Bernardo Kastrup Live!

Bernardo Castro Bernardo for those who don't know you can you say a little bit about who you are and what you do? I've been writing books on philosophy for about ten years now I have a background in philosophy of PhD in philosophy of PhD in computer engineering My day life is doing corporate strategy. It's good money easy to do and my night life is Wrestling with the ontology philosophy of mine. What's the nature of consciousness? What's the nature of reality at large? And writing a whole lot about it. Yeah, you do write a lot about this. I mean, you were writing about this before you got your PhD in philosophy is that correct? That's right. Yeah, I got a PhD in philosophy because I tired of people saying yeah, you're writing all this stuff about philosophy But it doesn't have a degree in philosophy and then I thought oh, no, all right So I was curious about what got you interested in these in this topic before delving into the details of your view and all that Well my original background is computer engineering and used to work at CERN and in Switzerland and the data acquisition system of the Atlas experiment part of the large hardware collider and What we had to do is basically pattern recognition and we used classical algorithms to do that But on the side I used to work on neural networks to do that as well and it was a hobby for me for years And at some point you start thinking, you know, these neural networks They're really emulating what the brain does. So why are they not conscious? What is it about the neural processing that gives rise to qualities as opposed to just, you know, quantifiable data processing and wrestling with that question for a while I realized that you know whatever alternative whatever hypothesis I came up with To to create consciousness actually already presupposed consciousness you cannot create it if you really follow your line of thought rigorously And then I I changed upon a paper by by Dave Chalmers on the hard problem of consciousness and that wasn't lightning because um It's not only that I understood it. I recognized that somebody had sort of articulated the issue very clearly and right and from that point on from recognizing the impossibility of deducing the qualities of experience even in principle from the parameters of physical arrangements wherever they are um Put you on a road that inevitably I think and in metaphysical idealism the idea that the ontological primitive is not physicality But mind itself consciousness phenomenal consciousness and that everything else arises from that as patterns of configuration patterns of excitation of consciousness Yeah, that's interesting. So were you having any having any affiliation or Leaning sort of idealism before you started thinking seriously about these issues or it was a surprise to you. That's where you ended up or Yeah, pretty much pretty much Definitely, I mean, I mean, I went to university was I had just turned 17 And my first job was at Surn which is the sort of the world cathedral Right physicalism not in a bad sense. I mean they are not philosophers, but you know, we breathe and leave physicalism at Surn And I had that job. I started on a Monday. I had a defendant my masterpiece is on a Friday So it's sort of and everything happened very early. I was 21 years old So it was in that world immersed in that world of physicalism You know thinking about the Higgs boson before anybody else knew what the Higgs boson was well anybody else outside of that small community So that that that was my life and dualism Yeah, never did it for me. I thought it was so artificially unparsemonious It's like a hack. I didn't I didn't like it Monism is Building me. I mean, I'm very predisposed to to monism. I can argue for it, but I am naturally predisposed to it And once you really rock the hard problem and you are a monist there's no way out for you. Yeah, you're turning to a metaphysical idealist But that's yeah, okay, well, we'll see. I guess I'm open to idealism I guess my leanings are towards physicalism and I actually spend some time defending it I wouldn't say I think it's true. I do think that it's hard to show that it's false and Hasn't been there's not really in I guess what I would defend is that there's not really a lot of good reason for abandoning physicalism But I'm certainly open to idealism and I think it's a under explored especially nowadays So it's really cool to see people taking this seriously and I really enjoyed reading your work There's a lot of challenging stuff in there not everything I agreed with but I still think it's it's this an important conversation that people need to have more of so I really appreciate that I did want to ask about the hard problem since if you don't mind to talk about that a little bit Because I mean not everyone takes the hard problem as seriously as you do So I wonder what you might say to someone who says the hard problem is either an artifact of where we are currently Scientifically or even stromore strongly that there just isn't a hard problem I Let's take the the latter first people who do not recognize that there is a hard problem. I think they implicitly Conflate the ideas of physicality and mentality and what they think of as physicality is actually mentality what they attribute or or Or or associate with the concept of physicality are concrete qualities things that I can hold Things that hurt if I knock myself against it like my the wall of my house, you know That's really physical because if I knock my head against it. I will feel its physicality. Right. Well These are all appeals to quality to qualities Concreteness is itself a quality of experience. So as a coherent physicalist An eliminative physicalist who denies that there is a hard problem at all or even an illusionist I mean there are so many is this days and it's a losing track of it But if you appeal to the to the Conquriteness and probability of reality To justify your physicalist position you're getting it wrong Because those are all experiences those are all qualities of experience what you have to appeal to is a complete completely abstract world Defined in terms of quantities Measurements things that you can measure mass charts being momentum geometrical relationships space-time position and so on um and If you really realize that in your coherent with that in your physicalism Then you ought to understand that there is no trivial bridge perhaps no bridge at all But at least no trivial bridge between measurable quantities and felt qualities that jump is arbitrary So people who deny that there is a hard problem. I think they are conceptually confused They are Sort of conflating under physicalism. What is the in fact an appeal to qualities? Now people who say Promissingly that okay that there is a hard problem. We recognize that but it will be solved I think that promising claim Would make sense if it were not impossible in principle To bridge the gap between measurable quantities or quantitatively defined entities devoid of any qualities and qualities if there were at least a way in principle to deduce qualities from quantities then you could say well We will crack that problem eventually But we see a way in principle I think the issue is that there isn't a way even in principle because these are completely Commissarable rounds by definition by the way they are defined they become Incomensurable Yeah, that would be my answer to that so I guess because the the most sympathetic way I would put it is what we need is that intermediate step So an intermediate step would be something like a theory Which would help us see how the one area is connected to the other and we may not have that yet So if we had a if we had a particular if we understood the how the brain function more and how consciousness actually works better What it was in this essence then when we don't have that yet We're still having endless debates over what the nature of consciousness is you know Well, how what's part of the brain if any it's associated with etc So if we had a better theory of consciousness then would you still be skeptical that you could make this kind of deduction? Because my intuition is that we could I'll be completely skeptical because I would play the following thought exercise Suppose I knew with perfect accuracy The position of every fundamental subatomic particle that composes my brain and my entire nervous system at any discrete moment in time Yeah, and I could model the whole thing with complete accuracy in a super computer Would any of that allow me to deduce how it feels to have a belly ache to falling love to see red or to taste strawberries Based on the configuration of those subatomic particles and their revolution in time I would claim no there is nothing about that not even in principle that would allow me to make this deductive Step from one realm to another And I think about what what what I mean I understand the what you're saying But what besides just your intuition that you couldn't do it actually supports us not being able to do it I guess what I'm asking Assume that you Take a wrong turn in a line of thought and that wrong turn will lead you into a complete dead end But you don't actually face a wall because you can always say well But in the future will figure this out and then you persist on that wrong turn That's where I think we are today. You cannot argue against somebody who says, well, we don't understand it now, but one day we will understand. I don't think that's a valid argument because it perpetuates your staying in the wrong path. I think what we have to do is step back and look at where we made the last turn and re-evaluate where that turn was justified. I think what's happening is that all we have is experience. We have always had only experience that has never been any other ontological category accessible to us other than experience, the qualities of experience. And at some point we abstracted because of an explanatory reason. We abstracted this material world outside and independent of experience. And now, and this is an abstraction of consciousness, of course, consciousness abstracted this theoretical entity called the material world in order to make sense of the fact that we all seem to inhabit the same universe and blah, blah, blah. And now we are busy trying to reduce ourselves to reduce consciousness to an abstraction of consciousness. I think that's like chasing our own tails at a light speed. And you can, you know, if a dog is chasing his tail, the dog can always say, well, but next time around I'm going to catch that tail. And you can keep telling that to yourself for the next few centuries. Could look with that. And I think what we have to do is stop. Take a step back. Re-evaluate our assumptions. Are we on a promising path here or are we on a dead end? Yeah, I mean, I understand the tail. I like the idea, but someone might argue that, well, there's, if you do an induction over the history of science, it seems like people who say what you say tend to be wrong and the people who say science will understand it someday tend to be right. And yeah, we're narrowing down what's not understandable to maybe this core issue of consciousness. But there, but I mean, you know, people said that about flight. They'll never fly. And you know, hilariously, someone said that on the day when they were actually doing it. So I'm, you know, I'm just wondering why, why should we feel like we should give up at this moment with the chasing the tail or chasing the, whatever? I aren't we conflate into completely different classes of question when we follow this line of thought. I mean, we say, well, science will one day explain consciousness. Why shouldn't we believe that science will one day explain consciousness? Now, building to these, there are two things. One is materialism is intrinsic to science. So when you say science, we explain consciousness. What you mean is that one day we will reduce consciousness to matter outside and independent of experience. Right. That is a metaphysics that's not science. Science is about, you know, look at the thing. What is the method of science? How does science work? Science works by asking questions to nature and then listening for the reply. And we call that making an experiment and observing the result. The answer that nature gives to any scientific experiment is a behavior. It's something that nature does. Right. So science is about studying modeling and predicting the behaviors of nature. What nature does. It is intrinsically incapable to study what nature is because there is no experiment that will tell you that the answer to every experiment is a behavior. So every scientific question is posed in the form of, hey, nature, what will you do if I do this and this under this and that condition? So if you say, well, science will explain consciousness. I don't think science will ever provide us the answer to the intrinsic nature of nature, the essence of existence, to the categorical basis of reality, to speaking technical terms. Because these are questions about what nature is, not how nature behaves. I would claim that idealism as a metaphysics is entirely consistent with all science that has ever been made and all science that will ever be made. I think what science can tell us is what are the