 Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode number three of Paterson in Pursuit. I won't give too much preface because this is a continuation of the conversation I had with Dr. Emerus Westacott. He was such a conversationalist that I intended to talk to him for the entire interview about objective truth and epistemology. And then he started asking me questions about my own philosophy and metaphysics. And naturally, because I talk a lot, I couldn't resist having a dialogue about the philosophy of mind. The commentary that I thought I was only going to last a few minutes ended up lasting a half an hour. And it was fantastic. We actually had some more agreement on this issue, just like we did on the epistemological issue. So Dr. Emerus Westacott is a professor of philosophy at Alfred University. He is genuinely somebody that cares about big ideas. So I really think you're going to enjoy this. If you are interested in the question, what is the nature of consciousness? Enjoy the conversation. You know, Descartes said, of course, I think therefore I am, and people have criticized that saying he's not entitled to use this word I, for instance, a very controversial concept. Because it is true, once you start talking about selves, then you've got some work to do to specify exactly what you're referring to by that term. I would absolutely love to talk to you about that. That question is something I'm grappling with right now is because this is kind of as far as I've gotten in my own metaphysics that it appears to be that there are selves. What does that mean? I am tempted by this concept of a soul just because that seems to be the way that we can explain the concept of selves, but I don't really like that conclusion. And if there's not this objective boundary of the self, it seems like you get kind of a hindu mystical conclusion that phenomena of mind experience is everywhere. There's no independent minds, it's all ultimately, and I like neither of those conclusions. And what about the, what's your take on the scientific view of we have evolution producing the brain, producing consciousness, and eventually a sense of self? That is illusory, ultimately. Well, not that it's illusory, but rather that our concept of the self arises out of a sense of self that arises out of the fact that consciousness comes packaged the way it does, attached to bodies. So what I would say is something like the way that I think about the self, the way that I like to phrase metaphysical questions is ultimately about boundaries. Is it the case that there is an objective boundary where there is self and there is not self? And what I would say is in that circumstance, if there is the process of evolution results in this phenomena of consciousness, I don't think that there's anywhere that you can say, ah yes, at this point there is the self, at this point there isn't the self. I think what I would say is that means the self is illusory. I think it's certainly a logical possibility, but I have trouble with that. I'm very drawn to this idea of the dualism of Descartes. I don't even see how you get awareness from bits of matter. I consider myself a reluctant dualist, that's my metaphysical perspective. I am a dualist, but I wish I weren't, just because I can't easily reconcile subjective experience with objective physical phenomena. Right, I know that in philosophy of mind these days, people talk about the problem of consciousness and the hard problem and the easy problem. And basically, as I understand it, the hard problem is simply, how do you get consciousness out of matter, which is what the brain is. And my answer is, I don't know, but I assume that's what happens. It's just, you know, so we don't understand how it happens, how matter can give rise to consciousness. But I don't feel a pressing need to posit any sort of, any things or forces or processes beyond what we can already be knowledgeable about. We just don't know how the whole thing works. In the same way, I mean, I think it's an analogous to how do you get life? I mean, still, it's a bit of a mystery, how does life get going? But the best theory we have is that inorganic chemicals do eventually produce organisms. That one strikes me as much more conceptually complete, that the inorganic matter eventually producing living creatures. The problem that I have is, from my perspective, there appears to be this complete category distinction between third-person matter, what we consider to be the constituents of the physical universe, and the contents of subjective experience. So if it were the case, for example, that human beings didn't have this phenomenon of awareness, then I think it would be complete. I think physicalism would be a complete theory. Even though you're right, we don't exactly know how life started. That's just a matter of time before we do. But it appears to me that you can give a complete description of the physical state of the universe and completely leave out this gigantic realm of information which is about the contents. Well, this is great. We're absolutely on agreement on that. I mean, there's a lot of academic philosophy on this topic, and I'm very much on the side of the position you just articulated. There's a famous essay by Thomas Nagel called What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he argues exactly that point, which is that when you've drawn up a complete description of every physical phenomenon in the universe, you've still left something out, which is basically subjective