Helen Yetter-Chappell: Is Reality Made up of Consciousness?

Hello, welcome to MindChat. I'm Philip Goff. Hello, welcome. I'm Keith Frankish. How are you doing, Keith? I'm good. I'm good. I'm settled in our new place. I've got most of my books unpacked, so I'm beginning to feel at home. Looks good. You look a lot sharper. You must have a better internet connection. I think perhaps I do. Yes, yes. And how about you? What have you been up to?

um i'm all right i've just got back from how the light gets in which is the uh kind of philosophy festival they have here in the uk a couple of times a year and that was very good did my first in-person talk since the start of the pandemic which was i was quite nervous actually and um i did a multiverse hosted a multiverse breakfast where people can come and chat about fine tuning in the multiverse over breakfast

And also debated, there was a debate called Life, the Universe and Everything, the finale debate, but it was sort of philosophy v. science, kind of. There were two philosophers, me and Julian Baggini, and two scientists.

Ganesh Taylor and Peter Atkins, who's a kind of... Do you know Peter Atkins? He's a retired chemistry professor who... kind of thinks philosophy is a load of bollocks and as a but he's very funny and good human so it's a really good kind of fun and entertaining debate so that was good and i played my band as well oh yes

I used to have a band in my teens and 20s, and we haven't played for years, but they have music at this festival as well, so I just asked if we could play, and they said yes. So, yeah. life the universe rock and roll everything all you know all together sort of yeah mixed together but yeah that's fun so i'm a bit shattered i think i'm getting a bit of a cold i might kind of

Go off shot to sneeze a little bit. But yes, life is good. Oh, I just want to announce one more thing, actually. People might be interested. We're having a clubhouse. Have you had a clubhouse, Keith? I don't know. It's an online app to get lots of people together on the internet. I don't know how that's different to Zoom or whatever. But anyway, a panpsychism clubhouse with the physicist Sean Carroll and Annika Harris.

owen flanagan the philosopher on uh the 8th of october so i just want to give a plug for that if anyone wants to get into that that's a public event is it uh online yeah yeah public so people can tune in and listen yeah

on this clubhouse app which i don't really know what it is but anyway yeah you should come along um yeah so i guess we need to talk about our new format don't we before we bring in our today's esteemed guest so yeah so we've i guess we we just wanted mindchat to be very very accessible and i guess we've been getting feedback that not entirely living up to you you think it's because we're a bit self-indulgent don't you keep

I think sometimes we've focused too much on the questions that we are keen to ask and maybe pursued lines of questioning that really interest us rather than perhaps thinking about... uh what's going to interest our viewers um so you sound really contrite I don't think we've done that. I think it's a kind of occupational disease of philosophers, isn't it? They get very intensely interested in some highly specific question and they doggedly pursue that.

And they sometimes fail to see the bigger picture. They fail to see the questions that other people might have about this. Or even just to explain why it's worth being interested in this particular, very specific question. Yes. We tend to take things for granted. And perhaps the things that we ourselves should question a bit more. So yes, I think it's always good to reflect on the context.

on why why is this question an important one and that's i think we could be a bit more aware of that i think it would be good for people listening and good for us too yeah absolutely so what the plan is we're going to divided into two parts the basics and the deep dive right so in the basics we're just gonna sort of introduce our guest what what excites them about consciousness what kind of philosophy they're interested in

the view the basic view the basics of view they're defending and their reasons for thinking we should take this seriously and then we'll move to the deep dive where we'll get we'll indulge ourselves and no i mean still trying to keep it fairly accessible sort of get into the more kind of techie and that's where we can also take listeners questions

yes there's questions at the end there and then as usual we'll have a little a little chat at the end um just to say what's coming up as well oh yeah we're gonna do an um oh we haven't spoken about that i guess we're gonna do an ask me anything next month We haven't got a date pinned down for that yet. But if people wanted to email questions to the MindChat address is MindChat 2014, which is the year Keith and I met on a boat, on a sailing ship in the Arctic.

Very romantic. I shall always remember it. Oh, we'll always have the Arctic. If you want to email questions, then we can sort of compile them. And then the following month of November, we're going to have... the physicist sean carroll on um i can't remember the date up on but anyway there's a there's a date for that and uh talking about zombies and causal closure and so on so yes should come along so should we

bring in today's guest we're very pleased to welcome Helen Yetta Chappell hello hey guys Helen is assistant professor from University of Miami She's written loads of very good, really interesting philosophy articles and is currently working on a book on idealism, which is going to be the topic of today, which we'll explain in a little bit. But yeah, I'm very pleased. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you, Helen. Thank you for joining us. Well, let's just start, I think, with a very simple question, but I think one that interests lot of people how did you first get interested in thinking about consciousness what led you to this particular topic yeah if I'm honest this might not be quite the answer you're expecting but if i'm honest

The things that initially I think attracted me in philosophy were the things that made me the most angry. So just the things that really pissed me off. So I remember sitting in my first philosophy of mind class and, you know, the professor spending probably more time than he should have on the minutia of different versions of physicalism and, you know,

whether they were able to account for all and only conscious things, being conscious. And I'm just sitting there the whole time with very strong anti-physicalist intuitions thinking, this is just completely missing the point. This is just missing consciousness.

um and so you know i sat there angrily drawing out little diagrams and worked out that epiphenomenalism had to be true and was very satisfied with myself and everybody else told me i was crazy and and um you know that of course led me to feeling even more outraged so I think um if there are any philosophy students out there I know a lot of times philosophy students will ask you know how do I choose a paper topic and my advice was always

what makes you the most angry um and so that was actually how I first got interested in philosophy of mind um that's not what's driving my current interest in idealism um so um currently i sort of think of myself as sort of like exploring

possibilities exploring what kinds of worlds are possible um so i think you know novelists when they write write novels they're sort of exploring you know different ways that the world could have been different ways that the world could turn out to be and in a sense I think that I'm doing the same sort of thing. I think, you know, there's lots and lots of different ways that worlds could be. And maybe some of those worlds are materialist worlds, worlds where, you know, the cup.

is not in any way conscious there's nothing it's like to be the cup or anything associated with it but maybe other worlds are very different and I think it could be really interesting to sort of explore all these different possibilities and to really flesh them out and that i think in order to do in order to really get a good sense of what our own world is like we sort of need to know what the possible candidate options are um so i sort of

I think I'm exploring logical space and playing with it. Wonderful. Yes, I guess that's a characterization of philosophy that a lot of people could, a lot of us could get on board with whatever our different. I love the idea of going with things that make you angry. You've got to be driven by some kind of passion, I think, in the end. It's too much hard work if you don't have some passion behind it.

I can share this, actually. I think in my first year of philosophy, doing materialism, I think I wrote my essay something about... These people who deny consciousness. Oh, I shouldn't say this, but I could show them pain if they wanted to. Well, it's two against one. And I got a really low mark. because the tutor said it was kind of violent, my essay, because it's a jokey thing like, you know, these people say they can't, pain doesn't exist. But anyway, yeah, so I can relate to that.

Yes. Why is it, though, that you're always keen to give us an example of pain? I mean, if you want to convince us, give us an example of something like a nice chocolate cake or something. I don't know. I find when I have students in my class who are insisting, I've had students insist when they can't see their way out of the zombie argument, which, you know, I think there are

perfectly respectable physicalist responses to the zombie argument. But I have students who insist, you know, because they can't see their route, they decide that they're zombies, which is to say that they decide that they don't have conscious experiences. I went through the zombie phase. Oh dear.

Well, I found that the most effective thing to do, back when I was in England, I had a point in time where there's a flower pot on the table, grabbing a flower pot, standing above the student's head. You don't feel pain, huh? You don't have any conscious experiences.

And that pretty quickly, I think, tends to change people's mind as to whether they have consciousness. Well, Keith's still going through the zombie phase, so maybe... Oh, darn. You haven't been threatened enough, Keith. I have pain. I have pain, all right.

i just have a different view as to what it is um sorry i'm being so so why do you i mean so i guess um you know a lot of people listening to academic philosophers can sometimes think it's sort of strange abstract questions that don't seem to have anything to do with the real world and sounds like you know arguing about angels dancing on a pinhead or so why do you think it's important to

think philosophically about consciousness why do you think it's important to ask these questions yeah i mean i guess there's two questions one question is why is it important to think about consciousness and one question is why is it important to think about consciousness philosophically um and i think

You know, if passing things over to neuroscientists was going to be able to answer everything that there was to answer about consciousness, and there wasn't any further debate that was reasonable to be had, perhaps it wouldn't be important for philosophers to get into the mix.

I don't think that that's the case. I'm inclined to think that even once you know everything that's going on in our brain, that there's still a question of why does it feel the way that it feels? And even if you don't think that there's a question as to that, you know, there's still...

you know for a physicalist questions about what is it about our brains doing those things that account for the way that it feels and what do we even mean when we talk about the way that it feels um so i think that you know For all philosophers interested in consciousness, we're all going to agree that there are further things that need to be settled. But to the question of why is it important to even talk about consciousness in the first place? I mean, I think when I think about.

When I think about people dying, people I know dying, when I think about myself dying, there's a sense in which the world goes on. It's this sort of terrible thing. You sort of like, they've died, but the world is just going on as though nothing happened. But what happens when they die is that their outlook, their perspective on the world, everything that they took in, everything that they thought, everything that they felt, that's winked out of existence, right?

That seems really bloody important to us, right? I mean, that's the stuff that we care about most deeply. And that's why, you know, thinking about people dying, it's not just that we're going to miss them, but why it's so rattling and so difficult, I think, to wrap our head around. So I think, you know, there's a sense in which this is the thing that is the most close to home for us as conscious creatures. Yeah. I think we can all agree on that.

More generally, do you have any other philosophical interests? Well, I'm sure you do. What are your other philosophical interests apart from consciousness? Yeah, well, I mean, so I first was primarily interested in consciousness. And from there, more recently, I sort of glibly say, you know,

I used to just do consciousness, but if everything is conscious, then I get to do just metaphysics because I get to do the nature of everything, which it's more than that. I'm just I'm interested in the nature of the world around us more generally. I've got interests.

know within specific areas of consciousness things like mental imagery um and perception um i also have interest in things that sort of border on ethics um so i think there are really interesting connections between the debates that philosophers of mind have and the debates that people have within metaethics about um

about sort of the nature of morality. And I mean, I have some attraction to virtue ethics. I haven't done anything in that direction, but I certainly have personal interests that sort of veer off in that direction. I think it would be strange if thinking about consciousness didn't have implications for other areas and particularly for ethical issues. You've got a paper connecting the debates on consciousness and philosophy of mind to debates on

What grounds morality and metaethics? Yeah, I think in funny ways the metaethicists are sort of behind the philosophers of mind and we can sort of hopefully help to nudge them in... useful directions that they might have gotten to eventually but hadn't quite yet. We can be self-congratulatory because we're the ones who are inserting our head. I wonder if they'd agree with that. Does he agree with that, that you're ahead of the curve? I think a lot of the, you know, there are people...

