Episode 39 • 22 November 2021

Keith Frankish on Illusionism about Consciousness

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Contents

Keith Frankish is a philosopher of mind. He is an Honorary Reader at the University of Sheffield, UK, Visiting Research Fellow with The Open University, and adjunct Professor with the Brain and Mind Programme at the University of Crete.

Keith is perhaps best known for his ‘illusionist’ theory of consciousness: the view that phenomenal consciousness is a kind of pervasive illusion.

In our interview, we discuss:

Keith’s recommendations


Also worth checking out:

Illusionism and consciousness

Quotes from the interview

Consciousness as something that poses a hard problem is something that is supposed to resist conceptualisation in functional terms. It resists it because you start waving your hands and saying, “well, it’s purely qualititative, it’s just a feel, it’s not a process occuring like digestion”

I agree completely that this is how we tend to conceptualise our own minds. I feel the pull of that picture as strongly as anyone. But, as Daniel Dennett would say, I don’t trust it. I think my brain could be tricking itself about itself.

[Illusionism is saying] that this world of private mental colours and qualities and so on doesn’t actually exist.

Introspection — the process of attending to what’s happening in our minds — is not reliable. In other areas, certainly in thinking about belief and desire and so on, this is widely accepted, that we often deceive ourselves about what we thinkg and believe and want. But it seems surely we can’t be deceiving ourselves about what we’re actually experiencing right now. But I think surely we can.

The view that some people confuse with physicalism is that the brain somehow produces consciousness. That the stuff that’s happening in the brain somehow creates these mental properties, that consciousness is a product of the brain. That’s not physicalism. That’s a sort of property dualism, because there are two sorts of properties: brain properties, and mental properties produced by the brain. Physicalism is the view that mental properties and so on just are states of the brain […] I cannot make sense of the view […] I can’t make sense of that identity.

[When you understand] illusions in terms of presentations in some private mental world, then the illusionist view of consciousness itself seems to have problems. Because it seems that the illusionist is saying that this private mental world that you seem to have is itself an illusion, so if you extend the same picture seems to mean that you are going to have another private mental world in which there’s a version of this private mental world being displayed. So you’re going to need a mental world after all in which to present the illusion of the first one. But the thing is, the illusionist says don’t think of illusions in that way at all. Think of them as producing a set of reactions in you, in particular a set of beliefs.

I like the analogy [between magic and consciousness] because when you now how the trick’s done, it’s always disappointing, it’s always mundane — the wonder you feel from seeing the effect is completely disproportionate to the actual apparatus that’s used. It’s often trivial and inadequate to produce that effect. And that’s a lovely analogy to the brain and consciousness — how could just neurons firing produce our sense of this? Well, how could just sleight of hand manouvers make it seem like this wonderful thing is happening?

Further reading

The Meta-problem of consciousness

Quotes from the interview

[The meta-problem] is a hugely interdisciplinary thing. This is something that we need a big collaborative project on. I would really like to see that get funded and I’d love to be involved with it.

One of the problems with thinking about consciousness is that it’s been too fragmented […] I think philosophers have done a lot to direct people down dead-ends, though exploring those dead-ends isn’t necessarily a bad thing […] it’s been too fragmented: philosophers have been driving in one direction, and there are certain fairly exclusive programs in neuroscience, which are largely seen as competing […] these are different and competing paradigms, and we need a new paradigm where people can work together.

[On investigating the neural correlates of consciousness] What you find [when you try to measure consciousness] is that different measures of consciousness (reports, eye direction, button pressing) — they don’t agree. And why would they agree? They’re measuring different things, different kidns of reactions. It’s only if there’s a hard-edged thing here, the light either being on or off, and which of these correlated with the light being on, that this question really makes any sense. The question of neural correlates is something like: which bits are essential to making the lights come on? The lights don’t come on, so it’s a silly question.

Further reading

Illusionism and moral patienthood

Quotes from the interview

Suppose we look at consciousness in the traditional philosophical way, as a private inner world. And we also say that this private inner world is what matters ethically. We assume that other humans have it, although we’ve never experienced their private mental worlds […] now what about animals? […] Whatever this world of private inner experience is, we can’t access it, we can’t even detect its presence. We can hypothesise that it’s connected with certain brain processes, and we can look to see if those brain processes are there in other creatures […] but we can’t test them, because there’s only one instance of this private mental world that we’re acquainted with, namely our own.

Once you locate ethical value in this private mental world, and conceptualise that private mental world as having no a-priori connection with anything that’s detectable, then I think all you’ve got are a bunch of assumptions about which kinds of creatures matter, and you make your picture of consciousness fit those assumptions […] but those are just a bunch of pre-theoretical intuitions you have, and you shape your theory of how consciousness is distributed to fit them.

It seems to me that the ethical problem isn’t about trying to identify what matters, it’s trying to get people to care about what matters. We all have a pretty good grasp on what things matter and don’t matter, but some people care less than others. If you could point to things in the world that are ‘labelled by the universe’ as good or bad, they could say “I don’t care how the universe has labeled things”.

Further reading

Go further

Transcript

Note that this is a machine-generated transcript, so it’ll likely contain some inaccuracies.

Keith 00:04

Hello.

Fin 00:05

You’re listening to Hear This Idea, a podcast showcasing new thinking in philosophy, the social sciences, and effective altruism. In this episode, we talked to Keith Frankish. He is a philosopher of mind and an honorary reader at the University of Sheffield, a visiting Research Fellow with the Open University, and an adjunct professor at the University of Crete. You’ll also notice on this episode that Luca has been replaced by our first ever guest interviewer, Rob Long. Rob is a Research Fellow here at the Future of Humanity Institute, and he was able to bring some philosophy of my knowledge to the conversation, which was extremely useful. Incidentally, we’re thinking about trying out this format more often with one of us swapping out for a guest interview. So let us know if you thought this one went well.

Fin 00:50

Now, Keith is especially well known for really introducing and defending a view about consciousness called illusionism. So here’s me trying to explain the idea. It might feel like there is something it is like to be you right now, hearing my voice, seeing whatever you’re seeing, and specifically, in addition to the way you’re reacting psychologically to what I’m saying and what you’re seeing. And alongside all of this information processing, you might think there is a kind of extra raw experience. There are some extra distinctive sensory qualities, and these experiences might seem, in some sense intrinsic or private to you, kind of ineffable. Maybe you might even think that they’re not physical, right? Really hard to imagine how they could be reducible to a bunch of neurons firing in your head or whatever. And this kind of raw experience is what philosophers sometimes call phenomenal consciousness.

Fin 01:48

Now, illusionism says that this kind of raw, private sensory experience is just not real. In other words, you are not, in fact, phenomenally conscious at all. And the strong impression that you might have that you are in fact conscious is a kind of trick or a fiction, which your brain kind of plays on itself or tells to itself or something. Keith does a much better job of explaining this view at length in the podcast, so stick around if this sounds unclear. One reason I really wanted to speak to Keith was to ask him about the ethical implications of illusionism, because it’s very natural to link together questions about ethics that is, what we should do with questions about consciousness.

Fin 02:33

For instance, it seems like some mental states are kind of intrinsically good or bad, and in some sense this could be a guide for what outcomes we should try to avoid or reach, and which kinds of creatures we should care for. And then that might motivate you to try figuring out which non human animals are conscious. Or you might even start wondering about which kinds of AI might eventually be conscious. But Keith basically denies that there are intrinsically good or bad mental states at all. And so I think he nuances and complicates this picture in all sorts of just really compelling and interesting ways. So thanks very much to Rob for joining me on this one. And without further ado, here is Keithfrankish.

Keith 03:15

My name is Keith Frankish. I’m a philosopher. I worked for a long time at the Open University in the UK, writing course material. I still have affiliations with the various universities in the UK. And I do some teaching here at the University of Crete. But I spend most of my time writing these days. I write mostly about consciousness. I think consciousness is a subject that fascinates people. It’s a subject that we all feel quite deeply about. I think it’s very intimate. Our consciousness is what we really are, in a way. But I think we’re often quite confused about it. And I’m trying to think more clearly about it myself and trying to help other people to think more clearly about it.

Fin 04:07

And I suppose as a way to get more of a taste of what exactly you’re currently preoccupied with. Could you maybe tell us about some kind of problem or question that you’re currently stuck on?

Keith 04:19

I’m stuck on two questions. One is the substantive question, which is thinking about what consciousness is and why we think about it in the way that we do. I just said that I think we’re confused about consciousness. I think we misconceptualize our own consciousness. And I think that itself is a very interesting fact about us, that we tend to think of consciousness in this particular way. There’s a kind of compelling picture of what consciousness is that we can’t seem to detach ourselves from, and I think it’s wrong. I think that the very good reasons for thinking this picture is wrong and that it’s actively misleading us and hindering our progress in all sorts of ways. But it’s very hard to detach ourselves from that picture. And so one thing that really interests me is why we have this picture.

Keith 05:09

If I’m right that it’s wrong, and what that itself tells us about consciousness, that it’s something that presents itself to us in this way. I’m also struggling with a practical question, because, as I said, I’m increasingly writing for trying to write for a wider audience, and I’m facing this problem of how to communicate about this. What I’m asking people to do in my work on consciousness is to rethink the nature of their own consciousness. And how do you get people to do that? It’s not easy. It’s not easy for me to hold this reconceptualized picture in mind, and it’s hard to get it across to other people.

Keith 05:53

I’m asking people to make a kind of daniel Dennett might call it an inversion or a sort of aspect shift in the way they think about consciousness, and it’s hard to get them to do that now. This is my problem, not their problem. And this is something that’s an ongoing thing. I think you can see it in Dennett’s work that he’s continually tried to develop new thought experiments, new analogies, new metaphors, new ways of trying to get people to see it, what he considers the right way. And I see myself as continuing to do that.

Fin 06:30

I really like what you said on the second point, which is that philosophers are fond of dealing in arguments. But if the question is how do I change someone’s mind to come around to a view which I think is right, does feel like the most effective way involves not so much leading them through arguments, but also presenting really interesting kind of new perspectives, analogies thought experiments, little empirical examples, new angles or something. And I wonder if that is underrated in philosophical discourse at least kind of public facing discourse. But I’m sure in some sense this conversation could be something like a test of that. And I suppose the real question has to do with the first problem you’re stuck on, which is something like, well, people tend to hold a view of consciousness which you think is mistaken.

Fin 07:24

And before we talk about that view, I guess we can talk about this big question that kind of motivates lots of different views about consciousness. This is often called the hard problem of consciousness. Now, whether or not you ultimately think this is a kind of good question to be asking, I would be keen to hear how you understand this question and just a little bit about how people begin to approach it.

Keith 07:49

It’s very easy to say what the hard problem is. It’s the problem of how the brain generates produces consciousness. Okay, how does it do it now? But everything is packed into the question of what you mean by consciousness. Now, standardly what happens here when you’re introducing this problem to students or to people who are interested in philosophy of mind is you start talking about what it’s like to have experiences. You say, well, consciousness is what it’s like to have visual experiences, auditory experiences. It’s what it’s like to see a brilliant blue sky, to taste coffee, to hear a violin playing or whatever. And you can be aware of these examples. And similarly with bodily sensations, what it’s like to feel a pain in your toe or whatever.

Keith 08:52

But very quickly you have to start clarifying things a bit here because it seems that what you’re saying is that it’s what colors and sounds and tastes and things are like. And at first sight, colors and sounds don’t seem to be mental things at all. They seem to be things in the world around us. Colors are features of objects on the basis of which we group some things together and distinguish things from each other there. So what is this? What it is likeness of the color? If the colors out there, what is it? And so you have to start making a distinction between the colors of things out there in the world, which is whatever it is we’re we’re picking up on when we categorize things in this way.

Keith 09:37

And then the mental color, what it’s like to experience the color, which seems to be another property. So there’s the color out there, whatever it is that some feature of the surface of an object that’s reflecting light of certain wavelengths, and then that’s sort of producing a kind of color in our minds, which is often referred to as the quality of the color in question, the quality of yellow, the quality of red or whatever. Similarly with pain seems to be something that occurs in our bodies. Pain is in my toe and there’s certainly damage in my toe and some kind of stimulation there.

Keith 10:14

But then it produces this pain quarrelli, it seems in my mind, which is what it’s like to experience that pain and this sort of line of thinking, this separation between the sort of the qualities in the world and the qualities that are experienced. It’s easy to sort of reinforce this by thinking about cases where you hallucinate or dream, whatever, where it seems all the mental qualities are there, but the appropriate worldly ones aren’t. And it can seem that really, it’s these mental qualities, these mental colors and sounds and things that are all that we really know for sure. And now it looks like you really have got yourself with this way of starting to think about consciousness as this interior world.

Keith 10:56

Once you’ve talked yourself into this way of thinking about it, which isn’t hard to do, then you really seem to be stuck with a big problem, because this interior world seems to be radically private, as no one else can get access to it. You can tell them about it, but even then, you’re limited in how you can describe it. You can say, Well, I’m having that experience that I have when I see yellow things, the experience that bananas produce. And how does the other person know that the experience bananas produce in them is the same as the one that it produces in you? They can’t get into your private little mental world and have a look at your mental qualities, and you can’t get into theirs.

