 Hello my friends and welcome to the 32nd episode of Patterson in Pursuit. I'm your host, Steve Patterson, and today we're doing an interview breakdown. I can't wait to start. We're talking about the interview that I did with Professor Brahm about machine intelligence and consciousness. The first half of the interview was about machine intelligence, which was interesting, but I thought by far the most exciting stuff was the second half of the interview when we started talking about consciousness. So in this interview, there's a good 20 minute build up or so of preface to see exactly where we're going, and then the interview explodes into some pretty awesome discussions of consciousness and the limitations of physicalism. Then I give you my own analysis of why I keep coming back to dualism and even a little discussion about the theory of souls. Before we start, I want to tell you about the awesome sponsor for the show Praxis. If you think of yourself as being stuck in college. I can sympathize. I was as well, but you need to know about the company Praxis. They specialize in taking people who are in college and maybe want to take a gap year or people who haven't gone into college yet and placing them straight into the real world. It's a nine month program. It starts with three months of a professional boot camp followed by six months of a paid apprenticeship. The net cost of the program to participants is $0. So if that sounds like something you're interested in, then go to discoverpraxis.com and on their homepage, they have a button that says schedule a call, click it, set up an appointment and see if Praxis is right for you. So with this interview with Professor Brahm, I love his thought process. I think when we get to the later part, there's some very clear evidence that he's thought a lot about the relationship between the mind, between consciousness and the external world. In my own investigation of philosophy, I think it's an essential understanding that one must have is to grasp the nature of the relationship between consciousness, the mind, our theories of the world and the world. Enjoy. So when I highlight two things with this interview, one, how much of it comes down to language and the other, the interesting metaphysical agnosticism of Professor Brahm. Those two things will be more clear as we go into the interview. So take a listen to this first part. We talk about computers as well, maybe they wouldn't be interested in such and such. Is that correct? When we talk about, if I say I'm interested in some particular subject matter, that means something that I think is fairly clear to me, but does that port over to computer technology? Could computers be interested in things? Oh, I think at some point, it can be. I'm a believer in the possibility of artificial intelligence for sure that we create, that's possible to create something that we say, yeah, it has a mind of its own. It is intelligent. All the normal things we ascribe to humans in terms of those terms by having a mind that we will do this to machines too. Okay. So the first concept slash word to keep in your mind is mind. Professor Brahm thinks that machines could have minds someday. To me, the word mind means something kind of particular. And then as we keep talking, we're talking about two different things. So the immediate follow-up question is this. So does that include my conscious awareness and feeling and what we might call qualia and subjective experiences? Yeah. You have to go to it, didn't you? So that is, of course, a really tough one. How can machines be conscious? And like so many philosophers, yeah, consciousness is such a difficult one. I don't really know what to think about this. I do reject the sort of straightforward, oh, we'll be able to reduce it to brain activity. We'll see that connection. I don't see that. I don't buy into the typical materialist reductionist story. Nor am I a classical dualist. I don't believe any of this soul or spirit stuff. But there is something indeed, something very mysterious about consciousness, so what then is this then? Right? And we were missing something. Okay. So that's the metaphysical distinction that keeping your mind throughout this interview. He is not persuaded by the materialist reductionist standpoint, I totally agree. And for me, what I've been pushed into an uncomfortable position, like I call myself a reluctant dualist, but he says he's not comfortable going there, that he doesn't believe in any of this soul stuff. So an interesting question would be, what's the middle ground? If not physicalism, then what? So can machines have this? I see no reasons why they can't, but I also don't have a good argument that they would have, because I just don't understand consciousness. I spend a good part of my thesis on it, and in the end I make no progress. So you think it's at least conceptually possible that we could have something like thinking without consciousness, without conscious awareness? Yeah, I think that is really quite unproblematic thinking with that. I don't think consciousness is necessary for thinking or intelligence. I thought this was really interesting because of how casual he said this, because for me, the way that I use the word thinking is very much in the consciousness, like I stick consciousness smack in the middle of it. When I'm talking about what the phenomena of thinking is, it's something that includes a conscious first person perspective, but he says, no, I don't think that's the case. So that means that something as essential as a word is thinking, we mean two different things. So we keep exploring. As I said earlier, I hinted that maybe we already sort of talk about thinking machines. Turing, of course, predicted this 50 years ago, and I think he's right. We have gradually started to use that kind of vocabulary, or the machine is thinking or it's