correlations between inner experience felt directly and that other class of experience that we call perception within which we find an object called a brain. A brain is an object of perception. If I go in that brain, I mess around with it and cut it or stimulate with electricity, what happens to the subjects from a first person perspective? I think these are the questions science can answer and I think we can refine the answers to these questions in the coming decades and centuries to a point that we wouldn't even believe today. And none of that would be inconsistent with idealism if properly and coherently formulated. Right. No, go ahead. I was going to say I certainly agree with the point that you're making that idealism is consistent with everything that we know from science. That wasn't the kind of question that I was trying to ask though. But I like the objection that you're raising that there seems to just be some kind of category mistake going on here. Because the material world is itself as an abstraction and consciousness itself is something that we know from the first person point of view. And so trying to reduce one to the other is seemingly strange at first glance. And you tend to think that that's the source of the hard problem, I think. But I wonder so you don't think your idealism has a hard problem. Is that correct? That's correct. Yeah. A physicalist has a hard problem because a physicalist posits the theoretical abstraction of a material world outside an independent of experience, which in turn modulates my experience by impinging on my sense organs. And that impinges on the brain and then the arrangement of subatomic particles in my brain does something sort of magical and voila, qualities arise within the confines of my scope. And the hard problem is this categorical transition from matter to experience. You have a transition, a bridge that you have to account for between the domain of matter and the domain of experience, which are two ontologically separate categories. And building a bridge between the two is in principle impossible. That's the core of the hard problem. And I an objective idealist, I consider myself both a subjective and an objective idealist. But I focus on the objective part now. Objective idealist would say, you know what, with the physicalists, I concur, there is something out there independent and outside of my personal mentation of my personal experience. There is something out there that holds the state of the universe even when nobody is looking at it. And that is the objectivity of idealism. You say the world is experiential, but it's not my experience or your experience alone. It's transpersonal experience out there. And now I have to translate the qualities of that transpersonal experience as experienced from my first person perspective. In other words, from the perspective of the inanimate universe as a whole, I have to transfer that to the qualities on the screen of my perception. Suppose that these transpersonal experiences are thoughts. There is something it is like to have a thought. So these are experiences out there. But when I look at the world, I don't feel thoughts, I see shapes, I see colors, I hear sounds, I taste flavors. So what the idealist now has to account is how qualities of a certain type, transpersonal thoughts, translate into qualities of another type, the qualities of perception. Right. Now, that's a pretty difficult problem. But it's certainly not impossible because it's happening to you all the time. Every time your thoughts in pinion your emotions and change how you feel, you're having a transition between one set, one category of experience and another category of experience. If you have an emotion, if you're feeling sad, that will pinion your thoughts. It even main pinion your perception. People who have or going through different emotional journeys, so to say. And describe the same environment in different ways. It directly affects your perception. Not your perception, but how you process your perceptions at higher cognitive levels. But I thought that point though was that, so that the transpersonal thoughts, which constitute the natural world on your view, when they impinge on my dissociated alter or what everyone call my sensory apparatus, that they give rise to a qualitatively different kind of thing, namely a perception, like ads of a treat or a table. So it's that transition, which seems to be the one that calls to be explained. Not how thoughts can cause and us something that's already disposed to have, namely, these protect my how, how that gives rise to the perception. Yeah. That seems like a hard thing to explain on your view. Yeah. So let's break the problem down into two. One is, do we have reason to believe that in principle, this is at all possible, that experiences of a certain type can impinge on experiences of another type. And that's what I already discussed. I think in principle, we know that this can happen because it's happening all the time. [BLANK_AUDIO] the other way around. Now the other part of the experience of the answer is, okay, now that I know that it in principle is possible, why does it happen the way it does? Why do transpersonal thoughts out there? Why are they registered by me in the form of colors, shapes and sounds? And there are two arguments for this. One is evolutionary. One is to say, look, if we were to become acquainted with the external environment as it is in itself as a forest of thoughts that we are sort of walking through, that wouldn't be very advantageous for surviving. I think it would be very confusing. It would be like a telepath in the middle of a very emotionally charged demonstration on the streets of New York. You go nuts, right? It's very difficult to negotiate your way around your ecosystem if that's how you will become acquainted with the environment around you. So I think evolutionarily, it has been very advantageous for us to develop a way of interacting with the environment that presents the environment to us at glance in one go. And that is the screen of perception. Instead of navigating through a noisy, confusing forest of all kinds of transpersonal thoughts that you cannot make heads and tails off, the world is presented to you in the form of a kind of a dashboard. And that dashboard is the screen of perception. It's what we see, what we hear, what we touch, what we feel. It grants a degree of separation. It makes sure that we never confuse the external world with our endogenous experiences, because they feel very different. And presents the environment to us in a very effective way. That's one line of argument. The other line of argument is very physical. An argument can be made and has been made. That if our perceptual apparatus would mirror the states of the world outside, we would dissolve into an entropic soup. There would be no bounds to the variability of our internal states. We would not be able to resist the second law of thermodynamics and maintain our structural and functional integrity. So the states of the outside world before they appear to us, before we become acquainted to them, with them, they are encoded. And that encoding puts a bound on the entropy of our internal states. Now, the papers have been published about this under physicalist context, but they are completely transferable to an idealist context. So, yeah, they are more than one lines of argument to be made for why not only is it possible in principle, but why does it happen the way it actually does? Right. So, I guess I can agree with all that in principle, but I'm asking, I guess, a slightly different question, which is, so suppose there is the transpersonal thought, and I perceive it as a green tree. Why not a red tree? Why green? So, you say, yeah, thoughts can impact our qualitative states. But there doesn't seem to be a kind of in principle explanation as for why it's red versus green, purple versus, so it's useful to have a simplified dashboard. And so, I understand all the stuff you're saying, but it still seems like you have the problem of trying to explain why the particular qualities are the way they particularly are in response to the transpersonal stuff. It could be that if we would shift the qualities that things would be just as effective as they are now. And therefore, evolution wouldn't have differentiated between these two alternatives. Because we found the local minimum, and that's the way it does. But notice that the question you just asked is equally applicable to physicalism, physicalism would face that same question. Right. That's the thing that you have the same hard problem that they do. So, that was kind of what started all this is that the, so there's one part of the hard problem which you don't have, which is how its consciousness get involved at all. And you have an answer to that, because there's transpersonal mentation out there. But the other part of the hard problem, so one way of putting it is, why is it red as opposed to green? Why is this neural processing associated with fear as opposed to anger? And it doesn't look like you have an answer to that part of the hard problem. So you have the same problem. Well, I would not characterize that as a part of the hard problem. It is not the hard problem is the inability to deduce qualities of experience from physical parameters. Even in principle, that's the hard problem. Why the qualities of the, on the screen of perception are exactly as they are and why we don't have inverted quality. I don't think that's the hard problem. This isn't a hard problem. I would consider it as an easy problem. That's a way, so I, that's one way of phrasing the hard problem. But so we couldn't also deduce or could you on your debut deduce what it would be like for an alter like us to come and come and come. What that transpersonal thought beforehand, right? If you all you knew were the thoughts of the universe, then you couldn't deduce from that what it would be like whether it be red or green or purple or what. So in that sense, it seems like the same kind of problem. I think, well, let's have a thought experiment. Let's pretend that we had access to what these transpersonal thoughts are. They really are in themselves. And let's pretend that we also had complete knowledge of the evolutionary pressures that eventually led to the perceptual practice we've developed. I would claim that in principle, we could make that deduction. We could at least narrow it down to a set of equally viable possibilities. I don't see any in principle in possibility for us to do that if we assume complete knowledge. And just go back and let's say the same thing, which is what I would say the heart of the heart problem is that even if you have complete knowledge in the sense of knowing the position, the physical parameters of every fundamental subatomic part of part of that composing or bringing it any moment in time, even with all that knowledge you still would not be able to deduce how it feels to have a belly ache from that configuration of subatomic particles inside your skull. Now, you may disagree with that, but that's how the heart problem is framed. Right. But so what you just said, though, was like on my part of the problem, I think we could do it. But when I say, I think we could do it, you say, no, we can't. So what do you have on your side that I don't have on my side? I don't have an ontological transition from one realm to another ontological category because I'm coming up from. You do from thoughts to qualities. Thoughts and qualities are both experience. They belong to the same ontological category, phenomenality. One sense, but in another sense, they don't because one thoughts are not. They're very different kinds of states of consciousness. So how you get from one to the other still seems a little. Your emotions affect your thoughts all the time and the other way around. So you have personal acquaintance with types of experience in pinging on other types of experience. Dissociated memories and emotions are factoring in their life all the time, even though you don't experience them. So there's plenty of examples for that. Memories. That's just different, though. Like I understand what you're saying. I hate to keep cutting off. I feel like I should let you talk about it. Let me just. So that's a case of a thought causing in something, the occurrence of equality or something like that. It's not the case of a thought creating a quality which wasn't there before. Oh, thoughts can create qualities. You can have a thought that leads to inner imagery. You can have a thought, "What if I won the lottery?" And there you go. You have inner imagery about your buying a new house, a nice car, a beautiful girlfriend. The post, the post, you were never had had mental imagery. Like for instance, Mary and Blacken Whiteroom, she's not going to suddenly think herself in having a red quality. Correct. So thoughts don't cause qualities to appear where they're not already apt to a writer. I think they do, but you frame now the problem, Mary and the Blacken Whiteroom. You frame in such a way that you automatically exclude colors by definition. So because you define the problem that way, then thoughts will not lead to the qualities that you excluded. That's kind of the point though, is that. So imagine the first