Keith 11:40

Moreover, investigating your brain through neuroscience doesn’t seem to help at all, because that neuroscience just doesn’t show up. This private world of mental qualities just shows neurons doing all sorts of wonderful things. So now you have this idea of so how does the public brain, this massively, complex biological organ of 80? Is it 80 billion interconnected neurons? I’m not sure of the number.

Rob 12:07

86 or so.

Keith 12:08

Is it 86? Okay. And without how many interconnections innumerable, how does that produce this private world of mental qualities? That’s the hard problem. And I think once you set it up in this way I’ve done a little bit to set it up there, but you can do a lot more once you set it up in that way. I think you’re presented with not merely a hard problem, but an impossible problem.

Rob 12:37

So there’s this paper called The metaproblem of Consciousness by David Chalmers. And you have written a response to this. And something that’s at issue in this conversation you have with Chalmers is how much is baked into our concept of consciousness. So I think he would say, and Eric Schwitzgable says things like this whether consciousness is private, as you’ve been saying, or infallible, those are like substantive things we can say about consciousness. And those do make things very tricky. But what do you think of people who say there’s actually just a more innocent conception of consciousness? That’s ashwitz gable’s term. We don’t have to think that it’s necessarily private or infallible.

Rob 13:17

We can still pick out this thing that we can wonder about, and it’s this thing that visual experience has and mental imagery has, but that hormone release doesn’t have, or certain low level things in muscle control or the regulation of heartbeat. You can wonder what the difference between those things is, just namely that there’s something that’s like to be in the first and not the second.

Fin 13:43

Yeah.

Rob 13:43

What do you think about this more innocent approach?

Keith 13:46

I was with you until the last sneaked in. What it’s like there? Yeah, I think there is an innocent notion of consciousness. I’m very happy with it. It just doesn’t pose a hard problem. Let’s just point to some examples of conscious experiences. There’s a light above me now. I’m looking at it. It’s a sort of yellowy white. It’s quite bright. It’s flickering a little bit. I’m having a conscious experience. Okay. And then we can point to other things that are happening in me, perhaps things that my brain is doing that are not very like that at all. Yeah. Here’s a bunch of events that occur in me that we group together because they have some kind of common features. For one thing, I can tell you about them. That’s one obvious thing.

Keith 14:27

When I’m having a conscious experience, I generally am able to describe it to you. Yeah, those things happen and they need explaining. But we’ve not got anything in that conception that presents a hard problem. There’s no reason to think that whatever it is that we’re talking about, there isn’t just some sort of complex set of functional processes in the brain. Now, consciousness as something that poses a hard problem is supposed to be something that resists conceptualization in functional terms. And it resists it because, well, you start waving your hands here and saying, well, it’s just kind of purely qualitative. It’s just a feel. It’s a pure feel. It’s not a matter of something happening, some process occurring like digestion, which we can conceptualize fully in functional terms. It’s just a pure feel.

Keith 15:14

And we could imagine all those film we get into all these thought experiments which are supposed to reveal something about consciousness, but I think just reveal or just reinforce a certain conception of consciousness.

Fin 15:26

I was wondering if I could try saying back the way you’ve been describing this conception of consciousness. So, as you’ve said, it does seem to most people, certainly to me, that, among other things, my conscious experience is kind of private in the way that no amount of peering around my brain or me talking to other people can really communicate what it’s like for me to be like tasting this coffee or seeing this color. It’s also similarly kind of ineffable. For instance, if I were trying to tell a blind person what it’s like to see the color red, I think it wouldn’t only be difficult. I feel like it also would just be impossible. Maybe red looks like the way a trumpet sounds or something, but I was not even getting close.

Fin 16:08

And then finally, it really feels like this thing, consciousness is in some significant way disconnected from the physical world or processes in that world. Right. So I could imagine, like, blowing up my brain so I can walk through the neurons, and no matter what I look at, I won’t see anything that I recognize as consciousness. I could also imagine duplicating a brain in some other possible world and there being no kind of attendant experience, right, just the people walk around, but the lights aren’t on or something. And all those thoughts kind of lead you to thinking that there’s this question to be answered about how and why it is that one hand, we have physical processes and on the other hand, we have the taste of coffee and the appearance of red.

Fin 16:55

And you’re saying, okay, I can see why people think this is a question. But I don’t only think it’s a hard question. I think it might be an impossible question.

Keith 17:03

Yeah, absolutely. That’s exactly the conception of consciousness that’s at the root of this. And yes, philosophers might say, well, I don’t want to endorse all of those things, or maybe I want to have a watered down notion. But that’s the notion that’s causing the problem. That’s the notion. This private mental world that is known to you in some very special way and is not accessible to either people or to scientific investigation, that’s the notion that’s causing the problem. That’s why we think there’s a hard problem. So so long as you think there’s a hard problem, you’re endorsing at least substantial bits of that conception. Yes, and I think it’s probably the privacy that’s at the root of it. The idea that this mental world isn’t really part of the public three dimensional world that can be investigated by science.

Keith 17:53

And of course, if you think of it in that way, then there’s a hard problem, because how on earth does science get well, science can’t get hold of it. The most you can do is tell some story about how these private world is related to the world that science describes. So my challenge really is to that way of thinking. It’s saying no, I agree completely that’s how we tend to conceptualize our own minds. I feel the pull of that picture, I think, as strongly as anyone. But as Daniel Donna would say, I don’t trust it. I think my mind might be tricking myself about itself, as it were. And at the very least we ought to consider this as a possibility.

Keith 18:38

Because if the intuitions we have about this private mental well are right, then we are really very special bits of the universe that somehow create these private worlds.

Fin 18:49

I like the phrase maybe our minds are tricking ourselves about themselves or something along those lines.

Keith 18:56

Or our brains tricking ourselves about our brains might better.

Fin 18:59

Yeah. You are pointing at a kind of alternative conception of consciousness which gets called illusionism about consciousness. We’ll kind of, I guess, go into this slowly and maybe from different angles because I happen to think it’s just a very weird idea. At least I find it very hard to wrap my head around. But maybe as a kind of first blush, could you tell us what illusionism is supposed to be saying and what it’s answering exactly as well?

Keith 19:29

Well, it’s saying that this conception of consciousness is first of all seriously mistaken, that these world of private mental colors and qualities and so on doesn’t actually exist. Something exists that is causing our beliefs about this private mental world. That makes it seem to us in some sense that there is this mental world and our talk about this mental world is certainly tracking things that are really happening. It’s not that when we say I’m having this experience that nothing’s happening, something’s happening, but the way we conceptualize it is wrong. Our way of conceptualizing experiences involving this private, especially intimate acquaintance with peculiar nonphysical properties. That’s the wrong way of thinking about it though. It’s a natural way and a way that is perhaps useful for talking about what’s happening with us and communicating with other people. I’m not suggesting we give it up.

Keith 20:34

I mean other way of putting this, I suppose, is that introspection, the process of attending to our own mental states, to what’s happening in our minds is not reliable. This is something that in other areas, certainly in thinking about, say the belief and desire and emotions, this is widely accepted that we often deceive ourselves about what we really think and believe and want. But it seems surely we can’t be deceiving ourselves about what we’re actually experiencing right now. But I think we can certainly misconceptualize what’s happening. I mean, another possible word for the position would be something like fictionalism. The idea that we are using a kind of fictional language, the language of this private mental world is a sort of fictional place with these fictional things. These things quietly are occurring there and some sort of fictional self appreciating them.

Keith 21:29

And Daniel Dennett likes to characterize this common sense idea, this wrong idea, as a sort of internal private theater where there’s a self watching this display of mental colors and listening to a mental soundtrack, as it were. And this is quite a compelling picture, which I think even those who would say, well, of course, I don’t believe anything like that. This kind of picture still is there somehow in the background shaping the things that they do believe.

Fin 21:58

I am interested to try drawing out just how possibly radical or weird or counters to common sense this view might sound to some people. And one way to do that is to explain how this is different from what gets called physicalism or materialism or at least certain kinds of those views about consciousness. So lots of people I know will think, oh, I don’t think that consciousness is something kind of mysterious or magical or nonphysical. I have this kind of private mental world. I see colors, sure. And I just happen to think that world is identical with or caused by my brain. I’m a scientist. In what way does that kind of view different from the viewer you’re expressing?

Keith 22:47

I think my view is much more commonsensical than the physicalist one. Right, okay. So first of all, let’s distinguish physicalism from another view that is often confused with physicalism. The view that’s often confused with physicalism is the view that the brain somehow produces consciousness, that the stuff that’s happening in the brain somehow creates these mental properties, these mental qualia, these mental colors and sounds and so on. The consciousness is a product of the brain that’s not physicalism. That’s a sort of property dualism, because there’s two sorts of properties. There’s the brain properties, and then there are these mental properties that are produced by the brain. That’s a form of a weak form of dualism. Physicalism is the view that consciousness and these mental properties and so on just are states of the brain.

Keith 23:39

So the feel of seeing a bright blue sky, the feel of a sharp pain in your toe just is certain activity in certain regions of your sensory cortex. It’s just certain patterns of brain fighting. That is the mental color. That is the pain that’s physicalism. Now, that seems to me I cannot make sense of that view. I mean, the physicalist is these two things are the same that I look at the vivid, brilliant blue sky above me, and that what I’m actually attending to when I tend to the blueness of the blue is actually some pattern of neuron firing in my brain. That’s what it is. Well, it certainly doesn’t look like it from the perspective of the neuroscientist investigating my brain. It doesn’t look blue to them. I can’t make sense of that identity.

Fin 24:40

I can imagine drawing in analogy to other things. So I am looking at what looks like a tiny Rob and a tiny Keith. But in fact, I know it’s just some array of pixels. And because I’m scientifically responsible, I’m a kind of pixelist about these images of people. And I’ve explained the way the problem of how it is that a tiny Rob and a tiny Keith appear to like beaming in front of me. Is that not the same kind of thing, that physicalista?

Keith 25:08

Not really. It’s an illusion. You’re not actually looking at me. You’re looking at pixels on a screen. That’s more of an illusionist position. You’re not actually seeing those pixels aren’t me. This is not a Keith. This is a picture of a Keith that you’re looking at. So you’ve not really mistaken me for the pixels. That would be an astonishing category error. And similarly, I think it would I think claim, the physicalist claim would be that I am the pixels. That I’m like sort of max headroom character. That’s an old reference. Probably too old for you. I am just a two dimensional digital being. That’s the analogy. So to me, illusionism is just clear headed physicalism. And if you look back to the identity theorists of the 50, the original identity theorists, people like Owen Place and Jack Smart, they were pretty clear about this.

Keith 26:08

Place talks about the phenomenological fallacy. The idea that this mental greenness. There is such a thing as this when you’re looking at something green, that there is a mental greenness. No, there’s just whatever happens when you normally see green things that’s occurring. You’re not aware of some mental version of greenness. You’re just in the state that you’re normally in when you see that, you’re normally when you see green, whatever that happens to be. And that’s for the neuroscientists to tell us what that is. But it’s not then to say that state really is greenness. So this is just clear eyed physical. And I think we’ve been going on a sort of physicalist of going on a detour for the last 30 or 40 years on this.

Fin 26:51

I see.

Keith 26:51

Trying to have their cake and eat it. Trying to take these hard problem intuitions seriously and discharge and respond in physical. I don’t think you can do that.

Fin 27:01

Yeah.

Rob 27:01

Interestingly. It strikes me that this reaction you have to physicalism of how could I possibly make sense of that identity? How could this really explain greenness? That’s something you share with Nonphysicalists. Both you and Nonphysicalists think that physicalism is just completely impossible to understand or to find satisfying.

Keith 27:27

Yeah. There’s a certain conception of consciousness. Yes, I agree. And if you conceive of consciousness that way, yes, you are making physicalism fairly inconceivable. But that’s because of the way you’ve set it up. The trick is that this conception is introduced as being a really innocent one. If you have to ask, you ain’t never going to get to know. And it’s just the obvious thing is what it’s likeness. But it’s actually built on the back of a whole tradition of philosophical thought about this, particularly the skeptical thought. And I’m not sure it’s as natural as we I think you can get yourself in a frame of mind where it seems very natural and compelling and hard to get rid of.

Keith 28:06

But surely the natural conception, the just the sort of completely pre theoretical conception is that all these qualities that are supposedly produced by my brain are just out there in the world. That’s the pre theoretical it’s only when you get to get early modern science and you get the idea that the world out there doesn’t have these qualities in it that you start having a problem of consciousness. You have to put them in the mind, okay, let’s take a little deeper. I guess patina science just saw all these qualities. All this stuff is just out there in the world. This is incredibly sketchy history. Then you get modern early modern science, where the idea is you try and sort of mathematicize the world.

Keith 28:48

That’s the point that Philip Goff makes a lot of and tries to describe the natural world in terms of the structure and dynamics of matter. So then what happens to the qualities? What happens to the redness and the painfulness and all this stuff and the sweetness and all these things? Well, you have to say well, you could say, oh, they’re in us. They’re in our souls. People tended to believe in souls at that time. They thought souls were not part of the physical world. So it was a convenient place to put this stuff.

Keith 29:15

So you say, okay, there’s this physical world doing all this stuff mechanically, and then there are souls which are filled with all these interesting qualities and stuff, which is also the locus of free will and intellectual thinking and all this fancy stuff that you can’t really explain in mechanical terms. That’s fair enough until you start science starts to get rid of the soul itself and tells you that what you thought was a soul is just a brain. And then you have difficulties because you put all this tricky stuff in there. Now you want to just be a mind brain identity theorist. So what, then do you do with this stuff? And the physicalists are trying to say, yeah, it’s still kind of in there somehow, but it’s now in the brain. You have to be more bit more radical, I think.