experience, which is real. And important. I mean, it's in central, really. Totally, yeah. And so no description that sort of tries to reduce subjective experience to the physical can be adequate. Now, the physicalists, they're being misunderstood that they're not trying to do that, but it always seems to me that they are. I agree. I wrote a little piece about this, and it's called The Case Against Physicalism. And I kind of take my reluctant, doulust approach from an epistemological standpoint, which is this, that you can have, in theory, you could imagine at knowing the position and the momentum and every single bit of information about the physical state of the universe, and there is still what I call information loss. And if that's true, then it seems like you have to expand your, what I call your toolbox of concepts, like you have to use other language. There is, and if the whole point of trying to think and understand things about the universe is to describe things that we're experiencing, it seems like you're cutting off half your body when you're only using physicalist terminology when there's so much more. I think the reason why this has become such a sort of pressing issue in contemporary philosophy, there's no question that, you know, the problem of consciousness and actually the pretty closely related problem of free will, I think, why they've become such pressing issues with a huge amount of literature written about them is because of the historical juncture out where, you know, the scientific revolution kicks in, there's just been this fantastic explosion of scientific knowledge and tremendous success of the physical sciences. I mean, absolutely amazing. And they're continuing a pace to perform miracles. And the question is really, well, do the physical scientists, the way they're structured and the way, you know, using their concepts, do they basically give us everything? Or is there stuff that somehow evades the grasp of those methods, those concepts? And I think we seem to be on the same page here because I think, yeah, because subjectivity just doesn't seem to lend itself to the physicalist, you know, account. It just doesn't. But you can, just like you say, you can describe the movement of every atom in the brain and you still haven't quite said what it's like to have a headache. And this is, I don't think this is unimportant. This is the reason why I'm coupling this Socratic journey I'm taking. We're doing philosophy and I'm going to talk to physicists and get that side of the spectrum. But that the phenomenon of subjectivity exists seems like a really big deal, especially when we're talking about it from a human standpoint. Like the entirety of my life has this feature, which I'm saying is there's like a category distinction between what I'm experiencing and, you know, the movement of billiard balls on a table. There's this other thing which is, again, drives me towards this uncomfortable, but it seems at this point an escapable conclusion that there's just something more. Maybe this is where we get concepts of God, this is where we get religious ideas, when you start incorporating the experience of living in the world as this apparent being who is experiencing things. But why can't consciousness or subjectivity simply be an emergent property? Well, just like life. Life is an emergent property of the inorganic. Because it depends on what you mean by life. So I could imagine a circumstance in which, let's say we're talking about insects and worms, or we'd say, yes, now that is life and there's nothing unique going on there. It's just matter that is moving in a particular way. But I don't know if there is an internal experience of being worm. I don't know if there is consciousness. But I do know that at some point you get advanced creatures who have bodies and at least assume that there's this entirely different realm that they have access to that is different than just the mechanical moving of matter. It's the internal subjective awareness. So it would be easy to dismiss life, especially like viruses, for example. You go down to that level and it just seems like you have proteins moving around. But I don't have reason to believe that that's what's going on in my circumstance. No, but in both cases you do have a spectrum. I mean, you have rocks and you have us and you have, like I said, viruses, yeast, bacteria, all the way up insects and the rest. You have different life forms of greater or lesser complexity that seem more or less mysterious. And in the same way, presumably you have degrees of sentience or degrees of consciousness. You assume that a mouse has some level of sentience but not quite what we did. Nothing like our self-awareness or anything like that. When it comes to worms, we've got no idea. But worms and that kind of thing, they do respond biochemically to their environment. What I would say is it depends on what you mean by they when you're talking about the worms. Because the way that I would put it is you're putting boundaries around the worm and saying that is something that is perhaps more than just the bits of matter that are there which constitute the worm and I don't think that's the case. So I would say in my metaphysical belief, I have a very particular idea of concepts that there is no, so you were talking about the mug on the coffee table earlier, all that there is is just the bits of matter that are constituted in a particular way. And we just reference that area of the universe as a mug. And so I think you can do