altar. There's universal consciousness. There's all these thoughts. And then there's the first disassociation. So that's a bit like a Mary case. There's never been an experience of perception before that time. Right. So why should we expect that that very first altar is going to see a green tree as opposed to a purple tree or you have no experience at all? It certainly didn't. That's very first altar was probably a new carrier of the bacteria. Right. Okay. But first take a argument, assume it's like the Garden of Eden and Booth there's Eve and she's the first altar or whatever. Then it would experience the green tree because now you're assuming that all the evolutionary mechanisms that led to a configuration of consciousness that would allow for the perception of the green tree that are already there from the beginning. If you grant that, then I would say well, then the first altar would see the green tree. So to answer your question, I would say it has been an evolutionary process. The consciousness of dissociated altars have been changing in configuration in order to survive in their equal. system and a key part of that is being able to become acquainted with the environment surrounding them in the most effective way possible. So to coordinate their behavior, maximize the chances of survival. And it is these changes in the configuration of consciousness that allow for transpersonal experiences of one type of quality to translate into inner experiences of the type we call perception. Yeah, I guess, I mean, I guess maybe I'll stop barking at this tree. I just don't feel like I am making the point clear or that I'm not understanding what you're saying back on. I think one of those seems to be happening. I think I do understand you. I think you see two jumps. First jump, which you acknowledge is the jump from one ontological category to another from matter outside consciousness to the qualities of experience. And then you see another jump from one type of experience, entailing certain qualities, to another type of experience, entailing other qualities. So these two subsets of experience are qualitatively different, like thoughts and perceptions or intuitions and emotions and so on and so forth. I acknowledge there is this second transition in idealism. I acknowledge that this is there. Idealism entails that you have to to account for this second transition. My point is that there is nothing in principle impossible about accounting for it because it's happening all the time within us. This one type of experience in pinging on another type of experience and even even leading to entire streams of consciousness of a completely different type. So yes, it is a problem. Yes, it needs to be accounted for. Yes, we need to investigate it more, but I see it as a problem of a very, very different level than that entailed by the hard problem, which is the first jump when you have to account for a transition from one ontological round to a completely different one. Right. Yeah. Thank you for that. I think that's good. So I got a comment here from someone who's watching along. I think he's talking back to something you were asking about before, or talking about before from Justin Quayles. He says, "Is it coherent to hold the subjective idealism?" which seems to entail solipsism. So why postulate the added abstraction? So you did mention briefly that you wanted to focus on your objective part, but I wonder if you could say so, because I think that is an interesting question. Yeah. So there is subjective idealism that would be Barclay's approach in which he said, "Okay, to be is to be perceived." So the world exists only in so far as it is perceived, and what holds the state of the world when nobody's looking at it is the mind of God, which is always perceived in the world. Yeah. Sort of. Lucky us. Yeah. Lucky us. So I'm not being very fair to Bishop Barclay here, but let's keep it simple. And there is another variation of idealism, which is called objective idealism, which grants that there is a world out there. It has its own states, and it holds its states even when nobody's looking at it, but that world out there is not matter outside and independent of consciousness. It is itself mental. It is itself constituted by the mental states, experiential states, which differ from the states that I experience on the screen of my perception, because perception arises as a sort of an interference pattern, an interaction between my own meditation and the trans personal meditation out there. That interaction, that observation or measurement, if you are a quantum physicist, is what gives rise to the qualities we call perception. So there are these variations of idealism, subjective one, alabarkly, and objective idealism. I personally hold to a mixture of the two. I think I'm an objective idealist in this in the sense that I think the world out there is experiential, but exists independently of me. But I am a subjective idealist with regard to physicality. In other words, I think the world, as it is in itself, out there, is not physical in the sense we normally attribute to the word. It's not constituted by defined and definite shapes and properties, like mass, charge, momentum, geometrical configurations, and quantum physics, foundations of physics, is telling us that the world, as it is in itself, before measurement, it does not have defined physical characteristics. So I think there is this world out there, it is not physical. And the physical world arises when I interact with this trans personal mental states out there. Only then does the defined physical world of my everyday experience arises on the screen of my perception. So with regards to the physical world, I am a subjective idealist, but I am an objective idealist in the sense that I grant that irrespective of observation, there is something out there mental that is holding its own states. So irrespective of observation. And so what you're saying is that Barclay couldn't agree with that because he has to appeal to God always observing in some sense. So I'm having trouble with this distinction because they sound the same to me except for that you don't have God always observing, but you have a mind with all this occurring in it. Well for Barclay, God would observe the world and see its qualities as we see them. So if there is a green tree, when God observes the world, there would be a green tree. Yeah, okay, that's the part. That tree would have a defined shape. Right. And what I'm saying is that, no, if nobody's looking at it, there is no green tree with the qualities that we associate with the green tree, there is something that will correspond to a green tree once somebody looks at it, but that something isn't a green tree. It is a transpersonal thought. This is the idea. I think I read in one of your papers that there's Numana, but they're mental. So this is the idea of the Numana mental stuff. Yeah, yeah, or Shopenhauer's will. There is the will, but the will is not physical. Shopenhauer is very clear about it. The physical, Shopenhauer is both an objective idealist and a subjective idealist. He says, the physical world is completely dependent on the individual mind that observes it and that subjective idealism, but he says, but apart from the physical world and underlying it as its essential, its essence, so to say, it's metaphysical essence, there is the will. And the will is outside space time. It's not physical, but it's what underlies the physical. I see. So these mental, numana things, how much like Numana are they? I mean, you call them thoughts. Yeah, it's going to be numana than they can't be thought. So I'm wondering how serious we are about calling them new. I'm anthropomorphizing it in order to be understood. I have to help people relate to their own experience to see what I'm going with this. Numana is Kant's term. It's basically a term for something that cannot be known because it's what is behind experience and behind the perception, let me be clear. Numana is what is behind perception, perception being the phenomena. And Kant takes a strong epistemic position about the Numana. He says, it's completely beyond our ability to become acquainted with because all we have are the perceptions or Schopenhauer's representations. What Schopenhauer did, he went beyond that. He said, yes, there are numana. And yes, I cannot know the numana through perception or representation by definition, but I can make inferences about the numana through introspection because there is one case in nature in which I am the thing in itself. And that's me. In so far as I can introspect into myself, I know the thing in itself, even if I had no sense organs, even if I didn't have a mirror, even if I couldn't see, touch or smell myself, there would still be something it is like to be me because that's endogenous. And if I introspect into that, I know what the numana are as far as I am concerned. And because I am made of the same types of atoms and force fields, Schopenhauer used the word matter because I am also made of matter like the rest of the universe. What I discovered through introspecting about the numana is applicable to the world at large because the world is also made of matter. Schopenhauer says matter is how the will present itself to observation. And I think that makes sense. What Schopenhauer is basically saying that there is a way to become acquainted with the numana. And it's not through the sense organs, it's through introspection and can't miss that. Right. So let me see if I understand this right because I'm not sure if I do, but so the idea is that when you introspect, you know that there's something that is like to be you. And you also know that there's a intrinsic nature to yourself. And so it's reasonable to put those two together and say, well, I'm introspecting the numana aspect of myself at that point. Correct. Yeah, Schopenhauer had two arguments for this. One is I'm made of matter like the rest of the universe. So if I know what it's what it's like to be the numana in my case, I am and I am made of matter, then I also know what it's like to be the rest of the universe because it's also made of matter. And the other argument he used was that space and time only exist within representation within the screen of perception. The space and time for Schopenhauer are the cognitive scaffolding of the screen of perception. They don't exist out there. They're just the way we were. we organize our representations or perceptions. And then he said, OK, if there is no space time out there, then the universe as a whole is a unity, because you need space time in order to draw distinctions between things. If I and you are occupying the same volume of space at the same time, we are not extended in space in time, then we are one and the same. So through introspection, I know what the universe as a whole is like from a first person perspective, because I and the universe outside representations are one. That's true. I mean, it does seem to be building a lot into introspection. So in some part, you're a bit cautious about introspection. Then as soon as-- Oh, we have to be cautious about introspection. Just as much as we have to be cautious about perception, both can be highly unreliable. Right. So I mean, I guess why wouldn't one say, yeah, an introspection one becomes aware of what it's like to be oneself. And yeah, given we could also consider ourself as a new and all object, I guess, I mean, you know, not just between the psychological, the phenomenal self and the transcendental or new and all self. And so it's not clear to me why he made a mistake there, because if what we're introspecting is just the phenomenal self, then it would be sort of-- it seems like incorrect to infer a bunch of stuff about the new and all self based on that. I don't want to start only defending Shopenhauer from now on. No, I'm sorry to put it in the-- I think Shopenhauer would say, Kant has not made a mistake. He just didn't go far enough. I say, OK. So yeah, yeah, and I don't know anything about Shopenhauer. So I should stop. It doesn't ever stop philosophers from talking. [LAUGHTER] But OK, so that's very interesting. So the sense in which you're subjective idealist is you think that the world as we experience it is dependent on us. Yeah. The physical world depends on our observation. And foundations of physics are telling us the same thing. And I guess I can't mind if I thought that too. Because one of the questions I did have-- and this is why I'm belaboring these points. Because I was interested in what the relation of your view was to their earlier German idealism and Kant was obviously embarking. So it is interesting to me. And I don't-- so one of the things I think that really is a big difference is that-- and maybe this is what you were trying to say earlier-- is that you agree that there's a kind of unconscious mental processes. It's just that you don't think-- characterize them the way, I guess, cognitive science or neuroscience would characterize them as-- so you would not characterize them in terms of what we call the overflow debate that there's a bunch of-- that they're unconscious in a sense that you're not aware of them, maybe. But they're conscious in the sense that there's something that is light. Yeah, to have this. Yeah, this is a