#190 - Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think our intuitions arise from an evolutionary history, a developmental history, and a social history that have to be well tuned to certain things but don't have to be so well tuned to others, right? So if your intuitions were wrong about walking along cliff edges and picking berries and planning parties, you know, then you would soon have physical or social trouble. So our judgments about like, yeah, don't invite that guy to the party if you're also inviting that party. And don't walk so close to cliff edge. And this is how you get a berry off a bush and into a basket.

Our intuitions about that have to be well tuned to the environment, basically, but there's no such pressure to have good intuitions about the origin of the universe or the fundamental structure of matter, or what kinds of space aliens would be conscious or not conscious, or whether computers would be conscious right on those kinds of things. There's no corrective source of pressure toward truth or accuracy. So our intuitions can kind of run wild.

Luisa Rodriguez
Hi listeners, this is Luis Rodriguez, one of the hosts of the 80,000 hours podcast. Today's conversation with philosopher Eric Schwitzscabel is about some of the most bizarre and unintuitive claims from his recent book the Weirdness of the World, which argues that nearly every kind of belief one could have about the nature of the universe and the nature of consciousness is actually extremely dubious and bottoms out in really bizarre conclusions. I found the conversation really fun, partly because I find thinking about weird philosophical claims intrinsically fun, but also because I think taking ideas that seem bizarre on their face seriously and challenging our own intuitions is actually an incredibly important part of figuring out what matters in the world and how to make the world better. We spent the first half of the interview talking about why the materialist view of consciousness leads to extremely strange places, including to the possibility that the US might be a conscious entity. We also talk about why our intuitions seem so unreliable for answering fundamental questions about reality, how to think about borderline states of consciousness, and whether consciousness is more like a spectrum or more like a light, flicking on the possibility that we could be dreaming right now, and the ethical implications of that, and why its worth it to grapple with the universe's most complex questions, even if we cant completely find satisfying solutions.

Alright, without further ado, I bring you Eric schwitzgable.

Today I'm speaking with Eric Schwitzschebel. Eric is a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and the author of a number of books, including a theory of jerks and other philosophical misadventures and the weirdness of the world. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Eric. Yeah, thanks for having me on. So, I hope to talk about whether the US is conscious and the probability that we're in a dream or a simulation.

But first, you just published the weirdness of the world, your most recent book. So congratulations on that. I really loved the basic thesis of the book because I just think it's really important beyond just being very fun. Can you walk me through kind of the basic thesis? Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So there are two main claims. One I call universal bizarreness, and one I call universal dubiety. And these both concern big theses about consciousness and cosmology. So the idea is every kind of big foundational claim about the cosmological nature of the universe and about the nature of consciousness is going to be both bizarre and dubious. And by bizarre, what I mean is that it is strikingly contrary to common sense.

And what I mean by dubious is that we're not epistemically compelled, we're not rationally compelled to accept one theory over all of the competitors. Right. So counter to our intuitions makes a lot of sense to me. And then dubious, just being like, there is not enough empirical evidence about these topics to be justified in having really confident beliefs about which kind of theories of these issues are true. Is that kind of it?

Yeah. Empirical evidence or any other kind of evidence. Right. You know, a priori deduction or mathematical proof or whatever. You know, philosophers sometimes want to go beyond the empirical.

Yeah. Right. Sure, sure. A standard of evidence that is compelling and not just, like, plausible. So, yeah, I guess we're going to talk about some of these in depth, but could you give a quick example to give people a flavor of the kind of thing that you mean?

Right. Well, I think the universal bizarreness and universal divide theses make intuitive sense to a lot of people when we talk about quantum mechanics. Right. So most people, probably most of your listeners, know enough about quantum mechanics to know that something weird is going on at the quantum mechanical level. Right.

So. But exactly what weird thing is going on, there's a lot of dispute about it. So that's a place where I think people can kind of get their head around what universal bizarreness and universal dubiety amount to, because I think both of those theses apply to interpretations of quantum mechanics. Yeah, yeah. For anyone who hasn't, I don't know, I think lots of people are familiar with quantum mechanics, super weird.

Luisa Rodriguez
But for those people who haven't done a super deep dive can you give an example of, I don't know, the kind of thing? I think my understanding is that quantum mechanics is a case where we actually do have tons of empirical evidence about how things work at the quantum level, but they just are extremely, extremely weird and make no sense when you compare them to things at the kind of macro level. So, yeah. Are there any examples you particularly like? So, one familiar example is the Schrodinger's cat example.

Yep. Great one. Right. So, this is the idea that you've got a closed box, and there's a cat in there, and there's some random, supposedly random quantum process that's evolving, like maybe a uranium atom, either decaying or not decaying, which is hypothesized in standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to be random. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So if during the time period the cat is in the box, the uranium atom does decay, then a poison will be released that kills the cat. And if it doesn't decay, then the poison will not be released. Now, the box is closed. And according to one standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, sometimes called the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat exists in a juxtaposition, a superposition of alive and dead. Like, it's kind of 50% alive and 50% dead at the same time.

Until you open the box. Some observer opens the box and looks, and then suddenly the cat resolves. The superposition resolves into either the cat is alive or the cat is dead. But before you look, it's in this superposed state of maybe 50% alive, 50% dead, which doesn't make a lot of. Intuitive sense, is incredibly bizarre.

That's a pretty bizarre view. Now, not every interpreter of quantum mechanics thinks that's the right view. So, for example, the many worlds interpretation is an alternative to that. So let's just simplify it a little bit and think that there's maybe one particular moment in time at which the uranian atom will or will not decay. Then on the many worlds interpretation, what happens is, when you hit that moment in time, the world splits into two worlds, one in which there's a living cat and one in which there's a dead cat.

And so the cat is never actually in a superposition of alive and dead. You know, the cat's in a familiar dead state or a familiar alive state, but the world has actually divided. And then when you open the box, you discover which world you were in. You were kind of uncertain before you open the box, but that was just uncertainty, an epistemic state, not the actual world being a superposition of two states. Now, that's also weird.

Right. It's less weird about the cat because there's no superposition, but it's weird in the sense that the world is constantly splitting into multiple different worlds on this view. That's the many worlds interpretation. Yes. And then there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics, too.

They are also bizarre. Right? So thinking about universal bizarreness and universal dubiety. Right. Every interpretation of quantum mechanics is bizarre, and they're all dubious.

Right. There's not a justified general consensus that the many worlds view is correct or that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, or that some other, one of the other interpretations is correct. So regarding this fundamental feature of the cosmos, how quantum mechanics works, universal bizarreness and universal dubiety are both correct. That's a really, really excellent example. I think, just briefly, the example that comes to mind most for me is population ethics, which is a topic we have talked about our show before because it does make a really big difference to the thing that we care a lot about, which is how do you figure out what the world's most pressing problems are and what are the best ways to solve them?

Luisa Rodriguez
And, yeah, I think there are all sorts of very strange conclusions that we could pick out for any single view of population ethics. My preferred one involves me having to come to the very, very uncomfortable and weird conclusion that I would prefer a world with, I don't know, many billions or trillions of barely, barely net positive beings compared with a much smaller planet with just a few, I don't know, hundreds of beings living extremely, extremely happy lives. Yeah. This feels to me like, yeah, this comes up a lot in philosophy, as far as I can tell. And when it does, I don't know.

It's not just fun. I think it actually just, like, really matters. And maybe. Yeah, maybe I should actually just put it to you. Why do you think this is such an important thing to reckon with?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. Well, I agree about population ethics. Right. What happens is you have these arguments that lead toward what you might think of as kind of repugnant conclusions or surprising conclusions, unintuitive conclusions, but each step in the argument seems pretty plausible. So then you kind of get stuck with either you accept this bizarre seeming conclusion, or you reject one of the premises, which is also going to kind of commit you to some counterintuitive or bizarre things.

And there's no consensus. There's no justified, I think, consensus about what the right way to approach these issues in population ethics is so right. I think that's another great example of a case where you've got both bizarreness and dubiety going on. Right. And that's characteristic of a lot of philosophical issues.

Luisa Rodriguez
Do you have a take on how important it is that we acknowledge that the world is weird? I think it's very important. I think it's derivatively important in the sense that we don't want to get stuck in views, common sense views that might be incorrect by just kind of taking common sense as an implacable standard. We've seen in the sciences that common sense, ordinary people's intuitions about how things work often don't pan out, you know, once the science is sufficiently developed. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So the same thing could be true in philosophy. So I think it's instrumentally valuable in that way. It's appropriate to keep an open mind about things that. About difficult issues. But I also think it's just.

It's also intrinsically valuable. One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water. You and me. How dare you.

That could. We can look up at the stars and look into our brains and try to grapple with the most complex, difficult questions that there are. And even if we can't make great progress on them and don't come to completely satisfying solutions, just the fact of trying to grapple with these things is kind of the universe looking at itself and trying to understand itself. And Earth is very different from Mars. There is nothing on Mars that's doing this.

Right. And here we are. Right. So this is kind of. We're kind of this bright spot of reflectiveness in the cosmos, and I think we should celebrate that fact for its own intrinsic value and interestingness.

Luisa Rodriguez
I really like that way of thinking about it. So let's turn to another topic. You argue that under the physicalist or materialist view of consciousness, that the United States is probably conscious, which is wild. I personally find materialist views of consciousness very compelling. So this idea really unsettles me, and maybe I should reflect on why I'm even so unsettled by it.

But before we go any farther, can you just quickly define materialism and physicalism? Right. Actually, defining it turns out to be a little bit tricky and controversial in literature. Okay. But I think the best way to think about it is this.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So at the most fundamental level is everything spatial and non mental. Right? So think about quarks and electrons and photons and that kind of stuff. Right? Those all have spatial properties.

They're located in certain positions. Some of them have other kinds of spatial properties, dimensionality of various sorts. Right. And we don't think of them as being fundamentally mental. Now, maybe mental is constructed out of physical stuff, but at the most fundamental level, most of us, except, unless you're a panpsychist, think that these kinds of particles are not by themselves intrinsically mental, but they are by themselves intrinsically possessed with spatial properties.