This would actually probably get too technical for the section on the basics, but the gosh. There are just sort of very sort of old facts, new guys arguments that are given in response to the knowledge argument. And, you know, a lot of the analogies that are used just sort of are trans.

that were initially used, you know, Clark Kent, Superman, it sort of transparently doesn't work. People in metaethics were still sort of using analogies along those lines and hadn't sort of moved on from that. That's very interesting.

Yeah. Okay, so we're going to do a new feature of the show now. We're trying to do some quick fire questions on the big questions of philosophy. So we're going to ask you about God, free will. and connected to what we've just been discussing is morality objective so this should be easy yeah in uh one minute or less does god exist uh actually agnostic agnostic between uh no god and sort of deist watchmaker god um so i i give

Very, very little credence to there being a sort of traditional Judeo-Christian God. I think problem of evil, problem of suffering is an insurmountable problem as I see it. But I do find some appeal, some... difficulties with things like the cosmological argument and the fine-tuning argument and I think especially if you are

attracted to sort of a non-reductive view of consciousness that the things like the fine-tuning argument look more problematic um so i i don't know that that means that there is a god but i i sort of i'm Unsure. Everything you said then sounds exactly like what I think. So I think we're really... Interestingly, I haven't read your stuff on this, which is, again, disappointing. It's converging.

the truth you say i don't need keith to agree with us when we all agree we can say we can say it's truth uh yeah i think we might have a job anyway Next question. Do we have free will? I think I have such strong compatibilist intuitions that I'm baffled by the question. So, I mean, I think that my actions... at least the ones that I choose freely flow from me or at very least from my brain and the way that it is.

that as a result of that it makes sense to hold me responsible for things and i'm not quite sure what more could be wanted i think i don't quite understand um libertarian we will so should we should we define compatibilism there Yeah, yeah, sorry. So basically I think that I guess the existence of free will insofar as

one's capable of making sense of it is compatible with the world operating in a deterministic way. Right, so even if the universe is totally determined what's going to happen from the big bang onwards we're still free just in the sense that we're not tied up we can do what we do what we want to do and so on so yeah because what we want to do is something that you know reduces to what's going on

Maybe in our brains, maybe in whatever it is that's causally generated by our brains, but it reduces to things to do about us. And so whatever's flowing from those desires and... and so forth the idea is that's what counts is acting freely um now there are people obviously that that don't think that that's what free will is and think like you're saying that you don't believe in free will um because i can't choose you know i can't bend the course um

And yeah, I don't think that we can do that. I find it a little bit hard to wrap my head around. oh so on this you're probably more on keith's side i think i'm more oh yes i'm very happy with that you can't be right on everything don't worry don't take that too hard uh and finally is morality objective uh yes um Yes. And if I had to give a less than one minute answer, I'm going to say Hitler was objectively bad, objectively evil, not just my...

personal opinion. I take it that you're not asking me about weird things to do with mineshaft cases, but the intuitive sense of is morality objectively bad? What are mineshaft cases? Oh, these are things where where It's a matter of trying to decide, you know, is the thing that you should do the thing that you should do based on if you had perfect knowledge or based on sort of your subjective knowledge that you have, which one of those things sort of determines what it is that you.

should be doing in these cases so they have cases with people lost in mine shafts and you don't know certain things about you know who's in which one should you sort of split you know the split up the probabilities because you don't really know what's going on and how should that affect basically what it is that you're doing? The lack of knowledge. Does what it is that you should be doing, is that governed just by...

the fact of the matter about, I guess, what the case is like or is it determined by what you know about the case? I didn't come across this. I hope I haven't gotten that totally wrong. This is not my area. This is Richard's area. Sorry, my husband is an ethicist. And so I'm sort of spouting out what I recall from hearing him talk about these cases if I've deeply offended.

any ethicists listening I'm sorry it's my own ignorance but since I take it that's not what you're asking me about I don't have to know Hitler's bad absolutely

Right, so we've got those big questions sorted out. Good day's work. Let's look at your own view of consciousness and of the mind. So your view is a form of idealism. Okay, right. So let's just, can you just tell us to begin with what idealism in the most general sense is? Yeah. So there are a lot of different ways that the term idealism is used. So, you know, Barclay is a famous idealist. You got Kantian.

idealism, transcendental idealism, you've got Hegelian idealism. I don't really know what all those things have in common. The sort of idealism I'm interested in is what I think of as ontological idealism. So this is basically the idea that reality, or at least the physical world around us, is fundamentally mental or fundamentally phenomenal. So it's not the view that cups don't exist. It's the view that...

cups, what are they? Well fundamentally they somehow reduce to something mental or some phenomenology. So yeah because that's probably a good characterization. There is a world, there is a reality independent of me, but that reality is itself. At least in the sort of realist idealism of the sort that I'm interested in. Yes, so it's not a denial of there being an external world. It's not a denial of there being something outside.

of my mind or your mind Philip's mind or your mind Keith it's it's you know there is a world outside of all of our minds perhaps as i think outside of all human minds outside of all finite minds um but it itself is is somehow the same sort of thing it's the same it's it's fundamentally so so it's a theory really

about the fundamental nature of things, what things really are. I mean, we're familiar with all these different kinds of things in the world. It's a theory about what these things really are. The idea is that what they really are is something like

what my mind really is it's the same kind of thing so in a way it's it's it's a bit like i mean i guess materialism is a bit like that it says that minds and the rest of the world are all fundamentally the same kind of thing but it says that kind of thing is It's just matter, whatever exactly matter is. And idealism says, yes, they are all made of the same kind of thing, but that sort of thing is mind. It's mental.

yeah in fact the the the example that you're giving i think um i i think i think it's a really really good point to sort of bring out for the viewers um so you know you might have like a materialist um who says you know For instance, pain is C-fibers firing. Maybe we have some sort of brain state, you know, we've got C-fibers that fire, and that's what pain is. Now, maybe some materialists think that

that there isn't really such a thing as pain and this is just a convenient way of talking. But you might be a materialist and think, no, I do believe there's such a thing as pain. I'm giving you an account of the nature of pain. This is what pain is. And not trying to deny its existence. I'm trying to tell you what it is. And similarly, for an idealist, you know, when you say, you know, what is the cup?

or the quark or the sun. Well, I'm not trying to tell you that the cup doesn't exist. I'm trying to tell you what the cup is. So I think there's very much this parallel. So it's a bit like the material that says pain is sea fiber firing. The idealist is going to say something like C-fiber firing is pain. Perhaps. Yeah, I think when it gets to the mind-blowing problem... Maybe not that particular case, but that's the sort of... C-fiber firing is...

Some sort of experiential thing. I guess that sounds a bit like panpsychism, doesn't it? Yeah, so it's a kind of monism, right? So we have dualism where we have physical stuff.

and mental stuff and they're completely different kinds of thing and then you've got various kinds of monism materialism that there's just matter or idealism that there's just mental stuff at the bottom of reality and then so another kind of monism that some people listening or watching might know that i have sometimes defended panpsychism

And it sounds kind of similar to panpsychism in that both panpsychists and idealists think at the bottom level of reality, things are totally mental. So do you have any thoughts about how this differs, how idealism and panpsychism differ? if they do yeah um i think that's a really hard question i think um

I think it's a hard question because I'm not sure that there is an interesting, important difference. I think that there are a lot of differences that you can point out between sort of traditional... panpsychist views and traditional idealist views, but I'm not sure if they sort of carve things in an important place. So, I mean, I think for our listeners sort of traditionally panpsychism, if you were sort of to start reading about it, would give you this idea that consciousness pervades reality.

sort of the locusts of consciousness are very very small things maybe the quarks or fundamental tiny particles that are sort of sorry, I shouldn't say fundamental, tiny, tiny particles that are building up to make up the universe. And that that's sort of, those are the fundamental conscious units. And then everything else is built up out of that. Idealism.

traditionally has sort of um gone with the idea that it's sort of reality as a whole or the physical world as a whole that is um that is the sort of locust of of consciousness i guess now of course there are panpsychists like Philip who sort of very much blur this line and would count as idealists on this way of characterizing things because Philip takes the fundamental thing that is conscious to be the cosmos.

So I don't know that that's a particularly interesting way of carving it up. I was actually looking because I knew you were going to ask me about this.

Dave Chalmers does these big categorizations of views and I was looking to see like how what does he say about this and he he says that sort of micro sorry that idealism basically will entail will entail some sort of psychism panpsychism of some sort but the panpsychism doesn't necessarily entail idealism because the panpsychist it's open to the panpsychist to think that there are things that are both fundamentally phenomenal and things that are physical and not

fundamentally phenomenal that you've got some sort of dual aspects. So that would be a principled way of drawing a line. So idealists think.

At the fundamental level of reality, there's mental stuff and only mental stuff. Whereas a panpsychist thinks there's mental stuff, but there might be non-mental stuff as well. So I sometimes call that... like pure and impure pants like it's for the pure pants like this thinks this maybe that's david chalmers term as well i can't remember he's good at taxonomy

Not so much at naming things. He breaks things down beautifully and then the names, you know, sometimes you're like, ah, A, B, C materialism and D and F and ah. just just to the word phenomenal just in case i guess that's just a synonym of consciousness or experience just yeah yeah yeah oh okay okay okay so this sort of this ontological kind of idealism that you've been talking about this i guess that's the most famous defender of that sort of viewers

Bishop Barclay in the 18th century, George Barclay. He had this slogan, didn't he? be is to be perceived he thought that things for something to exist is for it to be an idea in in a mind that's what it is for something to be real and if If something didn't exist in someone's mind, it didn't exist at all. So your view is something like that, but I don't think it's exactly like that.

is it? And I think one of the things you do in your writing about this is distinguish your view from Barclays. So what is the difference? How does your view improve? How does it differ from... from Barclay's view. I'll perhaps begin by telling us what Barclay's view is in a bit more detail. Great, that sounds like a super starting point.