tentatively, but yeah, I gradually use that vocabulary of mental goings on to machines when they're working away, and certainly memory, and we have reasoning machines. We say this machine figures it out. I think we already do some of those descriptions. So what I'm interested in is the phenomena that's going on with mental happenings. When I'm thinking about something, what is the process of thinking? What he's focusing on is what do humans label as thinking, but that's definitely not what I want to get at. I don't really care about what humans call things. I want to know about that underlying phenomena, that underlying going on process. Is that the same between machines and humans? It doesn't really matter what we call it. When I use those terminology and I introspect and think about my own mental process when playing chess, it has to do with abstraction. It has to do with kind of conceptual reasoning that, okay, the bishop's got to be on the diagonal here. Is that what's going on with computers though? Is there any abstract reasoning? Or is it all just purely mechanical logic gates? So now you're clearly on Alan Turing territory. This is exactly what he responded to. He said so many people will object to this notion of machine intelligence on the basis of that very argument. They said, well, it's just moving symbols around. And it's just that. So how can that be intelligence? So that's what I want to get at is this underlying process. And then Professor Brahms' response I thought was interesting, where he essentially says, well, you assume that humans are doing this abstract process that you describe in such a way. But in reality, what humans are doing is what machines do. It's not whether machines can reason as humans. It's humans are reasoning as machines. And we trick ourselves to think otherwise. And Turing would say, well, first of all, take the human case. Presumably, again, unless you're a classical dualist, presumably intelligence comes largely from the human brain. And if you're zooming on the human brain, you see, well, it's just neural firings. You see something similar there, so why the difference? Well, hang on a second. Did you catch the little interjection there? I'll play it for you again. Presumably, again, unless you're a classical dualist, but presumably intelligence comes largely from the human brain. Interesting little interjection here. Unless you're a classical dualist, then such and such and such and such. My position has been, as it is with the interview I did with John Searle and the one I did earlier with Dr. Westacott, let's grapple with the classical dualism. That seems to be the most powerful counterargument. When I'm talking about mental phenomena, from my perspective, I don't think I'm talking about just the physical goings on. I'm talking about this weird conscious abstraction process when I'm manipulating concepts in my mind that maybe have some physical correlation in my brain, but the actual concepts themselves don't seem to be some spatio-temporally existent phenomena. But this idea of classical dualism is seen by so many people as, oh, well, this can't be true, moving on. In fact, I've heard this type of casual interjection several times, even with interviews that I haven't released yet, where people go, okay, yes, if we follow that line of reasoning, then it leads towards classical dualism. Well, classical dualism isn't right, and so it must be that such and such is the case. And I don't see the serious grappling with the classical dualist claims. So the next word that we focus on is intelligence. What does it mean to be intelligent? And he says, essentially, intelligence can be separated from consciousness. Intelligence is something that we recognize through behavior. Machines could, at least in principle, act with that same behavior. Therefore, we should be willing to ascribe them the label of intelligence. Let's say it is the case, unequivocally, just for the sake of argument, that machines can have intelligence. It's kind of an ambiguous word, but whatever it is, they have it. There's still this other thing going on, which is the abstraction. So when we're talking about Magnus Carlson, who's best chess player in the world, when we say there's, is there something fundamentally different going on in the mental processes of a human than there is a computer? So is there, when we talk about abstraction, what is that? It's not referring to intelligence. Metaphysically, no. It's what is going on in Magnus Carlson. Was that right? Magnus Carlson is what is going on when he thinks, is it something other than computation? Alan Turing would say, no, and I'm one who's inclined to believe, no, I believe that it all reduces to computation. Again, they all leave consciousness aside, right? But as far as information processing goes, in the end, so that's all computation. So in that sense, there's no fundamental difference. So in principle, we could construct a computer that had some structure whereby you would get what we call abstraction? Yes, I believe it's true. And of course, the argument is all of cognition seems to be information processing, or at least can be looked at in such a way, memory, storage of information, reasoning, inferring information, decision-making, taking into account all this information and now doing further inference. If we can characterize cognition as information processing and computers, if there are anything, they're information processors. So I thought this is really interesting because when I think of abstraction, my metaphysical analysis of abstraction is that there's some, what we mean by abstraction is some kind of taking of the underlying principles of some phenomena and grappling with them in a conceptual non-physical level. And that doesn't fit very well into the physicalist framework. And what's interesting is because he deals with