that with something like worms and lesser life forms. But it's, again, it seems like, and I could imagine the philosophical zombie where you have this very complex machine that's acting in all these ways, but it lacks what seems to be this category difference of the internal subjective awareness. Right. And I mean, there's a debate here with the development of ever more complex computers, whether at some point they put together a silicon-based computer that is so complex as to have subjectivity, or whether, I mean, John Searle argues, no, that'll never happen, John, he argues, for some reason subjectivity has to be based on squishy, slimy stuff like brains, you know. I simply, I don't have an opinion about that. I don't want to rule out the possibility that a computer could have consciousness and subjectivity in my, I don't know. So let me ask you, I wanted to stay on epistemology, but this is such a good topic. Let me ask you something that I'm sure you know more than I do, because I've been studying the works of Bertrand Russell a little bit because I'm interested in the philosophy of mathematics. And what I have read is that on this question, actually I read just a little, I don't even know what it was called, a little essay that he gave about how, kind of, ultimately subjectivity comes prior to objectivity, because we're these beings that are seeking out knowledge. And I have read that he took a position that has been called neutral monism, where instead of the physicalist worldview where you might say all of the conceptual tools are physical, instead of the dualist position where you have this category distinction between the physical and the physical tools and the mental tools and there's this impenetrable boundary between them, he took a third perspective which is that ultimately mind and matter are not fully categorically different and yet neither fully explains the world. So there are kind of two derivatives of this other stuff that we don't know anything about. Do you know it? Can you elaborate on that? I'm not familiar with that, but I would be inclined to say it. I wonder why there has to be a third item there, when you say the derivative of a third item. One of the philosophers I've studied extensively is Hillary Putnam who died a couple of weeks ago. And he says in one place, he said, the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. Right, which I think is fair enough. Again, it's in the pragmatist tradition. To me, I think that perhaps makes more sense than saying that mind and world are as it were attributes of a greater, mysterious, something we know not what. If we were to try to be precise, doesn't that kind of take the dualistic perspective when you're referencing mind and the world as these two separate things? And I would agree, in a sense, even as a reluctant dualist, the mind and the world make up the mind and the world, but that implies that there's this sharp boundary between the two of them. Well, I think he's trying to say there isn't a sharp boundary in the sense that he's saying the world is constituted by both mind and world and the mind is constituted by both mind and world. I mean, you can't talk about mind separate from the material world and the world that we have knowledge, the world that we know, and you can't talk about the reality that we know, the empirical reality, without reference to the mind. Because as I was saying before, the mind sort of carves it up and shapes it and structures it. In that worldview, though, is there not a difficulty? Well, I suppose there is certainly a difficulty, but I don't, at least maybe I'm missing a part of it, but to me that doesn't seem like it satisfactorily explains the radicalness of the difference between when we're talking about objective matter and we're talking about this subjective awareness, just to say, well, they're together. Well, how does that? No, I think that's right. I don't think he's kind of addressing that particular problem. I mean, you keep coming back to this kind of Cartesian point because Descartes' argument for mind-body dualism is precisely when it boils down to the fact that they just seem to be so radically different. I mean, he may overstate the case, but he's just impressed by how very different they are. I'm inclined to agree with you that they are very different. I accept the general picture for, you know, anything better that life emerges out of in and around matter. Consciousness and sentience emerges out of basic life forms. And so while I agree with you that there is this difference between subjectivity and what is not subjective, and I agree that at the moment we don't really understand how it happens, so there is something mysterious about subjectivity. I agree with that. At the same time, I don't think its mysteriousness leads me, perhaps it doesn't lead me to posit anything like a soul substance or it doesn't lead me to posit anything like a pre-existing form of consciousness that somehow makes it possible. It could just be that the world in some little bits of the universe gets so complicated that they produce this extra phenomenon. I guess what it comes down to is whether or not, it's how bright that distinction is between the subjective and the objective. And for me, if that is a metaphysical category distinction, then you can't have the one giving rise to the emergence of the other. I was reading an interesting claim that was talking about epiphenomenalism, essentially the idea, which of course you know about, but for my listeners, the