Transcript

Cold open [00:00:00]

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I think our intuitions arise from an evolutionary history, a developmental history, and a social history that have to be well tuned to certain things, but don’t have to be so well tuned to others.

So if your intuitions were wrong about walking along cliff edges and picking berries and planning parties, then you would soon have physical or social trouble. So our judgements about like, “Don’t invite that guy to the party if you’re also inviting that person,” and don’t walk so close to the cliff edge, and this is how you get a berry off a bush and into a basket, our intuitions about that have to be well tuned to the environment, basically.

But there’s no such pressure to have good intuitions about the origin of the universe, or the fundamental structure of matter, or what kinds of space aliens would be conscious or not conscious, or whether computers would be conscious. On those kinds of things, there’s no corrective source of pressure toward truth or accuracy, so our intuitions can kind of run wild.

Luisa’s intro [00:01:10]

Luisa Rodriguez: Hi listeners. This is Luisa Rodriguez, one of the hosts of The 80,000 Hours Podcast. Today’s conversation with philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is about some of the most bizarre and unintuitive claims from his recent book, The Weirdness of the World, which argues that nearly every kind of belief one could have about the nature of the universe and the nature of consciousness is actually extremely dubious and bottoms out in bizarre conclusions.

I found the conversation really fun — partly because I find thinking about weird philosophical claims intrinsically fun, but also because I think taking ideas that seem bizarre on their face seriously and challenging our own intuitions is actually an incredibly important part of figuring out what matters in the world and how to make the world better.

We spent the first half of the interview talking about why the materialist view of consciousness leads to extremely strange places, including to the possibility that the United States could be a conscious entity.

We also talk about:

• Why our intuitions seem so unreliable for answering fundamental questions about reality.
• How to think about borderline states of consciousness, and whether consciousness is more like a spectrum or more like a light flicking on.
• The possibility that we could be dreaming right now, and the ethical implications of that.
• Why it’s worth it to grapple with the universe’s most complex questions, even if we can’t find completely satisfying solutions.

All right, without further ado, I bring you Eric Schwitzgebel.

The interview begins [00:02:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: Today I’m speaking with Eric Schwitzgebel. Eric is a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and the author of a number of books, including A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures and The Weirdness of the World. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Eric.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Bizarre and dubious philosophical theories [00:03:13]

Luisa Rodriguez: I hope to talk about whether the US is conscious and the probability that we’re in a dream or a simulation. But first, you just published The Weirdness of the World, your most recent book, so congratulations on that. I really loved the basic thesis of the book, because I just think it’s really important beyond just being very fun. Can you walk me through the basic thesis?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. So there are two main claims. One I call “universal bizarreness,” and one I call “universal dubiety.” And these both concern big theses about consciousness and cosmology. The idea is that every kind of big foundational claim about the cosmological nature of the universe and about the nature of consciousness is going to be both bizarre and dubious. And by bizarre, what I mean is that it is strikingly contrary to common sense. And what I mean by dubious is that we’re not epistemically compelled, we’re not rationally compelled to accept one theory over all of the competitors.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. So counter to our intuitions makes a lot of sense to me. And then dubious is just like, there is not enough empirical evidence about these topics to be justified in having really confident beliefs about which theories of these issues are true. Is that kind of it?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yeah. Empirical evidence or any other kind of evidence — a priori deduction or mathematical proof or whatever. You know, philosophers sometimes want to go beyond the empirical.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right, sure. A standard of evidence that is compelling and not just plausible. I guess we’re going to talk about some of these in depth, but could you give a quick example to give people a flavour of the kind of thing that you mean?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I think the universal bizarreness and universal dubiety theses make intuitive sense to a lot of people when we talk about quantum mechanics. So most people, probably most of your listeners, know enough about quantum mechanics to know that something weird is going on at the quantum mechanical level — but exactly what weird thing is going on, there’s a lot of dispute about it. So that’s a place where I think people can kind of get their head around what universal bizarreness and universal dubiety amount to, because I think both of those theses apply to interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think lots of people are familiar with quantum mechanics — super weird. But for those people who haven’t done a super deep dive, can you give an example of the kind of thing? My understanding is that quantum mechanics is a case where we actually do have tonnes of empirical evidence about how things work at the quantum level, but they just are extremely, extremely weird, and make no sense when you compare them to things at the macro level. Are there any examples you particularly like?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So, one familiar example is the Schrödinger’s cat example.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great one.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So this is the idea that you’ve got a closed box, and there’s a cat in there, and there’s some supposedly random quantum process that’s evolving — like maybe a uranium atom either decaying or not decaying, which is hypothesised in standard interpretations of quantum mechanics to be random. So if, during the time period the cat is in the box, the uranium atom does decay, then a poison will be released that kills the cat. And if it doesn’t decay, then the poison will not be released.

Now, the box is closed. And according to one standard interpretation of quantum mechanics, sometimes called the Copenhagen interpretation, the cat exists in a juxtaposition, a superposition of alive and dead. Like it’s kind of 50% alive and 50% dead at the same time, until you open the box, some observer opens the box and looks. And then suddenly the cat resolves, the superposition resolves into either the cat is alive or the cat is dead. But before you look, it’s in this superposed state of maybe 50% alive, 50% dead. Which doesn’t make a lot of intuitive sense.

Luisa Rodriguez: It is incredibly bizarre.

Eric Schwitzgebel: That’s a pretty bizarre view. Now, not every interpreter of quantum mechanics thinks that’s the right view. For example, the many-worlds interpretation is an alternative to that.

So let’s just simplify it a little bit and think that there is maybe one particular moment in time at which the uranium atom will or will not decay. Then, on the many-worlds interpretation, what happens is when you hit that moment in time, the world splits into two worlds: one in which there’s a living cat and one in which there’s a dead cat. And so the cat is never actually in a superposition of alive and dead — the cat’s in a familiar dead state or a familiar alive state — but the world has actually divided. And then when you open the box, you discover which world you were in. You were kind of uncertain before you opened the box. But that was just uncertainty, an epistemic state — not the actual world being the superposition of two states.

Now, that’s also weird. It’s less weird about the cat because there’s no superposition, but it’s weird in the sense that the world is constantly splitting into multiple different worlds on this view. That’s the many-worlds interpretation.