consciousness separately, he's saying, well, you could still have abstraction. Abstraction is just another underlying information processing phenomena. And I'm not exactly sure what to say about this. So for example, I could say something like, when I'm talking about abstraction, there could certainly be some physical information processing that's going on in my brain. I grant that. Perhaps the consciousness, the feeling of that information processing is what I'm calling abstraction. So when I see the color red, there's some kind of physical phenomena going on in my brain. That physical phenomena going on in my brain feels or correlates with a feeling of a certain way. And that feeling is different when I see red and when I see blue. Similarly, when I'm thinking about multiplication or I'm thinking about chess, these are two different types of information processing going on in my brain. And therefore they feel a different way. So perhaps the phenomena of abstraction, what I'm calling abstraction, is purely just information processing in the brain that feels a particular way. It's like seeing a different type of color. Maybe that's the case. But my suspicion is that that's not actually the case. There's another part in concept manipulation that's not just simply the phenomena of the concepts being manipulated. It's the intention of them being manipulated. It's me sitting down deliberately working through concepts. That intentionality also doesn't seem to easily fit into the materialist reductionist metaphysics. Usually we identify things you could say from the outside. So when I'm looking at objects, I look at what they look like, their form, their shape, whatever, and I assign them a label. But it seems like with these mental phenomena, we're not really categorizing things from the outside. We're almost categorizing it from the inside. That's the way it appears to me when I say, what am I and am I fundamentally a computer? I could say, okay, well, when I look at the machine, I got all these parts moving, okay. But there seems to be that thing lacking, which is what's on the inside. And the consciousness. That's consciousness. You're getting a consciousness not indirectly. I mean, that's what you're talking about. This is kind of a good way of getting back to the first question I asked you, because when I'm thinking about, maybe artificial intelligence isn't the right word, but when I'm thinking about the mind, can you have the mind as I'm referencing it as from the internal perspective on a computer, if that's a fundamental part of the equation, is that internal-ness, then my inclination is to think, well, how could you possibly get that? You can't even see it. You can't even see it from the outside. It's just that internal perspective. Yeah, no, I understand. But just as I said, you can have intelligence without consciousness. I totally believe you can have minds without consciousness. I have no problem with that whatsoever, right? I'm perfectly willing to ascribe minds to things without knowing that they even are consciousness. I mean, of course, the same is true of you. I don't even know if you are conscious. You're not claimed to be conscious. Oh, interesting. So then when you're conceiving of a mind, you're not adding the consciousness into the equation. That's right. Now this, I must say, I do strongly disagree with, and I think it's just about language. I think if you were to ask nearly anybody about what they mean when they're talking about their mind, they're talking about consciousness, or they include consciousness in what they're talking about. This seems like a very extreme position to say, oh, well, if we just take out consciousness, then we can say that other things are intelligent. They have minds. They have all these other properties. But the only thing that they lack is this one consciousness thing. I think taking consciousness out of what we mean by a mind kind of deflates the whole point. Again, I'm not saying this is like a jump in reasoning. I just think it's overly focused on one particular use of language I think that tries to get around some really difficult questions in the philosophy of mind. Of course, when I even say the philosophy of mind, central part of that is consciousness. It's not the philosophy of data processing. It's the philosophy of those mental goings on consciousness included. And this is the immediate transition to dualism. So if we grant all the physical goings on in the brain, in the world, in machines, we say, okay, yes, all of those things are fully explained with our language of minds and the manipulation of data and the firings of neurons and brains. Okay, let's grant all of that. Let's just say it's fully explanatory. Well, we're explicitly saying that it seems like there is this other thing. There is this other consciousness that doesn't fit into that particular narrative. So I ask him this. When you say that, it pushes me into something like a dualism because I say, well, hang on a second. I have this other thing. Doesn't that mean that there's something else going on here? Is there some other, I need to explain this somehow. Well, I mean, materialism and dualism are not the only options. Okay, that's good. So that non-physicalism, what are the alternatives? Let's explore. What are some better explanations than saying, okay, that conscious awareness is a soul that happens to be inside a machine? Well, so the sort of conclusion or tentative position I reach is, I think a big part of the answer is, is indeed, what is this physical thing? So we used to have a fairly clear conception of what is physics, right? It's something tangible. We conceived it as sort of tangible stuff. I can grasp it. I can paint it. I can kick it, right? And of course, in modern physics, it's like, well, what happened to that, right? And the question becomes, well, what doesn't even