Idealism vs Materialism Debate | Christof Koch, Bernardo Kastrup & Anil Seth

This is a very special session to me that took a very long time to put together. I am very excited for it. The interdisciplinary conference on psychedelic research and the Asencia Foundation organized a debate on math physics. Participants: Anil Seth, Bernardo Castro, and Kristof Koch.

Anil, have you ever had an experience of becoming one with everything? Compared to yours? I, it's hard to know, isn't it, that you lose a sense of self, that there's no more self, yet whatever remains of you is now one with everything? I'm just asking you. I remember I left my lab a kind of a note before going and said, "If I come back as an idealist, please stage an intervention." If I can have that sense of hyper-reality in that mental realm, how can I be sure that this is any different right now? And a lot of people say, "Bro, you're on drugs there, and here you're not." And of course, that's not true. We are on drugs right now. It's called serotonin, and it looks very much like psilocin. The only thing that truly exists, in some sense, is the mental. It's a phenomenon. You can't take experience as reality in that sense. It's not an insight. It is the only reality I have access to. I don't know about atoms. I don't know about superstrings and black holes and brains. All I know is what I see, what I hear, what I touch. Every scientist only accesses the world through seeing. Uh, could the dying process be accompanied not by a sort of a reduction of the experiential field, but rather an explosion of the experiential field? The version of materialism that I have can be redescribed, in some sense, as a transcendental idealism. And there's a numinum, the thing that's unknown. And everything that we know is sort of on the other side of this veil that will always carve out the...

So, you're one of us?

No, I'm not one of you, though. I'm not one of you, though, because... Now, the first question I want to open up with is, um, how has the neuroscientific study of psychedelics influenced your understanding of consciousness? Did it make you change your views or theories? And maybe, Anil, to start with you on that one.

Well, thank you. Thank you, Anil. Firstly, it's a great pleasure to be here. I'm sorry I was so hard to to pin down, but I'm super happy to have made it. Um, and thank you for tolerating the presence of a pragmatic materialist, metaphysical disclosure. You know, I like to wear my metaphysics lightly, but I am sort of working with the idea that materialism is a useful perspective to hold, which is, you know, very broadly, the idea that mind, consciousness are properties of physical stuff, whatever physical stuff ultimately is. We'll talk about metaphysics more, I'm sure. Bernardo, to the question which has already disappeared, but what has psychedelics, how has psychedelics changed my, informed my understanding of consciousness, neuroscientific study of it? So, I think the key thing for me here is that I think psychedelic experiences are a really profound and valuable window that discloses things about experience. It discloses the structure of experience in consciousness research in general. I think because of the desire to be very well-controlled in the laboratory experiments that we do, that Kristof has pioneered over many years, we often really simplify what we study in terms of the conscious experience involved. Dots go to the left or dots go to the right. Is it a face? Is it a house? These are very, very, very reductive kinds of conscious experiences. And so we run the risk of making assumptions about the wider richness of conscious experience. Like, does there have to be a self? Um, do we, you know, do we have to experience perception in a kind of radical way of disclosing things about the real world? And I think psychedelics can be very, very valuable in this, especially for me, when it comes to what we think of about experiences of the self. You know, there's the phenomenon of ego dissolution. This can really drive home how the experience of being the subject of experience is not necessary. It may be there much of the time, but it's not always necessary. This is very, very, very useful. So we can learn much more about what it is we're trying to explain when we're trying to explain consciousness. The other thing, and then I'll stop, is that in trying to get to grips with a complex phenomenon, I think whatever metaphysical perspective you hold, it's great to have some things you can do, some interventions you can make, some knobs you can turn. And just as we can use anesthesia to sort of knock out or potentially knock out consciousness in a controlled and reversible way, psychedelics do something to the brain, whatever the brain is, and stuff happens in conscious experience as well. So it's a very useful manipulation that allows us to track relations between observations we make about brain activity and observations that we might make about phenomenology. That's incredibly useful. It's a way, perhaps, of putting some of this vast, uh, tangle of theories somewhat to the test.

Thank you. And, uh, if I hear it correctly, I don't hear you say any anomalies arising from psychedelic research regarding your views of consciousness that you already had, so to speak.

No, I mean, to so I, there's one, one, I'll give you one, sorry. There was one time, so there's two questions, my own psychedelic experiences or reading about the study of psychedelic...

That's, let's save your for your for the next question, your own one, yeah.

But, but maybe Bernardo, nice to hear you on this question. So, how has the neuroscientific, the empirical results we see from psychedelic research influenced your thinking about consciousness?

Well, when the renaissance of psychedelics kicked off around 2006 to 2008, I was already an idealist, so it didn't really change my mind in that sense, but it caused me to explore the broader implications of idealism, which I was not thinking about. Um, in the first phase of the psychedelic renaissance, there were a lot of phenomenological studies, mainly at Johns Hopkins. There was a famous study where they collected the statistics of many different experiencers, and they could say that most people would classify a psychedelic experience as top five or even top three in intensity and meaning in their lives, right up there with the birth of your first child or losing a parent. So that didn't surprise me. But then from 2012 onwards, there were those studies of the physiology that accompanies the psychedelic experience. And I am an objective idealist. So to me, brain activity is what experience looks like from the outside. So I was pretty certain that the psychedelic experience would correlate with the brain sort of lighting up like a Christmas tree, not a grand mal seizure. Um, and don't you worry, I'm not presupposing that experience correlates trivially with the amount of brain activity. I'm not saying that. But I think I, and most of the world, expected that a very intense, rich, meaningful experience would correlate with very intense, rich patterns of brain activity. And that was not the case. If anything, it's the opposite. So that blew my mind. That was 2012. And I took a step back and I thought, okay, how do I make sense of this? And luckily, analytic idealism offers a way to be reconciled with this, which is that if brain activity is what experience looks like, it's the image of the process, not the cause of it, then images, unlike causes, don't need to be complete. They don't need to tell everything there is to know about the thing they are an image of. The image of you right now doesn't betray your heart rate, the details of your metabolism, or what's happening under your jacket. The same under analytic idealism would be applicable to the physiology of the psychedelic experience. But the main thing that it made me ponder was this: If some, not spectacular, but consistent reductions of brain activity can correlate directly with a tremendous increase in the richness, intensity, the meaning of experience, like the Johns Hopkins studies showed, what about when brain activity stops altogether?

You know, what about it when we die? Could the dying process be accompanied not by a sort of a reduction of the experiential field, but rather an explosion of the experiential field? And the answer is, I don't know, but I find entertaining the question very appealing.

And you do think you would put your chips on it being a fireworks show instead of being black?

I mean, when our brain stops, you would put your chips on... And that experience, of course, continues.

Yes. During the process of dying, I reserve my opinion for what happens long-term afterwards. I don't think there would be a personal subject to talk of a personal experience, but certainly in the process of dying, yeah, I would put my chips there. Yeah. And that's why I'm afraid of death.

And this gentleman is not afraid of death, you.

Oh, am I not? I remember you saying that when we conversed, when I interviewed you, I remember that you didn't have any problem with the perhaps nothingness you might experience then.