Fin 30:04

Yeah. One of the objections to this kind of illusionist view about consciousness, which occurs to lots of people when they hear about it for the first time, is, well, hang on. For there to be an illusion, doesn’t that presuppose that it’s an illusion for some kind of conscious observer or conscious experiencer? And I mean conscious in the kind of problem generating sense. So certainly this seems to be the case for visual illusion. If I’m experiencing some kind of illusory color where there’s. Actually no real color there, but just some like, dots which make it look like it’s there. I, the experiencer need to be there in the first place in order to be mistaken about what color I’m seeing. Right? So it looks like, worst case, this illusionism thing is just kind of presupposing the thing it’s attempting to explain away.

Fin 30:56

And very best case, it’s just kind of knocking the problem back one step, right? Because I just ask you, well, maybe the fact that I’m conscious is kind of an illusion, but it’s an illusion for who? And so I suppose the question is something like how can it be the case that I’m conscious in this problematic sense? How can that feeling be itself an illusion?

Keith 31:16

Okay? So that’s a natural objection and I can see it’s force, but I think it’s presupposing the sort of view of consciousness that I’m asking people to reject, that the illusionist asks you to reject. And the reason is this that you’re thinking of an illusion like, say, a perceptual illusion as something that’s experienced in this private mental world. So there isn’t really say, let’s suppose it’s a hallucination, let’s say, so there isn’t really a kind of pink elephant there in front of you, but there is a sort of pink elephant image in your private mental world. And your experience is constituted by what’s happening in this private mental world, not by what’s actually out there in the real world.

Keith 31:58

Or take an illusion where you have molar liar, illusion, where you have two lines, one of which appears longer than the other, that one’s not really longer than the other, but the version of those lines that’s presented in your little mental world, one of the lines is longer than the other. So you’re understanding illusions in terms of presentations in some private mental world. But if you think of illusions in that way, then the illusionist view of consciousness itself seems to have all the problems that you mentioned because it seems that the illusionist is saying, oh, look, this private mental world that you seem to have is itself an illusion. So that if you extend the same picture, seems to mean that you’re going to have another private mental world in which there’s a version of this private mental world being displayed.

Keith 32:42

So there isn’t really this private mental world any more than there’s a pink elephant out there, but there is a kind of version of it being displayed in another mental world. So you’re going to need a mental world, after all in which to present the illusion of the first one. Well, the thing is, the illusionist says don’t think of illusions in that way at all. So don’t think of perceptual illusions in that way as involving some presentation of mental shapes and colors and so on in a mental world. Think of them as producing a set of reactions in you in particular beliefs. So one thing that the illusion of a pink elephant produces is the belief that there’s a pink elephant there. So think of an illusion as something that produces all the psychological reactions typically produced by the real thing.

Keith 33:32

Well, the real thing isn’t there. And now we can tell the story about this in a world of this in a private mental world. We can say that for there to be an illusion of a private mental world is for you to have all the reactions to be produced that would be produced by a real private mental world. So, for instance, you believe that there’s a private mental world. You talk about this private mental world. You perhaps obsess about how to explain this private mental world. You have a lot of all the psychological reactions that would be produced by a private mental world with mental qualities and so on. And the thing that’s experiencing the illusion is just you the whole person, just as you the whole person having the reactions that are characteristic of seeing a pink elephant.

Keith 34:17

So you the whole person having the reactions characteristic of having a private mental world in your head. So you don’t need to have this second sort of presentation. There’s no threat of a regress, and there’s no need for some sort of inner person to witness this private mental world. So in order to get over the objection, you need to rethink what an illusion is. Now, that’s a little bit of an awkward thing for the illusionist because it looks as if we’re using a term that you already understand. And so illusionism says consciousness is a kind of illusion, but you need to rethink what an illusion is in order to understand it. So that’s a little bit of a defect in the name, but it is maybe an opportunity to explain the point better.

Rob 35:01

Very quick question, if you could go back. What are your top three alternative names for illusionism? You already mentioned fictionalism. Any other backup names that you would like?

Keith 35:13

Well, look, you could just call it eerieism. I kind of didn’t like that because it seemed to be sort of just dismissing it. It’s saying something. You’ll forget about it. Now, illusion, on the other hand, suggests something that an illusion is a real psychological state. And illusions can be quite powerful. I know wars have been started over illusions, I guess, and religions started over illusions using illusion quite broadly here. Illusions can be a power. I mean, the way fiction is drama TV is an illusion, but it’s a very powerful one that moves us and is quite important. Stage magic illusions, they’re important, potent, powerful things that can move us and amuses. And so I like the idea of illusion because it had a positive content. For me, it wasn’t just dismissing this.

Keith 36:05

It was saying, it’s not what you think it is, but it’s still quite important. So that’s one reason I didn’t like. I realism. I didn’t like eliminativism either, because I don’t think we should say eliminate talk of what experiences are like. We just need to understand what it’s really doing, what its function is. So I don’t like Eliminatorism. Fictionalism is probably the second best one fictionalism. The reason I don’t like fictionalism is because fictions are typically intentionally created. You make up a fiction. I’m certainly not making up this account of what my inner life is like intentionally. It’s being made up for me. So it’d be a fiction created by some personal processes in my brain. Whereas if I called it fictionism, people would say, you’re saying that you’re just making all this up.

Rob 36:56

You’re calling me a liar when I.

Fin 36:58

Say that, I see red.

Keith 36:59

Exactly. Illusions, on the other hand, are typically not deliberately created in that way. So that was a point in its favor, I thought. One’s trying something to do with magic, because I really like the analogy with stage magic, because stage magic is all about creating a certain effect on the audience. And I was particularly influenced around that time by Nick Humphreys work. He really is an illusionist, though. He doesn’t like the term, but he used this comparison with magic a lot. And his view then and it’s not really changed, I don’t think, was that this is actually an adaptive feature, this illusion of this private mental world that evolution selected for because it has all sorts of wonderful beneficial effects.

Keith 37:43

And so it’s a bit like evolution as a sort of magician crafting this illusion, carefully crafting this illusion to have a certain effect on us, on the audience. And another reason why I liked this idea of magic and illusion is because there’s a nice analogy with consciousness, which is this, which, when you know how the trick is done, it’s always disappointing, it’s always kind of mundane. It’s just like the wonder you feel from at seeing the effect is completely sort of disproportionate to the actual apparatus that’s used. It’s often sort of trivial and inadequate to produce that effect. And that’s a lovely analogy for, I thinking about the relation between the brain and consciousness. You think, how could just neurons firing produce our sense of this? How could just slight of hand maneuvers make it seem that this wonderful thing is happening?

Keith 38:45

People often say to me, illusionism isn’t an ideal name. Well, tell me a better one.

Fin 38:50

Anemia, I think, is important, though, right? Because often the success of some idea is attached to how catchy the name is.

Keith 38:58

I think it has worked in that respect. And another reason I chose it, I liked it was because it is deliberately provocative. And I think that is important because you really do need to do a bit of work to reconceptualize consciousness in this way. I think this is where physicalists have been sort of selling us short. They say all it is all you’re really introspecting here. Is the patterns of neural activity.

Rob 39:30

What do you think explains why it seems like children naturally wonder if people see red the same way they see red? At least I’ve heard this reported. I seem to remember that I myself had this and I don’t think I had at that time much of a theoretical conception of primary qualities and secondary qualities. And this goes back to the topic that you’re talking about at the beginning, which is what explains why we make these judgments. How much of it is maybe kind of baked in such that children would naturally come to it and how much of it comes from theorizing and things that we tell freshmen taking philosophy and so forth. What do you think about children wondering about this? Why do they do that?

Keith 40:09

These are really interesting questions. Yeah, I think some of it is baked in. I think it’s to do with the nature of introspection. I think we need a substantive story about what’s going off here. What introspection is tracking. My gesture at this is that what it’s tracking is something like it’s creating a reaction schema. It’s tracking the reactions that sensory stimulation is producing. By that I don’t mean behavioral reactions. I mean the whole complex suite of psychological reactions that are being triggered that it’s tracking the shape of those the unfolding shape of the reaction schema which is certainly something private in one sense in that it’s in my head and it’s my reaction. So the idea is that describing something as red, maybe we should sort of approach this a bit more slowly.

Keith 41:00

But the idea is that when talking about something as being red or painful, we’re saying something about how it’s affecting us. And I think that introspection is tracking obscurely how that complex pattern of reactive dispositions is unfolding and changing. When we say something’s red, we’re saying it’s pushing it in one direction, we’re saying it’s painful, it’s another, and so on. And that’s what we’re getting at with this talk about the feel of experience. This explains the privacy point because it is my reactions that have been tracked and my reactions are mine in a very unmisterious way. They’re not mine because they belong to some private world that is somehow strangely intimately attached to my bodies because they are just my reactions, not yours. But it’s not too hard to see how it might create the sense of mystery.

Fin 41:49

So there is I agree with Rob. I agree with you, keith does sound like there is a really interesting question to be answered here which is separate from the hard, quote unquote hard problem which gets called the meta problem of consciousness. This is something like the question of irrespective of whether there is, in fact a hard problem in the first place. Why is that when people kind of reflect on the fact that they feel conscious that there’s some really mysterious hard thing to be answered for in the first place, which as a matter of fact is the case. Lots of people go around saying there’s a problem. People devote philosophy careers to trying to figure out this problem. They’ll give lecture tours and so on. And the good thing about this problem is that you don’t need to start answering the metaphysical mysterious questions.

Fin 42:37

Presumably, unless things are really weird, we can answer the question of why philosophy professors go and give lecture tours about the hard problem of consciousness in more or less theory neutral, functional terms, in terms of what the h*** their brains are doing and what people’s brains are doing when they sit down and begin to introspect on their own experiences. And half an hour later they reach this point where they feel that there’s something really hard to explain going on. In fact, something so hard to explain that it’s almost mysterious or nonphysical or baffling in some way. And you’re kind of suggesting a piece of the answer which is trying to explain why people have these intuitions about privacy of certain kinds of conscious experience.

Fin 43:18

I wonder if that there are other kinds of answers or other angles or pieces of that puzzle that you find especially interesting as well.

Keith 43:25

Well, this is the first substantive question that I mentioned at the beginning. This is what I think people should be focusing on. Let me make a methodological point here. I think we should be focusing on this. First of all, I don’t like the term the meta problem because it implies, I think, that there is a first order problem, that there really is a hard problem. I wanted to call it the illusion problem. In fact, Dave Chalmer suggested I call it the illusion problem. But then that of course is question begging the other way?

Fin 43:51

Well, I don’t mind the term. I know the metaproblem of UFOs, which is something like irrespective of whether UFOs are aliens. Why do people keep thinking that they see UFOs with aliens inside them?

Keith 44:00

Yes, I guess it’s less question begging according to the illusion pump.

Rob 44:04

Okay, you can call it the quasi metaproblem. It’s a metaproblem if realism is true.

Keith 44:11

I’m always tempted to stick the word quasi in front of something. Don’t encourage me. But look, I think from a methodological point of view that’s the one we should be focusing on because suppose first of all, it’s tractable we know how to do it more or less. You know, it’s it doesn’t present a hard problem. It’s it they’re all easy problems in charmer’s terms that are approachable using the tools of cognitive science as we have it or of modest extensions of that. So it’s something we can get on and work on. And suppose we get a pretty good answer to that question. So we can say to someone who has all these intuitions that’s conscious, real mystery, I’m really puzzled about it.

Keith 44:52

And we tell them this story about why it is that they have all these intuitions about the mysteriousness of consciousness and why it seems that it’s this strange, private inner world with these ineffable properties and so on that doesn’t seem to be physical. And hang on, and we tell them this story now, two things might happen. They might go, oh, well, I guess that’s it then. I’m not really puzzled anymore. It’s just my brain doing all these complex things. As well as processing all this information, it’s also creating this sense that there’s this strange inner world, but I’m not puzzled by that anymore. I don’t think there is a strange inner world, and in that case, we’ve solved everything. Or they might say, yeah, okay, I understand all that, but I’m still absolutely convinced that there really is an inner world.

Keith 45:39

And maybe if everybody feels absolutely convinced of that, even when we’ve solved the metaproblem, then maybe we should start having a look at some of the realist theories. I don’t know if that doesn’t satisfy everyone, but let’s see if we’re satisfied with the metaproblem story first, which we can get. I’ve argued that we should be satisfied with that, and that not to be satisfied with. It would be rather like someone who believes in UFOs and then has a complete explanation of why they believe in UFOs, which doesn’t actually mention real UFOs. It’s all to do with optical illusions and weather conditions and whatever it is, and says, okay, I accept that you’ve explained away all my beliefs about UFOs without there being any UFOs, but I still think there are UFOs because I just can just tell they’re there.

Keith 46:32

But anyway, methodologically, we should start with the metaprom.

Rob 46:37

Yeah, well, this is just back to the first thing you said. How have you been trying to make progress on the metaproblem? Because one great thing about the metaproblem is it’s an empirical question. I mean, obviously plenty of work for philosophers to do to sketch how the answer might go and how it affects how we think about consciousness. But yeah, are you trying to build an empirical theory of why, for example, children are disposed to wonder about color inversion and philosophers are disposed to be dualists and the whole suite of behaviors that we would like some satisfying explanation of?