So I think, in my view, that's the clearest way of thinking about materialism or physicalism. Everything boils down, in some sense to those kinds of things. Yep. Yep. Okay, so that's materialism and physicalism.

Luisa Rodriguez
Let's use materialism for the rest of the conversation. Next, how are you defining consciousness? Well, one of those slightly tricky problems is defining what consciousness is. So, I mean, the term in the way that I take to be standard in both consciousness science and recent anglophone philosophy of mind. And I think the best way to define it is by example.

Eric Schwitzgebel
As soon as you try to define it in some more theoretical way, then you start assuming that certain theories are true, which could be controversial. So I think just you point to examples, and I think people get it. So, yeah, I have a whole chapter in my book kind of making this argument. So if you have your eyes open and you're looking out at the world, you will have visual experiences. That's an example of something that belongs to your consciousness or your stream of conscious experience.

If you close your eyes and think about what's the best way to get to grandma's house during rush hour, then you're having an experience of some sort of experience. Maybe it's visual imagery, maybe it's auditory imagery. Maybe it's some other kind of way of thinking. But you're having some sort of conscious thinking about how to get to grandma's house. If you drop something heavy on your toe, you experience pain.

That's another kind of conscious experience. If you sing to yourself happy birthday silently, that's another kind of conscious experience. If you remember being vividly angry about something, that's another kind of conscious experience. So all of these things have something, I think, really obvious in common. Yeah, that's their conscious.

Right. And other things aren't. Like, five minutes ago, it was true of you. It was a mental fact about you that you knew that Obama had been US president in 2010, but you weren't thinking about it. It wasn't part of your conscious experience.

So that was a mental fact, but it was not, at that moment, conscious. Right, right. So there are mental things that are not conscious, and there are things going on in you all the time in your brain and in your body that aren't part of your experience? Sure. For the most part, I'm not conscious of my blood pressure going up and down.

Right, exactly. So there's something that those positive examples that I gave have in common, that your experience of your blood pressure and your kind of unthought of knowledge about us presidents doesn't have that property. Right. That's what consciousness is. I think that's the best way to define it.

Just point at those examples. And I think most people, if they don't try to be too clever, I think you can really trick yourself up if you try to be too clever about this. Right. If you just kind of like, latch on to the obvious property that all these things have in common. That's what we mean by consciousness.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah. This is a bit of a side note, but what is the most common way that people trip themselves up when trying to be clever about what consciousness is? I think there are two ways. One is a kind of theoretical way, which is that they import their favorite theory. They say, oh, well, consciousness is the thing that self represents itself, or that I know infallibly or something.

Eric Schwitzgebel
They import something like that into the definition of it. And the other, I think, is, and this is a common source of confusion in the terminology with ordinary people, non philosophers, is they think about, they kind of confuse consciousness and self consciousness. Right. The idea that you are aware of yourself as having conscious experience. Right.

And that in order to be conscious, you really need to be thinking about the fact that you are conscious. Okay. Yep. Now, there are some theories, some philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness in which there always is some kind of self awareness of your consciousness as it's going on. So maybe it's true that every time you have a conscious experience, in some sense you're aware or thinking about the fact that you are.

But I don't want to build that into the definition of consciousness. Okay, nice. That was just a bit of an aside. What would it mean for the US to be conscious? Would it have thoughts like, what's the best way to get to grandma's house?

Luisa Rodriguez
Like, I might. Would it have preferences? Would those be strong preferences, or do some of those things come apart? Right. So if the US is conscious, then what it means is it's got some sort of experiences, some sort of consciousness, the kind of property that we just pointed at.

Eric Schwitzgebel
No, it's not going to probably have experiences very much like humans do. If this idea makes sense, and I haven't yet argued, we haven't yet argued for why it's plausible to think the US is conscious. Right. But if it is, if it does have conscious experiences, I think it's going to be pretty different from human conscious experiences, but it will presumably have something like preferences and something like representations of the world around it. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
On a gut level, my immediate reaction is surely not. It's bizarre. Right. The idea that it's contrary to common sense is one of the things that I argue for in this book, as we talked about. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So something contrary to common sense must be true about consciousness. This is a candidate of something that might be true, but in accordance with the dubiety thesis, I don't think it necessarily is true, but I don't think we should take our intuitive. Most of ours. I mean, I don't want to speak for everybody, but most people's intuitive reaction that that can't be true as solid evidence that it's not true. It's a consideration to weigh.

Right. But one of the things that I argue in the book is that most of the ways of trying to escape from the conclusion also commit you to other counterintuitive things. Kind of like you were saying with population ethics. Right. You have this argument, you come to this conclusion, you're like, that conclusion seems wrong.

Where do I get off the boat? And anywhere you try to step off the boat, you end up in other kinds of murky wine. That's weird. Yeah. Yeah.

So I think it's kind of structured like that. Right. And actually, maybe really quickly, maybe this is actually just a good place to say why I think this thesis is so important, because I think you said why you think it's important. I think, to me, it feels important because I have so many beliefs now, many of them philosophical. That did sound extremely, extremely weird to me when I first heard them.

Luisa Rodriguez
And I think it's super valuable and important that I didn't just take my intuition at face value when thinking more about those beliefs. And so I am going to be trying for the remainder of this conversation to be like, this could be one of those instances. It could be that I need to take really seriously the idea that the US is conscious. So I think one of the sources of resistance to the idea is just that the United States is a spatially distributed entity. It's not even like a coherently compact physical entity.

Right. So one of the ways that I try to warm people up to just the very idea of conceiving them as states, as consciousness, as conscious, is to work them through some hypothetical space alien cases. One of them is the syrian super squids. Great. So these are squid like entities that inhabit oceans around some nearby star.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Hypothetically, say, Sirius, they have a central head and a thousand tentacles, and their cognition is distributed among all of their tentacles, but it happens fast because they've got reflective light capillaries instead of chemical nerves, kind of like fiber optics. So among the thousand tentacles, they have integrated cognition just like we do. Now, the clever thing about them, or the fun thing about them, is they can detach their tentacles, right? So they detach a tentacle and then at one end of the transceivers, at the end of the tentacle and in the head, that then transmit the light signals between the tentacle and the head. So they can detach their tentacles, and then the tentacles can go do various things.

And since the speed of light is negligible at these spatial scales, this doesn't slow down their cognition in any appreciable way. So you could have these entities that are, with their cognition, spatially distributed among a thousand tentacles wandering around through the sea, and yet they would be conscious, just like we are. They would be capable. There's no reason to suppose that such entities would be incapable of having complexity. Psychological and philosophical discussions, art, literature, all of the wonderful things about humans.

It seems like we could have analogues of those same things in super squids. So it's plausible, and I think almost all materialists would say it's likely that if there were entities of this sort, that they would have conscious experiences. It's both kind of intuitive and theoretically plausible that super squids would be conscious despite having spatial distribution. So, yeah, that's just a start toward warming us up. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
I would have thought that there was a need for more central information processing in something like a head to get a single. Maybe not literally a head, but to get a single. To get a single consciousness. Yeah. So does your consciousness need to be in an organ in your head?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. So we think most people in our culture find it intuitive to think, ah, my consciousness is here, up in my head right now, this is not culturally universal. Right. So, for example, in ancient China, people thought that the organ of thinking and feeling was literally the heart. Also, Aristotle famously said this.

Luisa Rodriguez
Interesting. He thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood. That's great, right? So I don't think we have a great intuitive understanding of where consciousness is located. We, for some reason in our culture, we like to put it behind the eyes, maybe because, you know, because the eyes are so important to us, and maybe because we also have physiological knowledge now that ancient China wasn't present and Aristotle didn't have.

Eric Schwitzgebel
But if we took part of your brain and moved it into your stomach and just stretched the neural connections and made sure the connections were really fast so that nothing slowed down, you would engage in exactly the same cognitive processes as you do now, and you wouldn't even notice that half of your brain was now in your stomach. Yep, that does move me. That works as far as flipping my intuitions. Remember, we're working within a mainstream materialist perspective. And most materialists theories in science and in philosophy argue that what's really important about consciousness is the cognitive states that you have, the information processing that you have, the way that you react to your environment.

Why are brains so important? It's because they facilitate complex cognitive transitions, memory, self representation, representation of the environment, goal processing, all that kind of stuff. And none of that makes any essential reference to space, to being in some particular location. So as long as you've got the right kinds of cognitive capacities and processes, most materialist theories would be pretty liberal about. Okay, well, you know, if it's happening smoothly, it doesn't matter if the two halves of the brain are separated, or if it's a thousand pieces of brain that are.

That are separated. As long as it's upholding the same kinds of cognitive functions, you'll get the same answers. Right? If you think. Classic example is the Turing test.

So listeners might know this. The Turing test has fallen on hard times recently with chat GPT. Yep. Because it seems to pass at least weak versions of the Turing test. And we could talk about that if you want.

Right. But if you think about just one kind of familiar example would be if you can talk to something and it responds verbally just as if it's a person kind of indistinguishably be from a person, then it seems like it's got thoughts. You apply this to consciousness. It seems like it's got consciousness. All you need is the right kind of information processing, presumably.

So a super squid could, presumably, if it was organized in the right way, pass a Turing test, respond similarly to a human being. Doesn't matter that the pieces of its cognitive structure or its brain are spatially distributed. Yeah, it's interesting. I'm already. I can feel somehow the intuitive, like, ick feeling about the super squids going down.

