Is It Time To Accept That EVERYTHING is Conscious?

Any philosophical school of thought, if studied or developed hard enough, can be convincing, and we just choose which direction to start in based on aesthetic preference. Yeah, I'm going to give this spicy. I think it's true. I think that a lot of the time when we find a philosopher or a writer convincing, what we're really experiencing is somebody putting into words something that we already feel, but doing it in such a way that makes us go, "Yeah, that sounds about right." And in fact, take a look at the very first words of the preface of Vickenstein's practice. This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it or similar thoughts. There's something funny about Vickenstein saying that, but I don't think he's joking. I think what he means to express is that he's about to explain a philosophical system, but it's not supposed to convince you of anything from the ground up. It's instead supposed to systematize and formalize a kind of thinking that already exists and which hopefully the reader will just resonate with. Which is why, by the way, if you don't know anything about philosophy, you might read a list of the great philosophers, Aristotle, Plato, nature, Kant, these guys, and if you pick one of them up randomly, say you start reading Vickenstein, you might read it and think, I don't really see what all the fuss is about. I don't really understand what he's getting at, and it doesn't sound all that smart to me. And part of the reason for that, I think, is that these guys didn't just pop up out of thin air. They made contributions to fields that already existed. Sometimes in a way that would completely alter the field or completely change the way in which an issue was viewed. But they're not starting from scratch. So if for example, you are completely uninterested in the philosophy of language or haven't really thought about it before, if you start reading Vickenstein, you might just think to yourself, what's he banging on about? This doesn't really do anything for me. In that sense, our interaction with philosophical texts might be a little bit more like how we interact typically with poetry or something like that where it's not so much that if you read one of the great poets, you're guaranteed to think that they're a genius. It's just kind of a matter of whether it resonates with you or not. And that will depend on whether you already share some of the emotional predispositions of the poet. With the philosophical text, whether you like it or not will probably depend on whether you already share some of the philosophical dispositions of the author. Now, that's not to say that these authors can't convince you of anything within the field of interest. They might bring to light new information or debunk some of the fallacies that you believe about a particular thing. But when we're talking about a general area of philosophy and whether a general worldview as a whole is plausible or not, I think that the plausibility we attribute to these worldviews as a whole has a lot more to do with our philosophical predispositions before we read the text than anything strictly speaking that the text actually argues for. What reading a great philosopher can do then is make you realize just what it was you were thinking all along and how best to express it and defend it. That's why, by the way, if anybody ever asks me for a recommendation of which philosophers they should read, I always say just read the ones you've heard of. And the reason for that is because if you've already heard of a philosopher, it means that you must have been in some kind of context where that name has come up. Maybe you really like Jordan Peterson and you've heard him mention nature a bunch of times. So, you've heard of nature. Well, there's a reason why you've heard of nature. Because you like Jordan Peterson so much. And if nature is a really important thinker to Jordan Peterson and you like Jordan Peterson, chances are you might like nature, too. But if you've never heard of nature, it means that nature has never really been relevant to anything you've already thought about or anything you were doing. So, if you try to just pick him up and read him, you might still get something from it, and it might resonate with you, but I think it's less likely to. At least on balance of probability, you're more likely to resonate with those ideas which for whatever reason have just cropped up in your life here or there. And this aesthetic preference is really important because think for example about Albert Kimu. Have you heard of Albear Kimu? Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. He's a famous philosopher from the 20th century who popularized a worldview known as absurdism, which some people think is just a version of existentialism. It deals with issues of meaning and the absurdity of our expectations of finding meaning in the world constantly rubbing up against the fact that there seems to be no meaning to be found. Now, I'll bet that just as simply as whether or not you have heard of Albert Kimu will depend on your aesthetic as a person. Do you like existentialism? Do you think about meaning and purpose? Do you like reading novels? Do you wear a turtleneck? Do you smoke cigarettes? These kind of things are predictive factors I think of knowing who Albert Kimu is. Whereas maybe you are a mathematician and you have no interest in narrative. You don't really read fiction. You don't really care about meaning in life. You think that's kind of a useless question. Maybe you just create your own meaning or you think it's a a boring or uninteresting philosophical pursuit. If that's the kind of person you are, likelihood is that Albert Kamu just kind of hasn't come up. It's a bit crude those two lifestyles pitted against each other. But I hope you see what I'm getting at. And it's not just that those two kinds of aesthetics of living are predictive factors of whether you've heard of Albert Kimu. They're probably also predictive factors of whether you'll resonate with Albear Kimu, whether you'll enjoy his work and whether you'll think there's anything meaningful in it. Maybe you've tried it before. Maybe you've opened the stranger or the myth of Cisphus and you've read a few pages and you thought, "H, this isn't really doing it for me. I don't really find this interesting." And you gave up. Meanwhile, when you studied formal logic at university, it just captured you because that's the