I think, yeah, starting with Barclay. And I guess maybe one thing, just to go back to Philip's question a minute ago about the difference between panpsychism and idealism, just is that I think... panpsychists often get into this idea that consciousness pervades reality.

by thinking of it that it's going to provide a solution to the mind-body problem, by thinking it's going to tell us something distinctive about how our minds and our bodies relate to each other. Whereas for the traditional idealist, for Barclay and people in his vein, that's sort of not the way in. The way in is a way in from thinking about just directly about the nature of the world around us, what it's like.

whether we can account for it actually being the way it seems to us and for the sort of grasp that we seem to have on the world around us. So those are the sorts of things that are driving Barclay. when he formulates his view. So even if they wind up sort of converging to a very similar place, they're coming from different directions. So Barclay is sort of looking around and he sees this teacup. He's like, you know, what exists, you know? Well, teacups exist.

what's it what are teacups well you know it's a certain sort of shape and it's sort of burgundy up here and goes down to a beautiful blue it's warm it's solid um you know contains something that's hot and slightly sweet and slightly peppery, delicious chai.

You know, what is there out there? There are trees. They're green. They look a certain way. They feel a certain texture and so on and so forth. You know, we do some science. We look through some microscopes. We see little tiny things in there. We see cells. We see atoms. Well, what do we know about? those things. We know the experiences that we have. And we smash

Particles together and particle accelerators. Again, what do we get from that? The experiences we have when these things get smashed together. So Barclay sort of looks at this and says, well, we could posit that there is some sort of mind independent reality, some sort of. matter that underwrites all of these things. What would that be? We have no idea, right? All I grasp is the experiences that I have. Simpler view, Barclay thinks, what

what there is, what makes up reality is the experiences that I've just been elaborating. And Barclay is an empiricist. He likes the idea that, you know, we were going to give this very simple, elegant view where that's going to be based on, you know.

what what we actually gain through experience so he thinks you know the best view to have is one where reality fundamentally boils down to experiences um now that quickly lands you with a kind of obvious quandary right because if i i have a chocolate cake and i put it in my refrigerator and i close the door i'm not experiencing the chocolate cake and you know let's say there's no like

little critters in my refrigerator experiencing the cake from inside, nobody's experiencing the chocolate cake. Does the chocolate cake just wink out of existence if it's fundamentally a collection of experiences and then I open the door and poof, you know, the chocolate cake comes back?

um so Berkeley doesn't think that this is the case he doesn't think things are you know the back side of me exists right now it doesn't just pop into existence when I turn around right um and the question is why and God's

Barclay's answer has something to do with God. The way in which God plays a role for Barclay is actually the subject of debate, but the sort of cartoonish view that is typically presented in undergraduate philosophy classes at any rate um is one on which god is always experiencing the totality of reality um so there's this can i read you the great limerick

Yeah. So there's this fantastic limerick summarizing Barclay's view. So there was a young man who said God must find it exceedingly odd if he finds that the tree continues to be when no one's about in the quad. And there's then the reply limerick, which is, dear sir, your astonishment's odd. I'm always about in the quad. And that's why the tree continues to be since observed by yours faithfully, God.

God is always perceiving everything and that's why my chocolate cake continues to exist and doesn't pop out of in and out of existence. Whether that's the actual view, not entirely clear, but that's roughly the view.

um should i go on that's probably in a nutshell yeah i think that's so the there's a beautiful teacup you have there by the way so that so the teacup one here is uh is what is so it really exists it's really out there in the world but it's a collection of experiences for barclay and then for barclay okay what if no one's looking at the teacup

Well, God's still looking at it. So God's experience has constituted. Right. Okay, so that's Barclay's view. So your view sort of builds on Barclay's view, but...

How exactly have you developed this into your own version? Yeah. So I think the easiest way to actually explain my view is to start with Barclay's view and then tweak it a little bit. That's not... the main way that i'm developing it in the book because i think that doesn't give us a really detailed look at what i want to do but i'll start with that just to give the caricature um so we start with barclay's view we've got reality being ideas in the mind of god Now let's think about God.

the sort of traditional view of God that Barclay would be operating with has a lot of interesting attributes, right? He's omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipotent. God has, you know, beliefs and desires and so on and so forth. extraordinarily interesting agent right to say the least um but a lot of those interesting attributes in fact almost all of them are not important for the work that he's doing the metaphysical work that he's doing in

accounting for the persistence and stability of reality. So, I mean, is omnibenevolence. God could, you know, not be completely all good and still, you know, play the same role. Omnipotent. There could be things that God couldn't do and still play this role. Omniscience, I also think isn't necessary, but maybe let me say something else first to that. It doesn't look like God's desires are playing a role. It doesn't look like God's beliefs.

are playing a role. And hence, you know, it doesn't look like God's knowledge particularly is playing a role. What's doing the work of accounting for the chocolate cake continuing to exist in the refrigerator when I've closed the door is the experiences.

the god is having of it the phenomenology the raw sensory I guess Berkeley wouldn't use that term but the raw sensory phenomenology of the chocolate cake um and it's not just you know sweet phenomenology and brown phenomenology and things that are sort of disunified and fragmented. It's structured phenomenology. It's phenomenology that's structured into a cake-like structure.

So one way of getting at the idea that I'm trying to develop is to start with the Barclay in view and then to peel away all the attributes of God that aren't necessary for the metaphysical role he's playing. And then what you're left with is I think this much more minimal sort of view that, for one thing, for people who maybe aren't theists or at least traditional theists, doesn't require God. But I think also is going to be an interesting and useful thing to do insofar as I think, you know,

And Barclay's view sort of smuggles a lot of work into God. And what is God's mind like? How is God's mind structured? What does it contain? Like, God's mind is like, you know, it's a divine mystery. It's a black box. Like, I'm not going to presume to go on about like.

what God's mind is like and how it's structured, but I do want to be able to answer those questions when we're talking metaphysics, we're talking about the nature of the world around us. So I think that moving away from talking about God to talking just about unified collection of phenomenology. I think of it as a tapestry, a phenomenal tapestry with sensory experiences as the threads that are woven into reality.

I think that then gives us the sort of the freedom and the resources to be able to look at what are these sensory threads? What are the bits of phenomenology that make up reality and how are they structured and how does it all sort of hang together? so it's reality is a kind of mind uh but it's a sort of stripped down mind it doesn't have many of the traditional characteristics of god it's these threads of experience

So could you run us by, come back to the teacup? Yeah, I'll say, just to briefly, I'm not actually committed to it being a mind. I'm kind of vaguely... I want to be neutral as to like, I think maybe there could even be free floating phenomenology that doesn't necessarily require minds. But insofar as one thinks that in order to have experiences, you have to have a mind that's.

experiencing those things then yes that characterization is completely apt so it might just be threads of experience without any kind of self having them I'm neutral and open to that. I just don't want to commit either way. All of that exists quite independently of us and our minds. I suppose if you ask a materialist what the world's fundamentally made of, they're going to talk about elementary particles and forces and so on. Your view is that, well, you know what?

what's what's fundamentally there what the world's fundamentally made of are these threads of experience that's the fundamental nature of everything yeah quite independently of us and uh at our minds Yes. So it seems like there's a couple of questions there. Should I take a stab at them or? Yes. Just to tell us more about the view.

Yeah, sorry, if I cut you off, please just tell me I'm being rude and make me shut up. I'm here to listen to you, Helen, so go for it. Okay, so first up, yes, you could, somebody could go around. and shoot every, I shouldn't say this, there could be a terrible plague. Violence with us. Somehow. Back in time, before there are any humans around.

okay not even just humans i mean like before any life evolved i mean i was just you know first i was thinking somebody could go around and shoot every sentient sentient um entity and then i thought no wait maybe make it a plague no wait we don't want to have a plague all right um yes before Before there were any sort of sentient life had evolved, there still were oceans and rocks and stars and well I guess there wasn't

don't know it depends on what it takes to be sentient whether there is an atmosphere well whatever okay in any event um and molecules and and so on and all of these things existed even prior to any of us evolving um I do think that there are, in just the same way that I think that there really is a cup here, I think that there really are atoms. But yes, what they fundamentally are is collections of...

sensory experiences that are structured in interesting ways. So I don't want to deny, I don't want to say you know physicalists you know you're wrong about any of the things you take to exist. I want to say you're wrong about the nature of those things.

Because I suppose there is a form of idealism, I guess, that is more like a sort of solipsism, where the idea is that all that really exists is my own mind, or my mind, and perhaps other people's minds, if I really think they exist, and that's it. um and everything that exists is really just in our minds and that's not that's not your view yeah yeah no that's absolutely right that's good that's helpful yes

Experiences are structured. Maybe we could just say a little bit about how they're structured coming back to your teeth. I just want to look more at the teacup, actually. Sorry, I'll try not to set it down. It is beautiful.

yeah in what ways so the teacup is made up of these threads of experience tied together or they might not be in a mind they might just be threads that are a tap part of a tapestry um so so tell us a little bit more about how they're structured yeah so i think um i think a helpful analogy is actually to consider us. So I had, you know, I used Barkley's God as the starting point in explaining.

this sort of caricature of my view and i sort of took things away from him until we were just left with something more sparse so why don't we start with like start with me and we're going to peel things away from me So you may or may not know Philip and Keith, viewers probably aren't aware. I'm fantastically good, not quite as good as God, but I'm fantastically good. So let's first peel away my fantastic goodness. And, you know, we'll peel away from me.

you know my powers and ability to affect the world we're gonna peel away my desires and my beliefs right we're gonna I'm not really an agent anymore we're just gonna take all this stuff away now what are we left with well we're not just left with you know

sorry to get i've got ridiculous props all over my desk that i was using when doing zoom teaching um it's a nutcracker is it yeah um what's that that's scary oh no sorry i was uh i was i wanted to be a ballet dancer when i grew up and a dancer my nutcracker um so we're not just left with you know phenomenal red experiences and fluffy experiences and greenish experiences and dinosaur-shaped experiences that are sort of like free floating in a jumble.

right my experiences um seem to be structured in a whole lot of interesting ways so one way that my experiences are structured is that all of my experiences seem you know even though i have visual experiences tactile experiences um auditory experiences and so on they all seem in a sense to be unified into like at a moment i'm having a single kind of unified experience that encompasses all of my other experiences the experience that i'm having right now of all of this um and

My experiences are unified in that way, in a way that, you know, like my visual experiences and Keith's auditory experiences and Philip's tactile experiences aren't, right? Those experiences don't all form a single... there's not a single overarching experience of that unifies those things whereas you know i hear the bird and see the see the leaves blowing in the wind and so on and feel the sun on me all together as a single experience

So that's what philosophers talk about as the unity of consciousness. So all of my experiences seem to be sort of phenomenally unified into a super experience in a sense. So when we first thing to say is that when we peel away all these attributes of mine, we don't get rid of the unity of consciousness. If we did, there wouldn't be a experience of the world. There would be.

lots of fragmented experiences. I mean, maybe we wouldn't even be able to make sense of how many experiences there would be. But we think that there is sort of an experience that I'm having. And in the same way, I think that in order to have a unified reality, a single world, that the unity of consciousness relation has to be applying to the world as a whole to this phenomenal tapestry.