Luisa Rodriguez
So it feels like we must have made some progress for me personally, but there's this other thought experiment you give that I still, because I already know a little bit about it, feel, feel the same ick towards. So maybe we should talk about that one too. So this thought experiment is about ant heads. Can you say how this thought experiment goes? Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So this one is designed to reduce intuitive resistance to the idea that a conscious entity could have conscious parts. Right. So one of the things you might think is, well, the United States couldn't be conscious, because it's composed of a lot of conscious people, and people are conscious, and maybe it's not possible to create one conscious thing out of other conscious things. Right. So a conscious thing couldn't have conscious parts.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yes, I have this very strongly. Yeah. Now, why we would accept a principle like that, other than that, it's attempting escape from this unappealing conclusion. The United States is conscious. It doesn't seem like.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Okay, like, what exactly would be the theoretical justification for thinking this? I don't know, but let's say you're tempted to this or in some way. Right. So the ontarian et heads is meant as an example to kind of undercut those intuitions. Another kind of science fiction example.

Right? So here we imagine that there are these around antares. There are these big, woolly, mammoth like creatures, and they engage, like the super squids do and like humans do, in lots of complex cognitive processes. They have memory, they talk about philosophy, they talk about psychology. They contact us.

I imagine them coming to visit earth and, you know, trading rare metals with us, and then, you know, maybe falling in love with people so that they're interspecies, marital relationships and that sort of stuff. These giant, woolly, mammoth like creatures from the outside, they're kind of just like intelligent woolly mammoths. Now, on the inside, what their heads and humps have are a million bugs. And these bugs have. These bugs may be conscious.

They have their own individual sensoria and reactions and predilections, but they can engage in. There's no reason, again, from an information processing perspective, to think that you couldn't engage in whatever kinds of cognitive processes or information processes that you want with a structure that's composed out of a million bugs instead of 80 billion neurons, right. The bugs might have neurons inside them. So, again, kind of from a standard materialist, information processing, cognitive structure perspective, and also, I think, kind of from an intuitive perspective, it seems like, well, these things are conscious. This ontarian adhead who's come visited me, you know, has opinions about Shakespeare.

Now, no individual bug has any opinions about Shakespeare. Somehow that arises from the interactions of all these bugs, right? So once we maybe we don't know that these ant heads have these ants or bugs inside them until we've already been interacting with them for 20 years. Right. Huh.

So it seems plausible that such entities would be possible. And it seems plausible that such entities would be conscious, again, on standard materialist theories. And maybe also just using our science fictional intuitions, starting from a certain perspective. Sure. And if that's the case, then that's some pressure against the idea, what I call the anti nesting principle.

Some pressure against the anti nesting principle. According to the anti nesting principle, you can't have a conscious entity with conscious parts. You can't nest conscious entities. Nested consciousness. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
When I imagine a bunch of ants maybe doing small bits of communicating to each other in whatever way ants communicate using the neural faculties they have. And any individual ant either not being conscious or having some form of consciousness that is more limited than the kind of woolly mammoth as a full entity, my reaction is, like, how could they possibly create this emergent thing from these small bits of consciousness? But I think that is just, like. That's just evidence that consciousness is insane. I want to bat it down, but I can't.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. I think we have to remember the materialist perspective here. Right. So. Which you are doing.

But just to kind of remind your listeners. Right. So anti materialists will say, look at a bunch of neurons, and, like, it's impossible to conceive how these squishy things firing electronic electric signals among each other could possibly give rise to consciousness. So therefore, consciousness couldn't be a merely material thing. So if you're tempted by that line of reasoning, then you're not a materialist.

If you're a materialist, you got to say, well, somehow this does it. And then the question is, is the resistance to consciousness arising out of the ants the same kind of thing that the materialist is committed to batting down. Right. Yeah. From a certain perspective, it might seem inconceivable.

It seems like consciousness would be a very different thing, but it's maybe just inconceivable in the same way that a brain giving rise to consciousness seems inconceivable to some people. So we've talked about theories of consciousness on our show before, and we'll point listeners to those episodes so that they can listen to them. But in case anyone. The way I am right now is feeling like materialism's making me feel weird. I don't like it.

Luisa Rodriguez
What are my other options? Can you just remind us what our other options are? Because I think it really, for me, drives home the like, ah, crap. None of these options are good. Well, the historically most common option is substance dualism.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It's the idea that there is a soul that we have that is not reducible to material stuff. Maybe it exists before we were born, maybe it can continue after we die. Right. A lot of religious traditions see this kind of immaterial soul as central. Right.

So you could accept a view like that that leads to its own range of bizarre options, which I'm happy to get into. Right. Another possibility is idealism, the idea that there's no material world at all, that things are fundamentally mental all the way down. All there is is immaterial souls, and the whole world is just constructions, a joint construction of our minds. And then there's a grab bag of what I call compromise rejection views.

So these would include views we already talked about, panpsychism. Right. This is a view on which it's not quite a materialist view, for reasons we discussed, but it's not really a substance dualist view either. Right. Everything is conscious, literally everything is conscious, even electrons.

Another kind of compromise rejection position would be property dualism. David Chalmers is probably the most famous advocate of this. He holds that there are irreducibly immaterial properties and material properties that are kind of on a par in some sense, with each other. Neither is more fundamental than the other. Right.

That ends up leading either to panpsychism or to some kind of view on which these immaterial properties are causally impotent, because it seems like the material properties explain everything we see. So you got some bizarrenesses there. Another option is kantian transcendental idealism, which I also talk about a bit in the book. And this is the idea that we don't know how things fundamentally are. We can never know the fundamental structure of things, and the world is kind of, in some sense, everything that we categorize or interact with is in some sense a construction of our own minds upon definition, fundamentally unknowable, noumenal reality that's probably neither spatial nor mental as we ordinarily understand it.

Luisa Rodriguez
Right. So you've got a lot of weird options. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I feel like my.

I think, sadly, I don't think we will go through all of those and explain why each of them is weird in their own way. But it is just really interesting to me that before thinking about these particular thought experiments, I would have put a lot of weight on materialism. And I've basically spent the last, I don't know, two decades just flat out rejecting dualism. I've also found panpsychism pretty weird, though I've had times when I was more sympathetic and less sympathetic to it. But the super squids and ant head thought experiments really do make me feel like, well, one, fine, maybe this is some reason to push against my intuition that, I don't know, you can't nest consciousness or that spatially distributed systems couldn't be conscious.

But it also makes me more tempted to put more weight on these other theories of consciousness, given that this whole materialism thing is leading to some way weirder places than I expected. And so maybe I should let dualism lead me to some weird places too, and not have this like, kind of prejudiced. Dualism's weird because I associate that with like, I don't know, maybe God. And I don't think of myself as a theist, but here I am being like, maybe the US is conscious because, right. Because these thought experiments seem plausible to me.

Anyways, we haven't actually gotten to the US's conscious from these two thought experiments, so we should make that step. But first off, I don't know, is that, does that seem like the unappropriate way to react to some of this? Yes, I think that one of the things that materialists have not been completely explicit about, and I understand why dualists are also not completely explicit about this, Kansas are right. Is the strange implications of their views. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So once you start seeing these implications, then that gives you reason to think, okay, maybe I should rethink some of my resistance to alternative approaches. Right. Maybe this is a reason to somewhat reduce my credence in materialism. I think that is a reasonable response to think, okay, maybe I should take one of these other reviews seriously. If standard issue materialism seems to be leading me in this direction, which I don't like or seems unintuitive, or for some reason I'm inclined to reject.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah, I think for me it's, I'm trying not to let it be that I just don't like it. I'm trying to be more like, well, I don't like it as the only things going against these other views. And so I should at least be fair in my bias against theories of consciousness just because I don't like them. And if I don't like them is going to be a consideration, then materialism has to get some negative points there because I don't like it either. That's a nice way of phrasing it.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I mean, I think you end up, most people will end up with some things they in some sense don't like, and I think we have to pay attention to that. I don't think we have. Right. So, in some of the sciences, there are some conclusions that we might not like, but they're just so compellingly supported that you don't have an option, really. Right.

So time dilation issues in relativity theory, for example, the idea that something, the time goes slower for something that's moving fast relative to us, but at the same time, time is going slower for us relative to that thing. So our time is dilated relative to the other thing. I mean, it's like mind blowingly weird and confusing. We don't need to get into the, I guess, the time dilation stuff, right. But the empirical evidence for it is just overwhelming.

We couldn't run our satellites without the time dilation corrections. So even if we don't like it, you kind of have to accept that. But I don't think we're in that position with respect to most of the philosophical questions. I mean, we wouldn't call them philosophical anymore for the most part, if we were in that position. Right.

So I think one of the reasonable grounds for accepting or rejecting a position does have something that is related to this kind of your intuitive dislike or like of a position. That's not the only, I think, not the only thing to consider, but I do think that it's reasonable not to just disregard that. Okay. I want to get back on track and talk about, well, just get more into whether the US is conscious before we do, though. I think it would be helpful to me to understand how it's possible or what is explaining why my intuitions are sometimes so incredibly useless for thinking about some of these questions.

Luisa Rodriguez
Like, it seems I would have had the intuition that my intuitions about philosophy should be helpful. And I guess they sometimes are, but sometimes they go so wrong that I'm like, why do I even have them? What is it about, I guess, the history of the human mind? That means that lots of people tend to have intuitions about certain things, in some cases that seem to just be wrong across the board for lots and lots of people. Do you have thoughts on that?

Eric Schwitzgebel
Well, I think our intuitions arose, arise from an evolutionary history, a developmental history, and a social history that have to be well tuned to certain things, but don't have to be so well tuned to others. Right. So if your intuitions were wrong about walking along cliff edges and picking berries and planning parties, you know, then you would soon have physical or social trouble. So our judgments about like, yeah, don't invite that guy to the party if you're also inviting that person. Right, right.

You know, and you know, don't walk so close to the edge, to cliff edge. And this is how you get a berry off a bush and into a basket, right. Our intuitions about that have to be well tuned to the environment, basically. Otherwise they wouldn't have evolved, been socially reinforced, or emerged in ordinary cognitive development. But there's no such pressure to have good intuitions about the origin of the universe or the fundamental structure of matter or what kinds of space aliens would be conscious or not conscious, or whether computers would be conscious on those kinds of things.