I suppose, I mean, I aspire to that state. I think it's a reasonable state to hold. You know, our sense of self is always changing anyway. You know, it's a very Buddhist view, if you like. So what people are often afraid of with death is that they, their personal identity will no longer be around. It's always changing anyway. So it's sort of not something that you could reasonably hope to preserve. And there's a weird kind of asymmetry, too. We don't tend to be full of angst about all the time that passed before we were born. Yeah. But somehow we are full of angst about all the time. We have this kind of weird FOMO about the future, but not the past. So, you know, of course, but I'm like, I can't help being still apprehensive of death because it's a big deal.

Yeah. Thank you. I agree completely with this. Kristof, um, how has psychedelic research influenced your views on consciousness? And how does it fit or doesn't fit with Integrated Information Theory, your theory of consciousness?

Well, first of all, I guess we have to separate the neuroscientific study of psychedelics and what we've learned in the human brain, primarily fMRI, which of course is not a direct signature of neurons, but of hemodynamics. And in mouse brain, so we record routinely in the brains of mice that get high doses of psychedelics, psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT. And what's remarkable, so, you know, we have now, we record, let's say, 50,000 neurons while these animals supposedly are tripping. And it's remarkable how little changes in the brain. Yeah, there are some neurons somewhere that go a little bit up, 10, 12%, and some neurons that go down. And of course, in the hemodynamics, we think it leads to a reduction in certain parts of the brain like the default mode network, but it's still very early, I would say, in the neuroscience of psychedelics. On the other hand, the psychology of psychedelics and also the experiential aspects of psychedelics, they can teach us a lot. So what it's taught me is, and I came to psychedelics very late in my life, only 10 years ago or so. And what it has taught me, what I sort of knew intellectually and scientifically, but had no, to use the language of Bertrand Russell, no direct acquaintance with, are things like space, time, and self are complete constructs of the brain. Right? So under certain experiences, they are timeless. They're neither too short nor too long. They simply are. They don't have any space. They aren't anywhere. There isn't any space. Space can collapse into sort of a singularity that people often describe as a tunnel. And of course, as Anil already alluded to, you can get complete loss of self. So all of this, you know, in accordance with transcendental idealism of Kant, a construct that we need to orient ourselves and to survive, you know, in a world that's subject to natural selection. Everything has to have a particular time, has to be now or in the past or in the future. Has to have a particular location. And of course, we need a sense of self in order to plan short-term, medium-term, and long-term. But all of those are optional. But what still remains is conscious experience. And then the other thing that it's taught me, which is really a challenge, I would say, to physicalism, aka materialism, is that under certain conditions that you can have on psychedelics, but you can also have near-death experiences, or the overview effect when people, astronauts are looking back from space at planet Earth, or so-called religious conversion experiences, or just spontaneous being in nature, that you can, not only so what happens or what can happen in these states, they're called mystical experiences, non-dual experiences, peak experiences, they have lots of different names, that you access something that feels like you become one, you not only lose your sense of self, but you become one with everything. This is a common experience that people can have where there's no more me, there's no more I, but what there is a sense that I'm one with the universe. And that's the title of my book, "I'm Myself the World." And this is a fact. This is knowledge by direct acquaintance, which is different from propositional knowledge or procedural knowledge, which is, you know, that's what science and technology is about. It's all about procedure and propositional knowledge. And this, as William James already pointed out, you know, 120 years ago, has a curious authority over you forevermore. So you have experienced this, or whatever remained of my conscious experience has become one, that's how it felt. And so now when you come back to everyday consensual reality, you know, you're a scientist, I'm still a scientist, you know, I work in the brain every day, almost. But then you also had now this experience, and you have to reconcile it. And then you wonder, well, what about the, what about the metaphysical assumption, the implicit metaphysical assumption of science is materialism, physicalism? It doesn't have to be like that. Right? Science is just a practical tool that we've invented. That's by far the best method we have to predict and to manipulate. If you want to predict the weather three days from now, you use science. If you want to build things that blow up big time, every regime on the planet, whether you're a theocracy and believe, whether you're a theocracy or you're just a dialectical materialist, what do you do? You build nuclear bombs, because the physics of nuclear fusion and fission simply works. But you don't have to take the, you don't just because science works, you don't have to accept the underlying metaphysical claims. That's called scientism, that the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge, to be precise, is physical knowledge, in particular when physics itself doesn't really know what the physical is or what the material is. Right? We have great difficulty now in defining it. And so then you appeal to much older models of metaphysics, become much more relevant, because when you come back from these mystical experiences, most people instinctively turn to some form of pantheism, pantheism, or idealism, that the only thing that truly exists, in some sense, is the mental, is a phenomenon.

Thank you, Kristof. So that's what psychedelics have taught me. M. Thank you. And thank you for making a wonderful bridge to our second question, because this is exactly what you're hinting at, the direct acquaintance with something that feels more real than real. The Asencia Foundation exists to share with the world that consciousness is fundamental in our universe. It's our essence, our essencia. This worldview is known as non-dualism or idealism. Not only is it more compatible with modern science, it also gives deep meaning to our lives.

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For many people, coming back from these experiences makes them think that there's epistemically the knowledge is valid. So what I've experienced can be real, and can be real beyond just having had a mirror reflection upon myself. That's an experience many people have. And, as I hear you correctly, Kristof, maybe you can explain a bit later, you're sort of leaning in that direction, that there might be something true there. And of course, you're a scientist, you want to be rigorous. I know, maybe nice for you, this one. So to you, what is sort of the epistemic status of these experiences? Do they only reflect something of the unconscious that's already in our psyche, the personal psyche, and not beyond? Or is there knowledge about a world out there in these experiences?

I am of the opinion that most of the epistemic value of psychedelic experience is psychological. It's phenomenological. It is not metaphysical. I think, as I said at the beginning, that psychedelics are brilliant at disclosing the structure of experience, at breaking down some of the assumptions that we have. I think the three of us, maybe the four of us, maybe all of us, agree that the world that we experience is not the world as it really is. That what we experience is, in some sense, and maybe in different senses, a construction, an interpretation, the self, the same. And I think this is a really powerful insight. Psychedelics can help sort of put that insight onto some solid ground. But to take Kristof's example, and Kristof and I have enjoyed discussing this point before, about the example of, let's say, you have an experience of being one with the universe. Is that epistemically valuable? Does it have any evidential value for the metaphysical claim that consciousness is universal? I don't think it does. I think it's grounds for claiming that whatever is the basis of experience, that kind of experience is achievable by a human brain in a particular state, an embodied human brain in a particular state. To put it in a little bit of a cliché, it's a difference between taking experiences seriously and taking them literally. So, Kristof, when we talked about this last year, you know, the pushback I gave you was something like an out-of-body experience. People can have this. They can have them on psychedelics. They have them in other cases as well. They're real and meaningful experiences for the people that have them. So we should take them seriously. Should we take them literally, in the sense that they're evidence that consciousness has left the body and gone to a different location? Maybe. But I think that would be a poor interpretation of the results. Firstly, you'd have to explain how it is that consciousness can still see stuff even though the eyes have stayed where the body is. And also the fact that you can induce out-of-body experiences by stimulating the brain in particular ways. I think it's much more enlightening to recognize that an out-of-body experience tells us that the first-person perspective and its location is something the brain is always working to produce. So that tells a lot about consciousness. So there is epistemic value in an out-of-body experience, but it doesn't, the conclusion to draw is not a metaphysical one that consciousness can be separated from the physical body and move around. And I would say the same, I would say the same applies to other psychedelic experiences as well. They don't tell us metaphysical truths.