idea that what we consider to be awareness is an epiphenomenon of physical happening, so the analogy they give is this sound of a steam whistle. How that sounds kind of emerges just from the movement of the atoms, you get this phenomenon. I forget who said it, but somebody said that still doesn't solve the metaphysical question from the subjective or the objective. In fact, it presupposes there is still this category difference. You get this epiphenomenon that doesn't impact the world, there's no causal control from mental phenomena, it can't impact the world, but it's still out there in this other realm. Why are you so sure that it can't be analogous to the problem of how life emerges? People for many, many centuries said exactly the same thing about life. Life is special. Life is radically, metaphysically different from anything that's not alive. Anything living must have this sort of flame of livingness that the inorganic lacks, but we don't really believe that anymore, we just think it's more complicated. My answer would be that I can have a fully complete explanation for the phenomena of life without consciousness, just using the physicalist toolbox. I have no problem with that because what we're talking about life in that circumstance is just the movement of atoms. All that there is is just the complex movement of atoms. I have no problem even if we were to posit the human being absent the consciousness just saying that's just ultimately the incredibly complex movement of atoms. No problem explaining it. When I'm referencing my subjective experience, I'm not talking about any movement of atoms. Now there might be a correspondence of the movement of atoms in my brain, but I'm talking about the essence of what it feels like to be me, but certainly not the movement of atoms, because there's two different things. You could have, assuming that I don't have free will or anything, you could have somebody who could see every single position of the atom in my body and they could say, oh, look, I'm explaining that life, but they're still missing this other thing, which is how it feels to be me. Yeah, I know. I'm puzzled over this as well, because, as I say, going back to something I said before, I do assume there is a spectrum of sentience, and I assume that plants, when they lean towards the light or something, it's just biochemistry, there's no sentience there, and I assume that mice and even smaller things do have a degree of sentience, that they don't just move towards the cheese, that they actually have the experience of smelling the cheese. One of the things, I mean, your view presumably has to accommodate the fact that there does seem to be a spectrum of sentience, and so, you know, there's a point where it's not just biochemistry without awareness, but there's biochemical reaction with some very, very basic primitive element of sentience. And this is why I consider myself a reluctant duelist, really, that's one of the central issues is because if you take this line of reasoning and the explanation for the boundaries of consciousness as something like a soul, then you're kind of forced in the position of saying, oh well, so the rat has a little rat soul, and the baboon has a little bit of another soul, and at what point, when that consciousness isn't there, you know, maybe at the fly it's not there, but maybe at the lizard, do you have a little lizard soul? I mean, I think I'm forced in that position, but I don't like that conclusion either, because that strikes me as kind of preposterous. Not to mention where these souls come from or anything like that, which though, one potential resolution is this neutral monist or even potentially the panpsychist perspective, that that potential for conscious awareness is everywhere. Right, and yeah, and that is one of the philosophies, one of the potential explanations, except that it seems flamboyantly extravagant, doesn't it? It does, yes. I mean, to think that we are all in some way, you know, parts of aspects of this larger kind of consciousness or something like that. Though, in the research that I've been doing in the last several years, that claim seems kind of preposterous to us. There is perhaps even the majority of people on earth who don't think that's a preposterous claim, that they have, they tie that, well, if they get that far in understanding the metaphysics of what we're talking about, they say, oh, that's God. That idea of the global universal consciousness is God, and in fact, lots and lots and lots of people have claimed that they've felt that conscious awareness from the universal perspective. They thought they were one with the universe, with that God's eye perspective, which again seems like the term flamboyant, and seems dubious, but at least if you go down this line of reasoning where there's this category of distinction between mental and physical, or if you go down the physicalist perspective, that doesn't seem any more like a radical possibility. Another variation is Spinoza's point of view, and Spinoza is a pretty interesting character there, and he kind of seems to think that there's one substance, that's the God or nature, he says, one substance, and there's two main ways of viewing it. One view, the more material way is to see it as kind of a great sort of mass of, I guess, space and matter. I mean really, there's only one sort of material substance, and bits of it are congealed, called those matter and bits of it aren't, we call those space, but it's really just one substance. And