There's no corrective source of pressure toward truth or accuracy. So our intuitions can kind of run wild, right. And in some cases, like for consciousness, our intuitions may track superficial features better than they track the underlying things, right? So in developmental psychology, researchers have discovered that if you just put googly eyes on something, kids are much more likely to attribute mental states to it. Also me, I am also more likely to attribute menstrual states to it, right?

So there's something about eyes like, and in fact in, you know, our ordinary environment, a thing having eyes tracks pretty well with its having the kinds of mental states that we like to attribute. So that's a great superficial feature to track. You know, children, brand new born infants, you know, neonates will respond immediately to eyes and to configurations that look like an eye and a nose and a mouth together, right. So there's something deep in us that's about eyes. Right.

That's written deep in us. Right. But that might have little to do with what the real basis of consciousness is. Yeah, yeah. Just as a funny little aside, it's true that I just did a little check.

Luisa Rodriguez
I was like, yeah, is it eyes? Yeah, I guess if I put a nose on a rock, I wouldn't do nearly as much consciousness attribution as I would for eyes. It's true. So, yeah, I'm kind of sold on that. But moving back to whether the US is conscious, I found the super squid and ant head thought experiments helpful, but there are also obviously other things that differentiate the kinds of beings in those thought experiments from the US.

But you still think that those other things that are important to consciousness are also at least arguably found in the case of the US. So you've actually got a long list of kind of ingredients for consciousness or maybe potential ingredients for consciousness. Not everybody agrees on which ingredients are necessary, but some plausible ones that lots of people think are. Yeah, plausible. We only have time to explore a couple of them.

But if people are curious about the other ones, I highly recommend they pick up your book. But just one example of these is being goal directed in a flexible way that kind of leads to responding to things in the environment. So, first, in case that's not kind of intuitive to everyone, why does it seem like an important ingredient for consciousness? Well, one way of thinking about it is, again, to think about alien cases, right? So if we were to go to another planet and we saw some entities that responded with substantial goal directed flexibility to what's going on in their environment, say, if they did so with a sophistication similar to rabbits, then we would probably be inclined to say, oh, well, since rabbits are conscious, these similarly sophisticated things are probably also conscious.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So if we're operating within a materialist perspective and we're not assuming immaterial souls or, you know, some divine touch that ignites consciousness in us, right. Then it's quite plausible that an appropriate interpretation of an animal that we saw on another planet that was goal directed and sophisticated would be, ah, that's a conscious thing. Yeah. Yeah. So it's something like, if we, you know, if we saw alien rabbits and they were eating alien grass and they were avoiding alien lions and I don't know, what other kinds of things, maybe burrowing in alien soil, those would all seem like kind of complex goals and probably goals that they're carrying out with some kind of light switched on.

Luisa Rodriguez
So, yeah, so that's kind of the justification for why it might be one of these necessary ingredients. In what sense does the US have this? Right, so the United States. And again, we're thinking of this as a concrete entity with people as its parts. So this entity has borders, which it protects.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It imports goods like bananas, which it then consumes. It exudes waste. It monitors its own waste. Right? So there are smog regulations.

It monitors space for asteroids that might threaten Earth. And it has kind of plans for what to do if an asteroid actually threatened Earth. It does things like invade other countries. So you could think of, like, an army going into Iraq as almost like a pseudopod being extended by this entity, right? And what it does is the elements of the entity disembark at the border of the ocean and the shore, and it goes around the mountain.

It doesn't crash into the mountain, and it detects the location of enemy troops, and it retreats if there's enough of a threat, right? So it. So this complex entity is engaged in all kinds of things that seem to have at least the kind of responsiveness and flexibility that we see in a rabbit. Okay, so that's that one. And we'll come back to.

Luisa Rodriguez
Wait a second. Do these analogies make sense? But for now, another is self monitoring and information seeking self regulation, which is already a jumble of words that might lose people. Can you start by explaining what you mean by that? And then.

Yeah. Why it might be relevant to consciousness. Right. So self monitoring, the United States monitors itself in the sense that, for example, when there's an election, it's generally known across the US who has won the election. I mean, I guess there are some issues of that recent case, but even there, right, I mean, people can have doubt about their own states.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So the census counts us. It's generally known throughout the organism, or at least in relevant controlling parts, you know, who is a member of the United States and what the banana import rate is. And then the United States will also present itself in a certain way to other entities of its type. So it will represent its position on foreign affairs to Iran, and it will speak to Iran and say, hey, if you continue developing nuclear weapons, we're going to do this. Some of this stuff is done by the government, you know, like the State Department and the Census Bureau, but some stuff.

Some of the self knowledge that the United States has is not governmental, but just kind of bottom up. Right, right. So it's generally known across the United States that Taylor Swift is filling major concert venues. That's true. Right.

So that's a sense in which I think the reactions of this entity are, involve some sort of self representation. Right. How about information processing? So, clearly, part of what's probably going on under the surface of my consciousness is just taking in lots of stuff. Lots of information, like the things I see and the things I hear and things I learn about and developing concepts about those things and just having a sense of things happening.

Luisa Rodriguez
Does the US do information processing in an analogous enough way for it to make sense, to call it information processing that's relevant to consciousness? I am inclined to think so. I mean, the human brain processes a lot of information, right? It does. But also the United States has a lot of information exchange among its citizens and residents.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So, for example, just think about the retina of the eye, right? That's got millions of cells that are constantly processing information from the environment, including right now. You know, I can see you. I know our listeners can't. Can't see us, but I can see you.

And so I'm processing information about your face. Lots of. Lots of information is just exchanged between people through the retina. Yep. Right.

And of course, through the Internet and in many other ways, we're exchanging information. Now, the exact structure of the information exchange between people is not going to look like the structure of the information exchange between neurons, although the United States does have lots of neurons, right? Because it contains people who contain neurons. But I think part of the idea of the alien cases, and I think also part of standard issue materialism, although there are some materialists who would resist this, is that the exact structure of the information processing doesn't matter so much as long as it's got the right kind of overall cognitive shape, right? So if we think about our alien rabbit or our super squid or our ant head or any other science fictional alien, it seems like we know that it's conscious based on the sophistication of its behavior and its interaction with us, and we don't know necessarily what's going on in its head.

And, you know, if it's got a very different kind of looking brain than we do, we do lots of parallel processing. Imagine maybe an alien has fast serial processing instead, right? We wouldn't say, oh, serial processing. Not parallel processing. This thing can't be conscious.

I mean, no, it's talking to us and, you know, flying spaceships and is now trading for minerals. Right? But it can't be cut once we've seen that it's serial processing. No, no, no. Right?

That's right. It has all of its thoughts in a line that doesn't make any. Yeah, I mean, you could say that, right? And some materialists will maybe want to get off the boat here. You could kind of, like, exit the argument in various places, but you end up with kind of unintuitive commitments, right?

So you could take the commitment and say, no, look, really, it matters a lot that you've got very specific type of processing for consciousness, even if it engaged in very similar kind of sophisticated outward behavior. If it had a different kind of internal structure, just, it just wouldn't be conscious. And our intuitions otherwise are wrong. You could say that, but I don't. That's not the standard line.

Right. So that's the kind of liberalism about underlying structure that is essential to the plausibility of the case for the United States being conscious. Right? So that is a potential point of resistance. But I do think the natural mainstream materialist thought is not to put up resistance there.

To say that, oh, yeah, in alien species, and thus in other potential entities on earth, you could have consciousness underwritten by very different types of architecture as long as it had the right kind of cognitive sophistication and sufficient information processing and self representation and responsiveness to his environment and long term memory and all that kind stuff. Yeah. So I do think this is a place where I'm at least drawn to the exit. And I think that it would really help me to understand exactly how liberal materialists have to be to accept that the kind of information processing people within the US and their kind of subsystems are doing to be close enough to the kinds of information processing happening in a human body to create that individual's consciousness. What exactly are the disanalogies between how information is processed in the brain and how information is processed by Americans?

Well, there are lots of differences, right. If we think about, say, visual communication and auditory communication between people as the primary way, setting aside, say, Internet communications, that people interact. Right. Then with neurons, you've got calcium channels, you've got this release of ions and then an electrical discharge across a gap between the. The dendrite and the axon.

And, you know, with people, what you've got is light reflecting off, say, your face and going into someone else's retina, and vibrations of the air that result from things going on in your mouth and throat that then stimulate, you know, your eardrum. Right. And that's a very different thing than calcium channels across axon dendrite gaps. Right. Yeah.

So that's a big difference. But is that the kind of difference that should matter a lot? Yeah, I guess. Consciousness just seems pretty crazy and complex, and that just kind of seems like at least some reason to think that if you change the ingredients in the recipe, you could easily lose the whole end product. I mean, one reason I think, to be liberal, and this is I'm working on this in a paper collaborative with Jeremy Pober, who completed his PhD under my direction a couple years ago, is what we call the Copernican argument for alien consciousness.

Okay, so here's the idea, right? So the universe is really big. Probably there are conscious there. Probably there are intelligent aliens out there somewhere, even if they're not visiting us, maybe there are none in our galaxy, right? Given there's like a trillion galaxies out there, even if one in a billion galaxies has some kind of intelligent life, there's still at least 1000 intelligent species out there.

That's a very conservative estimate, I suspect, of how much intelligence is there in the universe. Sure. So here's the Copernican idea. We think about all this intelligent life. Imagine it's intelligent enough to have technology like us.

It would be really strange and surprising if we were the only ones who were conscious and all the rest were what philosophers call zombies. Right? They act as if they're conscious, but they don't really have experiences underneath. That would make us special in a way that, like, if we were at the center of, we would be special. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So just like Copernicus, the Copernican principle of cosmology says, as a default assumption, it could be proven wrong, but just as a default starting place, let's assume that we're not in an unusual part of the universe, right? So similarly, what Poeber and I are suggesting is that it would be a violation of some kind of copernicanism to say, ah, we're special. Our neurons, they give rise to consciousness. But the different kind of stuff that space aliens have, you know, in distant galaxies, there's no reason to assume that that would give rise to consciousness. Right?