Okay, Kristof, you wanted to ask a question to Anil.

Anil, have you ever had an experience of becoming one with everything?

Well, I mean, like, compared to yours? It's hard to know, isn't it? Let's not go there.

No, no, not compared to mine. Have you ever had the experience that you lose a sense of self, that there's no more self, yet whatever remains of you is now one with everything? I'm just asking you, you know.

Yeah. In front of people. Yeah. Um, yeah, that's that's fine. I mean, I was part of a trial in which that was the substance. And I have to say, you know, I remember I left my lab a kind of a note before going and said, "If I come back as an idealist, please stage an intervention."

Okay, that's nice. Anyway.

No, wait, but you didn't answer my question. Did you not become one with...

Well, I think I, you know, no, to be honest, you know, these experiences, they do, they really are incredibly fascinating because these aspects of ego that you've have always been there at some point in space and time are not there. What do I take from that after the fact? No, I don't take that as evidence of a different kind of metaphysics. I take it as evidence of the aspects of our everyday conscious experience that are always being constructed, and that we have to explain. It's a, it's a, it's really valuable data about how the brain creates experience, and in the deepest levels. But it doesn't tell us that you can't take experience as reality in that sense. It's not an insight.

It is the only reality I have access to. I don't know about atoms. I don't know about superstrings and black holes and brains. All I know is what I see, what I hear, what I touch. Every scientist only accesses the world through seeing, through hearing, through thinking. All of those are conscious activity. So it seems much more natural to take my experience as given, and then everything else, like the existence of elementary particles and these things called neurons, as inferred. It's a practical, useful thing to infer them. But do they have any reality, in particular, if we compare it against our conscious experiences?

Thank you, Kristof, to to sharpen a bit the discussion. We're hitting metaphysics. I like, I like where this is going. Um, what I'm sensing here, listening to different talks, is that especially in therapeutic sessions, there is this, and I think it's a good thing. Uh, I mean, in the psychedelic research, there's this metaphysical menu, I think, proposed by the philosopher Peter Shadet, use. I think that's good as a therapist to not say, "I'm an idealist, so what you experienced was the mind of the universe. How great!" You shouldn't do that, right? Should the... And that gives us sort of, but that doesn't sort of exempt us from doing the thinking, how to distinguish between signal and noise in these experiences. I think many here would agree that a lot of it is noisy. But then we have sometimes green stuff is hitting at that you have these experiences of real signal. Bernardo, philosophically, what and rationally grounds do we have to distinguish? There can we distinguish between signal and noise in these experiences?

I think we can make an effort in that direction, yes. Look, my starting point is, I agree with Kristof. I think mental stuff has must be given ontological precedence because it's all we have at the end of the day. Anything beyond the mental is an explanatory device, and we have to ask ourselves, do we need it to make sense of the world, or do we not? If we do need it, then by all means, I'm stupid to be convinced that we do need it. But I think that is an insight we don't need the psychedelic experience to have. It's an insight of the rational mind. To me, the main thing about the psychedelic experience is the following. Um, let me start with a disclaimer. I am very suspicious of the particular details of a psychedelic experience. When people come back from a trip saying, "Oh, bro, I have been to the Pleiades and I talked to the aliens and they're sending us heart vibrations through the galactic center or whatnot." I have the impulse to roll my eyes. I think people are not, by and large, not critical enough. I think the trickster archetype is totally loose in the psychedelic realm. But I do think if we try to see through that, there is something of metaphysical significance, and it is the following. Um, I think most of you have done a psychedelic experience, right? So most of you will connect with what I'm about to say. There is an extraordinarily strong sense of reality in certain phases of a psychedelic experience. It's like there is absolutely no doubt that what's around you, what's happening to you, is real, and it's more real than this reality. It's a sense of hyper-reality. Now, did we break into another dimension physically? Obviously not. Your sitter is looking at your body sitting on a couch or lying in bed, still breathing. Your heart is still beating. You didn't go anywhere. You didn't break into another dimension. You didn't travel to hyperspace. You're right there. Meaning that whatever experience you had was mental. I think there is very little empirical points about this, right? A psychedelic experience is definitely of a mental nature. Your physical body is lying in bed. Um, so to me, what that means is, if I can have that sense of hyper-reality in that mental realm, how can I be sure that this is any different right now? That my sense of reality right now isn't mind-gendered as well? Isn't a kind of cognitive hallucination of whatever is going on? Um, and to me, of course, that's music to my metaphysical ears, because I'm an objective idealist. I think this too is mental. It's not in my mind or your mind. It's out there, but it's mental, just like the thoughts of another person. And perhaps the same applies to the psychedelic experience. Perhaps we travel through what Jung would call objective psychic spaces, meaning they're mental, they're psychic, but they're not yours. They are not your material. I think a lot of the psychedelic experience is just your material. It's just the skeletons in your closet. But I cannot help but think that in certain high-dose deep experiences, that is not mine. That stuff is not...

Hans. Yeah.

Hans, do you think you could ask just to raise people to raise their hands? How many are sort of, you know, materialist as Anil or pragmatic materialist, versus how many, what fraction of the audience is sort of more inclined towards idealism?

I think this is going to go very badly for me. No, we need to define. And I will be with an okay. I think it's an interesting question, like metaphysically on the landscape, like more towards idealist takes on reality, that is fundamentally mental, or materialist, that sort of it's matter. If we...

Matter?

Okay, define matter. Physical, phys...

Okay, yeah. Matter defined as observer-independent property, stuff having physical properties that we can measure, that are observer-independent. If there's no consciousness in our universe, this room is still perfectly here. There's just no conscious observer. That would be materialism. Now I define it. Bernardo, you can sharpen that as a philosopher. And idealism being that fundamentally the world is mental, and what what seems to be material is just a perception. It's just how the world appears to me in my screen of perception in my consciousness. That would be idealism. Does that help? Um, okay. And then, yeah. So then, who is more towards the materialist metaphysics? Okay. And idealists? Okay.

It was better than I was expecting.

Yeah. Yeah. You didn't do too bad.

Yeah. But I think... Okay, let's let's...

Non-duality. Okay. Keep all of your questions. Save them all. We'll have time for all of this. So, save your questions here. I think...

Can I add a very quick comment? Because when I have said this before, that what the psychedelic experience shows us is that if it can feel real there, and it feels real here, then maybe this is also mental. And what people say is, "Bro, you're on drugs there and here you're not." Then of course, that's not true. We are on drugs right now. It's called serotonin, and it looks very much like psilocin or or DMT. But...

Before we move on, I want to just, because it's important to highlight points of agreement. And I think actually the sense of reality, this experience of things being real. I think of in the same way. I think this is not a given. It's again, it's in our normal experience. The fact that we experience things as real doesn't mean that they are real. Um, and you know, we've done some work in my lab about what underlies differences in how real people's perceptions feel. You know, in other, there's a condition of synesthesia. Many people might know, you see people experience colors when they see letters, for instance. But they interestingly, they don't typically experience the colors as really existing in the same way that non-synesthetic colors seem to really exist in a mind-independent way. So there are lots of interesting nuances about how and when we experience things as real, which for me is a very interesting question that I can approach from, you know, my pragmatic materialist...

