All About Space
Philosopher Philip Goff argues consciousness is meets with the author to find out more
Eddington and Bertrand Russell was the realisation that physical science doesn’t tell us what matter is, and the theoretical possibility of incorporating consciousness as the intrinsic nature of matter. Consciousness is the thing we understand. Maybe the intrinsic nature of matter constitutes conscious experience. Maybe there are connections, but it’s a very different intellectual trajectory that’s not necessarily wrapped up with anything spiritual or mystical. A lot of people defending this view are complete atheists, so there are important differences as well as potential connections.
The double-slit experiment proves atoms behave differently under observation. Why is this?
That’s a deep mystery. I actually don’t think panpsychism can help with this. Among philosophers of physics, the many-worlds equation is the most popular because it gets rid of collapse, so you get rid of the problem of how observation is making a difference.
Before we observe the system, we get interference patterns, and then this disappears and we just get particle behaviour, so whether you’re looking or not makes a difference between waves and particles. If you’re a panpsychist, you can’t say it’s consciousness that makes a difference because consciousness is everywhere, so we never have the distinction between before and after collapse or wave behaviour and particle behaviour.
Where it might help is a mind-body dualism where consciousness is outside the workings of the physical brain. The puzzle for the dualist is how the mind and brain interact. If you have this interpretation of quantum mechanics, you might want to say it’s non-physical consciousness.
Is it important to understand consciousness?
We’re about 70 per cent of the way through having a complete understanding of a maggot brain – which is smaller than the dot on an i – so we’re a very long way from understanding the 86 billion neurons in the human brain. We have a good grip on the basic chemistry, but what we’re clueless on is how those large-scale functions are realised at the cellular level. If it was true that there is a nonphysical consciousness impacting on the brain every second, that would show up in neuroscience. The more I talk to neuroscientists, the more I think we don’t know enough about the brain to assess whether there is non-physical influence on the brain. I’m not saying there’s a reason to believe
dualism, but I’m not sure we know enough about the brain to rule it out.
Do you believe that dark matter exists, and could it hold the key to understanding consciousness?
I’m not qualified enough to make such a judgement, although I do sometimes wonder whether our current scientific paradigm is telling us there is something radically wrong with physics. I don’t think we need dark matter to get mystery. Physics tells us how matter behaves, but we don’t know the substance of the stuff in and of itself, so the whole thing’s a mystery. It’s the conscious mind you understand because we’re in direct contact with it. Eddington thought we needed to build our conception of matter around our understanding of consciousness, which completely turns the mindbody problem on its head.
The Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011. Is it possible to amass enough empirical data about the Space Shuttle to have a qualitative experience of it?
Consciousness is subjective, so you can only understand something if you adopt its perspective. It would depend on how similar our own experiences are. Maybe you could know what it’s like to have experience of red if you’ve experienced a similar colour. I don’t think any amount of quantitative data can add up to that. If you’ve never been on the Space Shuttle but you’ve had experiences that are in some way similar, maybe you can start to have a grip on it.
So can machines think?
A neglected issue in AI is the relationship between thought and consciousness. Some philosophers think they’re different things, whereas a growing minority think thought is a highly evolved form of consciousness. Imagine we one day have a silicon duplicate of a human being. Let’s say silicon things are not conscious, but they’re set up to be behaviourally just like a human being. Suppose you’re talking to it and it’s opining about how best to deal with the pandemic or the global economy, but it’s not conscious. Would we say it really has opinions? If thought is just about information processing, yes, but I am inclined to say it doesn’t really understand anything. If you remove a part of the brain you lose a lot of information, whereas a computer is not like that. It can store a lot of information; the way it does so is not as dependent on a complex web of connections. If IIT is right, computers along the model we currently have will never be conscious. In many ways we’re not at first base when it comes to thinking through these issues properly, but that’s also why it’s very exciting!