critical difference. In psychology, modern psychology, it's a difference between what they call consciousness and metaconsciousness. So consciousness is what philosophers would call phenomenal consciousness. In other words, if there is something that is light to being that state, then that state is phenomenally conscious. And the metaconsciousness of psychology entails that and one thing extra in addition to that. Not only do you have to have an experience, you have to know that you have the experience. In other words, that experience has to be metacognitively re-represented or reflected. You have to separate yourself as subjects from the experience. So you are not the experience. You are the one who knows that he or she is having the experience. Now, that's metacognition. Well, it entails more than just phenomenal consciousness. But unfortunately, many neuroscientists, psychologists, and even philosophers conflate these two things. The founders of that psychology, for instance, Jung Freud, the people who used to talk about the unconscious. If you read their work, I just finished a manuscript about Jung. So this is a very fresh in my mind. If you read their work, what they call the unconscious is experiential. It is not only conscious, but it's not accessible through introspection because it's not metacognitive. It's abundantly clear in Jung's work that this is what he means. And it's all over the place across many of his volumes, very explicit. But even today, people are still conflating. It's still today their paper saying, well, consciousness, for me, is what a subject can report. And if the subject cannot report an experience, then it's unconscious. That's wrong. Today we have no report paradigms in modern neuroscience, in modern neuroimaging, which is precisely about this. It's precisely about finding out states that are conscious, but cannot be reported because they lack metacognition or re-representation or reflection. Right. There's a big controversy about that. I'm part of a workshop in this. And I've actually defended higher order views of consciousness, not that I'm convinced by them, but I do think they're worth taking seriously. And so those sorts of views would claim that there's no conflation there. That metacognition is somehow or some kind of metacognition or inner awareness. And certainly there's a long tradition. In Western philosophy, going maybe Aristotle, Locke, and other people. Even Kant, some people might suggest claim that consciousness that we understand it requires the acting and stuff, stuff like that. So it's not clear to me that there's a conflation here as opposed to a kind of argumentative strategy to help us try to understand what the nature of consciousness is. So what would you say about that line of response that what about higher order theories, basically? It comes down to your own experience. I mean, I can appeal first to literature, a netblock 1995. He talked about access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. What psychologists today would call metaconsciousness would be a netblock's terminology, a conscious state that is both phenomenal and has access consciousness as well. Because re-representation is what netblock calls access consciousness. So if you agree with netblocks terminology and his taxonomy of different meanings for what we refer to as a conscious state, I think it's implied right there that there is inter-conflation between consciousness and metaconsciousness. I mean, that there is a difference between consciousness and metaconsciousness. Right. Experientially, the way it would reply to this is the following. For the past hour, since we started talking, you've been breathing. And I would say, you have been phenomenally conscious of your breathing. You have been experiencing the inflation and the inflation of your ribcage, of your lungs, the air flowing through your nostril. But because your attention is not on it, your attention is on me, talking to me, you did not re-represent those phenomenally conscious states. And that's why you seem to have been unconscious of them. But the moment I say this, you put your attention on your breathing and you re-represent it. And now, not only you experience your breathing, but you know that you experience your breathing and you'd be able to report it. Before, without triggering, you were not reporting your breathing to yourself. You were not telling yourself, oh, I feel my breathing right now. Now, it was out of your attention. It was not re-represented. It was not metacognitive. Was it not experiential? I think it would be a very severe thing to say that two minutes ago, your breathing was not conscious. I think it would be very severe to say that. And I think the board-- Yeah, I don't see that. I think it's pretty not severe, actually. You know, I always tell this story about when I was young. Maybe people watching this may have heard this before. Who cares? So when I was very young, though, I was walking down the beach with my sister. And I noticed that she was limping. And I said, why are you walking that way? And she said, walking wet way. And I was like, well, you're limping. It's something wrong with your foot. And she said, no, what do you mean? She looked down her foot and saw that there was a bee with the stinger stung in her foot. And then she started hopping around a one-foot screening, yelling and running up and down the beach. And that always stuck with me because it was very clear to me being there that before I said, why are you walking that way, she was not feeling pain. It didn't seem like she was in pain. She had a hitch in her step. So there was clearly tissue damage. And something was responsive to that. But it seems just kind of arbitrary to say that she was feeling the pain, but just didn't know she was feeling the pain, as opposed to saying that there was some kind of unconscious damage processing, which became pain, which became aware of it. There are new areas of research in neuroscience. And the first big summary paper came out in 2015 by Tsushiya and at all. But it is an area of investigation today, the so-called no-report paradigms in neuroscience, in which people are basically realizing that what they call the NCC is the neuro correlates of consciousness, are the neuro correlates of metacognitive experience, because that's what subjects report. But that's underlying that there is a whole lot of probably conscious states that are not reportable people. Well, it's not clear that they show that. I mean, I know that no-report paradigms. It's not clear that there's a bunch of questions being vague by that. Well, for instance, people who claim that they cannot see from one eye, because there is an interruption of a back and forth communication between two neuro areas that doesn't allow metacognition. You cannot tell yourself, I am seeing through my right eye. So if you close the left eye, the person would say, I do not see anything. And yet the person will be able to tell you whether the ball that's running in front of him is going from the left to the right or right to the left. And they don't know how they know that, but they know that. and neuroactivity correlated with the early stages of perception are there. So I have every reason in the world to think that they are actually experiencing vision with their defective eye. I mean, we don't have any every reason. We lack the most important reason. Namely, they say they don't see any time. Okay, then I'll try and focus on the experiential part. Sometimes, I don't know where do you have had this experience. I have had it many times. You are having an experience that you're not reporting to yourself. And then something triggers your attention to refocus. And then you know that you were experiencing that all along. This usually happens in the form of realizing that you've always known something, although you never told yourself that you knew it. But retrospectively, you go back through your memory, you re-access what happened, and you know that you experienced that. These events can be very sophisticated. At least for me, they have been very sophisticated. But a very simple one is when you wake up in the morning, you don't remember a dream. And you think, "I had no experience for the past eight hours. I was sound asleep very deep. I had no dreams." Sometimes, later in the day, sometimes weeks later, this has happened to me weeks later. You realize, "Oh, wait a moment." I actually had a very intense dream. That's the moment when you re-re-re-present, but you use your memory to re-re-present. You are re-representing a re-experienced state from memory. But only then can you tell yourself, "I've had that experience." While the experience was not happening, you couldn't tell that yourself. And guess what? There is research done, published in 2007. By Vint, my internal bibliographic system is not working very well. 2007, first author was the Vint female psychologist. And they've shown that during dream, ordinary dreams, subjects lack metacognition. In other words, during a dream, you never tell yourself, "Oh, I am experiencing this. I am experiencing that." You sort of are like a leaf in the wind, a ragdoll in a tsunami. Just to go with the experience, you never tell yourself, "I am having this experience." Well, they haven't shown that there's no metacognition. They've shown that prefrontal activity is reduced with respect to waking levels. The paper I'm referring to is very explicit about lacking our ability to have metacognitive introspective access to dream contents. I'm not big it out now because it's just an hour, but I can send it to you afterwards. I'll post a link to it too when you send it. Yeah, but experientially, I think you can. I mean, I can relate to that completely. When I am in a dream, I'm not telling myself I'm having this experience. Only when I wake up and I recall the dream, I place my attention on that recall on those memory contents, then metacognition kicks in. And then I start asking questions, "Well, what that didn't make any sense at all?" Wait a moment. How come I was not alerted by the absurdity of the dream? Oh, guess what? You were not alerted because you were not metacognitive during the dream. You just experienced. You did not reflect the experience in order to ask questions about it. And compare those experiences with a broader context or a certain kind of continuity or logical consistency, whatever. Yeah, I mean, I'm aware of all that stuff. I like that stuff, but it just seems to me that there's a conflation between metacognition and kind of higher order awareness. So if higher order theories are right, then it's not all kinds of metacognition that are important. There's a specific kind of interawareness and awareness of some mental states occurring at that time or something like that. And that doesn't require all this other fancy stuff. And you can certainly have that in a dream, I would say. And that's what it having an experience is. So if you have an experience or having that, to some extent. But then you just open the door here. So you were acknowledged that there can be raw experience, and there can be multiple levels of metacognitive experience. Experiences that are not only experienced, but rerepresented and maybe re-represented and so on and so forth. But raw experience, I would say, involves kind of re-representing already. I'm not really sure that I understand. Like I understand there are views that say all you need to do is have raw experience. It just doesn't seem to me that there's really an argument as opposed to an intuition there. Okay. Well, the whole view of depth psychology is based on the premise that there are such things that are as experiences that are unreportable even to yourself. Yeah, I would say there are experiences, but there's nothing that is like to have them. But when you finally manage to bring them into the view of self-reflection, you retroactively know that, oh, I actually was experienced this all along. Yeah, that seems to me like a memory conflation. That's a reconsoleiation error on your parts. So that when you recall the memory, then you add some new information to it and reconsole it. It now seems like it was part of the original memory. You can always erode experience. You can always use skepticism to erode experience. And say, actually, I cannot make anything of what I seem to be experiencing. But then you end up with nothing because all we have is experience. What I can tell you is that I've done therapy for a couple of years. At the end of that process, I've come to me satisfying conclusion that there were points of pain in my life that if you asked me two years earlier, I would say, "Boah, I don't have any problem with that." And that after therapy, after bringing all that into the field of self-reflection of metacognitive introspection, I became convinced that, "You know what? I have been feeling that pain for 30 years, 30 odd years. I just wasn't telling myself that I was feeling that pain." Now, that is just fine to me, but. Yeah, but yeah, so this is. I see part of what I wonder is how are we going to get past like the satisfying to me part, because we can all tell like you were just saying, basically. I can tell a story about my interpretation of the data, which keeps me a materialist, and you can