I think we both agree that the world as we experience it is our mental creation.

Yeah. We both agree that this mental creation is modulated by something out there. The difference is, I think that what is out there is also mental. It's the same kind that it is here. It is out there. It's not here, but it's of the same kind.

Yeah. Exactly.

And of course, the difficulty, Bernardo, in the point you made, the difficulty is that indeed, you know, the argument that we are on drugs right now, but somehow on these drugs we are on right now, we do, by and large, experience reality in the same way, right? And on psychedelics, that clearly is not the case. And that's the noise.

Well, wait. But that's even, but that is very, if the more you look into the psychophysics of people, the more we know everyone differs. Remember the dress, the hashtag dress, right? Probably half of the audience there will see it as blue and black, and the other one will see it as white and yellow. And to both, it's totally intuitive, right? You just open your eyes and you see the dress, and that's all there is to it.

Yeah. We did this figure, we did this perception sensor study, Kristof, of like 40,000 people, many, many different dimensions of perception, and all you see is distribution. In basically any aspect of perception you look at, there's a distribution. But we don't see it because we have this sort of experience of naive realism that leads us to underestimate perceptual diversity.

That dress is definitely white and gold.

There is no doubt. You're wrong.

Is this the, is this the idealism versus materialism test, right? How you perceive the dress.

Well, if it is, then he's wrong, because the real dress actually is blue and black.

Okay.

Okay. But Anil, you just mentioned an important word, naive realism, right? So you do not see yourself as a naive realist. Uh, in my definition of materialism I just gave, say, I call you materialism, but what kind of materialism do you argue for, or say, yeah, that's my position, because it's not the naive...

No, I mean, it's, it's again, it's very pragmatic for me that that I think thinking of the world, the wider universe in terms of very broadly speaking, physical processes, is an instrumentally a very useful way for for developing, furthering our understanding of the phenomena we want to explain, whether they're black holes or elephants or arms or indeed, and this is the tricky one, conscious experiences. I do think it's a useful way to do it. Now, as to what fundamental reality really is, I don't think anybody really can know. I mean, physicists argue about it a lot, you know, is it quantum foam? Is it something else? Is it... I mean, I have to be, I think rationally agnostic about that. But if we want to explain the things that we want to explain in consciousness, my experience, your experiences, how experiences differ, what happens in psychedelics, what happens in sleep, for instance, then we tend to, at least in my experience, by constructing theories and experiments with the convenient fiction that there are things like neurons in there and there are things like electromagnetic fields in there, we shed light on the phenomenon. That's so it's, it's a metaphysics that I wear lightly because I find it useful, not because I believe it to be true.

Interesting.

But but don't don't you get the benefit?

But the metaphysics has spectacularly failed to explain how how experience, how a three-pound piece of an organ, like a piece of furniture of the universe, like anything else, how that three-pound can love and hate, right? No. And people say, well, in future, some physics will explain it. But there is this sort of, how can anything feel? How can things love and hate and dream and imagine and desire?

Yeah. I, I don't think it's as hopeless as you seem to have think now. I mean, there has been an awful lot of progress. I don't know whether it'll ultimately be successful.

There hasn't been any progeny. There's been very unfair on yourself.

What?

You're being very unfair on yourself. I mean, you have delivered, you know, progress in this...

No, but those are purely empirical findings. Yes, we know a lot about bits and pieces of the brain, like cerebellum is not involved, cortex is involved, which part of the cortex we can argue about. But those are all correlations, right? And physicalism has grappled with the fact, how can anything feel like something, right? That's a central challenge. We all got used to it. So we say, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a hard problem. Let's move on." But it's right there in front of us. And as a physicalist, as a materialist, it is totally unclear how to answer it. Now, you can say, in future, in future, we'll solve it. Maybe, you know, in future, maybe we all get raptured. In the future, I can't, I don't know. But that's rather unsatisfactory. So that's why consciousness first approaches like IIT or like other ones, Don Hoffman, etc. I think because the first thing I need to explain is my, you know, is the sense of color. And then from that, I infer there might be mechanisms that support that. But also, again, again, Kristof, thanks, thanks for making the bridge to our final question, if we can have it on screen, which is exactly when metaphysics is important for science. I mean, clearly, it's important for meaning. That's what I spoke about earlier, in thinking in therapeutic sessions, for meaning, it's very important for people to have a sense that what I've experienced has some reality status and isn't denied by the therapist, so they're okay. It's clear for meaning, but for science, it's not often...

It's not. It's not. So in quantum mechanics, you know, people just did this survey, Nature did the survey, right? The majority of physicists in quantum mechanics are belong to the school of metaphysical interpretation, "all shut up and calculate," sort of like the Copenhagen school. It doesn't matter whether reality, all of that is beyond us. All we can say, if I take the mathematical calculus seriously, I can predict things, I can build things like quantum computers. Metaphysics is sort of a luxury that a few people have, you know, professional philosophers that want to think about it. But of course, as you point out, it's critical for our meaning. We want to know, are we in a random universe? Are we in a meaningful universe? And meaning without metaphysics, I think, is not possible.

And Bernardo, would you agree to what Kristof says that it is not important for science?

Yes, I think it is, in fact, important that science not be colored by metaphysics. Science is a study of what nature does, how things behave, how we predict what nature would do next, how we account for what nature did before. Um, I think it is very important that in the process of cataloging nature's behaviors and then modeling it and predicting it, that we do not be limited or colored or biased by metaphysical assumptions. So from that perspective, I sympathize a lot with Anil's pragmatism, as far as science is concerned. Not for my life, for my life in general, I need to have a relationship with nature, with others, with meaning, and metaphysics is crucial for all that. But for the practice of good science, I think it is crucial that metaphysics does not play a role. But going back to Anil's pragmatism, yes, I think it's very useful that we have our convenient fictions. There is such a thing as neurons, in the sense that we can measure them, we can pluck them out, we can grow them in a culture, we can measure their electric potentials, and so on. So pragmatism, your pragmatism might sympathize with. But if you say, "I am a materialist pragmatist," or "I take the convenient fiction not of what appears in perception, but I take on a convenient fiction about what the nature of the thing is like, the neuron is material in the sense of not being mental," because that's, in fact, the definition of matter in philosophy today, it's a negative definition: whatever it is, we don't know what it is, but whatever it is, it is not mental. And if we take this assumption on board with our pragmatism, there we create problems. I think the hard problem arises right at that point, when you say neurons, whatever they are, have no mental qualities or properties of any kind, then you carve out the neurons into a different ontological realm than experience, and then you can't put a bridge in between. That's the problem. So I sympathize with Anil's position, but I think we have to go one step further than that, pure pragmatism without metaphysical coloring.

Thank you. And to add to what you said, Kristof, and bringing it back to psychedelic research, I think I put that on email in our pre-discussion, namely that indeed the "shut up and calculate" mode in physics has brought us just like nuclear fission and the computer and lasers, etc. But there's a story of the historian of science, David Kaiser, who makes this point that in a book called "How the Hippies Saved Physics," where he says basically that the fundamental physics group, and they were a group around the whole counterculture movement, they were like all open to exploring these weird things like having communicating with the dead. And of course, with their physics mindset, that group didn't give us anything, but what it did give us, and this is his point, is that they kept alive sort of an openness. And they picked up on John Stewart Bell's paper, who had picked up on the EPR paper from Einstein. This is all a long story, but it ended up with quantum information, quantum computers, and non-locality being established. And that, in his book, has to do, for me, it's like a fundamental metaphysical openness, because the physics community didn't pick up. They were shutting up and calculating. Now, what does this mean for psychedelic research? Right? Because, translated to psychedelic research, it could mean, should or should we not be open to the fact that DMT entities could be real? How could we, like that fundamental physics group, strange question, sort of study it? Would you be open to such a study, Anil, or would you say I have like metaphysical objections here?