Keith 47:14

I’m certainly speculating on this, and I mentioned the stuff that I’m talking about. I’ve been talking about the action schema, which builds on work that Michael Gretziana has done on the attention schema, which I think is also relevant to the story. I’ve been focusing more on a broader brush attempt to get people to reconceptualize consciousness, which I think is a precondition for people starting to do this sort of work. I mean, I think a lot of neuroscientists are still following dead ends in thinking about consciousness. So one principal activity is that the second one I mentioned at the beginning, trying to persuade people to think about consciousness in a way that makes the metaproblem center stage.

Keith 47:54

But, yes, I’m doing some sort of theory sketching in that area, but it’s a hugely interdisciplinary thing and this is something that we need a big collaborative project on. I’d really like to see that get funded, and I’d love to be involved in it.

Rob 48:10

Same here, for sure.

Fin 48:11

Yeah.

Keith 48:12

And I think another angle on this is if you’re familiar with Andy Clark’s work that combines a predictive processing story with he draws an element from Daniel Dennett. Daniel Dennett has a story about consciousness as a matter of tracking affordances in the world around the opportunities for behavior. Opportunities for behavior that things present. So the banana presents the opportunity for eating and so on. And this I think this feeds into the story that I’m trying to develop about a reaction. Schema again, we track affordances by being sensitive to the patterns of reactive dispositions that things are creating in us which tell us about their affordances, so that we not only track the affordances, but are able to track our tracking of the affordances.

Keith 49:04

So it’s not just that this thing affords some sort of action, but we’re aware that it affords that kind of action and therefore can communicate that to other people. So that’s a bit compressed anyway. And Andy Clark’s got a version of the story which is done in terms of predictive processing, which I think is a paper called Bayzing Qualia, which a lovely paper with Carl Friston and another person whose name I forgot. Sorry. And I think there’s gradually the shape of a new consensus is beginning to emerge here. But what we need is a big organized research project on it. And if I can do anything to help promote that, I’d be glad to.

Rob 49:41

And just to plug some work by Buck Schlegers and Luke Mulehauser and we’ve talked some about this. Keith an allusionist software agent which is trying to build at least a toy model of some metaproblem processes.

Keith 49:57

Yeah, that should feed into it too. Absolutely. It needs to be one of the problems with thinking about consciousness is it’s been too fragmented. Philosophers, I think, have a lot to contribute to it, but I think we’ve contributed. I don’t want to be too controversial here, but I think philosophers have done a lot to I was going to say that we’ve done a lot to direct people down dead ends. And I think that’s true, though exploring those dead ends isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it shows you their dead ends and helps you to find better ones. I’ve written about panpsychism recently, and I’m quite fascinated by panpsychism because I think if you take the hard problem intuition seriously, this strong kind of phenomena of realism, panpsychism looks like a very attractive option.

Keith 50:57

And that, for me, is a sort of modus tolerance and a reason for not taking that conception seriously. So I think it’s interesting to explore these avenues. But the point I was trying to get to is that we’ve it’s been too fragmented. Philosophers have been driving in one direction. The other scientists have folks that there were sent fairly exclusive programs in the integrated information theory program, higher thought programs, global workspace programs, and these are largely seen as competing. And I think what I’m trying to get at here is that there are different paradigms that are driving work, different and incompatible paradigms, and we need a new paradigm within which people can work together.

Fin 51:47

I think this might be an instance of a kind of general pattern where the question kind of lies at the boundary between two or more disciplines. In this example, maybe the philosophers often lack some of the kind of useful technical expertise, but the folks in the more kind of technical disciplines, like cognitive science or something, or even neuroscience, the kind of funding story, is a bit tricky. It’s going to sound a bit weird, maybe, to funders. Maybe it’s going to be difficult to kind of publish. So it’s, like, not obvious that I should move into asking these big questions about consciousness and so that the incentives just never line up, and it’s like a real shame.

Keith 52:24

This is something that’s puzzled me for a long time. Daniel Dennett outlined a pretty clear program, I think, of this kind of this illusionist kind 30 years ago. And although Dennett has had a huge influence, I don’t think anyone would deny his had influence. It it hasn’t really translated, I don’t think, into the sort of concerted scientific research program that it really needs. I think scientific work has been much more limited. Paradigm was the wrong word there. But is it specific theoretical approaches like IIT that are really quite restrictive? There’s only one way that sort of program can go in that it can either sort of validate itself or it can’t. There’s no way of integrating it with other stuff. It’s a very tightly specified program, and I don’t think that’s the way to go with consciousness at the moment.

Keith 53:17

We need the right kind of conception of what it is we’re trying to study, and then we need to have all options on the table, I think. I think something like IIT has leaped way beyond what is warranted by the by our understanding of the problem. I mean, it’s couched within a realist framework anyway.

Rob 53:39

If people have been working on consciousness in a realist framework, here’s a naive thought. Can’t you just port that over and say they thought they were looking for the neural correlates of consciousness? Say, in fact, they were looking for the neural correlates of processes that explain our judgments that were conscious? Because clearly there is some difference between processes that result in these reports and those that don’t. And you could just say global workspace theory was trying to find those.

Keith 54:09

I don’t think it’s as simple as that. No, first of all, you need to make a distinction between first order consciousness and then whatever metaproblem processors lead us as reflective creatures to develop this conception of consciousness. Now, I’m inclined to say that consciousness contested term, but the way to keep using the term consciousness is to use it for those first order processes which we’ll find widely spread among other animals. And I’m happy to talk about processes of this kind, more basic processes of this kind pretty much throughout the animal world. And I think they’re going to be graded and messy and complex and there’s all kinds of different aspects to them and you can test for specific aspects and certain sorts of discriminations that are involved in being conscious in this way.

Keith 55:08

But sentient, we might say you can find all different kinds of tests, behavioral tests if we’re dealing with non humans and you’ll get positive results on some tests and negative results on the test and whatever. It’s a huge, complex, messy kind of pattern of sensitivity and reaction to the world and it’s not clear cut and hard edge. And asking is this animal conscious or not? Is meaningless question because it’s not a hard edge thing. And then you have the metaproblem processes that generate our particular conception of consciousness and they’re probably in the sort of full blown state they’re probably unique to humans. They may well be unique to humans but I don’t think that’s of any great we can get on to ethical issues yet. I don’t think that’s of any great ethical significance. Now, what are you looking for the neural coverlets of?

Keith 55:56

If you’re looking for the neural coverlets of first order consciousness in this sense well, pretty much everything’s involved in it in some way. And you don’t need to look for the correlates. You can just look for the mechanisms that perform the relevant functions. You don’t need to bother with correlates anymore. You can just find the mechanisms that do the work. We only talk about correlates because we can’t conceptualize the thing in functional terms and similarly with the metaprom things, again, we don’t need to look for the correlates. We look for the mechanisms, the systems that produce these relevant the beliefs and so on in question. So we stop looking for covalents at all and we conceptualize what we’re talking about in functional terms and then we look for the mechanisms that perform the relevant functions.

Keith 56:43

And I mean, I’m very impressed by particularly Liz Irvin’s work on measuring consciousness and the point is that what you find is that different measures of consciousness verbal report, eye direction, button pressing, different sort under different kind of conditions, they don’t agree. And why would they agree? They’re measuring different things, they’re measuring different kind of kinds of reactions. So only if you assume there’s some kind of hard edge thing here, the light either being on or off and which of these correlates with the light being on that this question really makes any sense. The question of the neural cores is sometimes which of the bits are essential to making the lights come on. The lights don’t come on. So it’s a silly question. Yeah.

Rob 57:32

So at the Future of Humanity Institute, which is where Finn and I both work, we think a lot about whether AIS could feel pain, could suffer, could experience pleasure, and how we would know when we’ve reached that stage and how we should act. In light of this, it’s not news to you or to any listeners that AI is getting increasingly big and complex and sophisticated. And at a certain point, we’re going to have to face the question of do they deserve concern, moral concern? The term moral patienthood is one that philosophers use. That’s just the question of what things we should extend concern for. So my question for you, Keith, is a lot of people draw a natural, intuitive connection between consciousness and moral patienthood.

Rob 58:19

People seem to think it really matters which animals feel things, which animals experience things, which animals feel pain or feel pleasure. And that’s also a natural way of thinking about the problem of AI. When would we have AIS that can experience things and how would we know? But you don’t think consciousness exists. So how do you think about the problem of AI consciousness, animal consciousness, for that matter, and its relationship to moral patienthood? Just a small little question for you there.

Keith 58:51

Well, hang on. You said, I don’t think consciousness exists. No, I do think consciousness exists. I’m asking people to reconceptualize consciousness. I don’t think the kind of consciousness that philosophers tend to focus on, sometimes called phenomenal consciousness, I don’t think that exists. I don’t think consciousness is phenomenal consciousness. I think consciousness is very relevant to ethical questions. And in fact, I think that’s one reason for finding the illusionist perspective on consciousness more promising. Because suppose we look at consciousness in the traditional philosophical way as this private inner world, and we also say that it’s the existence of this private inner world that really matters ethically. We assume that all other humans have it, though, of course, we’ve never actually experienced their private mental world. It’s private, but we assume that other people have it. Other humans have it. But what about other animals?

Keith 01:00:05

Well, if they’re kind of like us, we tend to think, yeah, they probably have a private mental. Well, dogs do, because, well, you can just they really like us, they love us, and so on. Other mammals may be facial. I don’t know. They’re kind of strange, sort of rather unemotional creatures. Do they have a private inner world? We don’t really know. And then get that further down the scale and think about insects and so on? Probably not. They’re just like little robots. But we don’t know because having a famous question, what is it like to be about? How do we even know? It’s like something to be about whatever this world of private. Experience is we can’t access it, we can’t even detect its presence.

Keith 01:00:48

We can hypothesize that it’s connected with certain brain processes, and we can look to see if those brain processes are there in other creatures and say, all right, they’re so there they are, they essay in fission. So probably there’s this private world going along with them. But these are just hypotheses. We’ve never actually been able to test these hypotheses. We can’t test them because there was only one instance of this private mental world that we can ever be acquainted with, namely our own. So we’re really in a bit of a dead end for answering this question of which other creatures have it. And when you look at AIS, which have their brains, their processing systems are quite different from ours. Have we brought one of these private mental worlds into existence in creating this AI, or have we not?

Keith 01:01:40

All we can observe are its reactions, the physical processes inside it. So it looks like we’ve done a rather we’ve brought ourselves into a rather difficult situation in that. So we’ve tied ethical value to the existence of this feature, this private mental world. But then this feature is beyond our knowledge. We have no way of detecting its presence. So we seem to have put ourselves in a very awkward position. Now, I think now that wouldn’t show in itself that it’s true, but that wouldn’t in itself show that the position is not true. It could be that’s right, that, you know, the facts that are central to ethical value are facts that we can’t ascertain could be true, but a rather depressing thought. Now, on the illusionist view of this, the picture is completely different. It’s not about having a private mental world.

Keith 01:02:45

Consciousness is a matter of having certain complex patterns of sensitivity and reactive dispositions.

Rob 01:02:51

Can I ask a quick question before we move on to the illusionist perspective? I was wondering if I could offer a bit of a reply on behalf of realists who do try to study animal consciousness. So, Keith, you and I have discussed a great paper by Jonathan Birch at the London School of Economics. So that’s kind of what’s inspiring my thinking here. Finn we’ve also discussed it. If you’re a realist about consciousness, you can still think that consciousness plays some sort of causal role or plays some sort of mental role. And I think that’s what Jonathan Birch thinks is probably true. He has what he calls the facilitation hypothesis that it seems like it might be linked to certain things like multimodal learning and certain behaviors. And we know that’s the case in us, and maybe it’s true in animals.

Rob 01:03:39

And so that at least gives us something to go off of when we go to look for it in animals. There are also various things we can do, like be guided somewhat by structural similarity to the human mind. So all this is just to say whether we’re resting that much on Birch’s framework or not doesn’t seem to me that we’re completely in the dark as realists about consciousness. We’ve put ourselves in a very difficult situation, but not impossible a realist about.

Keith 01:04:09

This problematic phenomenal kind of consciousness. I think you are in a difficult position. The suggestion is that maybe consciousness has certain effects and we can look for those effects. Well, now you have a kind of dilemma. Is consciousness just a physical state of the brain or is consciousness not a physical state of the brain? Have you got some sort of property dualism though these nonphysical properties that the brain produces, that’s consciousness? Now, let’s take the second option. If you say that consciousness is nonphysical but it has effects, then you’re saying that you’re going to find in the brain physical effects that you can detect, which don’t have physical causes, which have causes that are, from a scientific point of view, undetectable. You’re going to be saying that the physical world is not causally closed.

Keith 01:05:00

That could happen, but I don’t think there’s the slightest evidence for it. We don’t find neurons firing without some adequate physical cause. So I think that route, that interactionist route is not a promising one. The other one is, of course, is to say that while consciousness in this rich phenomenal sense just is a state of the brain. But then, of course, you have the problem of trying to make that identity conceivable to understand how these pure ineffable fields could really just be patterns of neuron. Fine. So I don’t think appealing to effects is helpful if you’re really sticking to this phenomenal conception of consciousness as pure feel. The other point was you said, well, maybe we can look for isomorphisms between certain structures and consciousness. But again, how do you test for these here?