tell a story that keeps you an idealist, but is there anything more than just personal satisfaction at the end of this? No. And the end of what? Where are the arguments that points in one direction versus the other? You want the logical proof of that. Well, I want abduction at least, yeah. Yeah, look, every argument in the world is automatically anchored on what is to you personally compelling and persuasive. You cannot abstract yourself from that equation. Maybe you can make an exception to mathematicians, or anybody working with a formal system with defined rules and properly bound, which is a way of saying I'm abstracting my own experience from this. But when we come to a discussion about the nature of experience, you don't have the luxury to bound the problem according to formal rules, because you're dealing with the very thing where a formal system exists to begin with. It's not boundable, so to say. So at the end, you are always dependent on your own degree of persuasion. I find, for instance, extraordinary that some people can sincerely hold the position of illusionism in philosophy of mind. That's something people really think that raw experience, the qualities of experience, subjectivity, phenomenality is an illusion. I find it incredible because the cheap argument against the cheap, it is the final argument, but seems cheap as they say, an illusion is already an instance of that which you're trying to discard. If you are having an illusion of an experience, then that illusion is already an experience. Well, I'm on your side on that debate. I mean, I'm not an illusionist, I don't really understand the view, except for insofar as I've tried. And I've talked to Keith a lot about this, Frankish, and other illusionists. But the only way that I can make sense of them is by saying that they want to give a theory of consciousness, but a naturalistic one. And if you say that, then I can almost understand what they're saying. Because in a sense, your view is an illusionist view as well, not in the sense that the nice consciousness, but in the sense where consciousness is a dashboard, a quick and dirty representation that doesn't really capture. And that is a kind of illusion, but it's the one that takes serious experience. I don't deny all illusions. I think there is such a thing as an illusion because I acknowledge consciousness and illusion is an instance of consciousness. But what I was trying to get to with this point was not to bring Keith into this discussion cheaply. My point is, I believe they are sincere in their point. I believe they really think that they have an argument and they are sincere about it. Now, you see, this goes to show that you cannot abstract your own sense of being persuaded or not from this equation. Because some people can be persuaded by their own purely abstract conceptualizations and completely lose ground, lose touch from reality. And that can be done sincerely. You can truly deceive yourself to that level. So my point is this is not mathematics, this is not an artificially bound formal system with defined rules, we are always dependent on whether we are persuaded or not. And if you are not persuaded that there can be experience that is not rerepresented, I can talk now until the end of the century and unless there is an experience in your life that turns on that light and it goes, "Shit, this actually happens and it's happening all the time." Unless that happens, no amount of logical articulation and pointing to empirical things will resolve this issue. Well that's too bad because I'm going to a workshop where they are putting a lot of money into trying to figure out an empirical resolution exactly to this issue. So I'll be sure to do that. It's pointless guys, let's go home but let me keep on. No but this is that the Templeton Foundation or whatever is trying to host these adversarial meetings where they get people from theories of consciousness that they disagree to try to figure out how to work. So they are doing the higher order versus the first order one next week. It's a continuation of our attempt to abstract ourselves from the equation. That's something that started with the Enlightenment. It's probably a necessary movement in the history of human thoughts to compensate for extreme subjectivity before that. But it's seen in a historical context I think it's all good and fine. But if you ask me, does it make out made sense to abstract ourselves away from the equation? Of course not. We are the only carriers of our own reality. We are the carriers of reality as far as we can ever know. We cannot abstract ourselves from this equation. Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that starting point by the way. So that's why I think this conversation is interesting. I mean for other reasons too. But I think that point is, I mean some people would criticize it though, right? So some people would say that this is like an outdated theory of perception, endorsing the veil of perception as they called it in modern philosophy or something like that. How do you think to? Well, because people in philosophy of perception, they talk about direct perception and there's naive realism. That your perception is a window on the world. And so there's a bunch of debate about whether the way of characterizing perception as we've been talking about it is really the right way to do so, namely as a veil of qualities between us and the external environment. I thought no psychologist today would say that perception is direct, objective, accurate representation of whatever is out there. Yeah, I guess these aren't psychologists. These are philosophers. Okay. But even, but I just like Gibson, you know, the inactivists, those guys who deny all representation talk at all, talk about affordances and the world's out there. You know, Gibson was fond of saying things like, you know, I don't need to represent the world. It's the world is its own best model. So I use it. I don't need to internally represent it in any way. So there is that strand in psychology, at least. Okay. I can tell you it's in psychology textbooks that perception is not really an objective process, but anyway, right? No, no, but I'm aware of the psychology textbooks. But anyway, so, so you don't want to, you don't have anything you would say to the naive realists of the world that we, that the perceptions of window on the world and that the way the world is real itself to us. I would say physicalism denies that if the naive realist is a physicalist, I think he has to check the coherency of his various views. Because that physicalism is telling us is that except for some fringe, I'm not even sure coherent formulations of physicalism, but mainstream physicalism tells us the world as it is in itself has no qualities. It has no red, it has no white, it has no sweetness, it has no melody, it is just purely defined in terms of quantities. The best way for you to visualize it more or less correctly is as a set of equations as a model. You cannot visualize it in any other way in so far as visualization already adds qualities to the equation. And physicalism will tell you the world has no qualities. Now it presents itself to us in the form of qualities. So that step alone already tells the naive realist that the world isn't what it seems to be. Because the seeming is already a feature that is not in the world. Seeming is already an experience, already a quality. Yeah, okay. Since you brought that up, I did want to talk about the equation stuff. So I like the general way that you proceed by saying, well, the material world is an abstraction and then we abstract a second time to get the properties of the thing that we want and that there's not really a coherent way of characterizing what material is that doesn't appeal to experience. I think that's an interesting challenge. And I wonder why a good response to that isn't by appeal to mathematics. And this kind of gets at some of your motivations for idealism too. Because what you say, look, physicalism or physicalism make this move that there's an objective world which you agree with to the claim that it's material as opposed to being mental. So that you, yes, there's a motivation for getting from where we are to something objectively out there. It's true character. It's true nature is what's under question, I would say. And so I wonder why what is wrong with the claim that material reality is best characterized mathematically. And that gives us some insight into what extra mental thing we're talking about. You mean pen computationalism? Well, I'm hoping it doesn't go that far. Okay. Well, I think what mathematical models allow us to do very well is to model and predict the behavior of nature insofar as it's presented was on the screen of perception. In other words, mathematics is our way to describe the contents of perception. Even if you use instruments to measure nature, telescopes, microscopes, whatever RF sensors, the output of those devices of those instruments are presented to you in the form of perception. So ultimately, it's all about perception. And we can model the behavior of the perceived world through mathematics. That's what physics does. Physics is aims at a model of the dynamism of perception. That's even a definition of physics. Andrei Linde wrote that explicitly, by the way, Stanford's the famous guy of cosmological inflation. Right. Exactly. So as such, the mathematical apparatus used in physics is a description. That's what it is. You start from the contents of perception and its dynamism. And you try to describe that in a way that allows you to get a handle on it and that allows you to make predictions. That allows you to sort of anticipate its behavior. What some people then say, like Mark's tag mark, is, you know what? When we say that there is this ontological thing called matter outside experience out there, that I then model with mathematics, this matter thing is baggage. It's unnecessary. I don't need to postulate that entity out there because the equations already tell me everything. Now, if you pay attention to this, what's happening here is that Mark is starting from the contents of perception because that's his carrier of reality. That's how he does physics without that he has nothing. He describes that more or less accurately through mathematics. And then he rejects the thing described and replaces it with its description. To me, it's like saying now that Cheshire cats disappears and the green stays behind. I mean, you need the cat to have the green. The greening. Right? The green, right. You need the thing described to have a description. You cannot start from the described, have a description and then say the thing described I throw away, it doesn't exist and it never existed or has a description. But what is it describing? It's not there anymore. I think this is something that you can state in language, semantically, correctly. Right. But it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. It is devoid of meaning. Right. But not everyone says is max. I mean, so what's wrong with everything up to the second to last step where you say, okay, there are descriptions of something external to us and then there's also the external thing they describe. Yeah, I think we should not lose sight that there is the thing described to begin with. And I would say the thing described are the contents of perception, which are mental. And this is where we start from and you should keep our feet on the ground on that and not sort of take off on flights of abstraction that completely lose touch with reality. So where is the where is the misstep in someone who says what they describe is not mental? Okay, let's track the motivation to postulate something non-mental. All mentality, we know meta cognitively, in other words, all the mentality that we can report to ourselves we have is personal, right. It's my perception, my thoughts, my emotions. But we clearly, when we talk to each other, we clearly have the impression that we are sharing the same world beyond ourselves. There seems to be something out there beyond my personal mentality and your personal mentality because if I knew I'm in the same room, we would tend to describe the room in consistent ways, not identical ways, but consistent ways. That's first point. Second point is I can change my stream of imagination by just wishing them, wishing it to be different, but try as I might, I can't change the world by just wishing it to be different otherwise it would be very different. So there's a disconnect there. And finally there are all these correlations between patterns of brain activity and experience. I mean, you don't even need to appeal to the neuro correlates of consciousness. Drink alcohol and you will see that there is a correlation between what seems to be a material action and how you how you feel from within. So to make sense of these three things, we postulate a material world outside of experience as an explanatory model. We don't have direct access to it. It's not an empirical reality because all we have is experience, but it is a theoretical device that seems to go a long way into answering these questions. I think it goes wrong because it leads us to a wall, which is the hard problem of consciousness. And if these were the if the material world were