thought we had something short and snappy. Well, it's not so much that as the fact that it seems to take in forms of, not degrees of consciousness, but forms of consciousness, which are very far apart from each other. And I find that conversations suddenly have gone somewhere else because we only have the one word for this thing. And I'm not very interested, not philosophically interested, in chasing down the cause of, you know, why you feel pain if I stabbed you with a pin. That's not actually that interesting. It's much more interesting to wonder what kind of consciousness would cause you to write a poem about that experience or to make a painting of... Maybe a difference between us, actually. It comes back to something in your play where one of the characters, Hillary, says to the other, explain consciousness. One of them puts the other one's finger to a flame. He's going to misquote me. And the guy says, what's the guy's loan? He puts, she says, he gets irritated with her and he grabs her finger and puts it in the scented candle by the bed. And he says, flame, finger, brain, brain, finger, ouch, consciousness. And then she goes on and says, okay, you did pain, but now explain sorrow. Well, I would have said if I'd been there in her shoes, no, you haven't explained pain. You haven't got a thing to explain pain, the subjective experience. Maybe you've explained ouch, the reaction, that ouch is the easy problem. Conscious pain, the feeling of pain, that's the hard problem. Yeah, thank you, that's good. I'd say the hard problem is right there. But I think this gets to the idea that for you, the problem that's really gripping you is as Liz was saying, the point where it connects to morality and somehow and to art and to value. And maybe that's why sorrow is one of the things. Thank you, value, value. The hard problem for you is the problem of value. It's the problem of value. Thank you very much. That is what it is. I'd be unfairly insert myself into the question. So, because it somewhat follows up on this. So, I think a lot of what's, animating Hillary and other people in the play is concerned with sort of what's distinctively human. This connects to the discussion we've just been having about continuity. And so, I'm wondering what you, and as Dave said, there's increasingly people find, studies focused, do empirical work suggesting that other animals are rich in ways that we might not once have thought. So, I'm thinking in particular about studies suggesting that chimpanzees, for instance, if they're playing the ultimatum game where they have to dole out money to other chimpanzees, so the recipient chimpanzees will reject offers that they see as too unfair. And so those are very question-begging ways of putting the terms. But there are, if the partitioning is more like nine raisins to one raisin, in favor of the person giving out the raisins, then there's sort of a chimpanzee's, the recipient chimpanzees will hiss and sort of claw and sort of not, and then we'll later reject it in reiteration. Does that suggest something to you about moral outrage or feelings of morality or fairness or value in the non-human realm? It doesn't actually. Good, why? Not because they're chimpanzees, but because that behavior is related to appetite. It doesn't seem to be related to a kind of conceptual idea of quantity except the way you count raisins. It's not actually a value. No. Because, you know, there is a distinction, isn't there, between sorrow and pain? I understand what you're saying, that the sharp experience you have when your finger is burned, there's an experience which is no more explained than any other form of consciousness. At the same time, the correlation is visible between the physical brain and the experience. There is, you could actually isolate which tiny part of the brain is responsible for sending that signal to what you, so do you think it's your finger? That's fair enough, but the thing about sorrow and many other emotions, including decisions somebody might make to sacrifice themselves for some cause, you ask yourself, could you actually, can you really and truly isolate where that happened up here? You know, so it just seems as it were, a categorical difference when you think of emotion as opposed to experience, physical experience. And you think that not just that it's gonna be involved more of the brain involved, it seems, I mean, what makes you think that it's a categorical difference as opposed to a less pinpointed phenomenon? Well, I could go into that, but I'm really much more struck by the reflex, your reflex, which is that there is nothing I could come up with which you wouldn't be able to unfold in your idea of the sameness between pain and sorrow. I could come up with incredible things, but your starting point would still be to say, it's the same thing, it's just as hidden, it's more hidden, takes a bit of working out, but it's the same. One relevant question, do you think morality and sorrow were distinct of the human? Is this sort of coming out of the realm of the human? No, it's interesting, the picture which instantly came to my mind is of the grieving