Is there consciousness beyond the brain? | Philip Goff | TEDxNewEngland

Transcript

Transcriber: Angel Y Reviewer: Emma Gon Okay, I’m going to start with a bit of audience participation. I want each of you to take a moment to attend to what it’s like

to be you right now. So right now, you’re having an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you, visual experience of the room around you. If you pay attention, you’ll notice the subtle tactile sensations

of the chair beneath your body. This is what philosophers call your conscious experience, or simply your consciousness. Now, we've made incredible progress in recent decades in our scientific

understanding of the brain, but we lack even the beginnings of an explanation of how the brain produces consciousness. That inner world of colors and sounds and smells and tastes that each of us enjoys

every second of waking life. Welcome to the problem of consciousness, one of the deepest mysteries of contemporary science. Twenty years ago,

when I studied philosophy, we were taught that there were only two options unconsciousness. Either you thought it was something magical and mysterious, something supernatural, or you simply identify consciousness with the electrochemical signaling of the brain.

I came to think that both of those options were deeply flawed. In fact, I became so disillusioned I left academia altogether. What drew me back in was a radically new or rather

rediscovered approach to consciousness that is currently causing huge excitement among consciousness researchers. This new paradigm has the potential to do for the science of consciousness, what Darwin did for the science of life.

Throughout history, the most popular theory of consciousness has been dualism. The view that consciousness takes place in the soul, a supernatural entity distinct from the physical workings of the body and the brain.

According to dualism, the relationship between you and your body is a little bit like the relationship between a drone pilot and their drone. You control your body and you receive information from its sensors, but you and your body

are not the same thing. The trouble with dualism is that it doesn’t fit well with the findings of modern science. If there were a non-physical soul controlling your brain the way a drone pilot controls their drone, then we should be able to observe incoming signals arriving

in the brain from the soul. Unfortunately, this isn't what we find. Instead, scientific investigation seems to show that everything that happens in the brain has a physical cause

within the brain itself. And this is simply incompatible with dualism. I don’t believe dualism is a scientifically credible approach.

But we shouldn’t mistake an allegiance to science with a dogmatic commitment to our current scientific approach. It was only when I began to study the history of science that I discovered that, in fact, our current scientific approach was

designed to exclude consciousness. In 1623, the father of modern science, Galileo Galilei, declared mathematics the language of the new science. And from this point on, science has worked with

a purely quantitative description of the physical world. Simply put, physics describes the world with equations. But Galileo understood quite well that our conscious experience can't be captured in these terms.

And that’s because our conscious experience involves qualities - the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, the redness of a sunset, qualities that can’t be captured in the purely quantitative language of mathematics. An equation can’t capture

that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. And so if all we have is the purely quantitative vocabulary of neuroscience, we’ll leave out the qualities of your experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells and the tastes.

Galileo got round this problem by banishing consciousness from science, locating it in the soul rather than in matter. And in fact, our current scientific approach is built upon Galileo’s separating the quantitative

story of physical science from the qualitative story of human consciousness. If we want to solve the problem of consciousness, we need to find a way of integrating these two stories into a grand, unified theory of reality.

It took nearly 300 years to find a way of doing this. In 1927, a radical new approach to consciousness was formulated by the philosopher and Nobel laureate, Bertrand Russell.

A year later, it was further developed by the scientist Arthur Eddington, who was, incidentally, the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein's general theory of relativity. So in the 1620s, Galileo took consciousness out of science.

In the 1920s, Russell and Eddington found a way of bringing it back in again. The starting point for Russell and Eddington was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is.

Now, when I first heard that, I thought it was ridiculous. Any popular book of physics or cosmology seems to have such a rich story to tell about the nature of space and time and matter.

But then I remembered on the final page of A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking said that even a final theory of physics would be just a set of rules and equations, and won’t be able to tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe

for them to describe. This is what Russell and Eddington were getting at. You see, for all its richness, physics is confined to telling us about the behaviour of matter,

about what it does. Physics tells us, for example, that particles have mass and charge, and these properties are completely defined in terms of behavior. Things like attraction, repulsion,

resistance to acceleration. This is all about what stuff does. But isn't there more to what something is than what it does? Consider chess pieces. Now, if you're playing chess, you’re going to be interested

in what the pieces do, what moves you can do, what pieces you can take. But now, suppose you're somebody who collects high end luxury chess pieces. Then you’re going

to be interested in the substance of the chess pieces themselves. You'll want pieces made of gold or silver rather than plastic or cheap metal. This is what philosophers call

the intrinsic nature of a thing, what it is, considered independently of what it does. Consider by analogy fundamental particles such as electrons and quarks. You may very well be interested

in what physics has to tell you about what an electron does, attraction, repulsion, resistance to acceleration, all good stuff. But you may also be interested in the intrinsic nature of an electron, in what an electron is, considered

independently of what it does. And about this, physics has nothing to say. It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our standard scientific

story of the universe. Physics provides us with rich information about what an electron does, but tells us nothing about its intrinsic nature. The genius of Russell

and Eddington was to see the connection to the problem of consciousness. Current science gives us a purely quantitative description of the brain, and in so doing leaves out the qualities of our experience.

