Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1739 - Philip Goff
Uploaded: 2021-11-24T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1739 - Philip Goff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1739 - Philip Goff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-24. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1739 - Philip Goff

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Yep, yeah.
Well, it started out as a plain, clean table,
because this is a new studio.
And then along the line, people give you a bunch of shit,
and then it just starts piling up,
and you have to figure out when do I empty this ashtray,
when do I throw out some of these objects,
when do I move them into storage.
And then when I move them into storage,
there always seems to be new ones that show up.
So these are all things people have bought, brought?
Yes, everything is something someone's given me.
Oh, I should have brought something.
The deer head.
Oh, please don't give me anything.
We're good.
Thank you.
Just your pretty self is fine.
So thanks for doing this, man.
Appreciate it.
No worries.
Thanks for having me.
It's a very fascinating subject,
because I've always wondered.
Let's just explain.
Tell everybody what you do and who you are.
My name is Philip Goff.
I'm a philosophy professor from Durham University in the north of England,
and I spend most of my time thinking about consciousness.
And specifically, I guess I defend this view, panpsychism,
which is roughly the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous
feature of the physical world.
So it doesn't literally mean that everything is conscious necessarily.
The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks of reality,
maybe fundamental particles like electrons and quarks,
have incredibly simple forms of experience.
And then the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow
rooted in or derived from this very simple experience at the level of
fundamental physics.
So sounds kind of wacky, but I think more and more philosophers and even some
neuroscientists are thinking this might be our best hope for addressing the
hard problem of consciousness
and the scientific and philosophical challenges consciousness raises.
Well, we are starting to challenge whether or not other things have something
akin to consciousness, like plants, right?
There's real evidence that plants both feel something when they're being eaten
and react to it.
The real evidence that they react to it, they actually change the profile, the
chemical profile,
to make themselves taste disgusting so that animals will not eat them.
And that could actually be replicated with noises of the leaves being chewed on,
which is really fascinating.
They've played tape recordings of caterpillars eating leaves next to trees.
And those trees have triggered that response, this chemical response of
whatever it is inside of them that makes them taste disgusting.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the extent to which we've discovered how intelligent the kind of
mental sophistication of plants is incredible.
So Monica Gagliano, for example, has done experiments subjecting pea plants to
conditioned learning.
So, you know, the old Pavlov's dog idea that, you know, he rang the bell every
time the dog gets food
and then eventually the dog starts salivating when the bell rings.
But she's actually done this with pea plants.
So she's taught them to associate the ultraviolet light with the hum of a
computer fan.
And eventually they started growing towards the hum of the computer fan.
So there's been some kind of conditioned association there.
And also other people, you know, the sophistication of trees and the life of
trees, to the extent that they're hooked up under the ground,
what some people have called the wood wide web, and that even across species,
there's kind of a sort of quid pro quo,
that the evergreen, the deciduous trees giving nutrients to the evergreen trees
giving nutrients to the deciduous trees when they've lost their leaves and then
this being reciprocated.
And so there's, you know, much more sophistication in the plant kingdom than we
previously realized.
Now, but whether that's, I mean, whether that is consciousness is another
question.
I mean, there's a core difficulty at the heart of the science of consciousness,
which is that consciousness is not publicly observable, right?
I can't look inside your head and see your feelings and experiences.
You know, we know about consciousness, not from observation experiment, but
just from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences.
So, you know, and so, you know, science is used to dealing with unobservables,
fundamental particles, quantum wave functions, you know, maybe even other
universes.
None of these things are directly observable.
But there's a really important difference in the case of consciousness, because
in all these other cases, we're postulating things that are unobservable in
order to explain what we can observe.
That's ultimately what we're, you know, the standard model of particle physics.
It's all about explaining what is publicly observable.
But in the unique case of consciousness, the thing we are trying to explain is
not publicly observable.
And that is utterly unique and really constrains our capacity to investigate it
experimentally.
So it is, I mean, in the case of human beings, I can't directly observe your
feelings, but I can ask you, right?
Right.
And, you know, I can scan your brain at the same time, or maybe stimulate bits
of your brain and ask you what you're feeling, what you're experiencing.
And in this way, neuroscientists try to match up what kinds of brain activity
are correlated with what kind of experience.
And we can hopefully make some progress on that in the human case, but the, you
know, the further we get away from the human case, the harder it is to
establish what things are or are not conscious.
I mean, some people are now starting to think there might just be real limits
to our knowledge here because consciousness is not publicly observable.
So there's a real challenge there, I think.
It is a fascinating thing in that it's agreed upon, right?
Like everybody knows that we have it, but then trying to figure out what else
has it, we must rely on their reactions and motion.