Keith 01:05:58

Maybe it’d be useful to introduce a notion that I’ve used in a recent paper the phenomenal conception of consciousness. The conception of consciousness as mental qualities, as pure fields is a depsychologized conception of consciousness. That is, it’s a conception of consciousness as something that isn’t just a matter of the performance of certain functions of certain things, certain operations being carried out. It’s conceptualized as pure quality, pure feel, the what it is likeness of being in whatever functional state it might be. So there’s no conceptual connection between the two. So you can’t deduce the existence of consciousness from the existence of certain functions, certain operations being carried out. So what reason do you have to think there’s an isomorphism between them?

Keith 01:06:51

Well, maybe you can do establish it inductively by doing tests and seeing what when people are in a certain when their brains are doing certain things, performing certain operations, they’re having a certain experience. The trouble is you can’t do this because all you can test for is a correlation between those brain operations and certain reports or reactions that the person might make. They might say, oh, yes, I can see the light. Or they might press a button to say that they see a light, or they might react in some other pupils might dilate, or whatever it might be. There might be some physical reactions that you take to be indicative of the presence of phenomenal consciousness. And you can establish correlations between brain operations and those things, but those things aren’t consciousness.

Keith 01:07:36

Consciousness is specifically supposed to be something that can’t be characterized in terms of functions or reactions or anything like that. So you cannot do this inductively. And I’ve argued you can’t even do it in the first person by testing on yourself. But the argument for that is a little bit longer. And this is why, once you take this phenomenal conception of consciousness seriously, the path is open to a kind of panpsychism. Because if there isn’t any conceptual connection between the performance of certain functions and psychological functions and consciousness, then why do you need a psychology at all to have it? Maybe everything has got this interior aspect to it. Maybe tables and trees and atoms have this private inner world, maybe a very simple version of it. Once you conceptualize it in that way, I can’t see any argument for ruling that out.

Keith 01:08:35

So I do think the situation here, once you locate ethical value in this private mental world and you conceptualize that private mental world as having no aprioric connection with anything that’s detectable, then I think all you’ve got are a bunch of assumptions about what matters, about which kind of creatures matter. And you make your picture of consciousness fit those assumptions. And you say, okay, well, I’m confident that it’s there. In other animals. Not sure about fish, they’re not bothered about spiders, and I’m sure it’s not there any electrons. But those are just a bunch of pre theoretical intuitions that you have, and you shape your theory about the distribution of consciousness to fit them. There’s no way of actually no principled way of deciding where these private mental worlds are actually distributed.

Fin 01:09:23

So what I’m hearing you say is it’s like you’re delivering good news here about certain ethical questions about which kinds of mental states matter, to the question of how we go about finding which things have those mental states and what those mental states actually are. And the good news is that previously some people thought that maybe these ethically significant states like happiness or certain kinds of suffering are essentially private and mysterious in other ways, which will make them, at best, very difficult to investigate, like Rob pointed out. And you’ll say, no, I’m just denying that this private stuff exists. And that’s good because it means everything we care about, all this happiness or suffering, all of this is, in principle at least, investigable it’s in the public sphere there. It’s not closed off behind private inner mental world.

Keith 01:10:17

That’s exactly the message. I’m not denying that happiness and pain and so yeah, and we could recognize when they’re occurring.

Fin 01:10:26

But the next thing I wanted to say is that maybe there is a kind of more pessimistic framing of exactly what you’re saying, which is well, maybe the story is that on lots of sensible sounding ethical views, questions about ethics, they kind of bottom out. They ground out on mental states that we take to kind of matter in some intrinsic or fundamental way. Right? So certainly when I experience really bad pain or like I’m really happy, feels to me like these are mental states which are kind of they don’t matter with respect to something else. They’re just like intrinsically good or bad and indeed they have all these problematic features. Like they do really actually feel kind of private and essential and ineffable.

Fin 01:11:11

And part of me thinks that’s part of what makes them important and you’re denying that this kind of phenomenal consciousness exists at all. And so maybe the feeling is a bit like the rug has been pulled out of any kind of ethical enterprise that tries to ground out what matters in these kinds of mental states and that feels a bit worrying, a bit destabilizing. Maybe the question is something like where do you go from there? What do you identify as the things that actually matter once you’ve got rid of the kind of obvious candidates? That makes sense.

Keith 01:11:40

Yeah, I’m going to use an example that I often use and which I borrowed from Daniel Dennett. It’s a lovely example. One of the best little thought experiments in this area. It’s about the value of a currency, a dollar say. And then it points out the Americans tend to feel that the dollar has a kind of intrinsic value to it that other currencies don’t have, that other currencies like that kind of thing. Other people have these bits of paper that they exchange and that they can get things for and so on. And you can exchange these for dollars perhaps, but dollars are the ones that have the real value. They have a kind of intrinsic value that’s sort of vim, I think he calls it, that you can sort of just feel it. But of course they don’t.

Keith 01:12:29

They’re just tokens and their whole power resides in what you can do with them. And the notion of the vim, the intrinsic power of the dollar is a sort of illusion but it’s not the illusion based on nothing. And this is why I would add to Dennis point here, is that when you talk about the value of a dollar, someone who’s accustomed to using dollars, you see, this is why it’s not just a sort of anti American point to say that Americans think of this. Any currency that you’re familiar with, you’re kind of aware of its potency, you’re aware of the things that it affords. You can do things with this, you can get things with it. Seems to have a power and we kind of conceptualize that power as something residing in the thing itself whereas court it isn’t.

Keith 01:13:14

It’s just a matter of the social conventions and so on and what other people will give you for it and so on. And that’s very much, I think about conscious that we feel that these states have some sort of intrinsic nature to them that grounds their potency. But really it’s a matter of what they do, of what effects this state has on you. And I have tell you my own little sort of version of this which asks you to imagine, to think about pain. And now let’s take the sort of phenomenal realist view of pain. So let’s think of pain is let’s say some kind of activity in certain sensory that pain centers in your brain. Okay? Philosophers often said it’s C fiber firing. And now, according to the traditional view there’s sort of two things happening here.

Keith 01:14:03

First of all, those C fiber firings are having all kinds of effects on the rest of your brain and consequently, on a psychology they’re triggering beliefs. You believe something terrible is happening. They’re triggering emotions. You’re feeling fear and distress they’re making you anxious. They’re having physiological effects. It’s making you changing hormones and so on stress levels and things. It’s making you fearful. It’s maybe making you anticipate all kinds of bad consequences from the damage. It’s making you want whatever’s causing the damage to stop. It’s having a host of psychological effects many of which pups are only barely conscious of or many of which you’re not conscious of at all. And it’s also supposed to have just a pure intrinsic feel to it a pure intrinsic awfulness to it. And this, of course, is supposed to be analogous to the dollar.

Keith 01:15:00

The dollar has this power to do things in virtue of the social conventions that you can exchange it for what you can do with it. But it’s also, according to the naive you supposed to have this intrinsic value. And so my thought experiment imagines two different anesthetics one of which has the effect of killing, of stopping all the reactions that the pain normally triggers but leaving the intrinsic field intact. And the other, which does the opposite. It all the normal reaction. The state produces all the normal reactions, all the normal psychological reactions. But it doesn’t have the intrinsic awfulness to it. So if you imagine what would happen in the first case you would react exactly as if you were in pain. You would believe you were in pain. You would want whatever’s causing the pain to stop.

Keith 01:15:52

You would feel the emotions associated with pain. You’d feel fear and you feel you would cry out, you would beg for help and so on. All of these really complex psychological reactions and physiological reactions but supposedly there’d be no actual intrinsic pain. In the other case, the pain would somehow the intrinsic pain would still be there, but you would have no kind of awareness of it. It would almost be that from a psychological point of view you weren’t aware of it you didn’t notice it you don’t believe it’s there. You don’t feel any fear. You don’t want whatever that is causing the thing to stop you. You’re quite content and you perhaps continue having a relaxed conversation with somebody. Now, so the question is which would you go for? Which is the real heart of the pain for you?

Keith 01:16:53

Which anesthetic would you take? Assuming you can’t take both and which is the real source of ethical concern? Now, my intuition is that if you spell out the psychological picture, the picture of the psychological effects of pain in anything like a full detail, you will see that really that captures all that’s really significant about pain and this supposed intrinsic feel that somehow there isn’t really any intrinsic feel left over at all. Certainly not something that is really the heart of the matter any more than you need there to be an intrinsic value to the dollar matters is that you can buy things with it. So I think this way of thinking kind of undermines this idea that we have intrinsic feels or that they would matter if they did.

Keith 01:17:42

So I think once you start to really pull this apart this kind of natural way of talking that, yes, there’s this intrinsic feel, you see that it’s really just shorthand for your sense of all the effects of the state. Just as your talk of the intrinsic value of the dollar is a sort of shorthand for everything you can do with a dollar.

Rob 01:18:06

So, Finn, maybe you can do a poll of your listeners do some experimental philosophy because as an intuition pump that experiment actually pushes me towards caring about the intrinsic feel. I would take the pill that gets rid of the intrinsic feel especially if we can bracket that the reactions are going to have downstream effects of bodily damage will cause future bad things to happen. But bracketing that, as I take it, we’re meant to. If intrinsic awfulness did exist granting that I would still think that’s what matters. Now this could because I’ve spent way too much time at NYU. But more pessimistically it could be that there is this very deep intuitive connection that we draw between phenomenal consciousness and value.

Rob 01:19:02

And if that’s true, then I’m in that sort of pessimistic place that sin is that we’re sort of kind of out at sea meta ethically.

Keith 01:19:11

But take the dollar thing again. When people talk about assuming someone does talk about the intrinsic value of the dollar my claim isn’t that they’re just talking about nothing that there is nothing intrinsic there. But what they are trying to capture and trying to express with that language is their sense of the potency of the dollar. What they can do with it, what it affords them. So it’s capturing something real and something very important financially. What you can do with the dollar, and you can’t do that with a foreign currency, say, if it’s not legal in your country. So you don’t feel that foreign currency has it. And so you’re capturing something really important, something real and something financially important. Similarly with our talk of the intrinsic feel of pain, you’re capturing something real.

Keith 01:20:06

All of this, like the impact the world is making on you right now. And that’s something pretty important. That’s what you’re tracking with your talk of the intrinsic fields. And that really matters because how the world affects people matters. So if they’re being damaged and hurt and treated, that matters, and that’s what you’re tracking. And if they’re being treated well in ways that promote their flourishing and so on, that’s heaven matters. And that’s what you’re tracking. You’re tracking what’s really happening if you like. But you’re expressing that in a language of intrinsic feels. So I’m not saying this way you want to conceptualize it is completely idle. You’re not picking up on anything important. You are, but I don’t think you have to sort of take it too literally now. Why isn’t that enough?

Rob 01:21:11

Finn, are you still feeling pessimistic about value? And how did that thought experiment hit you?

Fin 01:21:18

So I am just deeply confused now. I think it sounds like Keith is using this thought experiment to push in the direction of illusionism. Rob is saying, well, actually, I’m kind of sympathetic to maybe the intrinsic thing mattering, and I’m not sure where to go. I think one thing hearing you describe that thought experiment keith did make me think was, well, I’m trying to imagine what it would be like in this example where I’m experiencing some kind of profoundly bad intrinsic experience, right, intrinsic experience of pain. But it’s failing to hook in functionally with anything else. So I’m behaving and I’m forming beliefs just as if I wasn’t in severe pain. I’m, like, absolutely baffled by what that would be like or feel like.

Fin 01:22:11

And maybe it’s kind of so confusing that’s just indicating that the assumptions that led to thinking this is even coherent were going wrong.

Keith 01:22:22

That’s exactly the point. I can’t make sense of it either. We talk a lot about zombies and philosophical ludicrous. There’s another sort of character that isn’t talked about much, which I want to talk about, which is what I’ll call qualia agnosics. And these are people who don’t psychologically have qualia, but they don’t psychologically react to them in any way. They’re not aware of them in a psychological sense. They don’t notice they have them. They don’t have any psychological reactions to qualia, any at all. So, like, there could be, like, a sort of invert, I suppose, that their qualia are just kind of free floating. Okay. And the quality of are doing whatever they’re doing, their pain, pleasure, whatever no connection with how the person’s behaving, no connection with any of their psychological reactions.

Keith 01:23:09

If you ask the person what you’re feeling, they give you some report that’s based on their introspection of physical states, okay? Not on their choilia. Then they don’t notice their quella at all. Now, it seems to me that the same considerations that support the conceivability of zombies support the conceivability of Qualio agnostics. Because the crucial point is that there’s no aprioric connection between functions and feel, okay? So it seems to me that if you can conceive of zombies, you should be able to conceive of quality of agnostics. I don’t think I can.

Rob 01:23:43

Yeah. Just to hop in and clarify what my reaction was to the thought experiment, it wasn’t that I now feel like a consciousness realist because, like Finn, I’m just very confused. It’s that I do feel like I draw a connection between phenomenal consciousness which does not exist on Keith’s view and value. And so I am in a position where I’m thinking keith is being very kind of accommodating to common sense statements like pain is bad. We’re a little confused about what we mean by pain, but that sentence is true because we are picking out these reactions, and these reactions matter. So pain is bad. Pain does matter. I’ve often find myself more in a mindset where I’m like, it turns out I was confused about consciousness, which I thought was the thing I knew the most about.