Paralleling this current science gives a purely behavioral description of matter and in so doing leaves out its intrinsic nature. Bringing all this together, Russell and Eddington formulated a bold hypothesis.

Maybe the qualities of experience are the intrinsic nature of matter. Maybe it’s consciousness that breathes fire into the equations. Now you’re almost certainly wondering, what the hell does that mean? Well, look, nobody's saying an electron

has a consciousness of a human being. What it’s like to be a human being is a rich and complex affair involving deep emotions, subtle thoughts. But what it’s like to be a sheep, significantly simpler.

What it’s like to be a snail? Simpler still. And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience.

It’s possible that this continues right down to the basic building blocks of matter, with electrons and quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. This view is called panpsychism, the view that all matter from

the basic building blocks of the universe right up to the human brain, has conscious experience. Again, not necessarily thinking and feeling the way we as humans do, but experiencing nonetheless. Is panpsychism compatible with a modern

scientific understanding of reality? Well, we need to remember that physical science gives us only a limited perspective on reality. It's confined to describing what physical entities do and tells us nothing about their intrinsic nature.

Panpsychism fills in the gap left by science. It complements science without contradicting it. But can panpsychism be tested? In a sense, it can,

because all of the other options fail to account for important data. Dualism fails to account for the data of neuroscience, as we see no sign of a non-physical soul impacting the physical brain. And our current purely

quantitative scientific approach fails to account for the qualities of our conscious experience. Only panpsychism can accommodate both the qualitative story of human consciousness and the quantitative

story of neuroscience. As Sherlock Holmes famously observed, once we ruled out the impossible, what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Human beings always think that at the end of history, before the scientific revolution

in the 16th century, people thought the philosopher Aristotle had basically got everything right, including that the Earth was in the center of the universe. They thought they had it all figured out. Now, as the evidence against

this Earth centred model of the universe began to mount, people struggled to accept that this version of reality no longer explained the data. People were starting from the conviction that the Earth had to be

in the center of the universe. And then they desperately try to make the evidence fit the theory. All of this was swept away by Copernicus's revolutionary idea that the Earth might go around the sun,

rather than vice versa. When it comes to consciousness, I believe we’re in the same situation right now. We’re starting from the conviction that our current scientific approach has to be right,

and then we desperately try to make the evidence fit that conviction. But our current scientific approach was designed to exclude consciousness. What is so exciting to me now is to see scientists and philosophers coming together to lay the foundations for this radical

new approach to consciousness. Together, we are united in the conviction that we are on the verge of a second Copernican revolution. In the first, we gave up our privileged

place in the centre of the universe. In the second, we’ll cast aside the idea that human consciousness is cosmically special, a unique miracle. Panpsychism frees us from this hubris.

Human consciousness is just a highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe. Finally, this isn’t just an abstract intellectual puzzle. Consciousness is

at the root of human identity. Fundamentally, we relate to each other as beings with feelings and experiences. Consciousness is arguably the source of everything that’s truly important in life.

And yet, our official scientific worldview does not have a place for it. To appreciate this, please consider again the qualities of your experience the colors, the sounds, the smells, and the tastes.

Our official scientific worldview tells us those qualities don’t really exist, that all that’s really going on in your head is the purely quantitative story of electrochemical signaling. This mismatch between theory and lived experience can lead to a deep sense of alienation.

Now, of course, as scientists and philosophers, we should be aiming not at the view we’d like to be true, but at the view that’s most likely to be true. The great thing about

panpsychism is that it does both. There's a good case for the truth of panpsychism as the best explanation of how consciousness fits into our scientific story of the universe. But panpsychism also offers a picture

of the universe in which we fit in, in which we have a place. According to panpsychism, we are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. In panpsychism, both our intellectual and our spiritual yearnings find a home.

Panpsychism has the potential not only to solve one of the deepest mysteries of science, but also to transform in a positive way what it means to be a human being. Thank you. (Applause)