Like, that's one of the things about plants, right?
Like the motion is so slow, like the motion of their growth or of the expanding
of the petals of a flower.
Yeah.
The motion is so small that we think of it as not being in motion at all.
Yeah.
I mean, actually, if you watch things of the plants sped up, it starts to look
a lot more like something you'd want to ascribe mentality, even consciousness
to.
So maybe there's just something going on in a different frame of reference here.
But, yeah, I mean, actually, so the neuroscientist Christophe Koch had a bet
with the philosopher David Chalmers in the 1990s that in 25 years we would have
completely established what is called the neural correlates of consciousness.
You know, exactly what kinds of physical activity go along with consciousness.
He bet him a case of wine, a case of fine wine.
Did he pay up?
Well, I think he's probably about to lose that bet because, you know, it's
pretty much 25 years later and there's just no consensus.
There are different theories and there's just no consensus.
And actually, I mean, it's exactly what you said, right, because we can't
observe it, we have to establish to do the science.
We're not, you know, not even talking about the philosophy, the hard problem of
consciousness yet.
Just just this scientific project of trying to map up map which kinds of brain
activity go with experience.
To do that, we have to set up what we can call detection procedures, kind of
rules for mapping behavior to experience.
So one of these might be if someone is having an experience, they can report it.
Right.
That's some people, some neuroscientists adopt that rule.
If someone's having an experience, you can report it.
So if you if you adopt that rule, then you can start to test whether someone's
having experience.
But they're controversial.
So other people doubt those rules.
So some people who accept what's sometimes called the overflow thesis think
that there's more experience than we can actually think or attend to.
So if you think about your experience of your clothes on your body right now.
So now I've said it, you might be attending to it and aware of it.
But before I mentioned it, you weren't thinking about it, you weren't attending
to it.
It's an open, debated question whether you're actually experiencing that,
whether you can have an experience that you're not aware of, that you're not
attending to.
And different what stance you take on that philosophical question leads to
different scientific predictions.
So people who think there's a close connection between attention and
consciousness tend to think consciousness is in the prefrontal cortex because
that's where things like cognition, like working memory is.
But people who think there can be more experience than we can attend to, they
tend to think it's in the back of the brain.
And it's just, you know, wildly different predictions.
And so, you know, it's a real mess.
And then there's subconsciousness, the concept of your unconscious and
subconscious thoughts, which are really just consciousness in different layers.
It's not really unconscious or subconscious.
So, I mean, the extreme version of, so some people think if you're not aware of
it, you're not really experiencing it.
So, I mean, you know, to take, you know, all of your experience right now, you
know, all of these beautiful, slightly odd objects and, you know, your
experience of the clothes on your body and the sound of my voice.
So we know, what we know experimentally is that you can't attend to all of that,
right?
There are real limits to what you can attend to.
So the question is, those things you're not attending to, are they part of your
experience that you're just not aware of?
Some people think that makes no sense.
If you're not aware of it, you're not experiencing it.
Or the case, you know, where you're kind of driving along and you've, you know,
you're lost in thought, you're just on autopilot.
Were you actually experiencing the road or were you just on total unconscious
autopilot?
So there's a real debate just there.
But I suppose for those people who think awareness and consciousness can come
apart, some people think there could be all kinds of really vivid experiences
that we're just totally unaware of.
And then, you know, so I mean, I think we're just, in a way, we're not at first
base.
We're not even at the kind of hard problem of consciousness yet.
Just in these scientific questions, we're really not at first base in how to
think about them properly.
Well, what, the way we interface with the world as a, as a life form is based
essentially on instincts and on genetics that have all been hammered into our
system in order to keep us alive.
I mean, that's, you can only concentrate on so many things.
It's only like, you have to have a certain amount of concentration on your
environment and the world around you.
If you didn't have it, you didn't survive.
That passed on to where we are today.
The concept of unconscious thoughts and of memories and things, this is all
supposed to be like things you could rely upon for certain instincts that you
have to avoid certain areas because this is, this is problematic.
This could cause you to lose your life, this could keep you from passing on
your genes.
Like, there's a reason for all this stuff, right?
When you get down to objects, though, like a thing having consciousness or some
kind of consciousness, that's where we, we have to like, do we, do we have to
parse what it means to be a human being?
And why do we have all these hammered in instincts and thoughts?
And there's, there's certain instincts that animals have.
Like I have a golden retriever.
He has not been around a lot of dogs to learn certain behavior, but there's
certain things that he does that are baked into his DNA.
Like one of them, unfortunately, he likes to roll around in fuck shit.
Nice.
I've got a friend who does that as well.
A human?
Yeah.
No, I was just jokin