I think you keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain starts falling out. I think it's, you know, I, I, no, I am, I mean, again, I don't know what the right metaphysics is. You know, Bernardo might be right. In fact, the version of materialism that I have can be redescribed, in some sense, as a transcendental idealism. There's a numinum, the thing that's unknown. And everything that we know is sort of on the other side of this veil that will always carve out the...

So you're one of us.

No, I'm not one of you, though. I'm not one of you, though, because I, um, it's very interesting, Kristof, like you, I also get co-opted by the illusionists who think that, you know, consciousness doesn't exist. They also say I'm one of them. So, um, I take that as a badge of honor, but it can, you know, I think it's not a million miles. Um, but the things that I want to explain on this side of the Canian veil, I think are better explained by thinking them of them in terms of physical processes. And, you know, your example about entities and DMT and so on. I think I think again of the out-of-body experience. I think the interesting questions there are all about how and why the brain generates those experiences, not as a hypothesis that those things exist. Maybe they do. Maybe a small amount of effort is well spent doing that, but I don't think it's, you know, it would be not really where I'd put my bets. Um, on the back to the sort of the utility of metaphysics, it's sort of interesting that although I, you know, I treat them a bit lightly, I think it does actually make a difference. I've had many conversations with a panpsychist friend of mine who will always make the point that everything, Philip. Yeah. Um, I was going... Yeah, Philip. Obviously, it's Philip. And he will always make the point that everything that you like, materialist types, have figured out is entirely compatible with pansychism. And I'll say, yes, it's also completely compatible with idealism and other things. But the question is, would we have discovered all these things had we all been pansychists at the time? Or would we have asked different questions? Would, you know, pansychists care about the combination problem? How does small conscious things combine to a big conscious thing? Would they have sort of spent all their grant money, if they had any, on that? And, you know, maybe that would have been great, maybe not. So the idea of compatibility, I think, is not the right point to make. The interesting question, I think, is an open question, is what's the instrumental, what's the, in a, the product, what's the productivity...

And I think in that sense, I actually think your metaphysics can't help affect the science because it might affect the questions that you think deserve attention, and that will shape just scientific knowledge. And its any specific finding is invariant to your metaphysics, but the findings that you decide to look for, I don't think is...

Or the questions you ask.

The questions you ask. Exactly.

That's exactly where I think physicalism can be limiting today. The questions we ask.

Yeah. I, it may be, but I think it's, that's still where I place my bets. I think it is revealing, disclosing more about the phenomena we want to understand. I would tend to agree with you.

But you also have to admit that there are phenomena like, in this EPR paper, right? Einstein used the famous quote that's action, spooky action at a distance. It's woo-woo. That things that used to be considered woo-woo, which might include mystical experience, which might include telepathy or other things, at some point might turn into legitimate science that you can study and manipulate and then exploit for practical purposes.

That's true. But those insights about quantum mechanics came about because people were trying their best to explain the universe in physical terms.

Well, but then the the the the the well, I mean, I I challenge your term of your use of the term physical. What does it mean, physical? If things are, if a system can be half a lightyear apart and as soon as you manipulate one side of the system, the other system, the other side of the system, you know, a lightyear away instantaneously changes. That's certainly not my grandfather's materialism anymore, right? Is that really physical? It's non-local. In fact, many physicists now reject the idea that there are matter of fact. In other words, they reject the idea that there are things that are true independent of whether they are observed by by and by someone. Again, that's a very basic, uh, definition of physical, that things exist independent of the mental. But some found, not all, not even a majority, but some physicists are beginning to question that.

Yeah, I I agree. I think today physicalism can be quite limiting, given the questions we should be asking today. I mean, when we were developing steam engines, building railways, and creating little automata, I think physicalism could conceivably have been very helpful. Um, but I I I still think that it is not psychologically possible what I'm going to argue for now. But in an ideal world, we would be truly always metaphysically agnostic while doing science.

But I don't think it is psychologically tenable. So you have to pick your poison. I I I try to pick a more open poison that allows us to ask a few more questions. I'll give you a personal example. I I have seen happening around me in a way that I cannot deny. Regrettably, it didn't happen to me, otherwise I would have better insight into it. But it has happened to people around me in a way that I witnessed, and I don't need to believe anybody's story to take it seriously. I've seen things happening that I don't see how to account without some form, some natural, subtle form of telepathy. But if we carry the physicalist assumption into science, we are not going to do the research. We are not going to ask the questions to create the experiments to do the work to to try to figure out, and that's where I think that if the convenient fiction includes metaphysical assumptions there, it can backfire. Anil, I want to give you briefly the opportunity to respond to that, or if you don't want to, we can already go to the audience that definitely want to bring in your question.

Yeah, I I want to leave plenty of time. I mean, I I I think there's, you know, as always with these things, there's less, uh, clear air between us than than it might appear if you read what we write and things like that. I mean, I I of course, any perspective is limiting in some way. There are some questions you won't ask, and there are other questions you will, given your metaphysical predispositions. If telepathy can be empirically just validated, shown to substantiated, that's amazing. That would that would change lots of things. Maybe we should look a bit harder. Um, that's fine. I think it won't be substantiated. Maybe maybe it will. Uh, every perspective is a bit limiting. Um, it really comes back down to, I think, whether the hard problem is a distinctive challenge to physicalism or not. And I think there we just we hold sort of different levels of optimism about that. I think our questions about the explanatory targets may change as we as we kind of evolve them, and we will end up seeing, maybe maybe this is why the illusionists try and caught me. We'll sort of see the hard problem as not so not the problem people think it is now, but a different problem, much like in life, you know, people were looking for the spark of life, and now and and then they realize, let's not look for that, we don't need to find the spark of life.

Yeah, vital. But, um, I like what you said. I've yet to I've yet to encounter a patient with chronic pain that is an illusionist.

Yeah, I mean, I'm also not an illusionist.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, what? To say chronic pain, oh, it's all an illusion until you suffer from it.

Just one final remark. I I've really enjoyed it so far. Thank you already. Um, when you said, I find that interesting, Anil, when you bring in Kant. Kant was the philosopher who said, okay, if we like, are rational, we cannot really say anything about that world out there, and we have to do with the phenomena. Um, which is also, in a sense, you could say, a Kantian trap, right? Ever since that, if you, if that's your philosophy, you're sort of trapped in mind. Whereas Bernardo, I think your version of idealism would say, no, there are things we cannot directly, we can touch into the numinal. Would that be a way to describe how you, you view it?