And then there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics too. They are also bizarre. So thinking about universal bizarreness and universal dubiety, every interpretation of quantum mechanics is bizarre, and they’re all dubious. There’s not a justified general consensus that the many-worlds view is correct, or that the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, or that one of the other interpretations is correct. So, regarding this fundamental feature of the cosmos — how quantum mechanics works — universal bizarreness and universal dubiety are both correct.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s a really excellent example. I think, just briefly, the example that comes to mind most for me is population ethics, which is a topic we have talked about on our show before, because it does make a really big difference to the thing that we care a lot about, which is: how do you figure out what the world’s most pressing problems are, and what are the best ways to solve them? And I think there are all sorts of very strange conclusions that we could pick out for any single view of population ethics. My preferred one involves me having to come to the very uncomfortable and weird conclusion that I would prefer a world with many billions or trillions of barely-net-positive beings compared with a much smaller planet with just a few — I don’t know, hundreds of beings — living extremely happy lives.

This feels to me like this comes up a lot in philosophy, as far as I can tell. And when it does, it’s not just fun. I think it actually just really matters. And maybe I should actually just put it to you: why do you think this is such an important thing to reckon with?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I agree about population ethics. What happens is you have these arguments that lead toward what you might think of as kind of repugnant conclusions — or surprising conclusions, unintuitive conclusions — but each step in the argument seems pretty plausible. So then you kind of get stuck with either you accept this bizarre-seeming conclusion, or you reject one of the premises — which is also going to kind of commit you to some counterintuitive or bizarre things. And there’s no consensus. I think there’s no justified consensus about what the right way to approach these issues in population ethics is. So I think that’s another great example of a case where you’ve got both bizarreness and dubiety going on, and that’s characteristic of a lot of philosophical issues.

Luisa Rodriguez: Do you have a take on how important it is that we acknowledge that the world is weird?

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think it’s very important. I think it’s derivatively important, in the sense that we don’t want to get stuck in common-sense views that might be incorrect by just kind of taking common sense as an implacable standard. We’ve seen in the sciences that common sense — ordinary people’s intuitions about how things work — often don’t pan out once the science is sufficiently developed. The same thing could be true in philosophy. So I think it’s instrumentally valuable in that way. It’s appropriate to keep an open mind about difficult issues.

But I also think it’s just intrinsically valuable. One of the most amazing things about planet Earth is that there are complex bags of mostly water — you and me —

Luisa Rodriguez: How dare you?

Eric Schwitzgebel: [laughs] — and we can look up at the stars, and look into our brains, and try to grapple with the most complex, difficult questions that there are. And even if we can’t make great progress on them and don’t come to completely satisfying solutions, just the fact of trying to grapple with these things is kind of the universe looking at itself and trying to understand itself. And Earth is very different from Mars. There is nothing on Mars that’s doing this. And here we are. So we’re kind of this bright spot of reflectiveness in the cosmos, and I think we should celebrate that fact for its own intrinsic value and interestingness.

Luisa Rodriguez: I really like that way of thinking about it.

The materialist view of consciousness [00:13:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: So let’s turn to another topic. You argue that under the physicalist or materialist view of consciousness, that the United States is probably conscious, which is wild. I personally find materialist views of consciousness very compelling, so this idea really unsettles me, and maybe I should reflect on why I’m even so unsettled by it. But before we go any farther, can you just quickly define materialism/physicalism?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. Actually, defining it turns out to be a little bit tricky and controversial in the literature. But I think the best way to think about it is this: at the most fundamental level, is everything spatial and non-mental? So think about quarks and electrons and photons and that kind of stuff. Those all have spatial properties: they’re located in certain positions; some of them have other kinds of spatial properties, dimensionality of various sorts. And we don’t think of them as being fundamentally mental. Now, maybe mental is constructed out of physical stuff, but at the most fundamental level, most of us — unless you’re a panpsychist — think that these kinds of particles are not by themselves intrinsically mental, but they are by themselves intrinsically possessed with spatial properties.

So in my view, that’s the clearest way of thinking about materialism or physicalism: everything boils down, in some sense, to those kinds of things.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so that’s materialism and physicalism. Let’s use “materialism” for the rest of the conversation. Next, how are you defining consciousness?

Eric Schwitzgebel: One of those slightly tricky problems is defining what “consciousness” is. So I mean the term in the way that I take to be standard in both consciousness science and recent anglophone philosophy of mind. And I think the best way to define it is by example. As soon as you try to define it in some more theoretical way, then you start assuming that certain theories are true, which could be controversial. So I think that just, you point to examples, and I think people get it. I have a whole chapter in my book making this argument.

So if you have your eyes open and you’re looking out at the world, you will have visual experiences. That’s an example of something that belongs to your consciousness or your stream of conscious experience. If you close your eyes and think about what’s the best way to get to Grandma’s house during rush hour, then you’re having some sort of experience. Maybe it’s visual imagery, maybe it’s auditory imagery, maybe it’s some other kind of way of thinking. But you’re having some sort of conscious thinking about how to get to Grandma’s house. If you drop something heavy on your toe, you experience pain. That’s another kind of conscious experience. If you sing to yourself “Happy Birthday” silently, that’s another kind of conscious experience. If you remember being vividly angry about something, that’s another kind of conscious experience.

So all of these things have something, I think, really obvious in common: they’re conscious. And other things aren’t. Five minutes ago it was true of you, it was a mental fact about you, that you knew that Obama had been US president in 2010. But you weren’t thinking about it; it wasn’t part of your conscious experience, right? So that’s a mental fact, but it was not, at that moment, conscious. So there are mental things that are not conscious, and there are things going on in you all the time in your brain and in your body that aren’t part of your experience.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure. For the most part, I’m not conscious of my blood pressure going up and down.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right, exactly. So there’s something that those positive examples that I gave have in common, and your experience of your blood pressure and your unthought of knowledge about US presidents doesn’t have that property. That’s what consciousness is. I think that’s the best way to define it: just point at those examples. And I think most people — if they don’t try to be too clever; I think you can really trip yourself up if you try to be too clever about this — if you just latch onto the obvious property that all these things have in common, that’s what we mean by consciousness.

Luisa Rodriguez: This is a bit of a side note, but what is the most common way that people trip themselves up when trying to be clever about what consciousness is?

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think there are two ways. One is a kind of theoretical way, which is that they import their favourite theory. They say that consciousness is the thing that self-represents itself, or that I know infallibly, or something. They import something like that into the definition of it.