it's not separate from what we call mind, it's actually the same thing as mind, it's just that when we think of it as mind, when we talk about consciousness, subjectivity, experience, all that kind of thing, we're viewing it simply from a different point of view. Now, I'm not saying I can make full sense of that, but that seems to be what he thinks, that instead of with Descartes, you have these two radically different metaphysical substances. For him, you have one substance, and you can, when you look at it one way, then it looks like consciousness. When you look at it another way, it looks like matter. I find that very profound. If that's true, that's a very big deal. And the way that I put this, and I wonder what you think about this, kind of tying all this together both with the epistemology and the metaphysics, I say that absurd conclusions are kind of inescapable. If you take the hard-line physicalist perspective, you kind of arrive at this silly idea of the bits of matter eventually being congealed in a particular way where you get parts of the universe that are so constituted that they start talking about the universe. Like if you and I are just congealed blobs of matter, no different than the rock, isn't that remarkable? That the rock has the same potential constituted as us, and now it's like talking about us and has these little individual lives, and the parts of the universe go around caring about what happens when it dies. That strikes me as absurd. If that's not the case, even the idealist perspective, that everything is mental, strikes me also as kind of absurd. The dualist perspective strikes me as absurd. The panpsychist, the spinosis, all of it, it seems like the absurdity is just inescapable when you try to, when you fully realize just how radical it is, specifically that there is such a thing as experience. The encouraging thing though is that almost, you know, a good chunk of what we now absolutely believe and take for granted would have been regarded as completely absurd by previous generations from the roundness of the earth to the equality of men and women. So you think it's just a matter of time, and then we'll be able to sort it out? I certainly don't think we should be afraid of the absurd in the sense that, I mean, and Bertrand Russell would certainly agree with this, that, you know, when you're faced with these kind of problems, I mean, the fact is we can't make full sense of things using our ordinary ways of thinking. Common sense is what, the new common sense, which includes the theory of evolution, and it includes quantum mechanics and the new common sense can't make sense of everything yet, so presumably there's something wrong with common sense. So in a conclusion to everything here, would you say this, that it is true that things appear absurd, it's difficult to explain all the phenomena that we experience, certainly with our current level of understanding. But my claim, and I wonder if you would agree with this, is that there are certain life rafts that were thrown in this ocean to use another analogy that we grab onto that represent certain knowledge, that in metaphysics it is certainly the case that of all the things that are out there, of all the existent phenomena that exist, certainly subjective experience exists. Maybe rocks do, maybe suns do, maybe other things do, but certainly subjective experience. Yeah, I don't see it as a life raft, I see that as a datum. But it's different, so we could say something like the cup on the table exists and we have a really high level of confidence, but ultimately we can't fully know that that is the case, but that's not true with the subjective. You say a life raft, that implies that we're faced with this confusion, we need to be saved as to how is all this possible, and what's going to save us is the fact that we can be certain about this thing called subjective experience. I don't see how that saves us, I say, actually that's part of the problem isn't it, the fact that it's subjective experience, the reality of it, the phenomenon of it and the fact that it has to be described in a certain way that doesn't quite match the way we describe the rest of the world, that's the problem. Well maybe I can extend the analogy and say it starts that way. So if somebody, we wake up and we're in the ocean, what the heck is going on, does it make sense, and then sure enough a datum floats by, this life raft flows by, we grab on, okay now I'm solid, now I can start somewhere, and then you get in the life raft and then you can, there's sure enough, there's sure out there and you can find epistemologically certain truths, logically necessary propositions. You say okay well now I can start building this, I can start certainly making sense of the world, both epistemologically and metaphysically, and you can make grounded progress, rather than always thinking oh well maybe the tide's going to come in and I'm going to drown and we just can't know anything. What I'm really interested in and I think a lot of people are interested in and inspired by is this idea that the mind and ourselves do have access to certain knowledge. We can know certain things to be true and by extension denials of true things are certainly false and we can make progress and all is not hopeless if you value discovering truth. Well I agree but I'll go back to something I said before which is that I distinguish between truth and certainty. Descartes demanded certainty and ever since then philosophers have sort of to a large extent