I I think we don't give credit to Schopenhauer, who was a contemporary, um, of Kant, and wrote about it like 38 years after Kant, Kant published, 36 after Kant published, um, his famous book that gave rise to the split between the phenomenal and the numinal. Uh, Schopenhauer's argument was that Kant is correct in making this split. And instead of phenomenal and numinal, Schopenhauer called it representation and will. But Schopenhauer's insight was the following. Yes, we cannot have have access to most of the numinal, because all we can access is how the numinal presents itself to us, and that's the phenomenal. We don't see the thing that is presenting itself to us as it is in itself. We just see how it presents itself to us. Schopenhauer's insight was that this applies to everything with one exception. You, me, you, we have access to what we are without intermediation of the phenomenal. You don't need a mirror to experience being yourself. No, you, you, you, if you have heartache, you feel it. Uh, if you feel disappointment, you know what it feels like. If you're eager, you know what it feels like. If you tremendously desire something, you know what it feels like. If you fear something, you know what it feels like. So Schopenhauer's solution to Kant's dilemma was was to carve out this one exception to the divide and show that the divide is not foolproof, and then use that exception to extrapolate outwards. So if we are will, and by will what he meant is endogenous experiential states that do not depend on perception, that do not have intentional content, as philosophers call it. Um, if we are will as we are in ourselves, and we appear to others as matter, because we unquestionably have a physical body. Um, then we can extrapolate that matter is always what the will looks like when observed from the outside. That was his step. Of course, this leads to all kinds of new problems, and we are not going to study the entirety of the, 200 pages of the world as will in representation here, but, uh, I think it puts a in the armor of the Kantian divide. Thank you. Um, now I want to give the floor to you, the audience. Um, I think mics are lined up. There's only just one sort of housekeeping, uh, thing of order that, uh, of course, these three gentlemen have a broad body of work with a lot of questions you might have. Let's try and restrict it to sort of the fundamental nature of consciousness, metaphysics, and of course, how psychedelics relate to that. Yeah, let's start here.

Hello. Yes, you can hear me. Um, I'm Philip. I'm a master student of brain and cognition. Can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay. Uh, and, um, I, um, basically fried my brain with too many drugs and also came up with a certain theory. Uh, and, um, my, uh, my theory is basically a dual aspect process monism. So, uh, what I want to say is, um, so Dr. Seth emphasizes the brain's structural predictions. Uh, Dr. Kau emphasizes integrated information, and Dr. Castro emphasizes the dissolution of boundaries. What if we combine these? Uh, could we argue that phenomenal presence isn't an illusion, isn't everywhere, and isn't everything, but rather emerges only when very specific organizational thresholds are met, and that psychedelics simply temporarily reorganize those thresholds? So basically, you are all right, but you are also all wrong.

Who, if you three want to pick up on this question? I think you want to synthesize.

It is possible. Yes. To follow up, it is possible that mystical experience, they will have a common biological signature, and that signature might enable us to use Bernardo's term, that the the dissociative boundary between us. So usually my conscious experience is the underlying substrate is the brain. But under these special circumstances that science can explore and discover, it may well be that the dissociative boundary between this consciousness and sort of this the the universal mind, universal consciousness, ceases. And that's when your egoic consciousness disappears, and you become you become one with the all. And then when that boundary reconstitutes, reconstitutes, you drop back into your egoic consciousness. I mean, that seems to be to me the most plausible explanation.

Thank you, Christoph. Do any of you want to add to this answer?

Okay, let's move on to the left.

Thank you.

I, sorry, I do want to ask you for giving as much many people as possible an opportunity to leave it by this. Yeah.

My name is Fen Bernardo. I'm not sure if you remember me. We corresponded briefly, but I have, I lecture on consciousness and psychedelics. I have one argument to support your claim. I sometimes say that people who vote for an idiot are also hallucinating. Just the difference is that in on contrary to psychedelic hallucination, which lasts four hours, that one lasts for years, and it can also have serious implications, like some very dangerous psychedelic trips can make people die, for example, some. Thank you.

An or question. Yeah.

Let's go. Yeah, let's go like this.

Hi, thank you. My name is Elsa. Um, I have two questions that I think are connected in a comment that Anil made. Uh, I wonder, there's quite some studies and stories that, um, have evidenced out-of-body experiences through third-person accounts of certain conversations have been heard while the person having the psychedelic experience not being in a room. And I wonder, um, to what extent you consider these experiences, and if you have criticism on them, uh, when would, uh, subjective consciousness being able to travel outside of the body be evidenced sufficiently? And then my second question is with regards to the role of meaning or purpose to existence. Um, and when it, I knew you said at some points that there is epistemic value in out-of-body experience in the sense that we know the brain constantly tries to produce a subjective experience. So why, um, so yeah, um, why is, which role do you think that this teleological or spiritual question should play in consciousness studies?

All right.

Okay, I guess I'll, I'll, I'll respond. Thank you for the, thank you for the questions. I think it's a very reasonable question to ask. So, what would be the evidence that would be persuasive to to me, others, that, you know, we take out-of-body experiences literally, as well as seriously, as evidence that consciousness is somewhere else? Um, and here I'm very sympathetic to Bernardo, that maybe people haven't looked hard enough. The evidence, such as it is, and I'm not aware of all of it, is mostly anecdotal. Um, and the sum of anecdote isn't isn't sufficient in in my view. There have been a few experiments. I know there was a whole series where people hid things high up in operating theaters, uh, with the idea that if people had an out-of-body experience and felt themselves floating up there, they should be able to identify those objects. But, but as far as I know, those never amounted to anything. Um, so as far as I know, there isn't good evidence. Um, but if there is, you know, that would be very challenging for, for the view that the experience of being out of your body is, is something that is just a, a fact about experience. Um, the second question about the function of,

Purpose, yeah. The role of purpose in consciousness studies, like, do we need to form a,

Well, I'm not sure I quite understand. One of the big, I think, unanswered questions in consciousness research, even from a materialist point of view, is what the hell is it for? Um, people look for, you know, how it happens, what's its basis, you know, what is it, but the, the function of consciousness, did it evolve? If so, why did it evolve? What does it do for us? Um, I think these, these are hugely important and interesting questions. There, you know, there are many answers to that in in different theories, but taking that, that kind of functional, teleological view is, is important. And the spiritual view, of course, this is now bringing about the question of of meaning. And I think to be honest, I think we can all, you know, whether you're a materialist or an idealist or a panpsychist, just contemplating the wonder of consciousness and the wonder of the universe is incredibly meaningful. And it's, it's to me, it's a very, you know, the journey of of trying to understand more about consciousness has been a, you know, it feels spiritual to me in a, in a non-religious way, but I feel it's kind of a secular spiritualism where we just cultivate a sense of awe and wonder about the universe and about being part of it.

Thank you.

You're here.

Yeah. Are you, is it okay like this? Let's go to,

Hi, gentlemen. Thank you very much. Um, I want to go back to the materialism, idealism that you were debating on so much, and, uh, the question has kind of a buildup. So if we look at things in neuroscience, like the phantom hand syndrome, which you would say materially, there's nothing happening until you actually go into the brain and you see the differences, and that's one piece and kind of building towards this. And the second one would be more so of the case of PTSD, where you can actually see the physical changes that are happening in the body, and we now understand that changes are also happening in the brain. Third would be in more of a, um, hallucinatory or psychosomatic illness, where people are operating so differently to our general understood reality, but they have a very particular outcome that we can't quite agree on as to their reality and our reality shared. Um, and then third or lastly, when you bridge into the idea of a psychedelic experience, and particularly the outcomes of a psychedelic experience that could in essence shift all three of those states, and we've seen to some degree that those three have been shifted. But more particularly, in this idea of almost a bridge from, uh, idealism to materialism, are these moments of insight where people go through a psychedelic state, they experience, as Christoph has, being one with all, and then they come out and they have more of an idea as to how the material world can operate, and in doing so, and only through doing so, they have the ability to actually manipulate the physical world, um, through thought, which could have come from something totally outside of their own experience. Um, how would you be able to explain that? And if, would you be able to reconcile the two because of the psychedelic experience?