kind of aesthetic of philosophy that you like and you managed to read the entire textbook in one sitting. That doesn't mean that you haven't properly understood Kimu or that you're philosophically misaligned or something. It just means you prefer one way of doing philosophy over another. And so, yeah, I think that what we do by and large is we just get a feeling for the aesthetic of a work of philosophy from the first few pages and that determines whether we'll keep reading it or not. And of course, if we do like the aesthetic, that's probably because something the author is saying is resonating with us. So, if we carry on reading, we'll probably find it convincing, which is actually to say a lot of the time, if you ask me, that they just put something into words that you've already been feeling and they do it in a more elegant and formulaic way than you've heard before. And that's why I think the most brilliant of writers and philosophers and indeed poets all tell you something that you already knew. So, who should you start with if you're trying to get into philosophy? Literally, just start with who you've heard of. Here's a hot take. You need more space in your trousers, which is a weird sounding thing to say until you realize I'm talking about these things. This is my old wallet, and as you can see, it was causing quite a bulge down there. That was until today's sponsor, Extra, sent me a replacement. This is the Wallet Pro. It holds up to 14 individual cards, and as you can see, it's a little bit sleeker and more elegant than my previous solution. Extra wallets have these pop-up mechanisms, which make for easy access to your cards. The mechanism itself is made from purely recycled aluminium, no plastic parts, and you know that it's supposed to last because it also comes with a lifetime warranty. It comes in four different normal colors and two extra colors, which are exclusive to Extra. And it's also, of course, RFID protected. And with Extra, you also unlock access to an ecosystem of accessories like this, the Finder card. It slots into the back of any of their card holders or wallets. And now it's connected to the Find My app on my iPhone. So if I lose it, I can see its exact location on a map. And if I'm within range, I just press a button and it'll start playing a sound. And Extra are currently running a Father's Day sale. So, if you go to my link in the description, you can get up to 40% off if you order before the 26th of June and use the code Alex Oconor at checkout for an extra 10% off as well. With that said, let's get back to it. All consciousness, at least human consciousness, is identical because it doesn't include personality, memory, intellectual ability, etc. Consciousness consists only of the pure awareness behind those things. For this reason, we are all reincarnations of each other irrespective of linear time. Okay, well that's definitely a spicy take. I don't know if I agree with the reincarnation bit, but there is something really important to be said about the nature of what consciousness is. I just had Anukica Harris on my podcast and we talked about the nature of consciousness. And she's of the view that consciousness might be fundamental. That is to say that the stuff that makes up the universe most fundamentally is consciousness. One expression of this view is known as pansychism. And in fact, we've got another submission here. Pansychism is by far the most plausible and comprehensive explanation of consciousness, which I'm also going to give spicy. And we'll just do the twoin one here. So, the pansychist looks at the fact that we appear to have material things like this microphone, which don't have any kind of awareness, and minds like the mind I'm using right now to think that do have conscious awareness. And there's this mystery of why there's consciousness here, but not here. Historically, philosophers have come up with all kinds of solutions to this problem. Maybe it's just that there is this immaterial mind that exists and I have a physical body and they're just completely different substances, but for some reason they're kind of like connected and work together despite not actually being made of the same stuff. That's a view known as dualism, as in there's two substances. Some are reductionists about consciousness. That is consciousness is just material goings on in the brain. In the same way that the information on a computer is just the same thing as zeros and ones on a computer chip somewhere. Some materialists think the brain works in the same way that there are just atoms bumping around in the brain. And somehow that is just the same thing as conscious experience. Other philosophers think that consciousness somehow emerges from that more fundamental material. So, it's still just atoms bumping around in the brain, but for some reason, they produce this new emergent quality called consciousness. And you might think of that a little bit like the sponginess of a cake. None of the things that make up the cake, like the atoms themselves or the materials that you use to bake a cake are themselves spongy. But somehow, if you put all of those ingredients together in the right kind of way, this new property of sponginess emerges. So pans psychist is somebody who looks at this problem and says well where does consciousness emerge? You know atoms themselves are not conscious and if I put a bunch of atoms together they're not going to be conscious. Like this microphone is a bunch of atoms together and it's not conscious. So how is it that at some point if I put them together in a particular kind of way suddenly consciousness just shows up. Well maybe it just does that and hopefully science will one day tell us how it does that but for now we just remain in ignorance. But it does seem like consciousness is this categorically different thing from matter. I mean the actual experience that you're having. I don't mean the brain waves or activity that's correlated with the experience. I mean the experience itself, the actual fear, not the brain state that brings about fear, but the feeling of fear. Not the brain state that brings about the perception of redness, but the experience of seeing red in such a way that you could never explain to a blind person, even if you could explain every single fact about the brain to them. There's something about experience which seems categorically different. And that's why it's a mystery how this experience could emerge from non-experience which