And I think the other — and this is a common source of confusion in the terminology with ordinary people, non-philosophers — is they kind of confuse consciousness and self-consciousness: the idea that you are aware of yourself as having conscious experience, and that in order to be conscious, you really need to be thinking about the fact that you are conscious. Now, there are some theories, some philosophical and scientific theories of consciousness, in which there always is some kind of self-awareness of your consciousness as it’s going on. So maybe it’s true that every time you have a conscious experience, in some sense you’re aware or thinking about the fact that you are. But I don’t want to build that into the definition of consciousness.

What would it mean for the US to be conscious? [00:19:46]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that was just a bit of an aside. What would it mean for the US to be conscious? Would it have thoughts like, “What’s the best way to get to Grandma’s house?,” like I might? Would it have preferences? Would they be strong preferences> Or do some of those things come apart?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. So if the US is conscious, then what it means is it’s got some sort of experiences, some sort of consciousness, the kind of property that we just pointed at. Now, it’s not going to probably have experiences very much like humans do, if this idea makes sense. And we haven’t yet argued for why it’s plausible to think the US is conscious, right? But if it is, if it does have conscious experiences, I think it’s going to be pretty different from human conscious experiences. But it will presumably have something like preferences and something like representations of the world around it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. On a gut level, my immediate reaction is: surely not.

Eric Schwitzgebel: It’s bizarre, right? The idea that it’s contrary to common sense is one of the things that I argue for in this book, as we talked about. So something contrary to common sense must be true about consciousness. This is a candidate of something that might be true, but in accordance with the dubiety thesis, I don’t think it necessarily is true. But I don’t think we should take our intuitive reaction — most of ours; I don’t want to speak for everybody, but most people’s intuitive reaction — that that can’t be true as solid evidence that it’s not true. It’s a consideration to weigh.

But one of the things that I argue in the book is that most of the ways of trying to escape from the conclusion also commit you to other counterintuitive things, kind of like you were saying with population ethics. You have this argument, you come to this conclusion, and you’re like, “That conclusion seems wrong. Where do I get off the boat?” And anywhere you try to step off the boat, you end up in other kinds of murky waters.

Luisa Rodriguez: Somewhere weird.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So I think it’s kind of structured like that.

Luisa Rodriguez: And actually, really quickly, maybe this is just a good place to say why I think this thesis is so important. I think you said why you think it’s important. To me, it feels important because I have so many beliefs now, many of them philosophical, that did sound extremely weird to me when I first heard them. And I think it’s super valuable and important that I didn’t just take my intuition at face value when thinking more about those beliefs.

So I am going to be trying for the remainder of this conversation to be like, this could be one of those instances. It could be that I need to take really seriously the idea that the US is conscious.

Supersquids and antheads thought experiments [00:22:37]

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think one of the sources of resistance to the idea is just that the United States is a spatially distributed entity. It’s not even a coherently compact physical entity. So one of the ways that I try to warm people up to the very idea of conceiving the United States as conscious is to work them through some hypothetical space alien cases.

One of them is the Sirian supersquids. These are squid-like entities that inhabit oceans around some nearby star, hypothetically Sirius. They have a central head and 1,000 tentacles. And their cognition is distributed among all of their tentacles, but it happens fast, because they’ve got reflective light capillaries instead of chemical nerves, kind of like fibre optics. So among the 1,000 tentacles, they have integrated cognition just like we do.

Now, the clever thing about them, or the fun thing about them, is they can detach their tentacles. So they detach a tentacle, and then there are transceivers at the end of the tentacle and in the head that then transmit the light signals between the tentacle and the head. So they can detach their tentacles, and then the tentacles can go do various things. And since the speed of light is negligible at these spatial scales, this doesn’t slow down their cognition in any appreciable way.

So you could have these entities with their cognition spatially distributed among 1,000 tentacles, kind of wandering around through the sea, and yet they would be conscious just like we are. There’s no reason to suppose that such entities would be incapable of having complex psychological and philosophical discussions, art, literature — all of the wonderful things about humans. It seems like we could have analogues of those same things in supersquids.

So it’s plausible, and I think almost all materialists would say it’s likely, that if there were entities of this sort, that they would have conscious experiences. It’s both kind of intuitive and theoretically plausible that supersquids would be conscious, despite having spatial distribution. So that’s just a start toward warming us up.

Luisa Rodriguez: I would have thought that there was a need for more central information processing in something like a head, maybe not literally a head, to get a single consciousness.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yeah. So does your consciousness need to be in an organ in your head? Most people in our culture find it intuitive to think, “My consciousness is here, up in my head.” Now, this is not culturally universal. For example, in ancient China, people thought that the organ of thinking and feeling was literally the heart. Also, Aristotle famously said this. He thought the brain was an organ for cooling the blood.

So I don’t think we have a great intuitive understanding of where consciousness is located. For some reason, in our culture, we like to put it behind the eyes, maybe because the eyes are so important to us, and maybe because we also have physiological knowledge now that in ancient China wasn’t present and Aristotle didn’t have. But if we took part of your brain and moved it into your stomach, and just stretched the neural connections and made sure the connections were really fast so that nothing slowed down, you would engage in exactly the same cognitive processes as you do now, and you wouldn’t even notice that half of your brain was now in your stomach.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep, that does move me. That works, as far as flipping my intuitions.

Eric Schwitzgebel: And remember, we’re working within a mainstream materialist perspective. And most materialists’ theories in science and in philosophy argue that what’s really important about consciousness is the cognitive states that you have, the information processing that you have, the way that you react to your environment. Why are brains so important? It’s because they facilitate complex cognitive transitions, memory, self-representation, representation of the environment, goal processing, all that kind of stuff. And none of that makes any essential reference to space, to being in some particular location, right?

So as long as you’ve got the right kinds of cognitive capacities and processes, most materialist theories would be pretty liberal about, if it’s happening smoothly, it doesn’t matter if the two halves of the brain are separated, or if it’s 1,000 pieces of brain that are separated. As long as it’s upholding the same kinds of cognitive functions, you’ll get the same answers.

The classic example is the Turing test. So listeners might know this. The Turing test has fallen on hard times recently with ChatGPT, because it seems to pass at least weak versions of the Turing test, and we could talk about that if you want. But one kind of familiar example would be if you can talk to something and it responds verbally just as if it’s a person, indistinguishably from a person, then it seems like it’s got thoughts. You apply this to consciousness, and it seems like it’s got consciousness. All you need is the right kind of information processing, presumably. So a supersquid could — presumably, if it was organised in the right way — pass a Turing test, respond similarly to a human being. It doesn’t matter that the pieces of its cognitive structure or its brain are spatially distributed.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, it’s interesting. I can already feel somehow the intuitive ick feeling about the supersquids going down. So it feels like we must have made some progress for me personally.