Is it addressed to me?

All of you.

I think you were making a claim, if I'm not mistaken, uh, that, uh, thought after having these experiences, mind over matter can have effects. Is that what you're saying?

To a, to a degree. Certainly, if you look at, like, the phantom limb aspect of it, of these shifts and understanding that it's not only what's perceptually there in a material sense, but what also is happening within the brain. And then if you start looking at the other pieces, are the correlation between the internal mental state and the physical reality that that person experiences? And then when you start to bridge, kind of more ethereally, um, or conceptually, as to,

Yeah.

Yes. Thank you. Like, how do you explain that shift from an idea of, oh, what's happening out here to what's changing in the physical world, just as what's happening in someone's trip can change their physical reality or the physical world?

Can it?

Well, if somebody is, like, relieved of PTSD symptoms, that changes their physical reality. That changes how their heart rate acts. That changes how they interact in the physical environment. That changes everything of how they operate within the world. Is it not?

I don't think this is a problem either for idealism or physicalism.

Um, the phantom limb story, we all have a body model, and you hack into it, you change your body model, you respond to that change. Are okay with that? So am I.

So it was more so of the elevation of,

Yeah, that's, yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I, I do think what you're hinting at, and I sensed that in a previous question as well. Let me phrase.

Well, I mean, there is a Hans, if I can interrupt. There is an interesting empirically accessible question that do you need the conscious experience? So, for example, when you have PTSD and then you do I gain or whatever, right? Do you actually need the conscious experience, uh, in order to help you to, you know, to, to have less symptoms of PTSD, or is the mere molecule acting on receptors that trigger downstream, you know, to pathways, etcetera, etcetera? Is that a good question?

And that is a question that can be experimentally answered, for instance, using, uh, doing this in the ongoing experiments now where you give, uh, psychedelics in people who are sleep-deprived, who, you know, in the first early part of this, of, of the night, they go into into deep sleep, or you can also do it under an under anesthesia, as Boris Hifett at Stanford is doing. So in principle, those things are, uh, empirically, we can find out whether or not you need the actual experience in order to derive therapeutic benefit.

Interesting, very interesting point. Um, yeah, also framed differently, Christoph, is, is big pharma's wish of giving us psychedelics without the phenomenology sort of viable, right? Because we,

Yeah. Because it's easy, all you take is a pill and just,

Yeah.

You don't have to take a trip. Yeah.

Who do you think on this one? To what degree indeed do we need to have the conscious experience of these, uh, substances?

Let's, well, let's take the specific example of the, the therapeutic, the potential therapeutic effect, very likely therapeutic effect of, of psychedelics on PTSD, on depression. It is an open question. You know, does the experience itself matter, or is it something that can run along below something pharmacological? My own bet is that it's, it's very likely the experience is causally involved in any therapeutic effect. There are good reasons to think it might be. It, you know, it disrupts your normal perceptual habits and routines. It can break the naive realism a bit. It can, you can just realize that there are other ways of, of experientially encountering the world and the self. I don't think absent that, I'm not sure what benefit you would get purely from the, the pharmacology alone. In fact, this work at Sussex we're doing with the strobe lights,

Yeah.

You know, is, is sort of placing the, the, you know, saying like, we can get an experience which is perceptually disruptive, but doesn't have any of the relevant pharmacology of psychedelics, and, you know, where we're running pre-clinical trials in depression using this intervention, um, which is predicated on about the experience matters.

Yeah. And that one is, by the way, very interesting to see for people like the dream machine, also, right? Uh, yeah, I had the pleasure of doing it. It's, it's amazing what you can achieve by that. Um, let's see to the right.

Okay.

Thank you so much. I have a question to Christoph. Um, for IIT, I felt like the body has been situated in a position as the input, almost the, uh, extrinsic input, um, instead of being constitutive of the causal effect structure. But in your latest works, you mentioned a lot of phenomenology and the lived experiences. Does it mean there is a kind of a development of IIT, and would that be a future of more embodied version of it? Thank you.

Well, it has to be embodied. There has to be a physical substrate, other with, without, I mean, no brain, never mind. So there has to be some sort of substrate, and you, you can think of that as, as being embodied, but because it has this consciousness first approach. Think about it as dream. The purest form of sort of everyday consciousness, leading a psychedelic is dream. In dream, the the body is behaviorally, uh, uh, you know, its thresholds are high. So it's, it's, uh, disconnected for, to a certain extent, from the world, not totally, of course, but to a large extent disconnected. The eyes are closed, yet you have, we all know from our own experience, we have these vivid streams. That's a pure form of, of consciousness. But when my body doesn't move at all, right? The only thing that may move is, is the, is the eye, is the eyes in REM sleep. Under many conditions, there is this complete dissociation between the body and its behavior and conscious experience, which makes it more difficult to study experimentally. But we experience that every, every day, every time we sit on a meditation cushion, and every time we, we take a high, do psychedelic trip, when we're just, you know, immobile, but experience heaven and hell. So, yes, embodiment is important, but it's not, it's not in that sense, it's not necessary for many conscious experiences that are highly meaningful to us.

Thank you to the right. Yeah.

Hi, wonderful conversation. Um, I just wanted to ask, you have mentioned the hard problem of consciousness, which mainly relates to why are qualia experienced? So why does it feel like something to have consciousness? And in this framework, if consciousness is described in physicalist or material terms, qualia must have some sort of causal power. Otherwise, they miss the philosophical criterion of existence, where existence is defined in terms of what the entity exerts causal power onto. So, in your opinion, what kind of material phenomena consciousness or qualia makes her the causal power to? And whether psychedelics, by perturbing qualia, might perturb also the causal power of consciousness?

Thank you.

Thank you. And who would you like to address this question to?

Um, I think it's like an open question, and I mainly refer to like the issue, not the issue, like the otherwise calling consciousness an IP phenomenon. If we want to describe consciousness in causal terms.

Well, so this is exactly what people are trying to answer now with respect to psychedelics. Do you need the psychedelic experience in order to have to drive, uh, benefit? If you do, that would, in your terms, demonstrate the causal power, the causal efficiency of, uh, of conscious experience in order to, let's say, cure you from your depression symptoms. If it's just the drug, the molecules that do their job quietly, and, you know, conscious experience is just, you know, something on top that you don't really need, then if you eliminate that conscious experience by putting the person to sleep or anesthetic, the psychedelic will still do its work. So that's an empirical question that we will be able to answer.

It should be done. Yeah. Because then we know.

Just a very, I mean, I think there's sometimes the worry that, you know, a materialist view implies a sort of necessary epiphenomenalism, that that the conscious experience, but it doesn't at all. You know, you know, materialist perspective as well, we, if you think of consciousness as a property of of matter organized somehow, then, and that you can't have the organization without the experience or the experience without the organization, then there's no problem with with causal efficacy of conscious experiences. Well, except now you have materialism plus. You've got materialism plus experience, right? That's not really classical.