the only possibility to make sense of those three observations are just listed, then okay, let's bite the bullet. We have the hard problem, but it's the only game in town. Materialism. So let's let's see how far we can take it still. But there are other options. There are other coherent options that circumvent the hard problem completely and still allow you to make sense of those three observations. That's where I think it goes wrong. It's in the assumption that materialism is the only thing that can make sense of the three observations. So whatever problem it faces, yeah, it is what it is because it's the only thing. Well, guess what? Guess what? It's not the only alternative. Right. Okay. Yeah, I guess that helps me because as long as you put it in that way, then I thought you were saying something stronger. But I agree with you that it certainly is not the only way to make sense of those those things that we're we're talking about here. And I think idealism does make sense of it. I don't know if I'm convinced by all the moves, but as we've seen, we disagree in various key areas. So, but I've certainly opened to it and think it's coherent idea that is explanatory of the things that we're trying to explain in this sense. But so one one difference though that and I wonder how you might respond to this is that well, when I'm trying to explain your behavior, it makes sense to postulate mental things because they seem to be the sorts of things that are called for. And I certainly know about them from my own case, you know, that why are you hopping on your foot because you feel the pain? Why are you acting that way? Because you feel really hungry and you're distracted by the hunger. I don't know why people always refer to alcohol by food is good enough. So there's good reason to postulate something mental there. But when we try to explain the behavior of the external world, the inanimate world, as you call it, it doesn't look like saying, "Oh, and it's mental does any explanatory work in its behavior?" It certainly is not like the thing falls because it wants to be at the center, you know, contra-error stuff. Yeah, yeah. So, but so I get that it's coherent to do so, but it just seems uncalled for, explanatorally, with respect to the behavior. So I wonder how you would respond. Yeah, I will argue that it's not only coherent, but it is called for. That's what I'll try to argue. Okay. When you're dealing with behavior, you have to keep in mind that we are organisms that evolved in a sort of a planetary ecosystem and that our behavior is modulated by those evolutionary pressures. You cannot apply the same rational to the universe as a whole because the universe as a whole did not have to survive within the constraints of a planetary ecosystem. Our behavior is impulsive in some ways or whatever your sincracies it has, it has been a result of that evolutionary journey, so to say, which is not applicable to universal consciousness if that's your starting postulate. That said, I think there are two things that are really compelling. One is the following. When it comes to our own body, which is material, our brains, our material, material I'm using it now, the word now, not in a metaphysical sense, but in the colloquial sense. Our brains are built of the same atoms and force fields or field quanta that make up the universe at large, including the inanimate universe. So there is something that is the same, at least in so far as representations are concerned, appearances are concerned, something unites us that doesn't seem to be a discontinuity between our bodies and the rest of the universe. You agree with that? When it comes to our bodies, we know that somewhere behind the material, from a first person perspective, our bodies in some sense correspond to phenomenal inner life. The patterns of my brain activity somehow correspond to phenomenal inner life. There is something it is like to be my body, which is made of the same atoms and force fields as the rest of the universe. So my claim would be the following. What we call matter in all instances is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenal inner life from across a dissociative boundary. In all cases, in nature, this is what matter is. In our bodies, this is sort of intuitive. Yeah, of course, my body is the way my inner life presents itself to you because there is something it is to be me, but you only see my body. You don't become acquainted directly with my inner life. But when it comes to the universe at large because of your behavior argument, that doesn't seem to be intuitive. So I would invite you to the following thought experiment. Imagine that you were a tiny little virus, but a virus that could see here, think, and no, imagine that. And you were sitting on the edge of a synapse, on a synapse cleft, synatic cleft, that little space between two neurons before they actually connect. And you're sitting there. And every now and then, there is a sort of an earthquake thing start to shiver. And then there's movement and there's all these neurotransmitter molecules kind of large that are released in between. And there's a electric impulses like lightning going on. And you go like, wow, this is amazing. It's like an electric storm with rocks flowing around. And your little self would say, this is not alive. I can model all this with the laws of nature. This is all mechanical. You know, these fuzzy fuels that just open when the electric potential reaches a certain threshold and they release these neurotransmitters that go into the little receptors on the other neuron and then build the potential on the other side, you would say, I have no reason to postulate that there is conscious in our life behind this, just like boulders and lightning going about. Yet you know that there is conscious in our life behind that. And you wouldn't know that if you'd observe it from another scale. And guess what? If you look at the inanimate universe at the cosmos, from its larger scales, which now has not only been visualized through modeling, but there is very recently the first observation of the dark matter connections between galaxy clusters. But never mind, I'm not going to get into the details of that. But we do have a sort of more or less proven view picture of what the universe looks like at its highest scales. And mysteriously enough, mathematically in terms of how those connections happen, the pattern of those connections across galaxies and galaxy clusters are very, very similar, surprisingly similar in a way that we do not understand to the pattern of connections between neurons. Right, I read about this. Right. So I don't want to make the fissious statements that the universe looks like a giant brain, but to guess what, the universe looks like a giant brain. So the implication then is that we were extra universal large. We would see behavioral patterns of the universe that required mental explanation. Not external behavior, because the universe is not an ecosystem. It is all there is. There's nothing external to it. But I think we are in a position similar to the little tiny U sitting on a synaptic cleft. I think we are exactly that. We are sitting on a synaptic cleft of the universe looking at asteroids and moons and planets and stars and seeing you. This doesn't correspond between their lives. Just like the neurotransmitters going across. It doesn't correspond to their lives. No, I mean. Yeah, I do. I get it. That's interesting. Okay. And who knows? I see we're sort of getting on a time. I don't want to keep you forever. You've been very gracious so far already. But I did want to transition to some, some since you brought up some more speculative stuff. I mean, anyway. So what's your take on the multiverse? I wonder, because you just mentioned the universe is the totality of things. So I wonder if they are including or excluding the multiverse from that. I think the multiverse is not physics. I think the multiverse is metaphysics. It's philosophy. It belongs in philosophy. I love string theory. I particularly love M theory, but I think that's mathematical philosophy. So it can be both very positive and very critical of it. If you present this to me as physical theory, I would say that's a symptom of our age in which physics in which physics is losing touch with reality. Physics is an imp. If you can't ground yourself in something that you can ask nature through an experiment, you should just stop. Now, if you ask me, now forget that M theory is supposed to be physics. Imagine there were a branch of metaphysics in which people were modeling things mathematically in terms of universal modes of vibration. Then I would say, "Fam, Tastic, I love it." I think it's right on. It's on the right track. We should pursue that. There are some, you know, the better an idea, probably working at Surnin all that, but there are people who predict super partners and they haven't been found. If we did find them, they would indirectly confirm the multiverse by confirming strength theory. Yeah, a woodday. I'm not sure what we call "suzzi", super symmetry. I don't think there is a direct implication between "suzzi" and "string theory." There may be some suggestive aspects. Not having found "suzzi" is one of the disappointments of my young self. In the case of some good years of my life, if you ask people like me back in the 90s when we were designing the Atlas, I was part of the Atlas design team, the data acquisition system. I didn't work on the LHC itself, but the LHC is just accelerator where the magic happens is the vector. Why were you designing that? If you ask us how you're doing this for the Higgs boson, you would say, "Well, officially, yes." What we really wanted is to find super symmetry because that was the beautiful thing. The Higgs was already predicting in the 60s. Exactly. There were very few people that had doubt that it had to be there. Of course, it has to be there. No, I just have to show it because I don't have to. Actually, the LEP before the LHC had already seen some Higgs events. Not sure, even maybe a certain thing. I don't know. It's been 30 years, almost 20 odd years, but he didn't have enough statistics. The previous accelerator, the LEP, did not have enough energy to build the statistics up to the 360 sigma, whatever it was that was required for us to declare there is a Higgs boson. Had we seen it happening already? Of course, we had seen it already. Very few, but we had seen it already. We were doing that for super symmetry. Because it is the ultimate beauty of nature. Man, I wish we had found that. I'm very disappointed about myself. You don't think it can be found in higher energies? It gets to a point where you can always say, "Well, if we build another accelerator, we'll find it." Then you don't. Actually, if we actually build another one, at some point you have to think, "Where do you best invest your billions?" The LHC will get enough rate. How's that about this one in China? Back in the 90s, there was a proposal to do the superconducting super collider. In Texas. That thing would have been a beast. It's a matter of where we invest our resources as it is. Is this skepticism apply also to things that come out of string theory research like the holographic principle and anti-deceder space stuff and EPR equals the R and all that stuff? That's what I mentioned to you. I love this stuff. I'm not against it. But I think it shouldn't be called physics. Some of what you said could. I think there is indirect evidence for the holographic principle, for instance, related to black holes. But if you ask me, "Motive-vers cosmology, should this be physics?" I don't think so because it's not empirically testable and it would not be for the foreseeable future. I think there is another perfectly valid area of human investigation called philosophy. That's what it is. Mathematics used for the sake of philosophy to make things more precise, more internally consistent. I think that's good. Physics is a bad development because it leads to physicists using what is essentially a metaphysical argument to deny what the experiment is telling you. For instance, this whole business about a realism, physical realism. That's a don deal. Reality does not have physical realism. Things are not physically there with defined properties before you measure them. It's a don deal. It has been started being proven in 1981 with Alan Aspect. Then in 2015, there was a test that basically eliminated every conceivable loophole down in here in the Netherlands, close to where I am in Delft. Then in 2018, last year, there was a big bell collaboration test. Talk about beating a dead horse. That horse is dissolving, it's pitrifying. Yet physicists, I mean, Sean Carroll and others will go up and say, well, you know what? Physical realism and all this stuff, it's not necessarily that because we have the multiverse. That's the moment I go like, oh, keep me up. Be a philosopher then. Yeah, Sean is happy philosophy actually, but I understand what you're saying. I'm certainly convinced of what you're saying about quantum mechanics telling us there's no classical state of system before you measure it. But it is hard to run around that treadmill with the people who are convinced that you can say physical realism if they're just doing one little thing. So