belongs to a completely different category. That kind of feels like if you took a bunch of numbers like 1 and 14 and 2 million and you added them together in the right order, you'd somehow get a chair. Like it just doesn't make sense. That kind of thing can't emerge from that other kind of thing. So one solution to this mystery that the pansyist offers is that well consciousness doesn't emerge from matter because matter itself just is consciousness. That is to say if I ask what this microphone is made out of, I'll say, well, it's made out of metal. Well, what's the metal made out of? Well, it's made out of atoms. Well, what are the atoms made out of? Well, subatomic particles. Well, what are the subatomic particles made out of? Well, we don't really know. Some people think tiny vibrating strings. Some people think quantum probability distributions or whatever. The pansychist says that the answer is consciousness. That is the fundamental stuff of the universe. One problem that pansychism does seem to solve is this issue of how you get one thing emerging from another categorically different thing. But hold on a second. If everything in the universe is made up fundamentally of consciousness, then why is my brain so different from other material objects? Like why can I do things that the chair can't? I can experience emotions like joy or sorrow. I can be creative. I can perform intellectual tasks if my brain is made up of the same conscious stuff as the chair. Why can I do that and not the chair? Well, this is where we come back to the comment. Notice the commenter said that all consciousness is identical because it doesn't include personality, memory, intellectual ability, etc. Consciousness consists only of the pure awareness behind those things. This is something I spoke to Anukica Harris about the idea that we often confuse the kind of things which our brains do like memorizing things or experiencing joy or experiencing pleasure which require consciousness for consciousness itself. These things these experiences these intellectual activities are not themselves consciousness. They require consciousness. You need to be conscious in order to remember something. But memory is not the same thing as consciousness. Maybe one of the biggest mistakes that we've made in the philosophy of mind is assuming that consciousness requires complexity. That is, if you want consciousness, you need something really complex like a brain. And that's why chairs can't be conscious and brains can because brains are much more complex. We could be totally wrong about that. Maybe consciousness doesn't require complexity, but some of the things that consciousness can do like memory or like feeling longing or like enjoying music do require complexity. That would mean the thing that's special about the brain is not its consciousness because consciousness is fundamental. But the things that its consciousness can do. For example, you can remember being conscious 5 minutes ago. Suppose you had absolutely no memory. You wouldn't be able to report any of your feelings. You wouldn't be able to learn a language in order to express it. You wouldn't even be able to know that you are a continuous person because you wouldn't have any psychological connection with the past. Genuinely imagining having no memory. And I don't mean that you like forget things after 10 seconds or like you've got dementia or something like that. I mean there is just no such thing as memory whatsoever. It's just pure experience. What would that be like? It's impossible to even understand what that would feel like. And whatever it did feel like, you wouldn't be able to reflect on it because a new moment would come and you wouldn't remember where you got up to in your thought process. Whatever that isolated thing itself is, you take away the memory. You take away the ability to experience emotion. You take away the ability to use reason and you leave just the thing which makes them possible. That is conscious experience. And that alone, it seems to me a lot more plausible to say that something like that is foundational to the universe. The reason why it sounds so wacky and weird to say consciousness is fundamental is because we associate consciousness with these higher order intellectual activities that the brain does. But those aren't the same thing as consciousness. Those are just some of the things that consciousness can do. So I'm made up of consciousness and the microphone is made up of consciousness, too. But just like how the Empire State Building and a rock are ultimately made up of the same thing, matter, but one of them has much more complicated stuff going on. It's got like elevators. It's got windows. It's got standing desks and it's got cash registers and all kinds of stuff. That's not to say that it's a categorically different thing. It's not made out of a different kind of material. It's just more complicated. And all of those cool things like windows and cash registers are just complicated expressions of the same fundamental thing, matter. The pansyist views consciousness in the same way. Consciousness is fundamental and it does make up this microphone. But the sheer complexity with which consciousness is arranged in something like a brain means that I can do lots of really cool extra stuff like memory and emotion and that's the kind of analogical equivalent of the cash register and the window and the elevators. It's the same material. It's just organized in a more complicated manner. So I think the commenter is quite right to point out that consciousness is not the same thing as personality or memory or intellectual ability. Instead, consciousness is just the awareness that allows those things to occur, that sits behind those things. I'm not sure that it means that we are all reincarnations of each other, irrespective of linear time. I'm not even really sure what that means, but it certainly does revolutionize the way that we understand what consciousness is, what it can do, and what's required for it. So if consciousness itself that is separate from all of the complicated things that it can sometimes do like memory or like emotions but just the awareness itself if that actually doesn't require complexity then not only do we need to rethink what it is that makes our brains so special but also just how plausible it might be to say that consciousness is more foundational than we might originally have thought. Anyway, that was fun. Let's do this again sometime.