ape. I don't know where it came from, but I know that apes grieve. I would not subject the ape to my massive condescension by saying that's not sorrow. It is something, it is something. And it's sentient as well as well. I think we'd have to say sentient includes the brain. But I don't think that when you pick a daisy, the next daisy is thinking. Just a tiny, tiny, tiny. All right, let's go back to another question over here. Tom, all playwrights are storytellers, but my experience is that you particularly are a philosopher. My question of course is about consciousness. We've been talking all evening about consciousness, but I'm not sure if maybe I missed something. Have we defined consciousness? And along those lines, David, you in particular have been using the phrase states of consciousness, levels of consciousness when we talk about different biological organisms. I use the term states of consciousness too, but I'm not sure what I'm saying when I use it. Have we defined consciousness? Well, it depends how difficult you want to make a life for yourself. You can simply say, I mean John Searle's definition is fair enough that the guy called John Searle in basic sense, consciousness is what you feel when you're awake. It might include the state of your dream, but essentially, consciousness is what's happening to you between getting up and going to sleep. There's a closely related version of this which I prefer, which is consciousness, that annoying time between naps. That sounds rather feline to me. How else could you, one would never get into the meat of an argument if one had to really establish definitions before you could proceed. But it's clear that it's, sorry, I'm trying to go back to something you said. It is true and self-evident that I, at this moment, but David, when he was speaking, is aware of his own first person subjective movie life inside his skull and that everybody else's, he has to take on trust. It's just by repute. And that is simply, that is just rephrasing the problem. That is the problem. How can you get hold of it in a way where you can say, oh yes, you are conscious for the first time. Say I can objectively state that I know you are conscious. I have figured out that you are conscious. We know we're near that, are we? This is, really these two problems are related. Yours is the problem of definition and yours is the problem of measurement. And they're both two places where you might think if we had a good measurement, we'd also be able to use it to give an operational definition. But in fact, what we do most of the time for consciousness, we've got one thing that we take as the gold standard for consciousness and that's what people say. If someone says I'm feeling pain right now or I'm seeing the red cross in the middle of the screen or I'm feeling anger, then other things being equal, we take their word for it. And we say, okay, that's a pretty good evidence that they're conscious. Obviously there are some troubles with this. It doesn't apply to non-verbal creatures, non-human animals and infants, people in vegetative states and so on. But it's at least what we can use in the relatively easy cases. Even that though, I think we'd probably foreshort of a definition. It's not that we think that to be conscious is to give a verbal report. Probably a baby can be conscious without a verbal report and maybe a computer could give a report without being conscious. So the problem, even if we did have a good measurement for consciousness, the question of what it is, is the definition. And I think my own view as a consciousness is somehow so primitive that we may never be able to give a perfect definition. We can just give kind of clarifications of what we're talking about. I really like my colleague Tom Nagel at NYU who was quite clearly a big influence on Tom's play. In the 1970s, he wrote an article called what is it like to be a bat? One way to raise this question of consciousness. What is a bat's consciousness like? And many philosophers including me adopt that in a way as their working definition. A system is conscious if there's something it's like to be that system. If there's something it's like to be me, I'm conscious. Presumably there's nothing it's like to be this bottle. If so, it's not conscious. And likewise a conscious state. When I'm seeing you right now, there's something it's like for me to see you. If that's right, then that state is a conscious state where there are other states of mind like what might be going on deep in my arteries or something which are not. There's nothing it's like to be in those states so those are not conscious states. That's the best I can do at least when it comes to definition. Okay, we're gonna have time for I think two more questions, something like that. So part of the reason that I'm enjoying listening to the two of you this evening is that you seem to be very happily playing in the sandpit between philosophy, art, and science. While remaining in that sandpit, I wonder if the two of you might offer some insight into how we might measure personal meaning. This? Hey. Well, so, I mean, look, Tom. I mean, I