that's interesting. I mean, the reason why I brought all that stuff up was because I wondered if it would affect your view about idealism. If there were multiverse, then it would be the various sections of cosmic inflation that might be where you would expect to find ultimate consciousness. And it sounds like you don't that's the only issue for you because you can add the physical reality of it. It's a yeah, how do I say, well, do I get myself out of this now? Do I entertain that myself? Of course I do. I entertain those thoughts myself. There were a couple of times that was younger and it took psychedelics and I thought, well, man, but a low in universe is doing this together. It's difficult to shake that off. It's been many years since then and I still can't shake that off completely, which is surprising because most of psychedelic noses, you shake off in 48 hours. Right. In 48 hours you look back and you say, ah, come on, nonsense. But some things I can't shake off and this is one of them. So could there be a core of truth in the idea of parallel universes? I think yes, that can be, but I think the moment you grant that you're no longer talking about physicality in the way we studied now. It could be that what we call a physical universe, physicality as we can model within the constraints of not only the laws of nature, but of our is totalling in logic, which is something that you can't prove. And you cannot logically argue for the validity of logic, we know of repostrylamine and all that's good stuff. I think you would have to part with all that. In other words, I think there may be parallel universes, but the degrees of freedom underlying that are way beyond what we would even imagine in the context of physics. So I think as far as physics is concerned, I don't think we should go there because then we lose grounding, becomes too loose, then you can say anything, you can open any possibility and ever close, it becomes chaotic. There is no way for you to ask a question to nature and be oriented towards the right path. This is the universe we live in. This is what we are trying to model and predict in order to develop technology. Metaphysically, that can be a lot more going on. Personally, I think there is a lot more going on, but I would hesitate as a lot saying that this is a subject for physics. Yeah, I see where your hesitation comes from, right? So it's front and perfectly good philosophy, it's just not so good in empirical science. Yeah, I guess I'm a little more optimistic about string theory since I do think it's testable and principle, maybe not now, but there are some people writing Richard Dawey who written a book on this called a Post-Imperial Science, something like that, where he thinks we need to revise, and he's a physicist who turned philosopher, but he thinks we need to revise what's at least loosen the constraint of empirical testability for what might count as real science. I would love to have Post-Imperial Philosophy, but maybe I'm too conservative and outfashioned I don't know, I think Post-Imperial Science is a contradiction in terms. Interesting. Okay, so, and I wanted to ask you about some of the stuff that I know that you wrote some things about a critique that came from Susan Schneider of your view, and it had to do with the fundamental reality being timeless and spaceless, and you're trying to reconcile that with the kind of idealism that you defend. So I wonder if you could just briefly tell us if you don't mind tell us what the issue there is and how you respond. I'm trying to access the files. Sorry, I don't want to misrepresent either me or Susan. I think the core, I mean I write regularly for Scientific American, and so I follow Scientific American as well, I have friends there, it's my sort of publication, the closest to my heart. And Susan Schneider published a blog on Scientific American, and if I believe, please forgive me if I'm going to misrepresent what happened, but if I remember correctly, her point was that panel. psychism could not be correct. Because panpsychism says that the experience is a fundamental property or aspect of matter. It's not a reducible thing, it's there from the get go to all matter. And then she says in the next step of the documentation experience requires time because there is no such a thing as timeless experience. Experience entails a kind of flow through time. Right, exactly. And then the third point of the argument was quantum loop gravity theory theories at the moment theories are suggesting that time itself emerges out of microscopic quantum processes and that it's not a fundamental scaffolding of the universe. Therefore time isn't fundamental. Aego experience, so far as it depends on time, cannot also be fundamental. Aego, panpsychism is wrong. And I think that's a hand-waving argument to begin with because it's relying on very new speculative physical theories. I think the nature of time is well open for disputation. Some people claim that time does not exist at all. It doesn't even emerge. It doesn't exist right now. It never existed. What's his name? I've published a famous book in 1999, the end of time. Forgot his name. And that there are some people like Lee's Moning who says that time is the only fundamental extension in the universe. Space you can reduce, but time you can't. And there are some people like Carl O'Reilly and the loop quantum gravity guys who say, well, time exists, but it's not fundamental. It emerges out of certain quantum configurations. So it's open, so open. And I don't think it's valid to rest a philosophical argument on an empirical point that it's so far from being decided. But even if you would grant that, I think her postulates that or her premise that experience always is in time that it presupposes time, I think it's false. I think she takes that for granted without really thinking it through. I would even claim that experience is always timeless and that time is a quality of timeless experience. Quality is, sorry, time is a qualia. It's a quail. It's a content of experience. Experience itself doesn't go through time because we are always in the moment of the now. We are always in this one moment. What we call the past is a memory that is experienced now. What we call future is an expectation that is experienced now. Time is basically a landscape that is present fully now outside time. So I wrote a sort of response on scientific American after several weeks in which I basically said, well, is experience really timeless? And I made much more elaborate fashion. I made the argument I just tried to summarize to you now. Okay. And so I was a little confused by the time that experience has timeless point. I mean, I get the idea that the past is not here right now. The future is not here right now. So all that's here is the now part. And you connected it to presentism is right. This idea that all exists at the current moment. Yeah, I have to be subtle and nuanced here. Okay. Yes, I am with presentism in so far as I say that only the present exists. But I am an eternalist in so far as I say that the past and the future just like the present are experienced now. And therefore they are equally real. In so far they're experienced now. In so far as they're experienced now. So my expectation of the future is what is what's real? Correct. Not the fact here though. Correct. Correct. So so I think past, present, and future they all have the same metaphysical status. They are all equally real or unreal. Whatever you choose, they are equal because they are all labels we give to experiences that occur now. And only now. And then now does exist. Is the now, I mean, as it exists a product of, on your view, I mean, a product of our interaction with a universal mind or does the universal mind experience things in time? Is this something that we can't answer? Well, I would say, you know, time and space are cognitive scaffolding, only exists in our perception. I agree with them. The problem is that you cannot discourse consistently with this position. Right. Because time and space are built into language logic science. You know, you cannot be consistent with this. This is something you can ever know. And then step on a stage, shout and say, this is my position. And then you step down and you start talking as if time and space really existed. There is just no way around it. It's built into the language. I can access a mental state in which everything I say, including the time and space, don't really exist, is perfectly coherent. But I cannot, I cannot alter anything from that space. And that's my problem. So the moment I start talking about my metaphysics and answering the question, I just asked, how we immediately get into space and time again. And even the word interaction, presupposes, presupposes that the, the agency is that interact in different points in space and interacting time. It's built into that very verb. I think from the first person perspective of mind at large, the transpersonal experiential states out there, there is no time in space. I think time and space is a cognitive construct. But I think everything that we correctly say from within time and space corresponds to something true beyond time and space, which we cannot articulate directly. Not the words analog of it or something. There is an analog. So, so for instance, I think evolution is true. There has been an evolution of organisms. But by, hey, wait a moment Bernardo, you just deny time. Time is presupposed by evolution. And then I would say, yes, so evolution is not literally what we are talking about. But it is true in the sense that it corresponds to something unfathomable outside time and space. There is something there that that once extended is most accurately described as evolution or interaction or impingement. There you go. And then we can start talking in time and space language, keeping in mind that these are penultimate truths. They are not automate because the ultimate is not within this cognitive scaffolding. But you can still make sure that your statements in this scaffolding in time and space more or less accurately correspond to something that is outside. Okay, interesting. Yeah, there's a lot of someone to ask you about. I still have two things that I wanted to bring up. If we have time. So one is I have trouble. So I want to talk about the disassociative identity disorder which we haven't really talked about. And I want to ask you, like, how much you care if that empirically turns out not to be real. And I know you spent some time defending that it's real. But I do wonder, like, is it really important for you that that's a real psychological thing as opposed to just a mind pump or an intuition pump to get people into seeing what you're trying to say? And then secondly, I want to ask about what if any differences you see between the kind of view you're defending and someone who might think that we're living in a simulation. Because it sounds to me that at a certain level that the views are identical except for how they ultimately get described. So I did want to ask the, so maybe I don't know whichever one you feel like talking about first. Yeah, let's start from the first. So the order first is easier. The use of dissociation to explain the rise of our individuality or sense of a personal, separate self within the context of what they presume to be universal and fundamentally unitary consciousness. It's an empirical handle. To some extent, it's a metaphor because dissociation is defined for humans. And I'm applying this to something that's not human. So by definition, it isn't literally dissociation. It's something like dissociation. Right. And it's not a disorder. You're not saying the universe has a mental illness. That's not the, no, no, even even the very concept of mental illness is is is anthropocentric. And even for human societies, the concept of what constitutes a mental illness varies from society to society. People who we consider schizofrenic would be enlightened in shalons and in other cultures. So the whole thing is completely relative. I don't mean this as a negative as passing a negative value judgment on the universe. I don't think the universe is is is is is ill exactly headline or not a pastor said universe is therapy. I think it's just nature. It's just what the universe does. It's to be dissociated. It's part of the dispositions and potentialities of universal consciousness. I'm very naturalistic in that sense. At the same time, the If the premise is correct, that automatically this is all one universal consciousness, then it's unavoidable that something like dissociation is going on. You can explain the mechanism in some other ways, but automatically you can always describe it as I am dissociated from the rest at a very general level. That's exactly what's going on if the premise is correct. So that's the first question. But so because, I mean, the reason why I asked that is because as you, I'm sure no, it's very controversial whether DID is a legitimate diagnostic category. And then what? It used to be. Well, I mean, whether it's tracked something real is what I'm saying. Yeah, it used to be a polemic. I think now it's pretty thinned down. I have been neuroimaging studies about the idea either. Well, but those are very controversial too. So I know there's that