But there’s this other thought experiment you give that I still, because I already know a little bit about it, feel the same ick towards. So maybe we should talk about that one too. This thought experiment is about antheads. Can you say how this thought experiment goes?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So this one is designed to reduce intuitive resistance to the idea that a conscious entity could have conscious parts. One of the things you might think is that the United States couldn’t be conscious, because it’s composed of a lot of conscious people, and people are conscious, and maybe it’s not possible to create one conscious thing out of other conscious things. So a conscious thing couldn’t have conscious parts.

Luisa Rodriguez: I have this very strongly. Yeah.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Now, why would we accept a principle like that, other than that it’s a tempting escape from this unappealing conclusion that the United States is conscious? What exactly would be the theoretical justification for thinking this? I don’t know, but let’s say you’re tempted to this in some way. The Antarean antheads is meant as an example to kind of undercut those intuitions. Another kind of science fiction example.

Here we imagine that around Antares, there are these big, woolly mammoth-like creatures. And they engage — like the supersquids do, and like humans do — in lots of complex cognitive processes: they have memory, they talk about philosophy, they talk about psychology. They contact us. I imagine them coming to visit Earth and trading rare metals with us, and then maybe falling in love with people so that there are interspecies marital relationships and that sort of stuff.

These giant woolly mammoth-like creatures, from the outside, they’re just like intelligent woolly mammoths. Now, on the inside, what their heads and humps have are a million bugs. And these bugs may be conscious: they have their own individual sensoria and reactions and predilections. But there’s no reason, again, from an information-processing perspective, to think that you couldn’t engage in whatever kinds of cognitive processes or information processes that you want with a structure that’s composed out of a million bugs instead of 80 billion neurons. The bugs might have neurons inside them.

So again, from a standard materialist information-processing cognitive structure perspective — and also, I think, from an intuitive perspective — it seems like these things are conscious. This Antarean anthead who’s come and visited me has opinions about Shakespeare. Now, no individual bug has any opinions about Shakespeare; somehow that arises from the interactions of all these bugs.

So maybe we don’t know that these antheads have these ants or bugs inside them until we’ve already been interacting with them for 20 years. It seems plausible that such entities would be possible, and it seems plausible that such entities would be conscious, again, on standard materialist theories, and maybe also just using our science fictional intuitions, starting from a certain perspective.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure.

Eric Schwitzgebel: And if that’s the case, then that’s some pressure against the idea of what I call the “anti-nesting principle.” According to the anti-nesting principle, you can’t have a conscious entity with conscious parts: you can’t nest conscious entities.

Luisa Rodriguez: Nested consciousness. When I imagine a bunch of ants maybe doing small bits of communicating to each other in whatever way ants communicate using the neural faculties they have — and any individual ant either not being conscious or having some form of consciousness that is more limited than the kind of woolly mammoth as a full entity — my reaction is like, “How could they possibly create this emergent thing from these small bits of consciousness?”

But I think that’s just evidence that consciousness is insane. I want to bat it down, but I can’t.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. I think we have to remember the materialist perspective here. Which you are doing, but just to remind your listeners. So anti-materialists will look at a bunch of neurons and say it’s impossible to conceive how these squishy things firing electric signals among each other could possibly give rise to consciousness. So therefore, consciousness couldn’t be a merely material thing.

So if you’re tempted by that line of reasoning, then you’re not a materialist. If you’re a materialist, you’ve got to say that somehow this does it. And then the question is, is the resistance to consciousness arising out of the ants the same kind of thing that the materialist is committed to batting down? From a certain perspective, it might seem inconceivable; it seems like consciousness would be a very different thing. But it’s maybe just inconceivable in the same way that a brain giving rise to consciousness seems inconceivable to some people.

Alternatives to the materialist perspective [00:35:19]

Luisa Rodriguez: So we’ve talked about theories of consciousness on our show before, and we’ll point listeners to those episodes so that they can listen to them. But in case anyone, the way I am right now, is feeling like, “Ugh, materialism is making me feel weird. I don’t like it. What are my other options?,” can you just remind us what our other options are? Because I think it really, for me, drives home the like, “Crap. None of these options are good.”

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, the historically most common option is substance dualism. It’s the idea that there is a soul that we have that is not reducible to material stuff. Maybe it exists before we were born, maybe it can continue after we die. A lot of religious traditions see this kind of immaterial soul as central. So you could accept a view like that. That leads to its own range of bizarre options, which I’m happy to get into.

Another possibility is idealism: the idea that there’s no material world at all, that things are fundamentally mental all the way down. All there is is immaterial souls, and the whole world is just constructions, a joint construction of our minds.

And then there’s a grab-bag of what I call compromise/rejection views. So these would include views like we already talked about panpsychism. This is a view on which it’s not quite a materialist view, for reasons we discussed, but it’s not really a substance dualist view either. Everything is conscious, literally everything is conscious, even electrons.

Another kind of compromise/rejection position would be property dualism. David Chalmers is probably the most famous advocate of this. He holds that there are irreducibly immaterial properties and material properties that are kind of on a par in some sense with each other. Neither is more fundamental than the other. That ends up leading either to panpsychism or to some kind of view on which these immaterial properties are causally impotent, because it seems like the material properties explain everything we see. So you’ve got some bizarrenesses there.

Another option is Kantian transcendental idealism, which I also talk about a bit in the book. This is the idea that we don’t know how things fundamentally are. We can never know the fundamental structure of things, and everything that we categorise or interact with is in some sense a construction of our own minds, upon a fundamentally unknowable, noumenal reality that’s probably neither spatial nor mental as we ordinarily understand it. So you’ve got a lot of weird options.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly. Sadly, I don’t think we will go through all of those and explain why each of them is weird in their own way. But it is just really interesting to me that before thinking about these particular thought experiments, I would have put a lot of weight on materialism. And I’ve basically spent the last two decades just flat-out rejecting dualism. I’ve also found panpsychism pretty weird, though I’ve had times when I was more sympathetic and less sympathetic to it.