So that's one relation that unifies my experiences. But there are more. Right. So like if I've got this dinosaur and I've got my. scary nutcracker right the redness seems to in here in the nutcrackery shape and the greenness seems to in here in the dinosaur shape right and they're not sort of swapped around and they're not sort of free floating from one another the redness and and this shape seem to be sort of

bound together. So this is what you might refer to as property binding. And so there are sort of property binding relations that are sort of unifying bits of phenomenology into what I perceive as objects. And the idea is that these same relations are going to be at work in unifying

the different bundles of phenomenology that make up my beautiful teacup. There are also, of course, four phenomenal spatial relations, which are just spatial relations for the um idealist there are temporal relations there might be some sort of diachronic unity of consciousness relation um but anyway in any event all of the sort of relations the structure of my mind the idea is those same relations

will structure reality. And to account for it being a single world with objects that stand in spatial relations to one another. means across time doesn't it just to uh sorry it was just an aside yeah yeah it means like unified across time sorry keith you had a question i was just

Just thinking that, you know, we're talking about, you know, the unity of consciousness in Philip's mind and my mind and your mind. Doesn't this, the idea that reality is unified in this way, doesn't this mean that there has to be a mind? that the reality has to be a mind in order to have this kind of unity because you said you're agnostic on that as to whether it was appropriate to call all these experiences to say that all these experiences that constitute reality belong to a mind.

But if they don't, then how can we talk about them being unified, isn't it? So I don't know that... I guess one view you might have of the unity of consciousness would hold that there are minds sort of like little boxes and we put things into a box and then they're all unified because they're all in the box. They were in the mind box.

Now, I try to be agnostic as to what I think the unity of consciousness is. I try to show that whatever account you choose, that it should serve my purposes. That's not how I tend to think of the unity of consciousness. I tend to think of it as sort of a

relate in terms of a relation that things can stand in to one and one another um and so i want to give sort of my own preference would be to give a relational view about this and to think that there are experiences that could be related to one another in certain ways or not um now

if you think that what is it to be a mind well it just is for things to be related in this way then yeah it would trivially follow that um that because is a mind um if you meant something stronger by mind than that you wouldn't um so they don't know these experiences have to be related to each other in certain ways they don't necessarily have to relate it to something else a sort of self or something a mind in some other some other sense okay we're in danger of getting into the deep

I think we've got a fair bit of idea about the view. It's this tapestry of streams of experience structured together, bound together in these ways. Anton Smith has said in the comments, but how do we know that the ultimate nature of reality consists of... structure of experience what's the exact argument right now we've got a clear idea of the view maybe we could move on why should we believe it okay

is that that's just an invitation for me to chat yeah you you talked earlier about exploring different ways the world could be okay so you've outlined one way the world could be there But presumably, I think you're not just saying, here's a coherent way the world could be, a possible way the world could be, you actually think it is that way. So how do you move to it being, it could be this way to, you should believe it is that way.

Yeah, so actually, you might be surprised by my answer to this. So I am not necessarily, well, I am not a committed idealist. I maybe am lean, think. give about 30 percent credence to the world being an idealist world of some sort um the the ultimate point that i want to make is one i want to persuade people that

there are idealist possible worlds. That if you look at all the vast possible ways that worlds could be, one way that world the world could be, and that a world that seems very much like our world, you know, the nature of that could be, is an idealist world. So first, I think that that's an important point that I think people should agree to. Second, I think that people should give much higher credence to our world being. Could we just say what credence means?

Yeah, so if you were sort of thinking, how likely is it? How likely do I think it is that We think about all the different possible ways that the world could be, and I've got them sort of spread out before me. And I'm like, oh, it could be that it's a materialist world. It could be that it's an idealist world. It could be, I don't know, all different kinds of other things.

How confident should I be that the world that I'm in is over here versus over there? I think that people in general are far too certain that they don't live in an idealist world.

I think that we should be much more agnostic. I'm not necessarily trying to say that everybody should jump on board the idealism bandwagon, but I think that people should at any rate give a lot more credence to... the world that we live in the the actual world being an idealist world i'll also say i don't think you know it's not like all possible idealist ways the world could be are the one that i'm describing i think you know this is just one way

one way that the world could be why am i describing this world well it's the way of describing the world that i think best captures what i think is intuitive intuitively think take to be true of our world so i think that we can capture you know uh sort of our intuitions about what the world is like and things that we learn from the sciences and that we can come up with an idealist picture of the world that matches what we have reason to believe.

part of what I want to show. So now that's not an argument that you should be an idealist, but I've asserted that I think that there is, you know, some compelling reason to move in that direction. So what is the reason? Well, I think that in order to answer this question, that you can't just look at sort of what does the idealist say about the nature of reality in isolation. I think that what we should be doing is really trying to sort of flesh out.

um complete pictures of reality of the nature of the physical world of our place in reality of how we relate to that physical world and to look at the picture that like a materialist can offer and to look at the picture that an idealist can offer and you know the other candidate views can offer and then to hold up those complete pit theories and to see you know which one of these theories strikes us as most plausibly true um and i think that when we do this

we will not get a knockdown argument for idealism. I don't think that there is an argument you have to be an idealist, right? I've said I think there are lots of possible ways the world could be and they're not all idealist ways. But I do think that idealism looks more compelling.

So here I'll try to say three things that I think look really compelling about idealism. So the first thing is that for the idealist, the world... really is the way that it appears to be to us so you know we we look at things and we're like you know yeah this this is red and this is warm and time seems to

flow and you know we've got all these things that we take to be true about the world but then you look at the materialist picture of the world and um can we account for color like well we've got you know surface reflectance properties um i think a lot of people who study materials to study color think you know there is no such thing as color or maybe what color is just is a disposition to make me have certain experiences but they don't get you

Red. Red doesn't exist in the world. The sort of thing that we take to exist. Warmth. You know, well, there's molecular kinetic energy. But fires aren't... hot right for the materialist they've got high molecular kinetic energy um they have some property that causes me to experience them in a certain way um certainly if you're a four-dimensionalist

Don't forget about this if you don't know what that means. Does time flow? No, time doesn't flow. We are sort of wrong about all these things. But for an idealist, We've got a picture of the world where the way that we take the world to be is the way that it is. You know, there are reds and blues. There is heat. Fire is hot. And I think even if you're a four dimensionalist. time can flow which is cool um i

So I think, you know, you might think, well, why is that a good thing? The world just isn't the way that we take it to be. And I think that that's an intuition that a lot of people have that I have when I'm not wearing my idealist hat that I always had. You know, of course, the world isn't the way that we experience it as being. We just know our experience.

experiences of the world. But I think that part of the reason that we think that is because it seems impossible to us to account for the world being the way that it is. And we've internalized the idea that this is just impossible.

If before we'd internalized that idea, we came to look and see that there are two candidate theories. And one theory says the world is nothing like you think it is. And the other candidate theory says the world is just the way you think that it is. Which one of these theories looks more?

plausible right um so that's one advantage that the idealist has um i think the idealist has other advantages but those other advantages come about not just from the metaphysics but from the metaphysics in conjunction with

the theory of perception that I think idealists uniquely can hold. So maybe I'll just... Yeah, I was just going to say, I think there's a missing piece here, isn't it? We need to talk about how we... experience the world because we've said that the world the reality is independent of our minds yeah so how do we

how does it get into our minds, as it were? How do we experience it? And you've got to... I'm not sure if it's unique, but it's a very interesting and novel account of how that... happens haven't you how we experience reality yeah um yeah so um sorry i'm just trying to think how much background i have to give to make this make sense um I'll try doing this without saying anything more generally about the mind-body problem. It may be that that doesn't work out. So I think that in perception.

If you think of the world, as I said, as a phenomenal tapestry, so we've got our threads of phenomenology. Instead of being woven over under, they're sort of hanging together by way of these phenomenal relations that I talked about. And so we've got this phenomenal tapestry of reality. I think, and this is somewhat, this is independent of the basic idealist view, but I'm inclined to embrace a view of subjects like, you know.

conscious subjects like us as um that's sort of a not non-reductive view so i don't think that my experiences just reduced to brain states so you know there's here's the tapestry part of the tapestry is my brain i don't think that my experience is just reduced to

brains to the brain states of going on in the tapestry. I think that they're sort of distinct and and my my You know, my desires, my thoughts, my pains, my hallucinations and so on are generated by what's going on in my brain, in the tapestry part of my brain. or the brain part of the tapestry, but that they are not themselves part of the tapestry.

So I think that that's true for all of my non-perceptual experiences. So when I have pains, I don't think the feeling of pain that I'm having is part of the physical world. I think that that seems like a strange view. to have, that my pain is a physical thing. So I think that it's something sort of distinct. But I think that when we perceive things, so when we have veridical perceptions,

that my mind actually overlaps with the tapestry. So to give an example, to make this vivid, here we've got the cup and the... these features of the cup are parts of the phenomenal tapestry. They're sort of appearing over here. Now, when I see the cup,

Of course, interesting things happen in my brain and there are changes to the brain part of the tapestry. But one thing that happens, so one view you might have, maybe just to back up, you could have a view where there is an experience qualitatively identical to the cup that's generated.

that's not part of the tapestry that's a view you could have but i think the idealist can hold a more interesting view which is that when i experience the cup the cup literally the cup part of the tapestry literally becomes a part of my mind so my mind isn't just hanging out independently of the tapestry, but it's actually overlapping with the perceived bits of the tapestry. So your mind, there's a lot to your mind that isn't part of this tapestry of experience.