No, no, no. I say materialism, materialism says that it's a property of of matter. It doesn't mean that it's materialism plus experience.

Philosophically, if you say that, you are already in psychism territory.

No, I,

I knew that. I just, you are,

I, I want sort of one, I want to give the audience one final question, and then wrap it up with a final question to the three of you. So, as a final question, yeah, please go ahead.

Thank you so much. I'd like, if it's okay, to just move, ask whether we can move this debate into the, my, the question of why knowledge has to do something. Why does knowledge have to be practicable? And if it is practicable, what, what, what is it there to practice in a world where we've systematically used the physical world into the sixth mass extinction? Could it be more practical and pragmatic even to see a river as alive with legal rights? Not to dwell on the question of what is it, is it like to be a river, but to give a river the same right that we give these, for example, multinational corporations with their instrumental reason, their materialism, who are of course sleepwalking us unconsciously, non-consciously into,

Into, thank you. I think,

What we, what we know they're walking us into, which is quite frightening. So, um, yeah, what about this, this animistic and the legal pragmatism of, of, of animism, irrespective of,

I think what you're pointing,

The circles that we're going into now.

Thank you. I think what you're pointing at is sort of like societal and ethical implications of a worldview of like hardcore physicalism that we see things go wrong where in a world where you would be open to meaning outside of yourself, whether you be an idealist or not, you wouldn't treat the world or exploit the world. This to me.

Thank you. Exactly.

I think this is very much a question about meaning. But I, I do think, I do not, is there anything the three of you want to add?

Yeah, definitely. I think it's a, it's a really, I'm glad you brought this up. It's a good point to finish because of course, you know, knowledge isn't, isn't, has it has effects in the world. It changes things and, um, you know, there is a sort of extractive economy going on, which you might think materialism sort of necessitates or inevitably leads to. Right. You know, there's a wonderful book by the writer Robert Macfarlane. Is a river alive? And I think it's, you know, he's one of my favorite writers, and he really, you know, it,

That inspired the question, actually.

It's a fantastic, uh, ah, there we go. Um, and there's, you know, there's merit, there's merit in that, even if one treats it metaphorically as a way of giving nature a voice in our, in our political discourse. As to what, what materialism itself necessarily leads to, I think it can go both ways. So on the negative side, one thing I'm personally very engaged in and worried about at the moment is how the tendency to project consciousness and mind into large language models,

Is leading us to diminish and reduce what it is to be a human being. You know, we, we project our selves into our algorithms, and then we reverse project our algorithms back into ourselves, and we think of ourselves as nothing more than meat-based computers. Um, that, that is just designed to predict the next token. And I think this is a terribly, uh, unfortunate reduction of what a living human being, a living animal, a living tree, indeed, is. But that's not the inevitable future of, of any metaphysics, certainly not materialism. And in my own view, is very much pushing against that to think of consciousness as intrinsically related with our nature as living creatures. And in this way, you know, I, a materialism is bringing us closer to be more part of nature and not, and not apart from it. And I think that's, to me, that's makes me feel more comfortable, I guess, about this, this approach, because it's not necessarily attractive. I think it's the opposite.

Thank you, Anil. Thank you for that. Completely agree. Um, to, I would disagree. I, materialism by and large. Well, yeah, because you can't, I don't think we can have it both ways. Anil, materialism by and large is, you know, Democritus, atoms in the void, there's nothing beyond atoms or, you know, superstrings, and everything else is meaningless. So talking about the meaning inherent in a river or in a person, literally under materialism doesn't mean anything. No, that's just,

May I ask the two of you? We, we should continue this, but I want to wrap it up as a final question to the three of you, and thanks for touching upon on meaning and bringing Neil, this sort of the, the power dynamics we see play out now. Like since we lack a coherent scientific theory of consciousness, we see people projecting consciousness onto machines, and we do not have any, I think, scientific grounds to do so. And you've written about that. I mean, that conscious most probably is non-computational. It says the same, Christoph, to a community very much,

Yeah, to, to a community very much sort of, um, I think we all feel that sort of the, the difference between conscious experience, who we are, and, and the machines. How would the three of you, what, how would you want to leave this audience, perhaps young researchers in the room, a message on the future of science, and what psychedelics, what role it can play? I know it's a bit of an open-ended question, but I just want to sort of give you all three, sort of, um, the opportunity to give final words to the audience here.

In which,

Consciousness first.

I can resonate with that, consciousness first. But I think the way a lot of people sometimes misinterpret this statement, certainly then misinterpret me, is to take this statement and say, when I say everything is consciousness, everything is in consciousness, then they say, okay, then the glass of water is conscious, the bottle is conscious, the AI is conscious. No, because when we say something is conscious, what we mean is more than that the substrate of it is mental. What it means, what we mean is that it has a conscious inner life, private to itself, and that does not follow from everything is a mental state. It doesn't follow from that, just as it doesn't follow that, uh, uh, one particular neuron in my broadcast area here has a conscious inner life of its own, that there is something it is like to be that one neuron. I don't think there is, there is something it is like to be me. That's very, very much aligned with IIT. So to say that everything is made of mental state does not imply that an LLM is conscious. It is not. We have no reason to think that it is. At least no more reason to think that it is conscious than to think that your fridge or your home thermostat is conscious. And if we project that consciousness, consciousness onto it, then I'm completely with Anil, that the implication of that will be to devalue human life, because that is a mechanism. If we think we are like it, or that it is like us, then the opposite holds, we are like it, and therefore we are mechanisms as well.

Thank you, Bernard. And Neil, you have a final word.

Well, I, I think this is nice, uh, consensus about some of the misunderstandings that are out there, and, and also, I think, really thank the last question because it does highlight that these things matter. These views make a make a difference. Um, there are people calling for welfare for AI systems, for the systems themselves, not for the people that that use those systems. And, and this could be catastrophic for for how this technology is developing. So what we collectively think about consciousness really does matter. You often hear that we don't understand it. We haven't solved the hard problem. We have, s all these metaphysics. We have 628 theories. And that is often used to motivate a kind of apathy or anything goes.

Um, we don't understand it all. We do understand something. Not everything goes. We have to operate like a good Bayesian and make our best guess given the priors that we have and the evidence that's out there, and that we have to stand up and do that, because if anything goes, then what will drive society is other incentives that frankly don't care about us or about the wider world.

Thank you very much, Anil. And, uh, as a final, thank you to all of you. Uh, yeah, just one, one final, one final personal thing I want to say. I want to thank you, Yos. I remember, um, four years ago at ICPR, I, I told you that, sort of, the journey into questioning these, having these deep questions around metaphysics, and then having psychedelic trips that can be sort of dangerous territory to navigate, and one has to keep thinking and be rational about it, and I said it sometimes can feel lonely. And you said, but this is, this is your community. And I was like, I don't know, I'm, this is my first time at the conference. But having been here, uh, so far, uh, it's just nice. And bringing back to Kant, if we are trapped in mind, it's nice to be trapped in it together and think, reason, and perhaps trip ourselves out of it and come back and converse around it. So, thank you all for that, and I've enjoyed it very much, and let's continue doing that at the bar. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Really good.