But the supersquids and anthead thought experiments really do make me feel like, one, maybe this is some reason to push against my intuition that you can’t nest consciousness or that spatially distributed systems couldn’t be conscious. But it also makes me more tempted to put more weight on these other theories of consciousness, given that this whole materialism thing is leading to some way weirder places than I expected. So maybe I should let dualism lead me to some weird places too, and not have this kind of prejudiced “dualism is weird” because I associate that with maybe God, and I don’t think of myself as a theist — but here I am being like, “maybe the US is conscious” because these thought experiments seem plausible to me.

Anyways, we haven’t actually gotten to the US is conscious from these two thought experiments, so we should make that step. But first off, does that seem like an appropriate way to react to some of this?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yes. I think that one of the things that materialists have not been completely explicit about — and I understand why; dualists are also not completely explicit about this, but panpsychists are — is the strange implications of their views. So once you start seeing these implications, then that gives you reason to think that maybe I should rethink some of my resistance to alternative approaches; maybe this is a reason to somewhat reduce my credence in materialism. I think that is a reasonable response, to think that maybe I should take one of these other views seriously, if standard-issue materialism seems to be leading me in this direction, which I don’t like or seems unintuitive, or for some reason I’m inclined to reject.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I think for me, I’m trying not to let it be that I just don’t like it. I’m trying to be more like, well, “I don’t like it” is the only thing going against these other views. So I should at least be fair in my bias against theories of consciousness just because I don’t like them. And if “I don’t like them” is going to be a consideration, then materialism has to get some negative points there, because I don’t like it either.

Eric Schwitzgebel: That’s a nice way of phrasing it. I think most people will end up with some things they in some sense don’t like, and I think we have to pay attention to that, and I don’t think we have. So in some of the sciences, there are some conclusions that we might not like, but they are just so compellingly supported that you don’t have an option, really.

Time dilation issues in relativity theory, for example: the idea that time goes slower for something that’s moving fast relative to us, but at the same time, time is going slower for us relative to that thing. So our time is dilated relative to the other thing. I mean, it’s like mind-blowingly weird and confusing. We don’t need to get into the time dilation stuff, but the empirical evidence for it is just overwhelming. We couldn’t run our satellites without the time dilation corrections. So even if we don’t like it, you kind of have to accept that.

But I don’t think we’re in that position with respect to most of the philosophical questions. I mean, we wouldn’t call them philosophical anymore, for the most part, if we were in that position. So I think one of the reasonable grounds for accepting or rejecting a position does have something that is related to this kind of your intuitive dislike or like of a position. That’s not the only thing to consider, but I do think that it’s reasonable not to just disregard that.

Are our intuitions useless for thinking about these things? [00:42:55]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, I want to get back on track and just get more into whether the US is conscious. Before we do though, I think it would be helpful to me to understand how it’s possible or what is explaining why my intuitions are sometimes so incredibly useless for thinking about some of these questions. Like, it seems I would have had the intuition that my intuitions about philosophy should be helpful. And I guess they sometimes are, but sometimes they go so wrong that I’m like, why do I even have them? What is it about the history of the human mind that means that lots of people tend to have intuitions about certain things in some cases that seem to just be wrong across the board for lots and lots of people? Do you have thoughts on that?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I think our intuitions arose, and arise, from an evolutionary history, a developmental history, and a social history that have to be well tuned to certain things, but don’t have to be so well tuned to others.

So if your intuitions were wrong about walking along cliff edges and picking berries and planning parties, then you would soon have physical or social trouble. So our judgements about like, “Don’t invite that guy to the party if you’re also inviting that person,” and don’t walk so close to the cliff edge, and this is how you get a berry off a bush and into a basket, our intuitions about that have to be well tuned to the environment, basically. Otherwise they wouldn’t have evolved, been socially reinforced, or emerged in ordinary cognitive development.

But there’s no such pressure to have good intuitions about the origin of the universe, or the fundamental structure of matter, or what kinds of space aliens would be conscious or not conscious, or whether computers would be conscious. On those kinds of things, there’s no corrective source of pressure toward truth or accuracy, so our intuitions can kind of run wild.

And in some cases, like for consciousness, our intuitions may track superficial features better than they track the underlying things, right? So in developmental psychology, researchers have discovered that if you just put googly eyes on something, kids are much more likely to attribute mental states to it.

Luisa Rodriguez: Also me. I am also more likely to attribute mental states to it.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right? There’s something about eyes, and in fact in our ordinary environment, a thing having eyes tracks pretty well with its having the kinds of mental states that we like to attribute. So that’s a great superficial feature to track. Children, brand-new-born infants, neonates, will respond immediately to eyes, and to configurations that look like an eye and a nose and a mouth together. So there’s something deep in us that’s about eyes. That’s written deep in us. But that might have little to do with what the real basis of consciousness is.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Just as a funny little aside, I just did a little check. I was like, is it eyes? Yeah, I guess if I put a nose on a rock, I wouldn’t do nearly as much consciousness attribution as I would for eyes. It’s true. So yeah, I’m kind of sold on that.

Key ingredients for consciousness [00:46:46]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, moving back to whether the US is conscious…

I found the supersquid and anthead thought experiments helpful, but there are also obviously other things that differentiate the kind of beings in those thought experiments from the US — but you still think that those other things that are important to consciousness are also, at least arguably, found in the case of the United States. So you’ve got actually a long list of kind of ingredients for consciousness — or maybe potential ingredients for consciousness; not everybody agrees on which ingredients are necessary, but some plausible ones that lots of people think are plausible.

We only have time to explore a couple of them, but if people are curious about the other ones, I highly recommend they pick up your book. But just one example of these is being goal-directed in a flexible way that leads to responding to things in the environment. So first, in case that’s not intuitive to everyone, why does this seem like an important ingredient for consciousness?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, one way of thinking about it is, again, to think about alien cases. So if we were to go to another planet, and we saw some entities that responded with substantial goal-directed flexibility to what’s going on in their environment — say, if they did so with a sophistication similar to rabbits — then we would probably be inclined to say, since rabbits are conscious, these similarly sophisticated things are probably also conscious.

So if we’re operating within a materialist perspective, and we’re not assuming immaterial souls or some divine touch that ignites consciousness in us, then it’s quite plausible that an appropriate interpretation of an animal that we saw on another planet that was goal-directed and sophisticated would be that that’s a conscious thing.