Part of what your mind is, it's something produced by the tapestry of experience, including specifically by the bits of it that are your brain. And that's producing something extra, something additional. But... There's also another part to your mind, which is actually the bits of the tapestry itself. So when I'm having a perception, when I'm having an experience of redness,

It's actually the redness in the world, the redness of the nutcracker. That is actually now becoming incorporated into my mind. Yeah. So my mind is made of two sorts of things. Some things, stuff produced by the tapestry and bits of the tapestry itself. And all those things are phenomenally unified within your mind. So just as you've got your phenomenal unity, your unity of consciousness that sort of binds together, you're sitting and you're daydreaming and you're...

imagining somewhere you're going to go on vacation and you're also sort of, you know, leaning back against your chair and feel the pressure of the chair against your back and hear noise of traffic going by outside. And all of those things are sort of unified. um into into your experience some of those things the the daydreaming part is this is sort of not part of the rest of the tapestry but the perceptual experiences actually are the sound of the traffic that i'm experiencing

is actually part of two phenomenal unities. It's part of my mind and it's part of reality. So if I'm just daydreaming the traffic or hallucinating the traffic, that's... that's not part of the tapestry that's just that's just part of my mind but if i'm actually hearing the traffic then that then i'm sort of as it were actually tapping into the tablet or sort of bringing the tapestry into my mind as it were

i thought a comparison that that might help here if if people viewers or listeners viewed our last month's mind mind chat with anil seth who thinks of just to get an opposing view so often things can become you know much clearer when you have the contrasting view so he says conscious perceptual consciousness

is is a kind of controlled hallucination so that the mind which he thinks of as the brain you know he's a kind of materialist is just in your head in the darkness of your skull and it's kind of trying to make these best guesses as to what reality is like from the data that's impinging on it and that's what sensory experience arises but it's all kind of in the head so that so i guess this is what's sometimes called

indirect realism so for anil seth there's you know there's a cop out here but my experience of it is just in my head it's it's my brain trying to guess what's out there and it comes up with the experience of the cup but for you your experience isn't just in your head it reaches out and envelops the cup so the cup is part of this

experiential tapestry and your mind overlaps with it reaches out and grabs hold of it and you demonstration there thank you i was getting a bit carried away consciousness is is out there in the world the extended mind yeah so yeah yeah yeah it is a strange sort of extended mind it's uh i suppose to be fair you know that is how things seem isn't it you know it does

it does seem like i mean for what it's worth some people might be skeptical yeah you know but it seems like i'm in direct contact with it doesn't seem like it's mediated so for the direct for the indirect realist reality is mediated you know it's all it were but for you you're directly in contact with it yeah it is a kind of it has a it does have a kind of poetry about it doesn't it i mean just imagine

bit of an amateur astronomer I have to go and look at the stars so I go look at these stars and I mean I guess the um the light you know for some of them has been traveling for uh millions of years um but Well, is it the stars or the light that are actually part of my mind on your view? Which is it? Are the stars actually part of my mind, which would be a beautiful view?

Yeah, I mean, I think the stars actually would be part of your mind, but what you'd be... Yeah, how best to actually capture it? Certainly the light is part of your mind. Whether the light, well, what does, what exactly is the star? I don't know. What is the star? Is it, does anybody think? The star, just the, I mean, I guess the. This experience of this visual experience, it is. Well, that's not all there is to the start.

of the star, yeah. So, yes, yes, there, the star is literally apartment. It is interesting because I'm having an experience, I'm overlapping with something from long ago, which is, yeah, so great. So a lot of the motivation we've talked about so far is to do with... perceptual contact with reality and it being as we commonsensically think it to be we're in direct contact with reality i mean is it someone's uh minister someone in the comments

monistic idealism has asked um you know a different kind of motivation and perhaps a more usual motivation for an anti-materialist does idealism handle the hard problem and the interaction problem better than physicalism due and dualism so i guess a lot of anti-materialists think

you know materialism cannot account for consciousness and maybe you think dualism cannot account for certain things interaction between mind and brain so maybe that is any of this motivating you as well these more familiar motivations or is it wholly this desire to have direct contact with reality? So I'll say I wholly myself endorse, as is probably clear from the beginning of this conversation, the sort of familiar anti-materialist lines.

But I don't actually think that the idealist winds up in a sort of uniquely good position to answer the mind-body problem. So I think...

I take idealism to be sort of fundamentally just to be a view about the nature of the physical world, right? So the physical world is fundamentally phenomenal. That doesn't in and of itself answer the question as to what the relationship between my mind and my brain is right as i said you know we've got my brain it's part of the tapestry we know what its nature is we know that we've got a monistic view so there's only one kind of thing but we don't

from that, you know, just like get out of that a view about how my experiences relate to my brain. And I actually think that the sort of familiar positions that are sort of well known within the mind-body problem all have potential analogs within an idealist framework. So I think you could be a sort of a reductive idealist.

which would be kind of like an analog of physicalism or constituative panpsychism, where you could think my pain, say, when I feel pain, reduces to, let's just say, C-fibers firing. And C-fibers firing, yes, they're fundamentally phenomenal, but they're not fundamentally ouchy. The ouchiness isn't, you know, they're sort of, you know, what's my brain like? It's gray. It's got zoomy neurotransmitters. It's got...

I can't describe it because I'm not in contact with those aspects of what reality is like. But so you could have a view where my pain reduced to sea virus fire. you could have a view which is kind of akin to maybe an identity panpsychism where my pain reduces to sea fibers firing but it doesn't reduce to like things like the grayness and squishiness of my brain.

Part of what C-fibers firing is, one of the aspects of C-fibers firing is the hurtiness of C-fibers firing. And that's a primitive element of my brain when it's doing this thing. I also think you can have a view that looks very much akin to dualism or emergent panpsychism, where you have my brain doing what it does, and you have some sort of psychophysical bridging laws.

traditionally the dualist has psychophysical bridging laws that say you know when my brain is doing this generate this new experience um I think that an idealist could have psychophysical bridging laws that are precisely analogous. So this would be one where we've got the phenomenal tapestry and then we've got experiences being generated that are distinct from the phenomenal tapestry.

I also think though, and this sort of goes back to the perception stuff, that the idealist can embrace a view of bridging laws that is sort of externalist so instead of just looking at what's happening in my brain and saying if this is happening in your brain generate this experience but where the bridging laws sort of look at what's happening in your brain and your broader perceptual environment and say if there's

elephant-y brain state happening in your brain and no elephant generate elephant phenomenology which is a hallucination or if there's elephant-y stuff happening in your brain and an elephant that's appropriately causally connected to you then we don't have phenomenology being generated. We have the bridging laws sort of expanding my mind to overlap with the tapestry. So I think basically, I think we've got analogs of all of these positions.

I don't think, I always embrace the non-reductive view, this sort of dualist or quasi-dualist view. I don't think that the analog, the idealist analog of dualism looks particularly better than the traditional dualism, apart from on the perception question. But I do actually think that the analog of materialism looks completely preposterously ridiculous on idealism in a way that goes way beyond anything that

I might think about traditional physicalism. So I think that things look a little bit different, but I think really idealism sort of doesn't especially help advance the debate on that front. Right. So it might be initially... issues with ordinary materialism being able to solve the hard problem account for consciousness and then there's there's arguments backing that up the knowledge argument the zombie argument but then it's this particular form of idealism

being an attractive alternative among others not for those reasons but because of this direct connection with reality and other kind of elegance and Okay, well, I think we've got a really good idea of the view and the motivations for it. Maybe we should move to our deep dive. I mean, we've already been getting a bit deep on me, to be honest. This is where you guys hammer me and I... So maybe we've... This is where I get confused.

but maybe keith can have a go a few questions and then and then we'll ask uh some some questions from the audience if people want to ask a question if you could just write q and then a question and then after me and keith have had a little uh i don't know what the word is raise some issues then we'll bring some audience questions in go for it keith what you reckon okay let me um um

Okay, so look, I take it the sort of common sense materialist theory is something like this, that there are objects in the world and stuff around us. it's not really like it seems to us. But it has a nature of its own, which we, you know, through scientific theorizing and so on. We try to characterize perhaps in mathematical terms or whatever. We try and describe what the cup really is. It's a structure of various materials which are themselves composed of atoms.

subatomic particles bonded together in certain ways and which collectively interact, reflect light waves and sound waves bounce off them and all sorts of this. And so we have this kind of picture and we have this sort of unitary picture of what things alike. And then we also say, and these things that we characterize in this way, they have effects on minds, on sentient creatures.

each of whom has its own sort of take on that thing. So there's the thing itself and then there's all the experiences that different kinds of creatures have of that thing. I take it your picture sort of completely inverts that and says, no, there isn't sort of a thing in itself. The thing itself just is this collection of experiences that sentient creatures have.

of the thing. Is that kind of okay? The tapestry just is this collection of, so the cup is not a thing that produces experiences, it is just the tapestry of cup-like experiences. Yeah, so let me just... maybe add a few things and see if this see what you think of this so i guess one thing to maybe to specify that might make my view at this point seem much less attractive is um

First up, I don't think that the cup is just comprised out of experiences of the sort that people have or actually existing animals have or that actual people have or anything like this. I think that the cup is this

incredibly, incredibly vast bundle of phenomenology. So I think that, you know, we've got maybe three perspectives or something on this cup. I mean, I don't know, maybe we've got more people watching this who have different... perceptual systems somehow um but we don't have that many different actual experiences on the cup i think that just as

Just as the idealist sort of wants to say that what I take in of the cup sort of is accurately grasping reality and is genuinely a part of reality, I similarly think if I'd been over here or over here or over here, if I had... color inversion, right? If I perceive this flipped, if I were a bat or if there were a butterfly or something that perceives ultraviolet light, all of these sorts of experiences equally well capture.

the cup and what it's like and equally well count as being a part of reality so if you were to think of like god's experiences you know just to go back to the the Barclay and starting point Barclay's god presumably doesn't just experience reality from all human perspectives but from all possible veridical percept perspectives um so i think that reality is this incredibly complicated thing and it doesn't so i should be clear maybe it doesn't just include possible experiences

But if you think about all the possible veridical experiences that could be had from all different perspectives of this cup, there are actual experiences qualitatively identical to each of those possible perspectives. And that's all getting bound up. to form reality. So there is very much a world that's independent of anything that I could possibly perceive. It's the sort of thing that I know about. It's phenomenal. I can perceive.

limited facets of the cup, which I overlap with, but it's very limited. There was something else I was going to say because I wasn't sure if that was directly germane to what you were saying. There was another thought. So this is, I suppose, this is the kind of price you pay for having perception, in good cases, being veridical. Because after all, different people experience the same thing in different ways. And how can you say they're all veridical?

Well, because all of those things are different real aspects of the thing. That's the price that you pay. You get the verticality at the cost of things being much more sort of multi. not dimensional, having many more aspects, as it were, than we think. Instead of the cup just having a single sort of intrinsic nature, it has this immensely rich nature. But I mean... Shall we just define veridical?