until the 20th century tended to rather uncritically go along with that demand and that's why even today a lot of philosophers think that philosophical propositions have to be more or less analytic. They're kind of just the analysis of concepts, they're not interested in sort of vague plausible empirical generalizations or something like that but I don't agree with that. I actually think that certainty is very hard to establish in many spheres. I think there are degrees of certainty. When you talk about subjective experience you're talking about probably the highest degree of certainty, mathematics and another very high degree of certainty but it seems to me that we should not fret too much if some of our knowledge isn't certain. We just accept that. Aristotle says in the ethics doesn't he, says that it's the mark of the mature mind to not demand more precision and more certainty in a field of knowledge than it's capable of delivering. I can certainly accept that and agree with it however only with the understanding that there is that certainty. So I like the idea, I wrote a piece called The Sliding Scale of Certainty and I'm fine with the idea, I think it's demonstrably true that different propositions have different degrees of certainty. The existence of the external world is something that almost everybody assumes is the case is very central to our lives but that sliding scale of certainty goes to 100% and if that's true then any proposition which contradicts one of the certain truths is necessarily wrong and we can't say that, for example a lot of people especially who are interested in quantum physics they say oh well even the idea of the physical world separate of our minds is false and really the world is illusory and they draw really grand conclusions because certain, the premises they're challenging are maybe 90% certain but not fully certain but what I would say is anybody who challenges those handful of propositions which are out there which what I would say they form the framework or the bedrock, those are untouchable and then that almost makes all the other ones more exciting because it's like okay I have this certain knowledge and then I can build given reasonable assumptions that other minds exist and cups exist and tables exist and all this I'm not going to base my, I'm not going to those aren't the most important beliefs that I have but I'm fine with 99% certainty or something like that I don't know, I mean it seems to me that once you allow there's a spectrum of certainty that slides go, then when you also you should be fairly content with the fact that most of human knowledge is not certain I'm perfectly content with that as long as, as long as, if we, if you acknowledge that there are some foundational truths I'll certainly acknowledge that they're greatly outweighed by the uncertain ones As I said before I'm not, I'm not comfortable with the word foundational because that implies at the end that's a kind of Cartesianism that implies that you're going to build the rest of human knowledge you're going to rest it on that foundation and I don't necessarily see that with the hope that some of the certainty is going to seep through Yeah, and I'm fine with that because it would correct me if I run but Descartes tried to prove the existence of the external world too, didn't he? Right, using God Right, right, I'm not particularly persuaded by his argument but where I think we might even have more agreement is then you and I might disagree with Descartes on this that it's perfectly fine to say I don't know that the physical world exists but if it does, here's what follows and here's how it works I'm totally fine with that and that in fact is given that we appear to live in a physical world one of the most central and reasonable propositions one of the most foundational maybe not ultimately bedrock one of the most foundational ideas that we have in building our entire world view is assuming that this thing called the physical world exists even though I totally grant it's not something we can know a certainty On that note, thank you very much Dr. Westacott for talking to me I have greatly enjoyed this Great pleasure Alright, so that was my interview with Dr. Emerus Westacott the issue of consciousness is going to keep coming up in this interview series it's one of the central questions that I just don't have a great resolution for and I'm sincerely trying to find an alternative to dualism but so far I haven't found anything I find particularly persuasive and hopefully in the Socratic journey when we start going to maybe Southeast Asia or India I'm going to be able to talk to more Buddhists and Hindus that have a very very different conception of consciousness than we do in the West and be sure to tune in for the next episode where I'm talking with Professor Brian Kaplan who's a fascinating and awesome guy he's got a lot of really interesting ideas and he wrote a book a little while ago called the myth of the rational voter that I think was a best seller caused all kinds of waves I talked to him about that what is the myth of the rational voter we talk about democracy potential alternatives to democracy talk about some radical libertarian ideas we also talk about his upcoming book which is called the case against education I won't give away any details but I think the title of the book is a sufficient enough hook that people will want to tune in to listen to that episode because it's awesome alright thanks for listening everybody hope you enjoyed it