Luisa Rodriguez: So it’s something like, if we saw alien rabbits, and they were eating alien grass, and they were avoiding alien lions, and maybe burrowing in alien soil, those would all seem like kind of complex goals, and probably goals that they’re carrying out with some kind of light switched on.

So that’s kind of the justification for why it might be one of these necessary ingredients. In what sense does the US have this?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So the United States — and again, we’re thinking of this as a concrete entity with people as its parts — this entity has borders, which it protects. It imports goods, like bananas, which it then consumes. It exudes waste. It monitors its own waste, so there are smog regulations. It monitors space for asteroids that might threaten Earth, and it has plans for what to do if an asteroid actually threatened Earth. It does things like invade other countries. So you could think of an army going into Iraq as almost like a pseudopod being extended by this entity. And the elements of the entity disembark at the border of the ocean and the shore, and it goes around the mountain, it doesn’t crash into the mountain, and it detects the location of enemy troops, and it retreats if there’s enough of a threat.

So this complex entity is engaged in all kinds of things that seem to have at least the kind of responsiveness and flexibility that we see in a rabbit.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, so that’s that one. And we’ll come back to, “Wait a second. Do these analogies make sense?” But for now, another is “self-monitoring and information-seeking self-regulation,” which is already a jumble of words that might lose people. Can you start by explaining what you mean by that, and then why it might be relevant to consciousness?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So self-monitoring: the United States monitors itself in the sense that, for example, when there’s an election, it’s generally known across the US who has won the election. I guess there are some issues of that in a recent case, but even there, I mean, people can have doubts about their own states. So the Census counts us; it’s generally known throughout the organism, or at least in relevant controlling parts, who is a member of the United States and what the banana import rate is. And then the United States will also present itself in a certain way to other entities of its type. So it will represent its position on foreign affairs to Iran, and it will speak to Iran and say, “If you continue developing nuclear weapons, we’re going to do this.”

Some of this stuff is done by the government, like the State Department and the Census Bureau, but some of the self-knowledge that the United States has is not governmental, but just kind of bottom up. So it’s generally known across the United States that Taylor Swift is filling major concert venues. So that’s a sense in which, I think, the reactions of this entity involve some sort of self-representation.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. How about information processing? Clearly, part of what’s probably going on under the surface of my consciousness is just taking in lots of stuff, lots of information — like the things I see and the things I hear and things I learn about — and developing concepts about those things, and just having a sense of things happening.

Does the US do information processing in an analogous enough way for it to make sense to call it information processing that’s relevant to consciousness?

Eric Schwitzgebel: I am inclined to think so. The human brain processes a lot of information. It does. But also the United States has a lot of information exchange among its citizens and residents. For example, just think about the retina of the eye. That’s got millions of cells that are constantly processing information from the environment. Including right now, I can see you. I know our listeners can’t see us, but I can see you. And so I’m processing information about your face. Lots of information is just exchanged between people through the retina, and of course, through the internet. And in many other ways, we’re exchanging information.

Now, the exact structure of the information exchange between people is not going to look like the structure of the information exchange between neurons, although the United States does have lots of neurons, because it contains people who contain neurons. But I think part of the idea of the alien cases, and I think also part of standard-issue materialism — although there are some materialists who would resist this — is that the exact structure of the information processing doesn’t matter so much, as long as it’s got the right kind of overall cognitive shape, right?

So if we think about our alien rabbit or our supersquid or our anthead or any other science-fictional alien, it seems like we know that it’s conscious based on the sophistication of its behaviour and its interaction with us, and we don’t know necessarily what’s going on in its head. And if it’s got a very different-looking brain than we do… We do lots of parallel processing. Imagine maybe an alien has fast serial processing instead. We wouldn’t say, “Oh, serial processing? Not parallel processing? This thing can’t be conscious.” I mean, it’s talking to us and flying spaceships and is now trading for minerals, but once we’ve seen that it’s serial processing: “No, no.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. “It has all of its thoughts in a line. That doesn’t make any…”

Eric Schwitzgebel: I mean, you could say that, right? And some materialists will maybe want to get off the boat here. You could kind of exit the argument in various places, but you end up with kind of unintuitive commitments, right? So you could take the commitment and say that it matters a lot that you’ve got a very specific type of processing for consciousness; that even if it engaged in very similar, sophisticated outward behaviour, if it had a different kind of internal structure, it just wouldn’t be conscious, and our intuitions otherwise are wrong. You could say that, but that’s not the standard line.

So that’s the kind of liberalism about underlying structure that is essential to the plausibility of the case for the United States being conscious. So that is a potential point of resistance, but I do think the natural mainstream materialist thought is not to put up resistance there. To say that in alien species, and thus in other potential entities on Earth, you could have consciousness underwritten by very different types of architecture, as long as it had the right kind of cognitive sophistication and sufficient information processing and self-representation and responsiveness to its environment and long-term memory, and all that kind of stuff.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. I do think this is a place where I’m at least drawn to the exit. And I think that it would really help me to understand exactly how liberal materialists have to be to accept that the information processing that people within the US and their subsystems are doing to be close enough to the kinds of information processing happening in a human body to create that individual’s consciousness. What exactly are the disanalogies between how information is processed in the brain and how information is processed by Americans?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, there are lots of differences. So if we think about, say, visual communication and auditory communication between people as the primary way — setting aside, say, internet communications — that people interact with neurons: you’ve got calcium channels, you’ve got this release of ions and then an electrical discharge across the gap between the dendrite and the axon. And with people, what you’ve got is light reflecting off your face and going into someone else’s retina, and vibrations of the air that result from things going on in your mouth and throat that then stimulate your eardrum. And that’s a very different thing than calcium channels across axon-dendrite gaps. So that’s a big difference. But is that the kind of difference that should matter a lot?

Luisa Rodriguez: I guess consciousness just seems pretty crazy and complex, and that seems like a reason to think that if you change the ingredients in the recipe, you could easily lose the whole end product.

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think one reason to be liberal — and I’m working on this in a paper collaborative with Jeremy Pober, who completed his PhD under my direction a couple years ago — is what we call the “Copernican argument for alien consciousness.” So here’s the idea: the universe is really big. Probably there are intelligent aliens out there somewhere, even if they’re not visiting us. Maybe there are none in our galaxy, but given there’s like a trillion galaxies out there, even if one in a billion galaxies has some kind of intelligent life, there’s still at least 1,000 intelligent species out there. That’s a very conservative estimate, I suspect, of how much intelligence is there in the universe.