mean to say something is physical? And the best answer I could reach to answer that is, when we refer to something as physical, I think, well, what we're saying really here is, it's something that seems like a copper, but something that's physicist, we study. Just like, or it's a kind of a perspective we take on the world, right? We bring to bear certain concepts and perspectives on the world. And that perspective is physical perspective, right? So when you say something is physical, we basically, I think we're saying, right, I can take that perspective and make sense of consciousness. That to me is never going to work, right? Because whether it's physical, biological, chemical, anything scientific, remember, that is third person. That is objective. Okay, okay, so I'm totally on board. He's essentially just saying, in one way, the physical world can be understood as a theory. It's one way to explain the phenomena that we experience is, but the nature of physical explanations of phenomena is necessarily third person, external. And he's saying that theory, by its nature, given the base concepts in what we mean when we're talking about physical phenomena, cannot include first person phenomena. The way that I put it as the conceptual toolbox of physicalism is insufficient for explaining all the phenomena that I experience because I'm not just experiencing what I attribute to be external third person things, objects that are separate from my consciousness. I seem to also be having the first person experience, which given the language and the concepts presented by physicalism, it just cannot seem to be explained. And so when two scientists stand next to each other and point to the same thing, right? They point and they both have their hands out and they point to something and say, do you see that? And the other one says, yes, I see that too. It seems like it's publicly observable, right? But they don't directly see the same thing, right? So how then is something publicly, how is that even possible for things to be publicly observable? I think my best answer is because when I say, do you see, right? Are there three chairs in the room, right? You say, yes, there are. And I say, yes, I see those three chairs too. But we mean something different. Well, whatever your experience is that right now you're having looking around the room, right? There's a certain structure. There's certain abstractions that you have learned to make from your experience, right? That tell you, you know, that make you say, yes, there are three chairs. I see three chairs. And I do the same thing. Even though our experiences may of course be completely different, right? So in other words, all of science, right, is in a way an abstraction. Of course it is. It's a description, right? It's a description. But even when we say it's physical, it's a perspective, right? And a perspective only gets an abstract description of reality. But an abstract description of reality, again, works well to reduce chemistry itself to physics and explain things like life because those are all abstractions too. Those are all, that's all about functionality, composition, just the kind of things you can indeed reduce to each other. And be, have a third person perspective on. But consciousness just is. That's a first person thing. We can't abstract consciousness from consciousness, right? It's the one thing that's there, right? As Dekar was really clear about this. It's the one thing I'm certain of its existence, right? Anything else, who knows? I love it. I love it. And I pretty much agree with everything that he just said. Although I wouldn't use exactly the same language. So a lot of people when they hear things like this, they'll say, oh, well, reality is constructed meaning that there's no third person world. That's not what he's saying. He's saying something I think that's quite deep and quite profound. He's saying, look, the purpose of philosophy, the purpose of thinking is to develop theories that help us best explain the phenomena that we experience. So say that again, the purpose of philosophizing, the purpose of science, the purpose of conceptualizing anything is to best explain the phenomena that we experience. The external world is a theory. Doesn't mean the external world doesn't exist. It means we have a theoretical concept in our head. This is the reason that I'm experiencing the world the way that I am, is because there's something separate from myself. This external world impinges on my senses. I bump into things and I feel things. And the reason that my experience is so varied is because this external world is so varied. There's lots of different things that are in it that sometimes I bump into. And therefore I have an experience of. Everything that I've just said is a theoretical attempt to explain my own experiences. Now, that concept of the external world is so deeply rooted in almost everybody's theories. That's okay, because I think it's accurate. But we must recognize it for what it is. It's a theory and it might be wrong. I mean, we might all be plugged into the matrix, right? If we recognize the existence of the world outside of our minds as being theoretical and attempt to explain our own experiences, then he's saying, accurately so, that theory of the external world cannot explain the experiences. That theory isn't about the first person. That theory is about the third person. It's the world that is out there is structured in such a way. So we come up with these concepts about objects and physics and chemistry and biology and astronomy, necessarily given the base concepts in physical theories. Those concepts aren't talking about consciousness. They're not talking about the first person. Now, we can talk about the brain, but the brain is not consciousness. The brain is still an external thing. The brain is still, if you identify what