one about the blind culture. But there's some that just some debate. They were using EEG and that one. There's some debate about whether you can fake the vote to his or her response or by defocusing your eyes. I mean, there's a lot of having ruled out those confounds. I'd like to very least I would say there's also the work of you along the Shulumph in the Netherlands to think 2014, which was done with FMRI not EEG. But okay, yeah, at that level, you know, most new scientific results are polemical. Yeah, I grant that. Okay. Yeah, so it doesn't really matter, right? Because okay, interesting. And so I've seen you say things about an hint earlier that you're not an optimist about minded computers, computers that have experience. So is that the case that you do? Would you claim that a simulated brain would lack experience? It's a matter of what you consider to be a separate object in the inanimate world. Objects are nominal partitions, right? I mean, where does the river end and the ocean begin? If a rock detaches from the mountain is a rock now a separate object, separate from the mountain. If you blew it back, is it not part of the mountain? I mean, the boundaries of objects are nominal. They are arbitrary. They are determined by convenience. Even a car is arbitrarily defined because you say, well, what constitutes the car is everything that you need for the car to work. So if you need the spark plugs, the spark plugs are part of the car. On that account, you need the air that cools the engine, that facilitates combustion. Without the air, there is no combustion. You need the fuel. You need the tires to grab the road. By the way, you need the road because if there is nothing for the tires to grab the car doesn't move. But it doesn't grab without gravity. So actually, you need gravity to pull the car to the road. So if you go down that path, especially if you go into quantum physics and entanglement, the universe is an indivisible hole. That's. I'm not the first one to arrive at this conclusion. It's been around a problem. That's a shaper. There's also the blog. How did it go? The blog. The blogject. Yeah, yeah. A little earlier than shafers. Yeah, that's right. But actually, it goes back to von Neumann and von Neumann changed the idea that measurement is a sort of an arbitrary idea in quantum mechanics that when two quantum mechanics, every system is quantum mechanical. When two quantum mechanical systems interact, they just get entangled. And since the universe at one point was a singularity, then it's just one quantum system, a system entangled. But anyway, so I denied that this cell phone is conscious in and of itself in the sense of having its own private inner life. I think this cell phone is just a cell phone, nominally. It's part of a unitary image we call the inanimate universe. I think the inanimate universe as a whole is conscious. There is something it is like to be the inanimate universe as a whole. There is nothing it's like to be this cell phone in and of itself. It's just part of the inanimate universe as a whole. I know, but could it be? I think if you could induce dissociation, because that's how it would translate your question into my language. I don't think this cell phone is the representation of a dissociative process in universe of consciousness. I think life is, I think that's what dissociation looks like, life, metabolism. Then the question would be, can we induce dissociation artificially? I think we can. But if we succeed in doing that, I don't think the result will look like a silicon chip. It will look like a living organism. Doing protein, folding, mitosis, transcription, all that good stuff. So can we emissimulate the environment doing all that stuff? In a simulated environment, I would say that we have no reason to think it's dissociated. It's just part of the image of the inanimate universe as a whole. In the same way that a single neuron in your head is just part of the image of what your inner life looks to me. There is nothing it's like to be a single neuron in your brain. There is only something it's like to be you. For the same reason, I would say there is nothing it's like to be this cell phone. There is only something it's like to be the inanimate universe as a whole. I don't think a simulation as accurate as it can be necessarily replicates the thing simulated. I have this cheeky metaphor I like to use. I can simulate kidney function on my Apple iMac computer here, which is powerful enough. I can simulate it with perfect accuracy down to the molecular level. That doesn't mean that my computer will be on my desk. The simulation is not the thing simulated. I think if you simulate the patterns of information flow in the human brain down to molecular accuracy, I don't think that implies that your simulation will be conscious in and of itself anymore that simulating kidney function makes my computer be. Yeah, I mean, I like, you know, SIRL used to famously say that simulate the hurricane you don't get water in the computer same idea. I like here's better a little bit, but you get something in the computer, I guess. But irrespective of that, some things you simulate, you do get the thing itself. So if I simulate an Nintendo entertainment system, I have an Nintendo. I mean, I play these old Nintendo games with an emulator. The emulator is the it is that system. It's not. You're defining now the thing simulated as an abstract level. An Nintendo emulation is not an Nintendo. It doesn't have the same PCB, it doesn't have the same chips, it doesn't have the same plastic casing. But what you're saying is this functionality is perfectly replicated. Right. That's something else. And isn't all there is to being an Nintendo system, though? It's a matter of definition. I don't think if you emulate my functionality that you will get my inner life. For instance, if I have a job, I mean, my day job is corporate strategy. I earn a living, you know, making cases for mergers and acquisitions and new product developments and and all that good stuff. Suppose you could have a highly intelligent computer that could replicate my functionality and perform that job exactly as I do. I do not think this is in principle impossible. I think it's a matter of time. I think it will happen. Artificial intelligence is perfectly possible. Actually, man, and that's what I said. I did it for you. I would say to be strange if I would turn my back on that. But I don't think simulating or emulating or replicating my functionality in a robot would imply that that robot has the same inner life I have. I don't think that. Yeah. I want to find that interesting because I mean, I understand that for like, you know, for to put it in your terms, the brain is the extrinsic appearance of phenomenal of our experience. And when we look at the brain, what we're seeing is how our experience appeared from the outside from the second person, so to speak. Well, actually, to speak. And so that we have a strong tendency to a core later identify the brain with those things. Is there any impreasible reason why some other kind of physical device couldn't be the extrinsic appearance? I don't think there is any impreasible reason. I don't think there is any impreasible reason why this couldn't be the case. For all I know, there is a silicon-based life somewhere else in the galaxy or some other part of the universe. You know, silicon atoms also have this four covalent bonds that carbon atoms have. Probably life would be various luggage because those are bonds very hard to break and very hard to do chemical reactions with those. But anyway, I don't think there is anything in principle that prevents this. But I don't think we have any impreasible reason to believe it because every instance of dissociated in a life that we seem to sense around us are in the form of other living beings based on their behavior because they also evolved in the same planetary ecosystem we did. So, I am inclined to think that silicon simulation is just that. Right. It's not the image of dissociation. It just replicates some of dissociation's functionality. I think that's interesting. So, what are you building into life here? I mean, so can there be artificial life? I think it is possible that we build it, not like that we find it, but could be. Yeah, I think it's possible. I think we would get there one day. I think Craig Vanter has been trying this for a while. He has not succeeded yet. He has succeeded in replacing the genome in a living cell, removing its original genome, putting a synthesized genome. and getting the cell to be a different organism, but he didn't start life from non-life. Nobody has achieved A by a geniuses yet. But I think I don't see any fundamental reason for why this wouldn't be possible. So from that perspective, I think we can, in principle, we can induce artificially, induce dissociation in universal consciousness, and create an organism for which there will be something it is like to be eaten in and of itself, an organism that has its own private, dissociated inner life. But we will call that artificial life. We will call that A by a geniuses. We will not call that assimilation or a computer emulation. I think. Yeah, that's interesting. Because yeah, I was surprised by your responsiveness in this area. So I think-- I think, you know, when we say, well, assimilation should be conscious, too. There are so many things you're not taking into account when you make that statement. And then you're not taking into account the physical substrate of the thing. And I'm using the word physical here, not in a metaphysical sense, but in a colloquial sense. It's not the same atoms arranged in the same way. A assimilation only corresponds to the thing simulated. At a very high level of abstraction, at a level of abstract information flows, and information topologies. But it's not the same arrangement of atoms. It's not metabolizing. It's not carbon. And it's completely different. The thing is, our culture is now so, so lost in abstraction that we forget everything that's left over when you only look at abstraction. You forget everything that makes assimilation different from the thing simulated. We can't even conceive that the simulation can't be the thing itself, because we only look at the abstracted similarities. We forget that nearly everything else about the nearly-- all there is to it is different. Right. So even if-- I mean, you're familiar with post-rum simulation argument that we could be in a simulation currently. Well, I'm extremely negative about everything nicked "boss-rum" sense. I'll leave it at that. I think it shouldn't be taken seriously. I think it's a charade. I think it only brings shame to philosophy. It's a terrible opinion. But let me put it at that. I think-- well, never mind. Now, let's look at the simulation argument. We have to look at the metaphysics of that. In so far, as you're just postponing the problem by saying, well, we are a simulation in a physical computer in some incommensurable universe. And incommensurable to us because we are the simulated thing. Exactly. You're not solving anything. We are just postponing it. You're just saying, well, I don't need to solve the metaphysical problems here because this is a simulation anyway. So you move though the metaphysical problems to something that you cannot even begin to talk about because it's incommensurable with all of our categories and concepts and language. And you think achieved something by doing that. I think you achieved exactly nothing by doing that. And there is an argumentation that any sufficiently advanced civilization would do a simulation. I agree with that. Would that simulation be conscious? I don't think so. For the exact same reasons, I don't think a computer would be conscious because it's just a simulation. It's not the thing simulated. So I am very negative about the simulation hypothesis. It's seen from this metaphysical angle. But the word simulation is so flexible that there is a sense in which I'm saying that the universe is a simulation. Because it's a sort of a dream, right? There is a very loose colloquial sense in which you could say that I'm positing some kind of simulated reality through. But in every technical sense that is out there, I disclaim any association with that trend of thought. OK, cool. I hear the children downstairs have gotten home from their activities and the screaming is commencing. So we've got to wrap this up, unfortunately, because I could talk to you forever. You have a lot of interesting ideas and argue very well for them. However, I wonder if there's anything which hasn't come up so far, which you would like to have come up before we sign off? No, no, it's OK. I hear it, children too. I want to feel guilty. Keep being them from all over their dead. They'll be fine. But I've heard on. I want to thank you very much for taking this time with talking to me. I've been a tremendous pleasure. I really admire your work. I'm glad that I have read it and met you. And I hope you keep doing what you're doing, fighting the good fight. Well, thank you very much. And it was a pleasure to talk to you very far. One and a half hour pass in the bleak. Yeah, two hours. That's the bling. Exactly. All right, so I'll end. I'll say bye off air. But thanks again. All right. Take care.