Rob 01:24:35

And now that has been kicked away by Keith and Dennis and many others, why not just think I’m extremely confused about value and what matters in as much as illusionism is a radical picture and counterintuitive, why not go with a radical and counterintuitive view of what matters?

Keith 01:24:54

So you’re saying that the illusions and sets a sort of precedent that you might then apply in the ethical realm, that it’s a sort of skeptic.

Rob 01:25:02

That’s one thing. It would be kind of, yeah, this is, like, so sketchy, but it’s like this very sketchy, methodological thought where I feel like I’d be somewhat surprised if something that was so central to my conception of the world was wrong. And then that left a bunch of other stuff relatively unscathed, like my moral intuition, what matters to quickly pile in as well.

Fin 01:25:25

I suppose an extra thing you could say is that if you were in a kind of less accommodating ecumenical mood, then presumably Volusionism is right. Then most people are just literally wrong about what matters ultimately. Because if you pressed people on what they think really matters, at least when it comes to experience, they would probably say something like, well, this pain just matters intrinsically or fundamentally in a way that isn’t hooked into that. Well, they wouldn’t use it, sure, but something like.

Keith 01:25:58

No, I think that’s a philosophical overlay on what they say. What they would say is they would just point to examples if you want to say, what do you mean by pain? And they’d say, this what happens when I stub my toe or I have a bad headache or whatever it is? Everybody knows what pain is. We can recognize it. And moreover, we can recognize it perfectly well in other creatures without having any access to any private world. You can see when a dog is suffering. This is one of what I take as a positive consequence of illusionism, that what matters isn’t sealed off from us in separate mental worlds that are inaccessible to us. You can see where if you attend properly, okay, people can act, people can deceive and so on.

Keith 01:26:43

But if you attend fully but descending fully might even involve having some sort of access to the actual events inside their brains. If you attend fully, you can get all the information you need. It’s all out there. This is the common sense. If you asked someone on the street, how do you know that dog is suffering there? That’s just been beaten or something? They’re not going to say, Well, I can’t really, because I can’t access its private mental world of quietly. They’re not going to say that. I think this picture of intrinsic mental qualities, which we have some kind of immediate acquaintance with, this is a philosophical overlay on all of that. The ethical intuitions come first.

Keith 01:27:29

They’re grounded in how we live and how we react to each other and to the rest of the world, and they’re part of what it is to be human. And, yeah, we can maybe tinker around with them a bit, perhaps, in the light of theory, but they’re not grounded in some theory of consciousness. After all, this sort of whole approach to consciousness is one that only originated the early modern period.

Fin 01:27:58

Something that Rob and I and others were talking about yesterday, as it happens, was this example of these little robot dogs that you use as kind of pack carriers for the US. Military, if I remember right, and someone was saying that. Turns out that soldiers feel really empathetic towards these robot dogs when they kind of get knocked down or something, right? To the extent that they end up risking their own livelihoods or something, or at least taking risks to look after the robot dogs. It seems to me like maybe there isn’t a sealed off private kind of fact of the matter about which things are worth caring about. But pretty obviously, I don’t think these robot dogs are like intrinsically worth looking after, right?

Keith 01:28:46

They’re designed, I suppose, to display certain sort of cues, and it was very useful to design them to display the sort of cues that trigger those kind of reactions in people because people will look after them, protect them, and they’re quite expensive. So, yes, they display superficial it’s pretty important superficial signs of distress, but if you attend to them much more closely, you’ll soon see that they’re not displaying the psychological reactions that we’d expect.

Rob 01:29:14

I think I see where Finn is driving, so I’m going to try to resident, I think, Keith, you were saying we can just see that dogs are suffering, biological dogs, and I agree that dogs are suffering, but if I see that they’re suffering you mean see just from their external behavior? That doesn’t seem right.

Keith 01:29:34

No, you’re quite right, but we see it against a background of interaction with dogs that is much more complex. We live with these creatures. Well, some of us do, anyway. We live with these creatures. We observe them. We interact with them in all sorts of ways. We know a great deal about the biology and their psychology and so on. So we’re interpreting this behavior that you see of this particular dog in the light of all that background knowledge, which we just don’t have for these. And that’s how we’re interpreting the behavior of the robot dogs. But of course, the background doesn’t apply to the robot dogs. What I mean is that I don’t mean that we can’t betray them. Of course we can. But there’s nothing deeply hidden. There’s nothing to which we don’t have access in principle. That’s the point.

Fin 01:30:26

And this isn’t really a question, but I feel like I really want to just emphasize how weird this feels to me, whether or not it’s right, because I really want to say that there is a fact of the matter about whether or not the lights are on in the robot dog. And you’re denying any kind of deep.

Keith 01:30:41

Fact about whether what does that even mean?

Fin 01:30:44

Well, it’s hard to express.

Keith 01:30:45

What does it mean, though, for the lights? Obviously, there are no lights. So what does it mean? Lights are on is a metaphor. Okay, so what’s it a metaphor for?

Fin 01:30:53

This is where I think I come up blank and end up wanting to kind of point to something like this. Right now, this thing I’m seeing, this thing I’m experiencing, well, this is real.

Keith 01:31:06

That’s the innocent notion of consciousness. I’m quite happy with this. What’s going off now? Something weird. Gosh. Now the idea that I can progress from that by sort of pure introspection to a metaphysical theory of consciousness, that’s where I go wrong. One thing we can start to pick away at this with the sort of quite thought experiments that Dan Dennett has used in his work. Things like change, blindness, the fact that we only have a very limited awareness of things in the periphery of our visual field, that we seem to be confronted with a rich and detailed this rich and detailed visual world. I have no, it’s not actually rich and detailed. And if you just focus, you only have fine grain vision within about 2% or something. There’s all sorts of ways that you can begin to pick away at this.

Keith 01:31:59

Let me try. Maybe this is a good point to try. One of my favorite. Thought experiments here. Is that okay? Try one on you.

Rob 01:32:09

Well, just with the warning. It might push me in the wrong direction.

Keith 01:32:15

Okay. You may have heard this before you’ve heard me talk about this because it’s one of my favorites. It’s the pickle jar. So I want some pickles. Okay? So I go to the fridge and the refrigerator, and I open the door and I look. I scan the inside of the fridge, and I can’t see the pickles. So I call to my partner. I say, Where are the pickles? And she says, they’re right in the fridge. I’ve just put them back. They’re right there and look again. So I turn back to the fridge, and there they are, right in front of me on the middle shelf, staring me in the face, as we say, okay, well, I think we’ve all done that sort of thing. And it’s also quite common, quite natural to think, hang on a minute.

Keith 01:32:57

Why didn’t I spot them the first time? What was my experience of the fridge like the first time I looked? Because here they are right in front of me. How could I have missed them? Okay, so what was my experience like? What was sort of showing in this inner world where the inner lights and the inner show are? What was there at that point in my visual field the first time I looked? If I could spool back the tape of my experience and have another look at it, what would I find there at that location? And it’s hard to see what could be there. I mean, if there was a pickle jar there, well, why on earth didn’t I react to it?

Keith 01:33:38

If I was looking for the pickle jar and that was actually there confronting me, my private inner world that I’m intimately acquainted with, surely I should have reacted. Was there just a sort of blank there? Well, if there was a blank, wouldn’t I have noticed that there was a sort of hole? Was it filled in with other products they sent with milk or something? So why now? It’s very tempting to think there must be a determined answer to that there must have been something there in my visual field. If there is this sort of inner world, the lights are on, what’s there to see in this inner world where the lights are on? But I think if you think about it, there doesn’t have to be answer to that question. Any answer is sort of kind of arbitrary and unsatisfactory.

Keith 01:34:24

The fact is, I just didn’t react to the presence of the pickles. I didn’t react psychologically to the presence of pickles. They didn’t enter into my sort of construal of the world, my take on the world. I came away that first time with a non pickle based interpretation of the world. And all the reactions were sort of pickleless reactions, and that’s all there was to it. There didn’t have to be some rendering of the world in some inner medium of me to react to. And of course, if you say that there was an image of a pickle jar in that inner world, why didn’t I react to that?

Keith 01:35:03

Now, if you say if you provide some sort of explanation of why I didn’t react to the rendered image of the pickle jar in the private inner world, why can’t I just tell that story about the actual pickle jar in the fridge, why I didn’t react to it? We just reproduced the problems. So I think that what this is trying to pick away at is the idea that we need to have this inner world, this inner rendering of the outer world. Now, if this inner world isn’t a rendering of the outer world, well, what is it?

Keith 01:35:33

I mean, if you want to say that talk of the inner lights is a metaphorical way of talking about being locked on to the outer world in a specially kind of attentive and focused way and being aware of that locking on, then, yeah, okay, I could talk about that. I could see metaphorical ways of cashing it out that are okay, but it always gets cashed out in this sort of naive sort of rendering in phenomenal qualities way. Okay, so let’s say that what we can all agree is we have this talk about the inner world and inner lights and what it’s like and all this we all have this talk, and it’s sort and it makes sense to us. It’s tracking something. Okay? Now, one way of cashing that out is as a rendering of the world in phenomenal qualities, mental qualities. Okay?

Keith 01:36:24

That’s one way of cashing it out. It creates all kinds of problems, but there are ways of trying to deal with them. Are there no other ways of cashing out that talk? Well, yes, and let’s consider some of them, especially since the kind of realist one creates so many problems.

Fin 01:36:42

Yeah, I really want to say that. So I think I’m very sympathetic to everything you’re saying. And if someone asks, I’d probably say I’m an illusionist about consciousness. But whenever I really attend to for instance, if I attend to what I’m seeing right now and I think, well, if I take seriously the thing you just said, in some sense, there’s just no deep fact of the matter about what I’m currently seeing, which is kind of a bewildering thought. Also, I’m reminded of this I think it’s netblock, maybe this example where you’re sitting in your room and all of a sudden you hear the air conditioner switch off and you can ask this question was I hearing the air conditioner beforehand? Because I didn’t realize it was on before it switched off. And you’re saying, well, in some sense, just no question.

Keith 01:37:27

Exactly.

Fin 01:37:28

Not like there was an inner sound stage which was either reproducing the sound or it wasn’t.

Keith 01:37:32

Exactly. Again, a lot of the metaphors and things I use here. Device from Dennis. Think about it. Your access to your own mind, to your own brain is through a sort of public relations department, which gives you a kind of digest of what’s going off. And that public relations department has a lot of information feeding into it all the time, but it’s not outputting a lot. And as soon as you ask it a question, it suddenly pours out all kinds of stuff. Pay attention to what you can feel right now in your left foot. Well, once you pay attention to it, you get all kinds of information about it. Maybe it feels a bit itchy or something, or maybe you’re aware of its position and so on. Were you aware of those things before? Were they sort of present in your consciousness before?

Keith 01:38:21

The information was being registered at some level, but it didn’t have a lot of salience. And as soon as you started attending to it got a lot of salience and you were able to report it and reflect on it and obsess about it and maybe someone talk about the feel of it and all this stuff. There’s masses of information waiting for you to tap. But if you ask, was that information rendered phenomenally before I tapped it? As you say, it’s a non question. And was it or wasn’t it rendered phenomenally? Well, suppose that were a fact of the matter. It would still be nothing to us. I’m not persuading, Rob. I can see that, actually.

Rob 01:38:59

I’m going to turn a question back on Keith. I was going to say, the case for illusionism I do find very compelling. I don’t think I have full belief in it. Which raises the question, yeah, Keith, what is your credence in illusionism? So I think in some public forum, and certainly in conversation, I’ve heard Dave Chalmers give his credence in physicalism dualism allusionism. What’s your spread?

Keith 01:39:29

I have this character called the Truth Demon. The Truth Demon knows the answers to every question it asks, and it asks you to answer these questions on something pain of death if you get them wrong. The point is to test whether you really believe the things you profess. Do you really have more than 50% confidence? Is this really your best bet at truth? Or is it just something you say for other reasons? The Truth Demon tests gets this out of you because it’s overwhelmingly all interest to get the answer right and all other considerations fall away. I think I would say yes to the Truth demon. So that’s more than 50%. Here’s what’s happening. My motivation used to be a prior commitment to physicalism.

Keith 01:40:17

So it was the the implausibility of the non physical option, physicalist options that moved me towards something like illusionism. But I think increasingly it’s more than that. It’s that I don’t think that phenomenal realism, quality of realism is even coherent. And if it’s not coherent, then I can’t give it much credence at all. It’s not just that it comes with a lot of heavy metaphysical baggage which I don’t want to take on board. It’s that I can’t make sense of it.

Rob 01:40:46

So you’re good friends with Philip. Goff and speak with him a lot. You also have great regard for Dave Chalmers. Neither of them have gotten you to 5% on panpsychism. Or it’s just that you can’t make sense of it.

Keith 01:41:01

My credence in panpsychism, conditional on realism being true would be quite high. I think panpsychism is probably the best realist theory I can see. The route from realism to panpsychism is quite an attractive one, quite a plausible one. But realism itself, as I say, I’m increasingly examples like the one I was using about stripping away all the reactions and leaving the pure feel, intrinsic feel, I increasingly find it hard to go. Or the Qualio agnosiac who doesn’t notice that I increasingly find it hard to see what I’m supposed to be having any credence in.