So here’s the Copernican idea. We think about all this intelligent life. Imagine it’s intelligent enough to have technology like us. It would be really strange and surprising if we were the only ones who were conscious and all the rest were what philosophers call “zombies.” They act as if they’re conscious, but they don’t really have experiences underneath. That would make us special in a way that if we were at the centre of the universe we would be special.

Luisa Rodriguez: It’d be surprising. Yeah.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So just like the Copernican principle of cosmology says — as a default assumption; it could be proven wrong — but just as a default starting place, let’s assume that we’re not in an unusual part of the universe. So similarly, what Pober and I are suggesting is that it would be a violation of some kind of Copernicanism to say, “We’re special. Our neurons give rise to consciousness. But the different kind of stuff that space aliens have in distant galaxies, there’s no reason to assume that that would give rise to consciousness.” So I think Copernican principles would lead us to think that whatever kinds of cognitive informational structures are interior to naturally evolved alien species, a lot of them — probably most of them — are going to be sufficient for consciousness, even if they’re very different from the specific architecture of human neurons.

Reasons to think the US isn’t conscious [01:01:15]

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, I definitely feel very sympathetic to all of that, and I’m trying to figure out what is still really bothering me about the US case that doesn’t apply there. One hypothesis I have is that in the case of the US, there are a lot of individuals with goals, and there are a lot of individuals doing information processing and sharing some of that with each other. And there are a lot of individuals doing things like representing concepts relevant to the US more broadly. And arguably, it’s not that the US, in some emergent-consciousness way, has goals that it’s enacting; it’s more that there are groups of individuals who have goals that they’re pursuing and that they’re acting on. And that is happening so much at the individual level that it doesn’t make sense to think of it as happening between individuals in the way that I think of my brain as happening, as neurons interact and create something bigger and weirder together. Does that make sense?

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think that’s a reasonable direction to explore and maybe push back on. I mean, one way of thinking about what goes on in the brain is that it is various subsystems that do most of the work. So if you’re having a visual representation right now of, say, my eyeglasses, that’s mostly going on in certain regions in your visual cortex. This is not going on in your cerebellum, but we still think of it as something that you, as an entire entity, are conscious of.

You wouldn’t want a general principle on which, if the main action of some representation or some goal or some activity is happening in a subregion of some entity, then it’s not happening in the whole entity — because then everything happening in you would just be in various subregions rather than in you as a whole. So you might be able to work up a principle along the lines that you suggested that could distinguish the United States from humans. But I think it would be a little tricky not to fall into a problem along those lines.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. It’s true that I’m like, obviously the whole brain doesn’t have to be involved to make a conscious thought happen. It can be subsystems, subgroups, and it’s OK in my conception of how consciousness happens for very small groups of neurons interacting with each other to create a conscious experience. But it feels like I could — and maybe this is what you’re saying — it’s possible to come up with some rule that is like, consciousness requires that information be shared in some way between two parts of the subsystem, maybe two neurons, in a way that you wouldn’t make that analogy in the US, if you’re thinking of human beings as the analogy for neurons.

Is there a plausible rule there? Not even to argue that it’s like a very sensible one.

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think it’s tricky. I don’t see a plausible rule there. I think one maybe could be constructed. But there are going to be at least two things to watch out for, and watching out for both of them successfully might turn out to be impossible. So maybe it could be done; I’m not saying it couldn’t be, but my guess is if you did it, you’d end up probably with some other unintuitive commitments — which is kind of the general structure of this whole argument, and the general structure of the whole book, right?

But the two things to watch out for: one is you don’t want to deprive the entity as a whole of a process just because the process is primarily implemented in some subpart, or else you end up with getting the wrong results for human cases. So that’s one thing to watch out for.

And then the other thing to watch out for, again, I think is kind of Copernican liberalism about aliens. If we end up with a principle that is too specific, then we end up committed to saying that if we encountered aliens that behaved a lot like us, but were organised along this slightly different principle that didn’t match the principle we’ve constructed, then we’d be committed to denying them consciousness. That would be both unintuitive and probably of violation of the Copernican principle. So that’s the other thing to watch out for. And jointly satisfying those two constraints, I think, might be tough.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. As I was saying it, I was starting to feel uncomfortable by how specific it was. I was like, this feels like I’m creating a pretty arbitrary rule about how consciousness might work in order to avoid this counterintuitive conclusion about the US.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. And I think that’s actually an important methodological point. So I think one of the ways to react to this case is to try to come up with, “We want rabbits to be conscious, we want a certain plausible range of aliens to be conscious: let’s concoct some rule that gets all of those but still excludes the United States.” And if you take that as a foundational principle, then you probably could come up with some rule.

But why are we so committed to that as a foundational principle? Why would that have to be a fixed point in our reasoning? Maybe, if it ends up the United States is conscious, then maybe, if that’s the result of our best theorising, are we so sure that it’s not that we have to bang our fists on the table and work really hard to try to come up with a principle that excludes the United States’s consciousness but includes all these other cases? Why are we so committed to that principle? I mean, I think it’s reasonable to find it attractive that the United States would not be conscious. But taking that as a deep, fixed point that’s really driving you hard to construct a theory that meets all these constraints despite the challenges, it’s not clear exactly how that’s justified.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, interesting. OK, anything else to add on this before we move on?

Eric Schwitzgebel: One of the slightly embarrassing things about working on the group consciousness of countries is that among the very few people who’ve taken it seriously in the past were early 20th century fascists.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yikes.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So they’re like, “See, Germany is a conscious entity. It’s finally coming to realise itself, and therefore the individuals of Germany should submit to this larger conscious organism.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Whoa.

Eric Schwitzgebel: These are obscure, untranslated philosophers, in French and German, mainly. Although Oswald Spengler is pretty well known and came pretty close to saying something like that. So you can imagine — and I don’t endorse that ethics at all, just to be really clear — if the United States is conscious, it’s maybe got the consciousness of a rabbit, and therefore it might have about the moral standing of a rabbit. I would not sacrifice any humans.

So just think about, if history had worked out a little differently, it could be that it was generally accepted in our culture now that we are part of a larger conscious organism.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right.