Truth, truthful, truthful, accurate, correct. As opposed to hallucination or something. As opposed to being distorting or, you know. It's not just that I need that in order to account for my experiences being veridical, but it's in order to account for the sort of direct grasp where the cup itself is part of the experience.

Yeah, I guess one of my worries now is that I guess if we think if we include all possible kinds of sensory experience then I suppose and so of course you can imagine a tiny tiny creature to whom the cup is like it's a mountain.

or you know a vast creature to whom it's just a speck and and creatures with a vast range of different kinds of color vision and or sensors we can't imagine it seems almost that everything is just going to be almost an infinitely rich collection of if we say what is the well it's almost infinitely rich collection of possible experiences which include practically every kind of experience

you could ever have because whatever kind of experience you imagine, you can imagine a creature who would experience the cup that way. So isn't it going to be that everything really is the same because everything is just this maximally rich set of experiences. The cup, the me, the sun, the trees and so on, they're all just going to be maximally rich. collections of possible experiences? Yeah, so sort of in a sense, yes and no. So I think the world is going to be

I shouldn't say preposterously, extremely rich, extremely, extremely rich, right? Perhaps preposterously rich, right? I think this is the drawback of the view, right? So the world is going to be vast.

is it going to be infinitely rich not necessarily um so i think there's a question so so i should say it's not that i think that all possible experiences make up the cup it's that all possible or actual experiences that are qualitatively identical to all possible veridical experiences make up the cup now there's then a genuine question what are the different veridical

experiences that could be had of the cup. I think, I've sort of mentioned before, I think that there are many, the space of possible worlds is vast. I think that the space of idealist possible worlds is vast. I think that there could be possible worlds that are idealist worlds that are very, very thin. So one possible idealist world that there could be is that the world is just made up out of...

actual experiences qualitatively identical to all possible human perspectives. It could be that there just aren't any other possible perspectives on the cup that would be vertical. Like, yeah, we think that there could be inverted twins and all these things, but we're wrong.

Now, I don't think that that's true. I think that that's ridiculous. But I think, is there a possible world that's like that? Yes, I think so. So I think there could be very actually surprisingly thin idealist worlds, that that's coherent as a world.

similarly i think that there could be infinitely rich ones um where our world falls is not something that um that i think is is is obvious right so um maybe just to to sort of to illustrate you know suppose you're a dualist and you think um you know, that there are bridging laws that we have certain, you know, about certain brain states and whenever I'm in this sort of brain state, this experience is generated.

um you could be a dualist who thinks that um you know maybe we have new creatures evolving and new creatures evolving maybe at some point you know when new creatures evolve maybe every possible sort of experience that could be had every experience that's metaphysically possible to have to be had is an experience that's already a familiar sort of experience to this world maybe when a new creature evolves

Yeah, it can have experiences, but they're going to be one of the experiences we're already familiar with. There just aren't any other sorts of phenomenology that they could be linked up to. The dualist isn't necessarily committed to infinite types of phenomenology being possible. And similarly, I don't think that the idealist has to be committed to there being infinite.

sorts of veridical, veridical ways to perceive this. Now I'm not telling you how many there are or what they are, but just I don't think I'm necessarily committed to exactly what you said. Right, I mean, yeah, that seems sensible. But I'm kind of pressing on what you mean by veridical here. I mean, given that we accept that, we definitely accept that people with, you know,

I guess a colorblind person who looks at this cup or someone with a monochromatic vision or whatever, that all those experiences are veridical. They're all veridical. Are they? Is that okay? The human experiences we might have of this cup are all veridical, even though they're not the same, of the colour of this cup. What then is it to say that an experience is veridical? When does an experience get to be not veridical?

Yeah, there's a sense in which I think my answer is going to be completely unsatisfying. So the project that I'm engaging in as I sort of conceive of it is... to sort of think

I'm sort of trying to capture different ways, different possibilities. And I'm trying to capture possibilities that intuitively seem to me to cohere with the way that I take the world to be. And so I think a lot of the time when I think about these questions, like the answer really... just is we've got some sort of sense some sort of independent sense of what our world is like of what seems plausible to say about our world and that is sort of what I'm

aiming at being able to characterize in an idealist way we know that we can give a materialist characterization of the way that we take the world to be can we give an idealist characterization so there is a sense in which i'm sort of taking for granted as background you know let's let's take the world to be this way that seems plausible um you know yeah it seems plausible of course that you know that these sorts of creatures um

experiences equally well capture reality and that they're different from mine furthermore um i suppose my worries to what extent you know talk about veridical experiences does it's sort of dependent on not necessarily a materialist point of view, but a view where we allow that our experience reports can be corrected.

where I can sincerely report that I'm having a certain kind of experience and, you know, I'd say the sun rising or whatever it might be. And somebody said, no, actually, it's the other way around. You're misperceiving it. And once we... except that experiences are kind of self-validating as it were, whatever experiences that is a bit of reality I'm in touch with, then I kind of lose the sense in which experience could ever not be veridical.

I'm going to get, I don't know. I can articulate this really clearly, but do you see where I'm getting, where I'm going? Sorry, I had two different thoughts, and my first thought, I think, maybe is not what you were getting at. So, I mean, one...

one thing could be sort of a matter of sort of distinguishing veridical perceptions from illusions and hallucinations and the like. Another thing could be a matter of you know imagining other possible creatures and saying that couldn't there just be an infinite number of possible experiences that they could be having and then wouldn't each of those equally well count um can i just ask which one of those well i started with the first I think, and I...

first question I thought I'm getting confused there was a bit that we can imagine all sorts of different possible experiences of this. And you know, so then that and we can imagine creatures that could experience it in, you know, infinitely different ways. And so

Doesn't that mean that the cup is infinitely complex? And then you said in response, I think that, well, we're only considering veridical experiences of the cup as part of the reality. And so then I started thinking, well, what makes an experience veridical on this view?

If you and I disagree about the colour of the cup sincerely, it looks one way to you and one way to me, there's no way of saying which is the correct way. They're both veridical experience. So when does an experience of the cup become? non-veridical. I mean, suppose I'm drunk and I'm kind of, you know, the public's all woozy and hazy and seems to be floating. Still, why isn't that veridical? And so experiences that we would normally say, no, that's...

By appeal to science, you'd say, look, you know, you've taken that drug and that's why everything seems to be floating around and merging into each other. Your perceptions are not veridical. Yeah, yeah. So...

That's because we know the mechanisms you see. Whereas if we just take the experiences at first as they present themselves, why aren't they veridical? Right. So I guess the first sort of question about the different sorts of creatures, I think that the sort of answer that I have to give is very much along the lines of what I mentioned about the dualist and how the dualist sort of could, you know, can say like, you know.

Well, there's just sort of a finite number of possible experiences that can be had. So each of these different perspectives that we could sort of, you know, each of these different creatures we could imagine evolving doesn't necessarily actually come along with a different perspective. So the other question about how to make make sense of illusion and hallucination. I really should have looked over my perception chapter because I wrote that very early on before coming here. But I think

Maybe just to start with hallucination because I think it's easier and then backtrack to illusion. So with hallucination, I guess in a sense, you're not asking how do you distinguish hallucinations? How within the theory, does the theory make sense of hallucinations, right? The theory makes sense of hallucinations because when I have an elephant hallucination, it's part of...

my phenomenal unity and not part of the tapestry. But what you're asking rather is, why should we think that any given thing belongs up here versus over here which is which is interesting and is not something that i've thought about enough i've been sort of pushing the work off to like don't we bloody know i mean come on can't we agree i think in a sense i've been sort of pushing it off to a materialist

way of thinking about it which i don't know is necessarily problematic for um for the idealist um to to to to take this sort of way of thinking and way of talking um you know i think we what is it that we're trying to account for well we're trying to account for some sort of reality that is shared a shared reality and when when you're the only one

the room who sees the elephant and everybody else doesn't see the elephant, that gives us a basis for thinking that it's up here versus down here. Yeah, and how do we account for that? Well, it's sort of... what else it's unified with in metaphysics. Illusions, I think I actually am inclined to think that, to take a sort of Barclian view of illusions, where in a sense there isn't a problem with your phenomenology.

the problem is with cognitively how you interpret it so all of those things that intuitively seem to be illusory actually i'm going to be like yeah that is part of the tapestry the problem is um when is is with well actually i'll also say i have a very thin view of what phenomenology is part of the tapestry i don't think cognitive phenomenology is part of the tapestry

i i don't think you know when i see you even in person i don't think that your your backside is part of what it is that i'm perceiving your backside exists but only because there are other perspectives on it so i have this very sparse view as to what the sensory phenomenology that's counting as part of the tapestry is and um the

illusory sort of phenomenology that I have will wind up counting as that, but then I've got all of these sort of filters through which I see it, through which I sort of cognize it. And those things can be totally screwed up and the world isn't necessarily So it is part of the tapestry, but I'm mistaken about which part it is. I didn't mean to take the final word. I'm conscious that I'm taking too much time up and Philip needs to have his...

yeah uh it's hard isn't it to stop these discussions so i had a few um related questions i was wondering why on this view we don't have psychic powers i was just at this festival philosophy festival the weekend just gone and speaking to rupert sheldrake have you ever heard of rupert sheldrake who's a sort of heretical scientist he has recently published something in the journal of consciousness studies arguing that the sun is conscious yeah but uh

he's the only person who's had a ted talk that ted pulled down because there were lots of complaints and then it went massively viral after anyway he so he he thinks like you um the consciousness extends outside the head but he thinks this facilitates kind of clairvoyance and you know various psychic abilities and he he thinks because he thinks there's lots of empirical evidence i i haven't looked at it but that people are aware when someone's staring at them

And he explains this because he thinks your consciousness, when you're staring at someone, reaches out your head and kind of touches them. Anyway, but just that was just an aside. But it seems to me if, you know, I'm looking at a tree and the tree.

my mind literally encompasses the tree and it's, like can i know lots of things about the tree without that without that being mediated why why is it that the only things i get to know about the tree are those that are mediated through light bouncing off it and going into my eyes if you know bloody tree is in my mind can't i just directly apprehend its properties without having to have light

yeah so i don't know that the bloody tree is in your mind um unfortunately it's not like you know we don't have this like little box and we picked up the tree and moved it into your mind and you're like tree That would be really cool. That would be more cool than what I think I can actually get. So I think, again, the sort of thing that I... I don't necessarily want to say like.

whether i think that there are minds or exactly what it takes to be a mind but the sort of thing that i'm i way i tend to think about this is just in terms of relations between things and so sort of the experiences that i have are all sort of related to each other in a certain way that you know seems to make them be you know subsumed under a single large experience so i've got this unity of consciousness relation between my experiences

um and the idea is that um when i perceive things so what's going on when i perceive this red cup um well light of course is bouncing off of the cup into my eyes things are happening in my brain and then

I think that what happens is that there are, as the dualist does, psychophysical bridging laws. The psychophysical bridging laws don't just attach on the view that I have, which I should say is not essential to idealism, is a somewhat... distinct add-on but on the view i have the bridging laws have to do not just with what's happening in my brain but with what's happening in my brain and the things that are causally impacting on me and in the case where

where you know there is a thing appropriately causally impacting on me and causing this stuff to happen in my brain the idea is that rather than generating new phenomenology I have the same phenomenology that would have been generated by my brain on that standard dualist view, but the identity of that phenomenology is different. It's not... a new generated phenomenology. It is one and the same phenomenology as is present within the tapestry.