you're talking about when you're talking about a brain, the brain is still a theory. Now again, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying brains only exist in your mind or there is no external world. That's not what I'm saying. I'm trying to say you in your head have a conception of what you think you mean by a brain. That conception may or may not apply to the external world. I think it does. I think my conception of what a brain is applies to the real world, but it might not. So I have to recognize it is not necessarily something that is definitely in the world that I'm experiencing. It's something that is a conception. That conception of the brain ain't consciousness. I can try to conceive of consciousness and build some kind of structure around trying to explain consciousness, but all those things are still theories. And what he's saying is the consciousness just is. It's the underlying definite going on. All these other theories are just theories, right? I might have an incorrect theory about consciousness. I might have an incorrect theory about the brain, about the external world, about almost anything, maybe not logic, but what is definitely true is that the phenomena of the experience is going on. That first person subjective awareness is definitely there. And you can't explain it away or even really get at it by talking about concepts about the external world because it's not the external world. The only reason we can reference such a thing as the external world is because we're not there. We're stuck in the internal world. In some sense, the physicalists who try to say that consciousness isn't happening, it's similar to somebody who's developed some fantasy land, some Harry Potter world. And then they're so into it that they forget that the Harry Potter world is a construction. And then their perspective is fundamentally about what exists in the Harry Potter world, not realizing that they've created the Harry Potter world. The same is true with the concept of the external world. You create that theory and it's so overwhelmingly powerful that people get tripped up and get stuck in that theoretical construction and they don't even realize that they're the ones conceiving of the physical world in the first place. I'm a realist. I believe that there is a physical world or at least there is a world independent of what I think. I'm not a solipsist or idealist, anything like that. But what we say is physical only captures some of that world, right? And consciousness, it can't capture. I agree with you. That's a very radical claim. I mean, to me, this takes the default philosophy of scientific materialism that I think people are very comfortable with. And that kind of turns it on its head when you're saying that consciousness is something that by its nature is almost not even open to scientific investigation or it's a category mistake to view it as. That would seem to be the implication. I mean, not that we can't study consciousness. Of course we can. We can bring the subjects to the lab and do things to them and then we can, and then they will report and they're conscious experiences and as such, we can come to know lots of things about consciousness but only sort of indirectly. We can only come to know how consciousness is associated to all those different physical conditions and circumstances, right? But what consciousness is, we're not really getting 100% agree with them. And it says consciousness is prior to the scientific investigation. So in terms of coming back to the mind and artificial intelligence, what is, so I'm still looking for a more palatable alternative than the soul really. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean the soul is always seen as a thing, like this ingredient that you sort of now put into this body and you're sort of- Yeah, it's a person. It's a being that it's me. Right, life was always seen like this too, right? Life was this vital force. Exactly. You and I have it inside of us and we're in rocks down. Exactly. You know, that's all pretty silly, right? And of course we say there's no vital soul. Now of course, the eliminativists say, ah, and same for consciousness, right? The consciousness is like the vital soul. And now of course they say, no, no, no, no, no, consciousness, we do know exists, right? There is a difference between consciousness and a vital force, right? The vital force was just a mistake. There is such a thing. But consciousness is, right? Again, as David said, that we're absolutely certain of. All right, and I want to explain that because that comes up a lot. When you're talking with eliminative materialist people who think that consciousness isn't happening, will often say, oh yes, well the theory of consciousness is similar to the theory of the vital force. That you think there's this additional thing that animates matter and turns it into life. There's this life force. But that's just a mistake, that's not what's going on. In the same vein, you think that there's additional, this additional thing to your brain and namely the consciousness, but that's not going on just like the vital force wasn't going on. And he correctly points out, this is a mistake. The theory of a vital force is still an external theory. It's not explaining internal experience. It's trying to say, why are some objects, why are some clumps of matter animated? And we call them living. So a toad is not, we're not talking about the explanation for a toad's consciousness if there's any consciousness in a toad. We're talking about the actual animation movement of living things is that, oh, there's gotta be this other force. That's a reasonable theory, but we have reason to believe it's not true. That again is not consciousness. The consciousness is still prior to the theory of the life force. It's just two totally different things. So, but what then is that