So I think Copernican principles would lead us to think, okay, whatever kinds of cognitive informational structures are interior to naturally evolved alien species, a lot of them, probably, most of them are going to be sufficient for consciousness, even if they're very different from the specific architecture of human neurons. Yeah, I definitely feel very, very sympathetic to all of that, and I'm trying to figure out what is still really bothering me about the US case that doesn't apply there. Yeah, one hypothesis I have is that in the case of the US, there are a lot of individuals with goals, and there are a lot of individuals doing information processing and sharing some of that with each other. And there are a lot of individuals doing things like representing concepts relevant to the US more broadly. And arguably, it's not that the US, it's the US, in some emergent consciousness way, has goals that it's enacting.

Luisa Rodriguez
It's more that there are groups of individuals who have goals that they're pursuing and that they're acting on, and that just. That just is happening so much at the individual level that it doesn't. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense to thinking of it as happening between individuals in the way that I think of my brain as happening, as neurons kind of interact and create something bigger and weirder together. Does that make sense? I think that's a reasonable direction to explore and maybe push back on.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I mean, one way of thinking about what goes on in the brain is that it is various subsystems that do most of the work, right? So if you're having a visual representation right now of, say, my eyeglasses, right, that's mostly going on in certain regions in your visual cortex, right. Not going on in your cerebellum. But we still think of it as something that you as an entire entity are conscious of. So this idea that you wouldn't want a general principle on which if the main action of some representation or some goal or some activity is happening in a sub region of some entity, then it's not happening in the whole entity, because then.

Then everything happening in you would just be in various subregions rather than in you as a whole. Yeah. So I would be. I mean, you might be able to work up a principle along the lines that you suggested that could distinguish the United States from humans, but I think it would be a little tricky not to fall into a problem along those lines. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
It's true that when I'm like, well, obviously the whole brain doesn't have to be involved to make a conscious thought happen. It can be sub systems, subgroups. And it's okay in my kind of conception of how consciousness happens for very, very small groups of neurons kind of interacting with each other to create a conscious experience. But it feels like I could. And maybe this is what you're saying, it's possible to come up with some rule that is like consciousness requires that information be shared in some way between two parts of the subsystem, maybe true neurons, in a way that you wouldn't make that analogy in the US.

If you're thinking of human beings as the analogy for neurons, is there a plausible rule there? Not even to argue that it's a very sensible one. I think it's tricky. I don't see a plausible rule there. I think one maybe could be constructed.

Eric Schwitzgebel
But there are going to be at least two things to watch out for. And watching out for both of them successfully might turn out to be impossible. Okay, so, I mean, maybe it could be done. I'm not saying it couldn't be, but my guess is if you did it, you'd end up probably with some other unintuitive commitments. Right.

Which is kind of the general structure of this whole argument and the general structure of the whole book. Right. But the two things to watch out for. One is you don't want to deprive the entity as a whole of a process just because the process is primarily implemented in some subpart, or else you end up with getting the wrong results for human cases. That's one thing to watch out for and then the other thing to watch out for, again, I think, is kind of copernican liberalism about aliens.

If we. If we end up with a principle that is too specific, then we end up committed to saying, hey, look, if we encountered aliens that behaved a lot like us, but were organized along this slightly different principle that didn't match the principle we've constructed, then we'd be committed to denying them consciousness. That would be both unintuitive and probably a violation of the Copernican principle. So that's the other kind of thing to watch out for. And jointly satisfying those two constraints, I think, might be tough.

Might be tough. Yeah. As I was saying it, I was starting to feel uncomfortable by how specific it was. I was like, this feels like I'm creating a pretty arbitrary rule about how consciousness might work in order to avoid this counterintuitive conclusion about the US. Right.

And I think that's actually an important methodological point. So I think one of the ways to react to this case is to try to come up with, okay, we want rabbits to be conscious. We want a certain plausible range of aliens to be conscious. Let's concoct some rule that gets all of those, but still excludes the United States. Right, right.

And if you take that as a foundational principle, then you probably could come up with some rule.

Why are we so committed to that as a foundational? Why would that have to be a fixed point in our reasoning? Why can't we just say, hey, look, maybe if it ends up the United States is conscious, then maybe, if that's the kind of result of our best theorizing, are we so sure that it's not that we have to bang our fists on the table and work really hard to try to come up with a principle that excludes the United States consciousness but includes all these other cases? Why are we so committed to that principle? I mean, I think it's reasonable to find it attractive that the United States would not be conscious.

But taking that as a deep, fixed point, that's really driving you hard to construct a theory that meets all these constraints despite these challenges? Yeah, it's not clear exactly how that's justified. Yeah, interesting. Okay, anything else to add on this before we move on? One of the slightly embarrassing things about working on the group consciousness of countries is that among the very few people who've taken it seriously in the past were early 20th century fascists.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yikes. So they're like, see, Germany is a conscious entity. It's finally coming to realize itself, and therefore the individuals of Germany should submit to this larger conscious organism. These are obscure, untranslated philosophers in French and German mainly. And although Oswald Spengler is pretty well known and came pretty close to saying something like that.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So you can imagine, and I don't endorse that ethics at all, just to be really clear. Right. If the United States is conscious, it's maybe got the consciousness of a rabbit, and therefore it might have about the moral standing of a rabbit. I would not sacrifice any humans. So.

Right. Just think about if history had worked out a little differently, it could be that it was generally accepted in our culture now that we are part of a larger conscious organism. Right. One thing that occurred to me is that you could actually make the same argument about lots of other kind of agglomerated groups of systems of humans or systems of beings that we think are conscious. So maybe communities of mammals.

Luisa Rodriguez
Does this mean towns are conscious? Does this mean cities are conscious? You could say this maybe about whole continents. Are they all conscious? Yeah, that's definitely a worry.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It seems like you could construct a slippery slope argument here. Right. If the United States is conscious, then is California conscious? If California is conscious, then is the city of riverside conscious? If the city of Riverside is conscious, is by university UC riverside conscious.

And at the end, it seems like you might end up with something even more counterintuitive than the idea that the United States is conscious. Yeah. And not just that there are many consciousnesses, but that they overlap. So San Francisco might be conscious. Riverside might be conscious, and then also the state of California might be conscious, which is itself part of the United States.

Right. And Google might be conscious. Some of their Google's workers are residents of San Francisco. Then you have partly overlapping cases and not just nested cases. Right.

Luisa Rodriguez
Oh, I find this so upsetting, and it feels like it surely is an argument against. But something tells me you don't think it is. Well, I think it is, you know, one of those danger signs that we're headed down some path towards something troubling and maybe absurd enough that we want to figure out how to get off this path. So, I mean, you could go all the way down this path. Yeah.

What happens if you do? So, for example, I think my favorite example of this is the philosopher Luke Roloff's. They say that every combination of things in the universe is a distinct locus of consciousness. Just like every combination of things in the universe has a combined mass. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
My shoe, plus the rings of Jupiter has a certain combined mass. Sure. Right. So likewise, my shoe plus the rings of Jupiter has a certain stream of consciousness that's distinct from any other organism or entity. Bizarre.

So, yeah. So that's. That's where you go. If you just, like, follow this line all the way to its end, you end up with Roloff's view, which that's a pretty hard line to swallow, but I would recommend people check out Roloff's book on this. It's called combining minds.

Cool, right? So you might want to get off. Get off the bus here somewhere. Yep. Now, I chose the United States as my example because I think it's the best case for group consciousness for a couple of reasons.

One is that it has a large number of entities in it. You know, it's the third most populous country in the world, and relative to other countries, there's a lot of communication and information exchange amongst its citizens. It also has pretty sharp borders. The entity of the United States engages in lots of behaviors. So it's a kind of best case, I think, for group consciousness.

And as you get smaller and more diffuse entities and entities that kind of do less and have less information exchange and fewer members, there's shoelace and Saturn. The case gets harder and harder. Yep. So at some point, I think here, it becomes useful to think about the possibility of borderline cases of consciousness and the possibility of overlapping consciousness. And these are two things that I've been thinking about in recently published papers and in papers that I'm still working on.

So we could certainly transition into talking about those things if you want. Great. Yes, let's do that. So this is actually another topic you cover in your book. You raise exactly these kinds of questions using snails as a case study.

Luisa Rodriguez
Can something be kind of conscious? And, well, if consciousness is a spectrum, is there a sharp boundary somewhere in there, or is it just continuous throughout? So I guess, diving right into it, you take the position that it can be indeterminate whether something is conscious. Can you say what you mean by that? Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Yeah, I think it's helpful here to use a pair of analogies that contrast with each other. Great. So you might think of a light. If you think about a light, a light could be dim or it could be bright. So there's a degree of brightness to a light, and it can be on or it can be off.

It can flicker between being on and being off. But the way that we normally think about lights, it's either determinately on or it's determinately off at any particular moment. And even if it's on and very dim, it's still determinately on. So there's kind of always a fact, although there's a degree of brightness, there's always a fact of the matter at any particular moment, whether the light is on or not. So you might think that consciousness is like that, right.

So maybe a garden snail has this tiny little wee flicker of consciousness, which is much less than, you know, human consciousness, but it's still determinately conscious, just with a small bit. Right. And that's a very different kind of case than an indeterminate case. Right. So in indeterminacy, say, think about the spectrum between color, between blue and green, right.

There's not a particular exact shade. Most philosophers think. Actually, there's a little disagreement about this, but I'm inclined to say there's not a determinate exact place in that spectrum where something moves from being determinately green to being determinately not green. Right. There's a kind of vague range of blue green cases where it's not quite.

It's kind of. It's indeterminate whether it's. Whether you should call it green or not. So that would be an indeterminacy case. It's very different from the light flicking on case.