Fin 01:41:43

That is kind of philosophically interesting question, right? Like how and whether you can have a credence in something which you think is literally incoherent. Because you’re not asking the question, am I in the world in which this thing is true? And I think there are, like, fewer worlds in which is true than other worlds. It’s more like credence in what or something.

Keith 01:42:01

Of course, my credence in the view would have to reflect the fact that I wasn’t confident that I was right about it being incoherent.

Rob 01:42:08

But then you wouldn’t know exactly what it is you’re believing.

Keith 01:42:11

Yeah, I’m a fallibilist, so, yeah, I could be wrong about anything. So, yeah, I mean, a rational person gives some credence to every contingent.

Rob 01:42:19

Some philosopher I can’t remember who said, I just heard this remark once in order to understand a philosophical view, you have to believe it.

Keith 01:42:28

I don’t think that’s quite true in the sense that you have to I mean, this is another thing I used to write about. But to believe in acceptance, where acceptance is more like trying on a view, it’s like adopting it and using it as a foundation, as a premise in your reasoning. And I think maybe you have to accept a view, at least temporarily, and think it through. And I think I’ve done that with panpsychism. You have to say, okay, let’s say I’m a panpsychist. What follows? How does this work? And I think you have to do that now. It doesn’t necessarily mean having a lot of credence in it because credence is separate from acceptance. You have to try it on, try it out.

Keith 01:43:01

It’s like you have to get in the car and take it on a test run and see how it performs. But you don’t have to actually buy the car. Right? I think we so often caricature other.

Rob 01:43:14

People’S views, so we have a lot of threads. And what Keith just said about caricatureing people, I want to flag that for later. But also I feel like I keep derailing us and we need to talk about the robot dogs. We need to find out what Keith is going to do and think as we steer into the future with extremely complicated, weird artificial beings that are sharing the world with us. Yeah. So when you wonder if we might make some sort of moral mistake about some animals or about artificial beings, how are you thinking about that mistake? What sort of mistake could we be making? Or could we make a mistake about which creatures we value and which ones we don’t? Again, the realist has a picture that seems very natural to me.

Rob 01:44:06

Ultimately, I might be confused, but the realist can say, well, there’s some fact of the matter about which ones can feel pain and which ones can’t. So I guess the question is yeah, what are the conditions for it being a fact of the matter? What sort of things should we be looking for in animals and in artificial entities such that we should start caring about them?

Keith 01:44:31

We’re sort of tuned up to react ethically, to see the world in ethical terms, to react we don’t just react on a purely sort of self interested basis. And we’re tuned up to do that by, I suppose, combination of evolution and culture. Now, maybe we can change that, revise that, improve on it in the light of theoretical considerations. I don’t know. But I don’t think that considerations of consciousness are going to force us to do that, because I think let’s just start where we are. We’re tuned up to, say, to care about other fellow creatures, other humans, animals, when they’re in certain states that we recognize in ourselves generally, in which we assume they are also experiencing.

Keith 01:45:29

Now, we’re tracking something real here when we talk about this, tracking something that real, that occurs in us and that we assume occurs in them. And let’s say we call it experience, consciousness, whatever we call it, and we can investigate what that is. We can find out what actually we are tracking. And I don’t believe there’s anything deeply hidden here. What we’re tracking is really a bunch of complex, sensitivities and reactive dispositions, certain ways of in which the world certain ways in which the world impacts on creatures. And we can say, look, we can produce a sort of list of the states in the world that matter to us, the states of other creatures that matter to us.

Keith 01:46:11

And then maybe we can say, if an artificial creature is in an AI is in a suitably similar state, then we should extend our concern to it. And that’s really it, as far as I see. We might then, on separate, independent grounds, try to it might be argued, they say, on utilitarian grounds. I’d argue that we should extend this concern in various ways or take its precepts more seriously. But I don’t see how considerations about consciousness as such affect any of this. Talk about suffering and so on is picking out certain states in the world, and we can investigate what those states are and extend our concern to other creatures that possess the same what, the similar ones?

Rob 01:47:01

Yeah, just to follow up on that. So what we’re picking out is, as you say, a complex set of dispositions.

Keith 01:47:08

Well, let’s say that’s what it is. I mean, we can find out what.

Rob 01:47:10

It is exactly, but for an illusionist, it will be more complex in some sense than it is for the realist, because the realist can say, there’s this thing we pick out and they can use a phenomenal concept to pick it up. So it is going to be complex. Let’s say we don’t know exactly what it is, but given that it’s complex, like on a cartoon picture, let’s say that there’s like 60 different complicated dispositions that we’re picking out when we think about human suffering, is there a fact of the matter about what we should do with a creature that has 40 of those dispositions? And then also, just to put it in your own terms, you said like, similar dispositions is maybe something we should care about, but of course you’re going to need a similarity metric.

Keith 01:47:53

Multidimensional.

Rob 01:47:55

Yeah. Any thoughts on what that looks like?

Keith 01:47:58

Well, we need to have some way of mapping the complex of dispositions. I’m sketching ideas for this in terms of what I call a reaction schema, which would have multiple different dimensions. But yes, it is going to be multidimensional. And so what do you do say about a creature that’s high on some dimensions and low on others? We have to decide. We have pretty strong intuitions about certain paradigm cases, and we have to decide how we’re going to what we’re going to say about ones that are more peripheral. Knowing more about what’s actually happening in the paradigm cases and about how closely related the peripheral ones are to the paradigm cases should help us guide, I guess, how we extend or retract our concern.

Keith 01:48:48

But again, it’s not a matter of the lights being on or off and concern or no concern, but we need to think more generally about what we’re trying to do with our ethical attitudes. This is where you need to get where you get into metro ethics, I assume, and I don’t really have a take on this, but I don’t think considerations of consciousness raise problems that we don’t face in other areas. It’s all going to be very messy and complex and multidimensional, and we just have to try and negotiate and find a way that we feel serves whatever purposes we think that ethics is serving. Ethical discourse serves.

Fin 01:49:29

It’s funny because in some sense it would be really suspiciously convenient if there were just kind of mental states or brain states that were somehow labeled by the universe as good or bad and at the same time, hearing you say all this, it does feel kind of uncomfortable. Right there’s, like, no place to rest your hat, nothing to kind of ground out in some stable, obvious way the things we care about. So I don’t really know what to do with a little bit.

Keith 01:50:00

Yeah, I mean, there’s certainly a sort of, I guess, a kind of anti foundationalist position in that sense. But I’m very generally anti foundationalist. We have to make sense of things on the fly. We make sense of things by living them through, as it were. Ethical attitudes are ones that we can live through. And I’m suspicious of attempts to ground all this in some set of basic principles. I think that’s kind of how ethics works. It emerges in a social setting, and as society changes and we incorporate new elements into our society maybe artificial elements then we change.

Rob 01:50:44

If the society had negotiated a line of concern that excluded dogs, say, and the society was full of dogs that were in terrible suffering or you could take our society, which is full of factory farmed animals that are suffering terribly.

Keith 01:51:01

Indeed.

Rob 01:51:03

How does one make sense of the idea that a society could be making a mistake?

Keith 01:51:08

Look, I’m not an ethicist, so I’m just sort of winging it here. But I’m not sure that you can reason people into having the right ethical attitudes. I mean, it’s a matter of it’s a matter of what kind of person you want to be and how you want to live in the world and how you want to relate to the people around you. And I don’t think I can reason someone into saying that they should care about factory farming. I mean, I can point out lots of things about the similarities between the animals and the things that they themselves experience. But if they don’t care about that, I don’t see that I can make them care. It seems to me that the ethical problem isn’t about trying to identify what matters.

Keith 01:51:56

It’s trying to get people to care about what matters. We kind of all have a pretty good grasp on the things that matter and don’t matter. But some people care less than others. If you could point to certain things in the world and say, look, it’s in a state that is intrinsically bad labeled by the universe, as Finn said, well, still, someone might say, well, I don’t care that it’s been labeled by the universe. And I don’t know what you could say to them about that then I don’t care what the universe has labeled it. You’ve got to care. And caring isn’t a matter of, I don’t think, having a certain set of beliefs. It’s a matter of living in a certain being, a certain person. I’m a virtue ethicist. I’m not fess up.

Keith 01:52:38

I suppose I think a virtuous person probably would have a certain amount of concern for things like the robot dogs.

Rob 01:52:47

If they that was going to be my question is how so? How do the virtues guide us as we enter this world of things that don’t share ancestry with us? And not that matters, but I’m just saying because they don’t share ancestry with us on all these multidimensional measures, probably are going to disaggregate all sorts of complicated things, be very complex in some ways, but simple in other ways, have different sensory modalities, have absolutely different reactions, different ways of being in the world. How do we navigate that virtuously? The virtuous approach to digital minds?

Keith 01:53:24

How do we do it? I guess trial and error. We have to live it through. I don’t think there’s like a cheat sheet that can tell us how to do it. I don’t think there are any sets of principles that can tell us how to do it. We’ve got to find a way of living in the world that we feel happy with, that we’re comfortable with. What if that starts to fractionate? What if different groups of us feel comfortable with different things? I don’t know. This is messy. This is horrible. This is part of being a self aware creature that we reflect on how we should live in the world and how we should react. And evolution has given us a good deal of freedom.

Keith 01:54:04

It’s hardwired a lot of stuff into us, but it’s also made as reflective and made us able to second guess ourselves and to worry about whether we’re doing things right. It’s going to be really messy, I’ll tell you. Okay. Something here that does worry me. I suspect that once we do get pretty complex AIS, and actually I think it’s going to be a long time before we get anything that’s really a really serious candidate for the sort of ethical concern that we give even to other mammals.

Keith 01:54:40

But once we do get those sort of creatures, I think there are going to be people who will say, I don’t care how complex and sensitive it is and how rich its psychology is, it’s just a piece of machinery and we can do what we want to it because they have this conception of the inner light conception of consciousness, and they can’t believe that the inner lights are on in this thing that’s not in this non biological thing. And they’re going to say, we can just treat them as we want. I think that’s a good I don’t think that’s a good line. I think it’s I’d much rather be guided by my gut feeling about these things.

Keith 01:55:21

I mean, gut feeling based on a good deal of interaction with them and fairly complex understanding of what they’re capable of than on some abstract theoretical principle like that.

Fin 01:55:35

Yeah, well, I think I would say that famously this is not the kind of conversation that often resolves itself in agreement and clarity. But the thing I wanted to say is that when it comes to thinking about what kinds of things matter, you said, well, the best we can do is play this game of reaching some kind of mutual agreement. It’s a real social process. And I want to say, well, to a first approximation, we’re in this world where we’re industrially farming animals, and most people are fine with that. And I think that’s very bad. And it’s not made better by the fact that people agree it’s for the most part that is okay and ditto for historical wrongs. I just don’t know what to do with that in light of everything else you’ve said.

Fin 01:56:19

But in some sense, I’m kind of happy to leave the conversation dangling on that kind of unresolved note.

Keith 01:56:26

When I talked about sort of establishing a sort of equilibrium, I didn’t mean that we just sort of settle and content with that. It’s an evolving process, and it’s very important that people are continually pushing and they have detentions within a particular picture, and they resolve themselves, and we move on. And it’s a dynamic thing, and that’s very important. It should be. Certainly in terms of factory farming, I think we should be absolutely pushing out here. And I don’t see there’s anything in illusionism that would deny that. There’s all sorts of considerations. You could appeal to this. They’re not living a life. They’re not thriving by any conception of what thriving is. You don’t need to have any sort of story about consciousness to see that these creatures aren’t thriving.

Keith 01:57:10

And if you think, well, of course somebody could say, well, I don’t care if they thrive. Well, if you don’t care if they thrive, fine. You don’t care, but not fine. But I can’t say much to you, but the fact that they’re not thriving seems to me a good reason for not doing it.

Fin 01:57:23

Yeah, I wanted to ask this question about whether we should expect especially advanced AI systems to begin getting the same kind of problem intuitions that people have about consciousness. Right. So people tend to think, as we’ve discussed, or at least many people tend to think that the think of consciousness has all these weird features. They think it’s maybe kind of mysterious or raises really hard to answer questions. I suppose that might because it’s just a very contingent feature of the way we’ve grown up over evolutionary history that we’re in this place where we all kind of share these strange opinions about our own minds. Or maybe this kind of illusion of consciousness, of phenomenal consciousness in particular, is a kind of attractor state in the, you know, the space of possible minds.

Fin 01:58:19

And maybe if we just kind of let the whole process go naturally, we just get more and more powerful AI. Systems. We should just expect them to reach the same kind of opinions about the fact that they themselves are conscious. So I don’t know if you have any way of beginning to think about which way you’re ready to go.

Keith 01:58:36

Dan Dennett and I have been working on a little project of imagine building an autonomous robot, starting with it with, say, something like an exoskeleton that is worn by a person, then gradually taking the person out of the suit and first of all, having them connected by sensors and effectors in the suit and then gradually replacing functions that were performed by the human operator by autonomous systems and seeing what the thing needs. What? The robot needs in order to carry out whatever tasks it’s facing and to see to what extent there’s a need for something like a sense of say, free will and phenomenal conscious to see what extent exactly say emerges. Because I don’t like talk of emergence, but to see what sense this comes naturally as a consequence of other capacities that we’ve equipped it with.