do think that this is personal meaning. So what is the, I mean, I do think that just for me, if that's, if I were locating the nexus of sort of moral gravity, it would be something more in that ballpark than either qualia, what it's like, or cognition of the universe's rulebook, which is somehow what you might think you get from a kind of God's law or something like that. It would be something like felt agency, what matters to me, what I really care about, articulating, preserving. And so that's a gesture, it's something like meaning and why it would be connected up to value. I'm not positive, this is actually related to a question I was just thinking about is you were, the two of you were talking, I'm not positive that that directly, its relationship to consciousness I think is complicated because I think I often find myself with, I only belatedly become aware of commitments and desires and motivations and meanings after they've been working on me and through me. And they're what make me me and they're a lot of what motivate me, but they're not always fully conscious. So does that, to me they don't seem like they're always fully conscious. So I guess among these definitions of consciousness, where does that kind of, does that fit in? Is that sort of continuous or is it at the margin? And how does that connect to value? Well, the question is, I think the question was how does one measure personal meaning? Was it? What? How might one measure personal meaning in the context of consciousness? Yeah. So and you're thinking there, not just sort of, like whether this, the way in which this property or this feature or something matters to a particular agent and might not matter, the very same experience in some sense of the very same experience might not matter to a different agent in the same way. See, I think consciousness is a given. None of these questions have any meaning without consciousness being the given. And in the case of that question, I would say that there is no, there's almost no meaning in measuring one's meaning autonomously. Or I wouldn't care about measuring my personal meaning in isolation, my personal meaning in the end is a measurement of how I affect the other people in my life, the people I love particularly but every axis towards another human being. Then you might begin to get a sense of how it might be possible to measure the effect of your own meaning. But taking one's own meaning as though it's some kind of temperature one might take, no, it doesn't seem even a meaningful action. Is it okay if I, there's, so I think that there are two people left to ask questions and I think if we're brisk, we might be able to do that. So if, can you, I don't know if you have a brisk type question. Mr. Stopper to question. That's rather unfair. That's two things smuggled in. And utilitarians somewhat glibly promise to measure happiness and solve the problem that way, but they would have to be measuring goodness too, measuring how good it was to maximize happiness. So it seems like just measuring happiness isn't enough. Now I'm moving on to my question for Mr. Stopper about evolutionary theory and meaning. I'm wondering, this is a philosophical question or maybe a story question, but how about the idea or the story that all our capacities and perceptions have evolved and there's no other way to explain them than through evolution if we accept the theory of evolution, but that just as we've evolved a sense of sight and hearing and these various sensory perceptions human beings have evolved in addition and a capability to make moral perceptions which correspond to value, to objective value. So just the way ticks, ticks evidently don't have a lot of perception. They just sense warmth and then they jump, they fall onto it, they feel warm below and suck its blood and that warmth is connecting them with something in the real world and then dogs can do more than that and birds can do certain things and then human beings have evolved and the perception of value, of objective value and it seems like that would be, that doesn't answer a lot of questions but it would be a place to start. It's not you, it's me, but I'm half-deaf. So you have to paraphrase a little bit. I heard much of what you said. So sometimes, I'm just gonna sort of freely riff on what I think was the, I mean, yeah. So it varies points in the play. It seems like if there's a worry that if we offer an evolutionary explanation of why we respond in certain kinds of ways, then that explains what the thing being sensed is right in some sense captured. So if we are evolved to respond in certain kinds of interactive patterns, then that would be an amount to a scientific claim about what morality is, right? Yes, I think so. But isn't it compatible to say that on the one hand we are evolved to do certain things and to say that what we're evolved to do is to be sensitive to features which are really out there in the world. So just as the tick is sensitive to features which are really out there in the world and following those is good for the, being sensitive to those is good for the tick. So too, we could have evolved to