Luisa Rodriguez
Right. So the indeterminacy view is the view that consciousness is like that. Not like a light flicking on. And I see from your face, your listeners are not seeing your face, but I can see from your face that you're like, what the heck? Consciousness is like that.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I think it's a very unintuitive view. And if you see how unintuitive it is, then you're understanding correctly that it's unintuitive. The main argument against it is that it seems inconceivable, right. Not only is it unintuitive, but I can't even, like, wrap my head around how it could even be possible. That is basically how I feel.

That's basically the main argument against this indeterminacy view. You might think, look, I mean, one way of thinking about it is one of the ways people talk about consciousness is they say if you're conscious, there's something. It's like to be you. Right? Right.

So you think, look, either there's something. It's like to be you or to be a garden snail or to be an alien or to be the United States, or there's nothing. It's like, yep. And between something and nothing, like, there can't be a half something. A half something is already a something unless it's nothing, right?

So how could it even make sense for there to be indeterminate cases? Yeah. Yep. That's where I am. So that's the objection.

That's the objection. Right. And the challenge of defending borderline consciousness is overcoming that objection. That sounds like a really, really tall order. I'm really, really struggling to even.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah. To buy that it is a live option. Would it help to describe some cases you think are plausible candidates for indeterminate consciousness? Probably not that much. Okay.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I mean, I could suggest. Right. So it's a little easier. Well, I'm slightly impaired in this by the fact that I don't have the correct theory of consciousness and don't know exactly what entities are or are not conscious. Right.

This is one of my disadvantages as a skeptic about these general theories. So I have a two pronged approach. One is to show how it's naturalistically plausible from a materialist point of view and from other naturalist points of view, to think there probably are maybe even must be indeterminate cases. And then I can point toward what some of those cases might be. That's prong one.

Luisa Rodriguez
Okay. And then prong two is to try to suggest that this feeling of incomprehensibility or impossibility is based on a misguided standard, an inappropriate standard of conceivability. So that's my two pronged approach. Right. So it's easy to start with the first.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Easier to start with a first prong. Right. So we already mentioned garden snails might be an example of a borderline case of consciousness. I'm not committed to their being. So they might be determinately conscious, or they might be determinately non conscious.

But I think borderline consciousness is a possibility we should consider. And just to be 100% sure, we're going to be using all the same language, or I'm going to be understanding your language. So there's. You can be conscious, you can be non conscious. And borderline conscious is not referring to this dim light, very little, little teeny bit of consciousness.

Luisa Rodriguez
It is referring to this turquoise, not blue, not green thing that is neither conscious nor not conscious, or not determinately. Conscious or determinately non conscious, not determinately blue or determinately green. Right. Okay, great. Yep.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. Yes. So very important to be clear about that because it's easy to get confused on that particular issue, especially since borderline consciousness seems so inconceivable, it's natural for people to hear it as, oh, just a little bit of consciousness. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly what we don't want to say.

All right. So one kind of plausible way of getting into the idea that borderline consciousness must exist is to think phylogenetically, think about animal cases, think about evolution. It would be a little odd. If somewhere across the spectrum of animal cases or somewhere in evolutionary history, consciousness suddenly popped in, pings on. Where would that happen?

Right? So let's say you were to say, okay, well, look, this particular species of frog is conscious. This closely related other species is just a wee bit cognitively less sophisticated. And because of that, boom, it's suddenly a non conscious entity. Yep, right.

If consciousness is psychologically important, has some kind of functional role, as we were talking about earlier with the us case, then you would think its existence or non existence would make an important cognitive difference. So if you thought, ah, determinately conscious has got to flick on somewhere, then you ought to see a plausible leap somewhere in evolutionary history, somewhere among animal species between, ah, these are the ones that are, say, creative and have self knowledge, and these are the ones that don't. And boy, there's a gulf, and that's where consciousness happens, right? But we don't see that. Instead we see an approximate continuum.

So you can kind of create the slippery slope case where, like, if people are conscious, then chimps probably are, and if chimps are, then probably mice are, and if mice are, they're probably all vertebrates are. And you keep going down, and there's. It doesn't seem super plausible, I mean, it could be the case, but it doesn't seem super plausible that there will be a moment somewhere there, boom. Where consciousness suddenly flicks in. Or you could ride the slippery slope all the way down to panpsychism again.

Right? That's the other possibility. So you've got basically a quadrilemma, four horns, right? One horn, you say, nothing is conscious, another horn, you say, everything is conscious. Both of those seem pretty hard to accept.

So you've got to either say, okay, there's a sharp break somewhere between the conscious and the non conscious organisms, and somehow that sharp break exists atop what seems to be a continuum of biological cases and cognitive capacities. Or you say, well, no, it's kind of like the blue green thing. There are going to be some indeterminate intermediate cases where it's not determinately the case that this entity is conscious and not determinately case that this entity is not. So I think there's at least some attractiveness, some initial plausibility to the idea that it's not going to be a sharp break, it's going to be continuum like from blue to green. So you get this in animal cases, you get this in evolution.

Plausibly. You also get this in fetal development. Let's assume that babies are conscious when they're born. I mean, you could think that the moment of birth is when consciousness flicks on, but that's a little strange. And even birth is a kind of, is a temporally extended process.

Right. So if you narrow in, right, is. It when their little nose pops out, or is it their eyes? Or does the whole thing have to come out? It's kind of plausible to think that maybe a nine month fetus has some consciousness already, at least a little bit.

The light is on, so to speak. But again, in fetal development, we don't see, like, okay, here's the moment where consciousness winks on. So generally, if we look naturalistically, it looks like there's a continuum. The kinds of things that we think are associated with consciousness, biological states and cognitive capacities seem to exist on a continuum, rather than having this wink on structure. And in general, almost everything in nature that's large and floppy and complex, like consciousness, is not, strictly speaking, discrete.

If you want to look for really discreet, sharp edges in nature, you kind of to go down to the quantum level. Right. So is the electron in this orbit around the hydrogen atom or in this other orbit and you get a quantum jump. Right. It can never be in between the two.

Right. But aside from those kinds of cases, almost everything in nature admits of borderline indeterminate cases where it's not quite clear where to draw the boundary. Yeah. So I I still feel more drawn to the, there's a flicking on, a winking on. And I think the reason is, well, if I try to also do something analogy y.

Luisa Rodriguez
And still in the world of evolution and phylogenic groups, the analogy that I come up with, let's say an eye, it is not the case that there we went from one organism to another, and there was all of a sudden, eyeballs. We had less sophisticated eyes before we had sophisticated eyes. And before that, we had probably photoreceptive photosensitive cells. And before that, there weren't necessarily photosensitive cells or photoreceptor cells. And that seems like it feels closer to me, like there is a line.

It is super early, like going from a cell that doesn't have the capacity to respond or kind of pick up on light to one that does. And that is a line. And then after that, it's like the light getting stronger, so the eyes become more sophisticated. That feels like the most plausible way or the most kind of intuitive way. I would think about features kind of being picked up and evolved and improved upon over time.

And while I find it very strange to think about the same happening for consciousness. I don't know exactly what it means to have the first photo receptor like cells, but conscious for the case of consciousness. But it still feels very plausible to me that we're talking about something more like that. We went from something without any consciousness like property to a tiny, tiny, miniscule consciousness like property, in the same way that you might get a dim light and then it. And then it got brighter and brighter.

Why does that not seem like a natural conclusion or the best conclusion or even just more plausible than the indeterminate case? Well, I don't know much about photosensitivity. Sure. And I don't either. So it's possible someone listening would be like, that's just a false way of.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Describing that, but let me speculate just a little bit. Sure. Great. So we normally don't think of humans as having the sensory capacity to detect electric currents in the way that eels do. But if you stick your finger in a light socket, you will detect an electric current.

Luisa Rodriguez
That's true. Right. So if a cell is bombarded with enough intense electromagnetic radiation in, say, the visible spectrum, it might have some limited response to that that's different than the response it would have in the dark. And that would be a little bit like you're, you know, you don't want to say, okay, this cell is. Has a photo sensitive sensory capacity.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. But it would be kind of like you sticking your finger in the light socket. Right. Like, with enough energy of that sort coming in, there is gonna be a reaction in the cell. Yeah.

Right. So I think, I'm not sure whether in evolutionary cases, there is a kind of jump. Sometimes there are surprising evolutionary jumps. Right. So I don't know whether there would be, but at least it seems to me, hypothetically possible that you would have in between cases of photosensitivity like that, where, you know, a cell has that kind of, you know, you got two cells.

One is a little bit more sensitive to that high level of electromagnetic energy, and one is less sensitive, and that turns out to be a little bit of an evolutionary advantage, and then you're off down the path toward creating what we think of as a kind of more specifically, photosensitive sensory capacity. Right. So that would be, again, a kind of a way of thinking about borderline cases. At what point do you say, ah, this is actually a sensory capacity versus at what point do you say, this is just the cell reacting in a certain way to an intense energy input? Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
Okay. So that is helpful. It helps me understand more what the interpretation would even sound like, of this case, when you're trying to make the argument that it's indeterminate and not discrete, but little. So I guess, I mean, maybe this is actually the perfect segue to prong two, because I'm now like. But it doesn't make any sense still.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It doesn't make any sense to still. So then what do you do? So before we get to prong two as kind of a little bit of more of a segue to it, let's think about human cases. Right. So, generally speaking, most people would think that when we're awake, we're determinately conscious.

And on some, but not all, mainstream theories of sleep, we have some periods in which we are not conscious. Now, not all sleep theorists think this. There are some sleep theorists who think that you are always, to some extent conscious when you're sleeping, even if you're not dreaming. But I think that's a minority view in the literature. And intuitively, we often think, okay, you know, there are moments of just, like, zero consciousness when you're sleeping.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah. And then we kind of suddenly transition into waking. Or alternatively, we suddenly transition from non conscious sleep to conscious dreaming. And although this is a little bit at variance with how some people use the word consciousness in ordinary language, we sometimes think, say, oh, when you're sleeping, you're not conscious. But in the sense of consciousness that we were talking about earlier, there's something that's like, you've got an experience when you're dreaming.