But why isn't that the tree being in my head then? I mean, the tree is this bit of phenomenal tapestry, and that bit of phenomenal tapestry is in my mind. Well, so only the, I mean, like when you think about, like, what is it that I... Just think about a standard dualist view. What is it that I experience when I look at the cup?

I experience from one particular vantage point, this redness fading into blueness and this particular, you know, shape. And that's basically it. I don't experience, I don't have the experience that a bat would have, that a bee would have. I don't have all the experiences that God. would have and similarly what experiences what facets of the tapestry of reality do i wind up in contact with well my mind gets expanded but it just gets expanded to overlap with those narrow facets um

So it's not the tree itself in all its rich glory. I see. I see. Oh no. Okay. Fair enough. So it's, it's some aspects of the tree, but it still seems like. And I can know those. I know those directly. I really know those aspects. Thinking in like Bayesian says that what you'd expect to be true on this view, if our mind could sometimes reach out and envelop bits of the material world, you'd expect...

that sometimes we'd be able to know things about the material world without them having to be mediated. So it seems like a bit unexpected that the only things I can know about things out there are when light mediates. the the information why why would that if if if if if all the time you know my mind literally overlapped with the physical world you'd think

You know, why couldn't I know about things without the information being mediated? Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, it's a genuinely interesting question that I need to think more about. Well, that's not how the world works. But just I still think in some sort of level. you'd think that you'd think it would be isn't the answer i mean wouldn't ideally say something like well that's true you can you can know the qualities of things

I mean, the whole point about the story about the light and the stuff in your visual cortex is that it doesn't explain that. That's what Mary doesn't know, right? Yeah, I suppose so. It tells you something. It tells you the quality of the thing. Yeah. So, I mean, I do think that there are genuine aspects of the tree that we are indirectly aware of, that we directly grasp, that we grasp sort of the nature of these things, of the facets that we are aware of.

I mean, I take your point to be that like, why are we only aware of those facets? Why aren't we aware of other facets? Why do we systematically only perceive, you know, systematically when I look at this. I tap into the redness of this part and the blueness of this part, my inverted twin would systematically be tapping into the yellowness of this and the greenness of this. Why am I systematically tapping into some and not other threads?

tap into the bits that we have some mediated connection with like you know i tap into the bits that where the light bounces off but if my mind is reaching out into the world yeah i think it'd be able to get onto bits that are not mediated through light and see you know i mean yeah i mean i guess it depends on how you how you

think about it so if you if you come to it and you're like told hey there's this view where our minds reach out into the world um and then you're like told oh but they only reach out into a little bit of it you're like but why like that makes no sense and i completely understand that feeling

on the other hand i'm sort of thinking of it and i'm like you know we've got this story as to you know what's going on in our minds that what's going on in our minds involves these bridging laws and the bridging laws are precisely the things that are causing our minds to extend into the world and

And they are providing the explanation as to why it is that we tap into the things that we do. But then you might ask, well, why do we, why think that the bridging, that we have bridging laws that work this way that only allow us to tap into these things and not this other sort of picture? I mean, I guess the answer is to why it is that I'm endorsing bridging laws that work like this, and this is sort of the background story, just is that when I look around and I look at the cup,

all I seem to be aware of is the redness and the blueness and the shape, like I just don't have all those other things. And if I had those other things, if empirically things just presented differently, then I would wind up telling a different story about why they do. But do I have a story about why we should expect that to be the case? That's where I think I don't have... So you could just say it's how the world works. I mean, I guess...

Just quickly to other thoughts I had that are very closely related. I mean, so one thing is like, why have we, an evolutionary question, why have we evolved this way? Given that we only... get information about things that are causally mediated to us why is why does evolution care that we re our consciousness overlaps with the cup it seems like uh you know

Given that that only gives us information about the things that are mediated through light hitting our eyes, it seems like a creature that just took the information from the light and generated an internal representation.

uh more like anil seth's book viewers but that would survive just as well so you know why have we evolved um but yeah i guess you might just say that's just how the bridging laws work Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's, I guess it's a sort of a standard move that non-physicalists make, you know, why would, presumably the bridging laws don't evolve, the bridging laws just are laws that, you know, why are they the way that they are?

satisfying i know when i say it than when um standard dualists say it but that's what it is here's my final question then these are all very closely connected i was just walking around thinking about it today um it seems like oh my gosh

it's okay that's me um just a second it seems like the bridging laws uh are kind of it's pretty fortunate that the bridging laws are like that because

In the good cases, they put us in direct contact with reality, which seems like a good thing. So it seems like I'm worried that your world is... suggests design a bit like the world the fundamental laws of nature set up so that even though it's not relevant for survival in the good good case good conceptual cases we come in direct contact with her so i'm worried you know you're trying to get rid of god but i'm worried here back in through the back door because this is here

Yeah, I'm actually, because that's, you know, when I said at the outset, you know, God, ooh, agnostic, that I sort of find, you know, there to be some, you know, I find the fine-tuning arguments, especially given that I... have non-physicalist intuitions and that you know i i'm inclined to think that my ex my experiences are

distinct from brain states and then you get this question of well isn't it fortunate that you know the valences of my experiences um go along in the ways that they do with the things that are good and bad for me um and you know isn't it fortunate the way that the bridging laws worked out and I think that that you know that that does provide that that sort of in a fine-tuning kind of way provides some you know

reason to push in favor of at least some sort of god maybe like a deist watchmaker god at the very least um and you're saying don't you have the same and maybe maybe even more so um as an idealist who's embracing bridging laws that are doing this additional weird work. I have to think about that. That would be an interesting endpoint to wind up sort of circling back around to something much closer to Berkeley.

I will say I'm not necessarily opposed to that. The view, while I've sort of described it as idealism without God before, I don't take it to be in any way incompatible with God. And I think that even if... you sort of like sort of a more traditional Barclay and conception where reality is perhaps ideas in the mind of God. I think that it can still be useful to do the sort of work that I'm doing because I'm trying to do the work of actually looking at how do the threads.

fit together and what it is that's structuring them and what it is that they are and those are things that Barclay sort of well it's God and they sort of doesn't get into so I still think that regardless that there is very interesting work. sort of to be done here and that can be done in part by sort of freeing yourselves from thinking in in in terms of god at least of a traditional sort um but yeah i'm gonna have to think about that philip thanks

No, it's really interesting. It's got me thinking. OK. Oh, just quick correction on reality. I said I made a mistake that Graham Hancock also shares the honour with Rupert Sheldrake of having a banned TED talk. um but anyway so we'll move on to some questions there are a couple of questions if anyone wants to put up a question with uh just just q in the title um i think the first was

Katka Sklutovka, sorry, Katka Sklutova. I apologize for... Okay, so the question is, what do you think about functionalist theories of consciousness? And what is the relationship between... idealistic view and a more functionalist view of consciousness ah okay um so i'll say i am so i've said already that i'm i i

even when I don't have my idealist hat on, that I am not drawn to reductive views of consciousness. So I think that, you know, you tell me all about the physical workings of the brain, whether those physical workings are material or... phenomenal fundamentally and you tell me all about how it is that they work how they function what they're made of that that's not going to be enough to tell me what it is that is what it is that's being felt

that's sort of their standard arguments for this that are not my own that i i'm in favor of um So I'm inclined to think that functionalist theories whether of a materialist sort or given within an idealist framework are not going to be enough to explain consciousness. But that being said, I think sometimes people present certain objections to functionalism as though they were objections that dualists and the like were immune to. And I also think that that's kind of ridiculous. So when I teach...

things like the China Brain Thought Experiment in a philosophy of mind class. So this is the idea that you could have everybody in in china or a large country mimicking neurons and behaving functioning as though they were a brain and that the functionalist would need to say that the population of China was thereby conscious and this is sort of presented as a challenge to functionalism. I think that you know dualists also face a challenge here because dualists of course are going to have to say

give us an answer as to what it is that the bridging law is attached to. So dualists are going to have to say, you know, it's C-fibers firing in particular that is what the bridging law attaches to causing pain, or it's some functional state.

And so when I think about what it is that are the relevant neural correlates of consciousness or the relevant physical correlates of consciousness, I am attracted to a functionalist account, so I think I would also be in the same boat on things like having to say that the population of China was conscious, even though I'm not a functionalist in terms of identifying the two.

thank you very much um jack eastling has asked what he's asked um for a question for all three of us what is the view we find most theoretically virtuous but well maybe i mean i've my answer would be panpsychism. I think Keith's would be illusions. Maybe we could save discussion of that for our Ask Me Anything next month. But I mean, in terms of you, for you, Helen, is this, is that you said 30% credence to this?

is that is that do you think that's higher for you than any other view of consciousness or um or is it is there a tide with anything I'm a committed epiphenomenalist, regardless of the nature of the physical world. Yeah. epiphenomenalists um think that uh basically that you know you're you're you're physical states somehow cause your experiences, but that your experiences don't play any causal role in the world. So I've sort of got this constant generation of phenomenology.

doesn't actually affect anything because we can give physical purely physical explanations as to why it is that my physical body does all the things that it does so whether or not I'm a whether or not i've got my idealist hat on or my um or my materialist hat on i am in camp epiphenomenalism um it looks slightly different of course because sometimes i'm overlapping with reality and sometimes i'm not

But I think I probably am more on the materialist side in terms of the credences I give, you know, like when I sort of plot out. all the possibilities. And I'm like, where do I think we most likely are? More likely, I think we probably are on the materialist side still. But as I've been working on idealism, I've gradually shifted to giving more and more weight to idealism. So you do think materialism is more likely to be true?