it's, I have some sympathy to, you know, Chalmers kind of new dualism where he says, well, it's, and which is really a kind of property dualism, right? He says, look, there's still only one kind of thing. It's still a kind of a monist position in terms of maybe substance, right? But, you know, but we have these physical properties. Again, these abstract properties of functionality composition that we can study through the normal sciences, right? So when we reveal those, you know, we can call those the physical properties, but then there's other properties to this thing, right? That makes up the universe, right? Whatever that is, right? And those would be the non-physical properties, you know, maybe what he calls the phenomenal properties, right? So consciousness would be on that side of the coin. I don't know if I'm a property dualist either because again, you know, I think there's something because if you say, you know, if you say, well, the phenomenal and the physical are both properties of the same thing, you sort of put consciousness on the same level if you want this physics. And I say consciousness in a way is more fundamental. It really is, right? Where physics to me is an abstraction, right? So I see a difference. I don't know if I want to be a property dualist either. It starts to sound like more like an idealism again, right? That all the physical comes from the consciousness, but that gets too quickly into solipses. And I don't want to be a realist. There is something that exists clearly outside of me. I love it. I just, this guy's awesome. I agree with his reasoning, but to me, the conclusion is shouting, dualism is the answer. So let me break down exactly what he just said there. He said, look. Okay, so there's this idea of property dualism that fundamentally there's one type of thing. There's one substance and that substance has physical properties and that substance has mental properties. The two properties can't be reduced to one another, but he's saying they're seen as being equally fundamental. He correctly notes, however, that's probably not true because in a very real sense, consciousness is more fundamental than our theory about the existence of the external physical world. But then he says, well, I don't like that though because that leads towards idealism. Idealism is the idea that fundamentally there is consciousness, there's mental stuff, and then out of the mental stuff we get physical stuff. And he, I think rightfully again, says, I don't like that because that leads you down the road of solipsism, which is the idea that only my mind exists, that there isn't some independent property that is the physical world, it's all mental stuff. I don't like that, I don't like that either. This is the reason why I've called myself a reluctant do-list, the theoretical power of the physical world is overwhelming. It's just not self-evident, but it's pretty damn near self-evident that there is an external physical world. That theory correlates incredibly powerfully to my own experiences. However, it certainly isn't fundamental, my consciousness is fundamental, and if it's the case that I cannot be wrong about the existence of consciousness, but I can be wrong about the existence of the physical world, that implies consciousness in a sense is more fundamental at least to us than the physical world. So if you want to grant the real existence of an external physical world, and you want to grant the real existence of consciousness, and you want to say, neither is fundamentally reducible to the other, this is the reason I'm a do-list. I cannot say that consciousness does not exist, and I really don't want to say that the physical world doesn't exist, therefore I grant them independent existences from one another in different worlds that there's two-way causality. The mental world affects the physical world, the physical world affects the mental world, and I'm not comfortable giving up either of those real existences. If I had to be a strict monist, I would be forced into the idealist position because consciousness I'm certain of the physical world I'm not. Now it might be the case that over the course of the investigation of the pursuit of truth, maybe I'll end up an idealist, it's of course possible, but I'm going to be fighting that conclusion tooth and nail because I find the theoretical explanation of my experiences, including the existence of an external physical world, completely overwhelming and explanatory. In terms of what we're certain of, consciousness is a real fundamental phenomena in the universe. We have reason to believe that in addition to the existence of that phenomena, there's also something that we've labeled as physicalness, which is, so I have the conscious experience of there being some kind of three-dimensional existence, where I have a visual feel and if I'm aware of it, I think, okay, well there seems to be this space and there's these little things that occupy that space. Now it might be the case that all of that's just made up in my mind, just complete solipsism, I don't know, maybe, but it seems reasonable to believe that in addition to my consciousness, there is some other thing out there and that there's some kind of causal interface between the two, right? So it seems to be the case that if I bump into a chair, I have the conscious awareness of it and if I want to move the chair, then it seems like that external world moves around. So there seems to be that meaningful external internal. And we talk about consciousness, right? Now we're debating consciousness, so we're clearly doing something with consciousness, it clearly has causal force, right? And that, of course, makes the idea that, oh, I can sort of talk about minds and intelligence just in computational terms, sort of now pushing consciousness on the side, it does make me nervous sometimes. I'm like, is