Yeah, definitely. Dreams are conscious experiences. So in the human case, we have what seem to be pretty sudden transitions between either non conscious sleep and conscious dreaming and non conscious sleep and conscious wakefulness. And when you're kind of like disoriented and half awake, you might say, oh, I'm half conscious. But again, that's not really the way of thinking about it.

Eric Schwitzgebel
It's more like you've got. You're determinately conscious, but you've got this kind of confused, dim, fuzzy sense of where you are or you're disoriented in a certain way. So our human experience seems to be that mostly we are in determinate states of either being conscious or non conscious. So that makes it hard for us to think about or remember any in between cases. Maybe they don't even exist in the human case, or maybe they're rare.

Right. There might be during sleep some borderline cases. There might be during slow falling asleep or slow waking some borderline cases. There might be, say for people who are in vegetative states, some borderline cases, but we don't really know whether that's. So if you look at the neurophysiological literature, there seem mostly to be sharp transitions between conscious and non conscious states.

But there are also brain states that seem to be not quite either conscious or non conscious. And then how to interpret that is going to be super complex. But even if it's typical for us to engage in sudden state transitions from conscious to non conscious, it's not establish that that's universally the case. There. There can be states that are intermediate between these typical states.

So we have a lot of trouble imagining or conceiving of what an in between conscious state might be. And that, I think, is the source of our sense that this is impossible or inconceivable. What we want to do is we want to imagine what it would be like to be in a borderline conscious state. But that is a contradictory demand, right? You're asking what is it like to be such that there's not determinately something determinate that it's like to be that thing, right?

It's like saying, show me a case of a borderline green that is also determinately green. Right? That's just a contradiction, right? So it would be saying, okay, I want to know what it's like. I want to imagine or remember what it's like to be such that there's not something determinately.

It's like to be that thing, right? So that's the contradiction. So I think we're drawn intuitively toward this feeling. Like, I don't really understand what borderline consciousness would be unless I can imagine or remember it in a certain way. But what we want is something that's impossible to get and is illegitimate to demand.

One analogy here is imagine a middle school kid who's being introduced to imaginary numbers. So they're like, what is this three eye thing? It's true. I remember this feeling. I still have this feeling.

I can't picture or imagine three eye sheep. I can't hold three eye pebbles. Imaginary numbers, kind of despite their name, are, in a certain sense unimaginable in the kind of middle school standard of like, what would it be to imagine three? I, the middle schooler, can't do it. So they might be like this.

This is unimaginable, incomprehensible. This isn't a really number. It doesn't fit on the number line. It's just some pretend game. Yep.

Right. So that's. That's kind of what it feels like to, like, have an imaginative demand that's not being met and is frustrating because you feel like it should be met. So my view is that you, when you say, I just can't imagine what it's like to be in one of these in between states, that seems inconceivable. You're being like that middle schooler.

So that's the two prongs, right? The one prong is to say, look, most large natural processes admit of in between fuzzy cases. Think about development, think about evolution, think about different kinds of animal cases, and it doesn't seem like there should be this kind of in between range of cases, because that's generally how nature works, and that's how the cognitive processes and biological processes that we normally assume underlying consciousness, they also tend to be vague and fuzzy. To assume that sharp is to assume a sharp border in nature atop what seems to be a continuum of fuzzy processes. Right, that's prong one, and then prong two is to say, and here's why we shouldn't take so seriously the intuition that this is inconceivable.

Luisa Rodriguez
Okay? This one, my brain is fighting with everything it has, and now I'm like, maybe I'm just a panpsychist. Maybe I like that better. I mean, that's one way to go. I mean, panpsychism is really bizarre, but its beauty is that it gets you out of a lot of these problems.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. I do like being out of these problems. I mean, but you do have to be a radical panpsychist, right. So if you're a panpsychist like Philip Goff, who's probably the best, most prominent panpsychist right now, he still has this problem because he thinks rocks aren't conscious. Hmm.

At least, I don't know. His view may be changing a little bit. I've been seeing him flirting with some other views, but at least his view as of 2017, his 2017 book, was that although fundamental particles are conscious, not every aggregate of fundamental particles is conscious. So you still end up needing a bright line between the non conscious rocks and the conscious protons. What does he do with that?

He doesn't have an answer to that. Oh, no. He thinks there is a bright line. He thinks there is a bright line. He's a bright line defender, but he doesn't know where to put it or exactly how to defend it.

So he still ends up with this continuum problem. The only way to really get out of it through the panpsychist move is to go full roll offs. Right? Right. Which just says rocks are conscious, which.

Just says rocks are conscious because every combination of everything is conscious. Yep. And here I am again with the thesis of your book just horribly ringing in my ears. There are no good options for me. Every possible option makes me want to curl up and stop thinking about philosophy forever.

Well, that's the wrong reaction. No, I actually love it. It's really, really fun. It's just fun to feel like you know something, and it'd be nice to have that. But it is also fun to be like, holy crap, my brain cannot comprehend.

I just. I think we ought to celebrate that. So the kind of the mood that I prefer, prefer to encourage. I mean, I can see how someone might despair. Like, all of the options seem ridiculous, and how could we figure out what the truth is?

I'm gonna give up and, you know, go become a chemist or something. Right. But I think another reaction is to just be struck with awe and wonder and think it's kind of amazing and to see the world as richer with possibilities. Right. So you might have initially thought, oh, panpsychism.

That's totally absurd. Not even worth thinking about. And I still am disinclined to think panpsychism is the right answer. That's not where the bulk of my credence lies. Right.

But this way of thinking, to me, opens up. Oh, you know what? I can now see the attractions. And now the space of possibilities for the universe has grown larger. For me, the world has kind of become bigger in a certain sense, because now there's this live possibility which wasn't previously live.

Like, wow. Maybe consciousness is ubiquitous. That's interesting to consider. Let's think about that. It is pretty cool.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah. Yep. Yeah, I'm with you now. I'm with you. I think probably I just genuinely have a part of me that is, like, run away and another part of me that's, like, incredible.

Wow. So I'll try to do more celebrating of the latter. Okay, let's turn to another topic that's weird, any way you look at it, whether we're really, truly awake and hear where we are or whether we're in a dream or maybe a simulation or a brain in a vat or this weird thing called a Boltzmann brain that we may or may not get to, what's the argument that we might be dreaming right now? So let me say first that I'm pretty sure I'm not dreaming. 99.9% confident that I'm not dreaming.

Eric Schwitzgebel
But I've got this little non trivial niggling worry that I might be dreaming. Yeah. 0.1% is not. Is not trivial. It's non trivial, although small.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah, sure. So, here's one way of thinking about it. What is the evidence that I'm awake? Well, I seem to be having all of these sensory experiences that are pretty rich in detail. And, you know, say if I pinch my.

Eric Schwitzgebel
My hand, I feel the pinch, and I got this paper here, and I'm gonna read some text. And I usually think that in dreams, text doesn't stand still. It's a little hard to kind of look at. It flutters away. A lot of people have that experience or report having that experience in dreams.

But now, if I think about all of that evidence, it's consistent with at least some theories of dreams, right? So, some dream researchers, some major, important dream researchers think that we sometimes have very realistic sensory experiences in our sleep and that dreams are not always full of bizarreness. And some people report that they can read texts in their dreams and that they can feel pinches. And sometimes we have false awakenings. I definitely have had experiences where I kind of am dreaming, that I've woken up and dream that I'm judging that I'm awake and having ordinary experiences.

And then I wake up again, and I'm like, holy crap.

And then I momentarily worry, am I going to wake up still another time? So, all of the evidence that I have, I think, is some kind of support for the fact that I'm awake, because the odds that I'd be having an experience like this during sleep, right. A certain kind of theory of dreams has to be true. And maybe this kind of experience isn't exactly a totally typical dream experience because it's a little more well organized and less bizarre than a lot of dream experiences are. But none of that's really compelling in the sense of bringing me all the way to, say, zero credence or even one in a trillion credence that I'm dreaming, right.

All of this is once I kind of think, well, I. On some theories of dreams that I can't decisively reject, I could have experiences just like this during sleep. Once I kind of get myself in that mood of recognizing and realizing that fact. It's a little hard for me to feel 100% confident now that I'm awake or to justify that confidence. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah. So, I feel a little bit open to this. And it is interesting and compelling to me that some dream theorists, including prominent ones, think that these kinds of dreams that would feel a lot like the experience I'm having now can happen. I personally have no memory of ever having a dream, anything like what it feels like to be me with a lifetime of memories that I can kind of look at and that are all very logically consistent and coherent with richness that feels orders of magnitude more, whether or not it even makes sense to describe it that way, more than I've ever had in a dream. So it would at least feel surprising to me that.

That despite the fact that me in a dream right now, dream Luisa, potentially has never had anything like a dream this vivid, that this happens to be the one dream that feels like it's years long and has the richness of an entire life, right? So it feels like it's years long. But of course, in dreams, it's plausible to think sometimes we have the experience of feeling like we've been spent years as, you know, whatever, in whatever dream reality we're in. So that's part of my reaction. But actually, my main reaction is to kind of agree with you.

Eric Schwitzgebel
My own preferred theory of dreams is an imagery theory on which dream experiences are more like images than they are like sensory experiences. So there's a debate about this in the dream literature. Interesting. Right? Now, some people say, well, dreams experientially are more like daydreams, which are images.

And that's pretty different experientially from, like, the vivid sensory experience of actually seeing something. Yeah, that does resonate with me. So I'm inclined toward that theory. But I should say, like, jennifer Vint, anti Ravansuo, you know, two of the top theorists of dreams disagree with that theory, and I. So I've got, like, maybe 80% credence in this theory, but I don't think I could justify much more than 80% credence, given that some of my favorite theorists of dreams disagree with it.