Yeah, it depends on the day. Sometimes it's 50-50. So you're not convinced by these arguments against materialism? I mean, while I've been, you know, trying to offer a really forceful defense of the view, I do find at least some pull to the isn't that bongers complex.

um sort of line that Keith was pushing um so yeah so I'm I mean I give I give a very I give a sizable amount of credence to idealism being true um but um And I have been drifting further and further that way, but I'm not all the way there yet. I think Helen's attitude here is wonderful. I think it's exactly the right attitude to take towards philosophical theory, theorizing that if you worry too much about what you actually believe.

and whether you really believe the view you're arguing for. It becomes so stressful. question is to take a view that you find interesting and you think is fruitful and that's worth people taking seriously and do the best job you can of defend. I'm sort of addressing this to people who might be sort of thinking about doing a PhD or something like that.

Don't worry too much about whether you believe. Ask yourself whether it's an interesting region of logical space, as Helen talked about. And I think the way Helen has presented her view here, in a sort of modest way, this is something worth...

considering i think this is this is this is exactly the right way to do it and it really that's the way to make people take you seriously not be dogmatic about it i mean i guess we still want to be ultimately interested in you know trying to guess what the world is like but that that's still compatible with trying out possibilities that's part of

that journey to having our best this is why this subject is still philosophy because we're we're not at the stage where we've established a a really solid consensus and we are just trying out um theoretical frameworks that's what philosophy is so you've given us your credences helen what what are your what is your credence that your credences are correct oh no this was nice i feel confident about my credences but i i have a low credence that my credences are right

I don't know. My meta credence is, I don't know. Okay, another question from Anui. Is Helen's view related to Donald Hoffman's view? Do you know Donald Hoffman's view? No, maybe they can help me out. Donald Hoffman is a kind of idealist, actually. He's written a book called The Case Against Reality. He thinks that... At the fundamental level, there are networks of conscious agency, calls them, and reality. I think, well, I could...

I mean, he likes to think, say, we live in a virtual world. So he has a metaphor of, like, the icons on a computer screen or something. So the table is just a sort of... the interface between me and reality so reality is nothing like what we experience so although i would say you're both idealists but actually what your view is is much more realist that the real world is there and it's as we experience it whereas hoffman

The real world is nothing like we experience it. What we seem to experience is a sort of virtual reality. Actually, if you could tell me the name of the book or... or send me an email later that would be cool so thank you thank you for the question i'm sorry i can't say anything enlightening to it um but it would be it would be great to to look up um sorry i'm just scrolling down now oh katka also asked about

What's the difference in cognitive phenomenology and phenomenology of consciousness? I guess the word cognitive phenomenology slipped in at some point. Sorry. Yes. So. So cognitive phenomenology then very, very roughly would just be the phenomenology of thoughts. So I'm inclined to think that, you know, I sit back and I think about what I need to do today and that there is some phenomenology to that.

thinking um and it's not just sort of phenomenology of like hearing my voice in my head that it can't be reduced to that but that there's actually some sort of something primitive to the thought phenomenology. I think similarly, like when I look at a triangle and I see it as a triangle, that there is that same sort of thought phenomenology. There's a conscious experience of seeing it as the triangle in the same way that there's a conscious experience of thinking contentful thoughts.

So I think that when I, let's see if I can come up with a good example for the illusions case. I think that when, so if you've got the Mueller-Lyer illusion. See if I can draw this out well. I don't know what these are. Hopefully I've done this well enough. I've got our Mueller a liar illusion. And I was saying that I think that the phenomenology that I have when I look at this actually will be part of the tapestry. So Keith was asking me, how do we distinguish?

veridical phenomenology from um from phenomenology that's not veridical um so i think that the brute phenomenology will be part of the tapestry um but i think that when i look at it that

longer, I don't think longer and shorter and those sorts of things are actually part of the brute phenomenology. I think that those are things that are actually part of our sort of thought phenomenology that sort of a cognitive overlay on this pure sensory phenomenology that's part of the tapestry and that sensory overlay that sort of conceptualization that sort of feeling of conceptualization that's not part of the tapestry that on my view is

it's kind of almost like um i don't know if this is a terrible analogy but like i think about those like overhead transparencies for viewers who are old enough to know what i'm talking about and um so you'd have these clear um for youngins, clear plastic things that you could put one over another and you could draw on it with marker and then you could sort of lay them over each other. I sort of think of it of our sort of thought phenomenology.

as being kind of an overhead transparency that's sort of modifying within my mind, modifying how I experience the totality of it. But not all of that is part of the tapestry. Would you say the same about illusions, designs where there seems to be movement, where we look at a static image and we seem to see rotation or something. Would you say that would have a cognitive effect as well, or is that part of the phenomenology? Or is that just too complex?

I haven't thought about those illusions enough. I've got this section on it and I've got some holes in what I've written and there are certain particular illusions and things that I haven't gotten to. But thank you for... It would be really interesting to think about. this perspective. However it pans out, it's an interesting issue, I think.

One last question. OnReality asks, do you see varying metaphysics resulting in different ethics or value systems? Do they deliver different psychological attitudes to reality which affect our interpretation of meaning? So the connection between metaphysics and value, I guess. Ah, okay. That's interesting. The short answer is no, but I'm going to struggle to put into words why the short answer is no. Hold on a sec.

I'm trying to think of a way of saying this intelligently in a way that brings it all together and I'm sort of failing to do that. But I guess when I started off and Philip asked me, is morality objective? And I said, yes. And then the sort of short answer as to why, because Hitler was objectively evil. I sort of think, you look at the space.

of possible worlds you look at all the different possibilities is there any world where there's somebody behaving like hitler and that isn't just evil um no he was necessarily evil um So you can sort of vary the metaphysics, I think, and play with it in any way you like. But I don't think that that changes those sorts of facts. Yeah, I'm sorry that...

I didn't come together in a really punchy way, but I think that's what I endorse. That makes a lot of sense. Well, we better store things to a close. It's been really great chatting, Helen. Could you tell me? Would you be willing to share the working title of your book that you took? Oh, yes. So it is tentatively titled The View from Everywhere, Realist Idealism Without God. You said you were thinking of writing a children's version as well. Yeah. Well, I'm...

This is not yet underway, but once the book is finished, I would really, really like to sort of have a book that was the view from everywhere for kids and actually just takes chapter by chapter. I'd hopefully really clear and accessible way explains the background of the issues and what the view is without getting into the nitty gritties, but in a way that hopefully would be accessible to sort of 10 year olds.

And I just, I really want to persuade some publisher to sort of start a whole line of translating, you know, actual philosophy books and then having the for kids version, which would go for kids. I think I would love that. I would read them.

And, you know, I suspect that that would be a lot harder to write than the original and that it actually might even force us to rethink some things that sometimes it's so easy to adopt a sort of theory and let the theory... know sort of get its own momentum going and it has its own rationales and everything everything makes sense in the theory and you develop but as soon as you start to set it at to set it in a wider context and try to explain why that's the right theory

It transforms the way you see it. I think it would be a great exercise for every philosopher to rewrite their books and papers for 10-year-olds. I think so too. I'm hoping I can persuade some publisher to start a series. I'm totally down with being an editor once my book is finished. If any publishers listening to this would like to set me up.

It's been a super fun and also really helpful for me discussion. Well, thank you. I really enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Helen. It's been wonderful. Everyone to check out Helen's work. Her website is linked to in the... video description. And thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Thank you, Helen. Great discussion. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Brilliant. Yes. Enjoy that.

schedule again but sorry we didn't keep the schedule again oh no we've run over by half an hour but it was good i mean it would it would have been uh it would have been a shame to cut it short and uh I enjoyed that. I really like the way Helen presented that. My credence in idealism is still pretty low, but I think maybe it might have just edged up a little notch.

for that discussion. And that's what Helen's trying to do. She's trying to make people open to alternative possibilities. And I thought it was beautifully presented. I enjoyed it. Yeah. I mean, I think the most interesting bit is the perception stuff, which you talked about. You know, that's what's quite unique about the position, this ability to make sense of this. direct contact with reality and our kind of how close that is to our sort of common sense way of looking at the world and

Yeah, I mean, I think that is quite a unique aspect. I mean, I don't have a lot of faith in common sense when it comes to thinking about consciousness, but...

It's still a very interesting exercise to see what happens if you take certain assumptions, if you start with certain assumptions and say, we're not going to, we're going to try and... produce a picture that vindicates that aspect of our common sense picture and what kind of how do you make that consistent with everything else and how do you build on that on that foundation it's a really interesting exercise at the very least to do that that's how you get a sense of the of

you know the shape of the landscape of the theoretical options and their attractions so it's important that people do this i think um even if you don't buy it in the end absolutely i like our new bits but you bits at the beginning of the show actually i'm talking a bit more generally about the person and uh views on the big questions and stuff i think it's nice to get to know the guests a little bit more i think but yeah

I need to apologise. I don't think I've done the last podcast or the audio version. Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you. I'll get that done as soon as possible. I've just been getting everything set up here. I'll get that done. You've been very stressed in the living house, haven't you? and uh so yes i'll get that and this one up as soon as as soon as possible cool well we were

We were going to talk about your reply to me in my volume, but maybe we should leave that till next time. I guess we're getting... It's my father-in-law's birthday today, actually. So I should probably... I said I'd be... finished by five should probably go and um have some champagne and cake and stuff um 60th birthday 60th

they're staying uh the in-laws staying anyway this isn't interesting to anybody but um so we should we definitely do that next time let's do that next time yes and let's volume that's coming out next month actually on essays on panpsychism and Keith had one of them. Galileo's real error. And then I have a response and that would be good to talk about.

both of which are online videos. Great. And so the next thing, we're going to have the Ask Me Anything next, and then we're going to have Sean Carroll. Is that right? That's it. And then... oh yeah we we have got some more guests confirmed we should probably announce that um uh at some point but maybe we'll maybe we could maybe we could do a little um little video just announcing the guests an intro video with explosions and things yeah special effects yeah that would be good

If people want to write in questions for next month's Ask Me Anything on mindchat2014 at gmail.com. Let's put that on the website as well, on YouTube. the email address. Yes, so ask us anything, I guess, related to consciousness and philosophy of mind. Yes, or anything.

well i suppose if you could ask about your band within reason within reason yes ask me almost anything i think isn't it okay laughing in the background actually all right so well i think you know there are some things we agree on um you know I've forgotten how we do it now. I mean, one thing, you know, we can agree that consciousness is wherever it is. And nowhere else. I've forgotten how you do it.