that, can I really do this? I mean, cognitive scientists, most cognitive scientists, practice cognitive science, do the same thing. They sort of put consciousness on the side of like, oh, let me just study reason, let me just study perception and action, decision-making, problem-solving, et cetera, right? From the computational kind of perspective and sort of disregard consciousness here. We might be making a mistake there. I don't know, so I really don't claim to have the answer about consciousness. It is a real doozy to me, a real mind-boggling. I am flabbergasted about how to even think about this. Well, good, then I feel better about it because I'm in the exact same boat. So I love this, again, I just agree with all of the guy's arguments. He's got an agnostic conclusion and I have this theoretical explanation for this seeming mutual existence of mind and matter and its dualism. I thought it was so interesting too, it just in that last thing he said, he just casually mentioned, well, of course, it seems like consciousness has causal power and such and such. Whoa, whoa, whoa, is that true? Is it true that consciousness has causal power? It seems to be the case. But if that's true, that also has massive implications because that implies that mind can move matter, right? So if it's true that your consciousness can affect this thing we call the external world and you can choose to move a chair around and that chair without your causal decision, that chair would not have moved and the actual particles that make up the chair actually moved as a function of your conscious causal decision, well guys, you got a big philosophic problem to explain and I agree with it, I believe that is true. However, it implies maybe the physical world as we conceive it is not something that's a causally closed system. It certainly gives room for free will and this is why when I talk to people about consciousness and dualism, I always say, look, the theory of the soul, that there is a person, there is such a thing as a person that's not fully reducible to physical matter. The person understood as kind of a first person entity has a very direct causal connection with my hands and my arms and my body. That person can consciously decide to raise this arm, I call it my arm and the arm goes up. I can say, well, I'm gonna get a drink of water and then my body moves around and goes ahead and gets the drink of water. It seems to be that that person directly controls parts of the physical world and this, I mean, just sounds like a soul. Now maybe when I use the term soul, it's very off-putting because of the theological connotations. I actually don't know that much about souls and maybe when I posited the existence of a soul, I'm positing more baggage than I'm aware of but the way that I describe it as something like this where it's a person with a first person perspective that is meaningfully different than other people's first person perspective, those people cannot be reduced to their brains. You won't find a person in a brain. If you know the position of every single atom in a body, you will not find a person. That person is the one that feels all the qualia, that person is the one that has all of the experiences. So for example, when I stub my toe, it's not simply the neurons firing in the brain, it's not simply the mental conscious feeling of the neurons firing. No, there's an additional part, which is the possession of that conscious experience. It's I am having the feeling of stubbing my toe. It's not the universe as some independent third person process is having the experience, right? I, it's the first person that is having the experience. That person has meaningful boundaries, meaning that person isn't everything. There's some distinction between the person and the not person. And those boundaries make up what I'm calling the soul. Where your person ends is the boundary of your soul. Now, I hate that conclusion. I wish that weren't what I find persuasive, but that theoretical explanation for the phenomena that I'm experiencing has the most explanatory power. It explains all of the phenomena that I experience. I don't really have any difficulty explaining what I think the physical world is, what I think consciousness necessarily is. I have words to describe it, and I don't have to describe consciousness as some independent third person process that isn't attached to people. I have language to describe what seems to be the case, which is that my consciousness is my consciousness. My personal, me, Steve's consciousness. That is a long way of saying, I completely agree with almost all of Professor Brahman's arguments about the weirdness of consciousness. But in my mind, there is one screaming resolution, which is dualism. Mental phenomena exists. They cannot be reduced to physical phenomena. Physical phenomena exists. They cannot be reduced to mental phenomena. That's dualism. And I understand and appreciate his hesitancy and skepticism and discomfort as saying I'm totally baffled by it. But since I don't really care if people think I'm a crank or crazy, I can say, look, I do have a theoretical explanation for consciousness. I'm not particularly comfortable with all the implications, but at least I'm not totally baffled by it. And I have some relatively powerful theory to explain what's going on. All right, so that's my breakdown. I hope you guys enjoyed it. This topic is so awesome. Got lots more to say. If you wanna help support the show because you like this kind of breakdown, you like this kind of honest, philosophizing, head over to patreon.com slash Steve Patterson. You can patronize the show, become part of the community, contribute one or two dollars whenever a new episode is released, and help support the creation of a more rational worldview. Thanks so much, guys. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.