So contingent upon that 80%, it would be very unlikely that this is the one exception. Yeah, right. But I think what we need to do is say, okay, well, look, maybe that's not the right way of thinking about dreams. Maybe your impression and my impression that dreams kind of lack this vividness of sensory detail. Maybe that's an error on our part, a memory error.

We don't really remember the experience of dreams maybe as well as we think we do. Right. There's this whole interesting literature on dream memory, and how accurate or inaccurate is. I think it might be pretty inaccurate. One interesting sign of the inaccuracy, and I don't know if we want to get into this, but I did a whole research project for a while on the fact that people used to think they dreamed in black and white.

Luisa Rodriguez
Really? Yeah. In the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States, the majority of people said that almost all of their dreams are black and white. How does that happen? And that was not the case before the 19th century, and it was not the case after, say, the seventies or eighties.

Wow. And it corresponds with the rise and fall of black and white filmmaking. So my theory here is that what happened was people were over analogizing. They don't remember their dream experiences very well, and they're over analogizing their dreams to black and white movies. Right.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Their dreams are like movies. Ah. Movies are black and white. And I don't seem to remember the color of these particular objects in my dreams. So I guess my dreams are black and white, too.

Luisa Rodriguez
Wow. Weird. And we confirmed this. I did a cross cultural study with some people in China. Right?

Eric Schwitzgebel
So in the year 2000, in rural China, media were predominantly black and white, and in wealthy urban regions in China, media were predominantly colored. And there we found this is collaborative with some chinese researchers, that the rural population were more likely to say their dreams are black and white than the urban population, than the wealthy urban population, and the poorer urban population was in the middle. So we maybe don't have such great knowledge about our dream experiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So then another, another thought I have is just, does it even matter?

Luisa Rodriguez
I guess I'm interested in this question because, well, there's a whole can of worms that I sometimes look into and then close back up. That's like, should I actually care a lot morally about the experiences I and other people have in their dreams? Because they're really terrible for me a lot of the time. And I think some people have wonderful ones, and that's great. But if we were to put more kind of moral weight on the experiences people have when they're dreaming than we do, I think we basically put none on it.

Now, then, then that would be pretty crazy. But given the fact, if we just assume that that is a reasonable thing to do for now, would that imply that the experience I'm having right now is not morally relevant? Or maybe we should go the other way and say this is all pretty morally relevant because it seems like we are having an experience and there is something it is like to be me even if I'm in a dream. That's a complicated, interesting question. There's a recent paper on this that came out in Pacific philosophical quarterly, and I'm forgetting the author's name, unfortunately.

Eric Schwitzgebel
But the idea is, so if we accept a utilitarian ethics, which would be a view on which what you try to do is maximize the balance of happiness or positive experiences minus the balance of negative experiences or pain in the universe. If you accept that, and you accept as seems plausible, that during dream experiences you can have positive or negative affect, you can. Even though maybe you don't feel the pain of the pinch, it's, you know, agonizingly terrible to feel like you're being chased by a monster or whatever. Yes. Or wonderful to have an experience of flying.

Right? If you accept all that and you accept a utilitarian ethics in which our, our ethical, the ethical imperative is maximize pleasure, basically, then we ought to be investing a lot of work into improving the quality of our dreams. All right, so this is what this, this article argues. Interesting, huh? So.

But we don't. So you could either do modus ponens or modus tollens with this, right? So modus Pohlens would be okay. Utilitarian ethics says we should invest a lot more in improving the quality of our dreams. There are ways you can improve the quality of your dreams.

For example, you could learn to be a lucid dreamer, right? So therefore, let's invest a lot of time and energy in improving our dream quality, right? That's the modus ponens direction, right? Or you could do modus Tollen's, which is to say, look, if utilitarianism says we should be investing a lot of time in improving the quality of our dreams, well, I reject the idea that we should be investing a lot of time in improving the quality of our dreams. Therefore, I reject utilitarianism.

Right. So that's kind of traveling the other direction down the implicational arrow, right? Right. So I briefly made that the modus Tollens argument in some earlier work, like in a chapter in my book, a theory of jerks and other philosophical misadventures. And then.

But the modus Ponens direction, the idea that we should be investing a lot of energy, has been recently defended elsewhere. Yeah, interesting. So I, I am more inclined to be like, I buy utilitarianism. Let's all invest more in dream improvement research. Does that mean that it's not super consequential to me whether I'm in a dream right now at all in terms of whether I'm, I guess I'm a moral patient, because I think that was my first off the bat intuitive reaction to this is like, oh, if I'm just in a dream, then none of this matters.

Luisa Rodriguez
But maybe I actually don't have to conclude that because dream people matter so. Your experience right now on a utilitarian view, and on my view, although I'm not a utilitarian, would matter insofar as you're having positive experiences, hopefully instead of negative ones. I don't know, maybe this interview is a total disaster and you're miserable. No, you're blowing my mind. It's very good fun.

Eric Schwitzgebel
Right. And insofar as that's going on, that's good. And we want that to be going on. But if this is a dream, whatever you're doing for kind of long term is useless. Right.

So you're working hard to make this a good interview where the pieces will fit together and you're thinking about the next question is. Right. But if this is a dream, odds are no one else is ever going to hear this interview. Right. So in that sense, it doesn't matter whether you've asked a good question for a prospective audience, because there's no audience that's ever going to hear it.

So your momentary experience would matter, but the long term consequences would be sharply discounted. Okay, you just threw a whole wrench in my, in my coming to terms with maybe I'm in a dream and maybe that's okay. Yes. I would find that distressing. Maybe I'd also find it a relief to know that liberating.

Luisa Rodriguez
Yeah, yeah. Are not so consequential interesting. I mean, I think one of the consequences of thinking allowing a tiny sliver of non trivial credence in the dream possibility is kind of decision. Theoretically, it reduces, slightly reduces the value of long term consequences. So if you are, say, on the cusp between doing something with a short term gain and a long term loss versus doing something with a long term gain and a short term loss, and say you're rationally right on the cusp between those two things before you think about the dream possibility, as soon as you think, ah, but I should invest a tiny credence in this being a dream, then that will reduce, it will discount slightly that long term benefit, and so it will tilt you toward doing the short term benefit thing instead.

Eric Schwitzgebel
So that would be like one decision, theoretical, practical consequence of thinking that you might be dreaming. Yeah. Interesting. And that, I guess, would also apply to some of these other cases that we didn't talk about. So simulations, for example, which I actually put a little bit more weight on than dreams, the idea that we might be in a simulation and a simulation could be turned off, and that is some reason to discount the future more than I would otherwise, and that can have really big consequences.

Right. And I think one of the things that hasn't been sufficiently emphasized or appreciated by defenders of the simulation hypothesis like Bostrom and Chalmers, is that, but if we're living in a simulation, then there's not particularly good reason, I think, to assume that it's a large, long, enduring simulation. It could plausibly be a pretty small or short term simulation, in which case much of what we believe and expect about the past and the future and distant things could be false. And if you find that distressing, then you should find the simulation possibility also somewhat distressing, maybe more so than Bostrom and Chalmers, than the tone that you get from reading defenders of the simulation hypothesis. Yeah.

Luisa Rodriguez
Oh, there's so many things we could talk about there, but we don't have time today, so we'll have to have you back on another day. Okay, I'm going to ask just one last question, which is, do you think that we will ever have defensible answers to any of these questions that have these qualities of being dubious and bizarre? Maybe so. For consciousness and a lot of these cosmological questions, I don't see it happening in the next 30 years, the foreseeable future. Okay.

Eric Schwitzgebel
I don't see why in principle we couldn't come up with answers. I'm really struck by how science can sometimes make progress on things that you might have thought. There's no way we could figure that out, right? One example of this is the big bang, right? You know, like consider it abstractly, how in the heck can, just by looking up in the sky, we figure out all the bizarre stuff that happened in the very 1st second of the big Bang and all the weird transitions that are going on there.

You might think, like, basically it could be a tv screen out beyond Pluto for all we know, right? But nonetheless, science has come up with a very plausible theory of some pretty amazing things that are pretty far removed from what you might have thought we'd be able to figure out. So I'm not a principled skeptic about ever figuring out the right theory of consciousness or the right interpretation of quantum mechanics or any of this other bizarre stuff. I think that in academia people tend to be rewarded for being overconfident, or at least those are the ones who publish about these kinds of things. So I don't accept the level of confidence that a lot of people who publish on the issues tend to have.

But I don't see why in principle we couldn't learn the answers to some of these things. But one way of thinking about it is there's this nice analogy that's sometimes attributed to Einstein, although it doesn't, I don't think Einstein did originally say it, that as the circle of light expands, so does the ring of darkness around it. So I think whatever knowledge we have right now, we know about the big Bang. So now there's this kind of like, okay, was there something before the big bang? What, if anything, caused the big bang?

Right? So as the circle grows, there's this penumbra of shade where we could kind of peer into the darkness around the ring and think about those things and maybe not get decisive answers, but get kind of shapes of the possible structures of answers. And that's often where I think philosophy operates, right in this kind of penumbra around the ring of stuff that we know scientifically. So even if we do find answers to some of these questions, my prediction would be that there would be then further penumbral questions beyond those that would become the new territory of philosophical speculation. Yeah, well that is both exciting, thrilling, daunting, distressing, but I really appreciate, I really appreciate all of those things.

Luisa Rodriguez
Thank you for helping me celebrate them a bit more. And thank you for coming on the show. Yeah, my guest today has been Eric Schwitzscapel. Thanks for having me on. It's been wonderful chatting with you.

If you want to learn more about philosophical views on consciousness or you just liked this episode and want to hear more philosophy, I cant recommend our interview with David Chalmers highly enough. Thats episode number 67, David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness. Alright, the 80,000 hours podcast is produced and edited by Kieran Harris. The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire, Simon Monsoor and Dominic Armstrong. Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together as always by Katie Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.

#190 - Eric Schwitzgebel on whether the US is conscious

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1: Introduction to Schwitzgebel's work

2: Materialist implications for consciousness

3: Questioning intuitions and ethical implications

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