Keith 01:59:44

I’m inclined to think something like this, that what’s really going to be the driver of this is social considerations. When you get a community, say, you get a community of autonomous agents together who have pretty rich kinds of sensory awareness of their environment and can use this sensory information in really kind of really rich range of behaviors and so have complex reactions to sensory information. And you make these creatures, social creatures who share information with each other, they’re going to have one very important source of information about their environment which it will be useful for them to share and that’s information about how things in their environment affect them. So this thing, when you taste it produces this kind of complex reaction. This other thing, if you touch it puts another kind of very complex reaction.

Keith 02:00:46

Now, they don’t need to communicate all the details of that complex pattern of reactions, but they need to say whether it’s kind of good or bad, kind of what sort of region it is. Is it a sort of reaction that allows you sort of fine grained kinds of motor control, like a visual one? Or is it a reaction that allows certain other kinds of reactions? They’re going to need to have some crude but convenient way of packaging up information about how different aspects of the world affect them. And one way of doing this is to say how it feels. So they’ll say, well, that feels bad, don’t do that. Meaning it has a cluster of reactions, that the reactions that it produces are ones that are negative, one that I regard as negative.

Keith 02:01:33

And then they will be able to sort of nuance this in different ways. And maybe they will have these ideas of something like quality spaces where different kinds of stimuli are related to each other in different systematic ways and other ones occupy a different sort of space of relations and. So on. So they get different ideas of different sensory modalities and so on. So if that’s right, and this information is very useful, then it will be natural to develop the sort of mental picture that we have. And also, as Dennett stresses, it may be important also to conceal information. So they’re going to have this sense of that they’re tracking something that only they really know about.

Keith 02:02:22

This is my private take on this and I don’t have to tell you about if they just printed out everything that occurred to them, that could be quite dangerous. They would lose all sorts of opportunities. So they create this idea of sort of curating their own experience and monitoring it and providing information about some of it and withholding information about other bits. And gradually they have this idea that what they’re really in contact with is this private inner world through which the outer world is sort of filtered for them.

Rob 02:02:54

So, yeah, I wanted to talk about Twitter. Keith, apologies for pouring on the flattery, but I just really enjoy your Twitter feed. Whenever I check it, you’re having some really interesting conversation with someone or you’re kind of wondering aloud about something you’ve been researching in a very interesting way, and it’s news to no one that’s not the norm for Twitter. Twitter can attract bad conversation and anger. I never really see any of that associated with your account or even close to it. What are your motivations for using Twitter the way that you do? Do you find it useful for philosophical conversation?

Keith 02:03:36

Yes, I do. And I started using it when we came here to Greece. I felt a bit cut off, so I started using it to chat with people in philosophy back in the UK. And I used it partially just as a way of socializing, just of having the sort of conversations you would have. When I was working at the Ou, I’d just go along to somebody’s office and I just stand in the doorway and I’d say, did you read that piece the other day? Or what did you think about that? I’ll just go away. I always like to chatting with people idly. And I particularly like this because when I try to write really carefully.

Keith 02:04:17

And when I write an article, I really want to be very precise in what I say and I need some channel where I can just sort of stick stem horizon just talk without worrying too much about getting it exactly right and so on. And this chatting, I like doing it, so that was what I started doing. And I also just jokes. That’s how I use it. What I think the key to it, I think, is to think of yourself as talking to real people. This is something you’re saying to a real person who could be just in front of you now, just in the office next door. I don’t think people use it as that. I think they’re often arguing with kind of fictional characters they’ve created out of a bunch of tweets.

Keith 02:05:09

They’ve read these little bullet pointed tweets and they’ve created this idea of this monstrous person who has these terrible views on the basis of these few things they’ve said. And so they go and attack this sort of Don Quixote style way they go, tilting at this sort of windmill thing that they’ve created, and then, of course, the other person does the same back. So that’s what I would say. I would say if you want to make use of Twitter, find people you like, talk to them as if they were there in front of you face to face, and just don’t engage in argument, because even if the cause that you’re arguing for is a good one, you’re really not going to achieve anything on Twitter.

Keith 02:05:50

You’re more likely to simply antagonize the other person and make them more entrenched in the view they started with. I mean, it’s a tool, let’s use it creatively and constructively. It’s a way in which we can all be friends.

Rob 02:06:06

It’s funny because you do argue on Twitter, Keith, but in a friendly way. So, like, I don’t mean you fight with people, you don’t bicker with people, but, you know, I’ll see you in the replies. If someone’s talking about the phenomenal concept strategy, you’ll be in there, like pressing the table.

Keith 02:06:21

Yeah, when I said argue, I meant don’t fight. I mean, don’t abuse argue. Rational argument. Yeah, absolutely.

Rob 02:06:28

In that fun way that you can do in a philosophy department.

Keith 02:06:31

Yeah. That you would do with somebody who you’d see face to face. Don’t say anything to somebody on Twitter that you wouldn’t say to them face to face. And interestingly, often when I’ve met people who I’ve communicated with in Twitter, they’re often quite different from what you imagine them to be, and they’re always more complex than you imagine them to because people are very complex. And yes, they may have said something that you think is outrageous, and it may be outrageous, but that doesn’t define them as a person. People are complex and always richer and more interesting than your interpretation of them.

Fin 02:07:08

Wise words, indeed. It’s funny, people often can play the Twitter as a kind of cesspit of rage and vitriol, and I’m sure a lot of it is, but I’m always a bit confused that maybe they haven’t discovered that you can just curate who.

Keith 02:07:21

You it’s a wonderful thing. It’s a wonderful way of communicate, but again, it’s what you make of it. I don’t know. I think some people just enjoy abusing.

Fin 02:07:30

Yeah, that might be the explanation. Okay, so we have some questions which we ask all, I guess, at the end of interviews. And one of them is, which three books would you recommend for someone who is listening to this and wants to either learn more about the things we’ve talked about or maybe things which actually just influenced you when you were working all this stuff?

Keith 02:07:54

Well, I’m going to say some obvious things. I mean, if you’ve not read Daniel Dennett’s work on this, you’ve got to read it. So consciousness Explained and Sweet Dreams, which is a lovely little book. It’s a sort of follow up to Consciousness Explained. You’re probably better to read Consciousness Explained first, but Sweet Dreams, take some of it off in wonderful directions. It’s a lovely little book. And I think some people misunderstand what Dennis doing. He’s not providing rigorous arguments. He’s trying to get you well, not unregistered, but he’s not formulating this as a series of premises and conclusions. He’s trying to get you to look, to do this reconceptualization, to do this kind of aspect shift on consciousness, to see it from a different perspective. And this is why he uses metaphors and thought experiments and so on.

Keith 02:08:48

And you’ve got to go along with it. You’ve got to go with it. You’ve got to let him take you to show you the view he wants to show you. I mean, you may not like the view if you don’t find but let him take you there. Go with him. Don’t say, oh, this isn’t about really about consciousness, because consciousness is this bifurcular. He knows that you think that. He’s trying to show you another way of looking at it. Go with it, try and inhabit the view. Whenever I reread either of those books, I find myself seeing more and more of the picture. And I think they’re wonderful books. So, yeah, read those. Of course, I would also suggest you read Nicholas Humphrey’s book, solders from 2011, which is today Humphrey.

Keith 02:09:33

He doesn’t like the label illusionism so much, but the position is very illusionist. And it’s a wonderful one about how this conception of consciousness as a private, subjective world is an adaptive one about the wonderful effects, how it enriches our lives and what’s great. What I really like about Nick Humphrey’s work is that he’s got a really rich background. He’s a psychologist, but his background in neuroscience. He knows a good deal of philosophy. He’s also really widely read in arts and literature and quotes mystics and poets. This is what you need to talk about consciousness. You need this rich background of experience. And Nick has this, and it’s a wonderful little book. He’s got a new book coming out soon about animal consciousness, which is extending the picture.

Keith 02:10:30

And I think that would be very relevant to the people who are listening to the interests of the people who are listening to this podcast. So I really encourage you to have a look at his work. So that’s two. If you want to know more about my views, you could have a look at this series of YouTube videos that I YouTube lectures that I recorded last year for the Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies. There they’re on my YouTube channel, something like 12 hours of them. And so you can sit and do a marathon here, ramble about consciousness to your heart’s content. Look. Also read some of David Chimers. I mean, read The Conscious Mind, because in many ways, you got to know the enemies. I agree with Dave on a lot.

Keith 02:11:24

I agree on the whole way that he sets it up at the beginning, the whole sort of what would have to be true to have a reductive theory of conscience. I agree on all of this. Davies himself, fairly simple. I mean, he outlines an illusionist position in that book, and he wrote this.

Fin 02:11:43

Big paper about the metaproblem, more or less introducing it. And I feel like if I’m remembering it right, he does this thing at the end to the effect of, well, if it wasn’t for this, in my opinion, quite difficult to understand view of his, which kind of is a realism which fits with the metaproblem, then I would be an illusionist.

Keith 02:12:02

And he admits at the end that in terms of the dialect tick, the illusionist has more to say, because in the end, all the realists can do is keep thumping the table and say, yes, but the quarry are real, d*** it. And the illusionist can say, I know. I know you think that the quality are real, and I can explain why you think that the quality are real and why you’re banging the table. And the realist says, yes, I know you can explain why I’m banging the table. Am I doing that? But they’re still real there. I think he probably understands the illusionist position better than as well as anyone, and maybe there’s a fairly close possible world in which he is an illusionist.

Fin 02:12:41

Interesting. Maybe there’s still okay, last question. Is it might be the case that some listeners are, in fact in a position to do useful or interesting work on some of the things you’ve talked about? Are there specific questions or areas that you’re really excited to see progress on from the philosophical side or from the empirical side as well?

Keith 02:13:09

Dave Chalmer’s paper on the metaprom is a good start to mapping out some of this stuff. There’s there’s a lot of X Five stuff to be done. How how widespread are these intuitions about consciousness? Is it just, you know, the weird, the Western educated, et cetera, people who have these there’s loads of interesting stuff to do just on trying to work out how pervasive these intuitions are and what their source is. That’s the really interesting what’s the source of these in? Is it just the one extreme, just bad philosophy at the other end? Is it some sort of hardwired, subpersonal introspective processes that produce these beliefs? And I think there’s a whole spectrum of position and probably some dimensions to it as well. I talk about this in some of the lectures that I one of the lectures that I mentioned.

Keith 02:13:55

So there’s a load of interesting stuff to do. Then you get into substantive theorizing about the nature of first order consciousness itself and the nature of our introspective access to those processes that causes our metaphor of intuitions. I think there’s bound to be some there must be some sort of psychological story to tell there about the process involved, even if it’s overlaid heavily with cultural stuff. As I said. There’s also this wider project of trying to broader project of trying to sort of tease people out of the cartesian sort of way of thinking of this.

Rob 02:14:36

Make the world safe for illusionism, or.

Keith 02:14:40

Make it safe, make the world open to illusionism. Don’t write illusionism off. That’s my main objective at the moment. But there are lots and lots of projects within this. I mean, things like change blindness and how studies of change blindness help to undermine intuitions about consciousness and tell us something about the nature of our reports on consciousness or think about looking at measures of consciousness. This is very interesting, Stefan. I mentioned Liz Irvin’s work here, that how do you measure consciousness? How do you decide whether the lights are on or off? If you have that picture, and there are all kinds of different sorts of ways you might do this, and asking people is one way, but many other indications, both voluntary and involuntary, and they don’t all produce the same results. That’s the point. They don’t all give the same verdict.

Keith 02:15:32

What does that tell you about the nature of the process, both about the nature of the processes you investigate the first order process and about the introspective processes that generate at least the reports. Start picking it all apart. But what you should stop doing, I think, is looking for the correlates of the inner lights coming on, because that’s a dead end.

Fin 02:15:57

Okay, final question is where can people find you or the things you’ve made online?

Keith 02:16:04

Well, as you said, they can find me on Twitter, which is at Keithfrankish all one word, and they can find me on my website, which is Keithfrankish all written as one word.com. And there’s a lot of stuff on there which I’m currently in the process of updating. It’s a bit out of date, but I’m putting my new stuff up there. There’s a lot of prints of papers and various other stuff and some limericks as well, some philosophical limericks and a couple of rude ones.

Fin 02:16:41

And we will link to all of those things, limericks included in the show notes and on the website and so on. Keith Frankish, thank you very much.

Rob 02:16:49

Thanks, Keith.

Keith 02:16:50

Thank you. It’s been a great pleasure.

Fin 02:16:53

And guest interviewer, Rob Long. Thank you.

Rob 02:16:56

Thanks for having me. It was a delight.

Fin 02:16:59

That was Keith Frankish on illusionism About Consciousness as always, if you’d like to learn more, you can read the write up Fin Hearthisidea.com episodes, Keith. They’ll find links to all the books and resources that were mentioned, along with some further reading. As always, it would be great if you could leave an honest review on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this. If you have constructive feedback, there is a link on the website to anonymous feedback form. There’s also a star rating form on the top and the bottom of the write up, and you can send suggestions, questions and whatever else to feedback fin hearthisidea.com particular we’d love to hear how you think the guest interviewer format went and whether we should experiment with that more in the future.

Fin 02:17:44

Finally, if you would like to support the show more directly, you can also leave a tip by following the link in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening you.