be sensitive to features of objective morality. And that could be good for us, but it wouldn't amount to a theory of what goodness was. Well, you know, thank you, both of you, because that actually is very much my view. I must make it clear that, honestly, I think that Darwin had the pretty much the best idea anybody ever had. Evolution by natural selection, absolutely. And the follow through or the follow on from that is something which I think in the end one has to accept that there's something through about our sense of morality, but that's how it has been defined by the way we've evolved for the moment. You know, who has a better answer but that is communicable. Of course, that's the case. I think that arguing against almost anything is actually quite a useful thing to do. I think it takes you, it takes your brain to places you'd be too lazy to get to if you weren't pulling up an argument. So, sorry, I'm nothing aphoristic to say, except that I sense that you've got the right end of the stick there, yeah. Dave, is it okay if I take the slide? Last question for Dr. Cholmers. And picking up on what Tom said about the Archimedean stance, I love that phrase, and Darwin's idea and my question is there's a philosopher I greatly admire, Colin McGinn, a mysterious flame from 1999, and Colin McGinn is a mysterious. He doesn't believe that our minds are capable of solving the hard problem because we are products of Darwinian evolution, and as such, our brains are the products of a limited, confined, constrained evolution on the African savannah. My question for Dr. Cholmers is, isn't it premature to affirm naturalistic property dualism in light of the fact that substance monism might be true, but we don't have the capability to understand substance monism, of how brain and mind are uniformly welcome together in nature. There must be some intelligible unity in nature that runs through all nature. We evolved, our consciousness evolved, our brains evolved. I think everybody ought to have some humility about the problem of consciousness, and everyone who says they've got the answer right here and it's written down on this notepad is probably wrong. T-shirts too. Yeah, maybe 100 years will have the T-shirt. I think at the same time, Colin McGinn's view, I also take that to be premature. Could turn out at the end of the day that the problem is too hard for us and that our brains just can't handle it. I mean, someone once said that if the mind was so simple that we could understand it, we'd be too simple to understand the mind. And anyone who's spent much time thinking about the sciences of the mind and the brain is gonna have some sympathy with this. But I don't think McGinn has made anything like a demonstrable case for his view. I think he's laid it out as something which could turn out to be the case at the end of the day. I'm by nature a glass half full kind of guy. So I think the situation right now is on the borders. Consciousness seems to be sort of straining just at the border of what's noble. And the theory of consciousness may turn out to be within our grasp and may not be. My own view is the only way we're gonna figure it out is by trying and by thinking about it really hard and investigating it with all of our scientific and philosophical and artistic tools. If it turns out at the end of that day, after thousands of years, we still don't understand it, then maybe he's right. I'd like to think that somewhere along the way we might come up with the insight. And though I'm not gonna tell you that my own particular theory, naturalistic property dualism is the be all and end all and we can go home. That's more in the way of saying my own view is that the most promising places to the most promising theories to pursue right now lie in this corner of the territory. But of course I have to contend but I could be completely wrong. It's an inner step to further to ultimate our understanding. The last word? Well, I shouldn't have the last word on a question like that but temperamentally, I don't really buy that that we've evolved in a way which doesn't actually offer the possibility, the capability of our understanding ourselves. We've already arrived at understandings in all kinds of mathematical areas particularly which were so way beyond what seemed to be possible for us to understand. I think it's a bit defeatist while David is alive and well, should we say? Yes. Yes. All right, I think on that note we'll conclude. Thank you very much. We're done. You guys. You have to bow. What's that? You have to bow. Thank you. Thank all of you for coming. I want to remind you again that the hard problem, Tom Stoppard's the hard problem, will be performing from January 6th to February 6th. Also might want to draw your attention. You might have wondered, there's something a little obscure back here but those are actually risers on which there are going to be seats so that when you come to see the hard problem you may be over here, you may be over there. So it's a little bit different experience than most productions here which I'm excited about. I hope you are too. So thank you. Thank you again.