Overlapping consciousnesses [01:09:32]

Luisa Rodriguez: One thing that occurred to me is that you could actually make the same argument about lots of other kinds of agglomerated groups of systems of humans or systems of beings that we think are conscious. So maybe communities of mammals. Does this mean towns are conscious? Does this mean cities are conscious? You could say this maybe about whole continents. Are they all conscious?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yeah, that’s definitely a worry. It seems like you could construct a slippery slope argument here. If the United States is conscious, then is California conscious? If California is conscious, then is the city of Riverside conscious? If the city of Riverside is conscious, is my university, UC Riverside, conscious? And at the end, it seems like you might end up with something even more counterintuitive than the idea that the United States is conscious.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. And not just that there are many consciousnesses, but that they overlap. So San Francisco might be conscious, Riverside might be conscious, and then also the state of California might be conscious, which is itself part of the United States.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. And Google might be conscious. Some of Google’s workers are residents of San Francisco. Then you have partly overlapping cases and not just nested cases.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, I find this so upsetting, and it feels like it surely is an argument against. But something tells me you don’t think it is.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I think it is one of those danger signs that we’re headed down some path towards something troubling and maybe absurd enough that we want to figure out how to get off this path. I mean, you could go all the way down this path.

Luisa Rodriguez: What happens if you do?

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think my favourite example of this is the philosopher Luke Roelofs. They say that every combination of things in the universe is a distinct locus of consciousness. Just like every combination of things in the universe has a combined mass, right? My shoe plus the rings of Jupiter has a certain combined mass. So likewise, my shoe plus the rings of Jupiter has a certain stream of consciousness that’s distinct from any other organism or entity.

Luisa Rodriguez: Bizarre.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So yeah, that’s where you go if you just, like, follow this line all the way to its end, you end up with Roelofs’s view. That’s a pretty hard line to swallow, but I would recommend people check out Roelofs’s book on this. It’s called Combining Minds.

Luisa Rodriguez: Cool.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So you might want to get off the bus here somewhere.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Now, I chose the United States as my example because I think it’s the best case for group consciousness for a couple of reasons. One is that it has a large number of entities in it; it’s the third most populous country in the world, and relative to other countries, there’s a lot of communication and information exchange amongst its citizens. It also has pretty sharp borders. The entity of the United States engages in lots of behaviours. So it’s a kind of best case, I think, for group consciousness. And as you get smaller and more diffuse entities, and entities that do less and have less information exchange and fewer members —

Luisa Rodriguez: Your shoelace and Saturn, for example.

Eric Schwitzgebel: [laughs] — the case gets harder and harder.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep.

Borderline cases of consciousness [01:13:22]

Eric Schwitzgebel: So I think at some point here, it becomes useful to think about the possibility of borderline cases of consciousness, and the possibility of overlapping consciousness. And these are two things that I’ve been thinking about in recently published papers, and in papers that I’m still working on. So we could certainly transition into talking about those things if you want.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great. Yes, let’s do that. So this is actually another topic you cover in your book. You raise exactly these kinds of questions, using snails as a case study: can something be kind of conscious? If consciousness is a spectrum, is there a sharp boundary somewhere in there, or is it just continuous throughout?

So diving right into it: you take the position that it can be “indeterminate” whether something is conscious. Can you say what you mean by that?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. Yeah, I think it’s helpful here to use a pair of analogies that contrast with each other.

Luisa Rodriguez: Great.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So you might think of a light. A light could be dim or it could be bright, so there’s a degree of brightness to a light. And it can be on or it can be off; it can flicker between being on and being off. But the way that we normally think about lights, it’s either determinately on or it’s determinately off at any particular moment. And even if it’s on and very dim, it’s still determinately on. So although there’s a degree of brightness, there’s always a fact of the matter, at any particular moment, whether the light is on or not.

So you might think that consciousness is like that, right? Maybe a garden snail has this tiny little wee flicker of consciousness, which is much less than human consciousness, but it’s still determinately conscious, just with a small bit. And that’s a very different kind of case than an indeterminate case.

So in indeterminacy, think about the spectrum of colour between blue and green. Most philosophers think — actually, there’s a little disagreement about this — but I’m inclined to say there’s not a determinate exact place in that spectrum where something moves from being determinately green to being determinately not green. There’s a kind of vague range of blue-green cases where it’s not quite, it’s kind of, it’s indeterminate whether you should call it green or not. So that would be an indeterminacy case. It’s very different from the light-flicking-on case. The indeterminacy view is the view that consciousness is like that, and not like a light flicking on.

And I see from your face, your listeners are not seeing your face, but I can see from your face that you’re like, “What the heck?”

Luisa Rodriguez: “You think consciousness is like that?!”

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think it’s a very unintuitive view. And if you see how unintuitive it is, then you’re understanding correctly that it’s unintuitive. The main argument against it is that it seems inconceivable; that not only is it unintuitive, but I can’t even wrap my head around how it could even be possible.

Luisa Rodriguez: That is basically how I feel.

Eric Schwitzgebel: That’s basically the main argument against this indeterminacy view. I mean, one way of thinking about it is that one of the ways people talk about consciousness is they say if you’re conscious, there’s something it’s like to be you. So you think either there’s something it’s like to be you — or to be a garden snail, or to be an alien, or to be the United States — or there’s nothing it’s like. And between something and nothing, there can’t be a half-something. A half-something is already a something unless it’s nothing, right? So how could it even make sense for there to be indeterminate cases?

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. That’s where I am.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So that’s the objection. And the challenge of defending borderline consciousness is overcoming that objection.

Luisa Rodriguez: That sounds like a really tall order. I’m really struggling to even buy that it is a live option. Would it help to describe some cases you think are plausible candidates for indeterminate consciousness?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Probably not that much.

Luisa Rodriguez: [laughs] OK.

Eric Schwitzgebel: I mean, I could suggest. I’m slightly impaired in this by the fact that I don’t have the correct theory of consciousness and don’t know exactly what entities are or are not conscious. This is one of my disadvantages as a sceptic about these general theories.

So I have a two-pronged approach. One is to show how it’s naturalistically plausible from a materialist point of view, and from other naturalist points of view, to think there probably are, and maybe even must be, indeterminate cases. And then I can point toward what some of those cases might be. That’s prong one. Then prong two is to try to suggest that this feeling of incomprehensibility or impossibility is based on a misguided standard, an inappropriate standard of conceivability. So that’s my two-pronged approach.

It’s easier to start with the first prong. So we already mentioned garden snails might be an example of a borderline case of consciousness. I’m not committed to their being so; they might be determinately conscious, they might be determinately non conscious. But I think borderline consciousness is a possibility we should consider.

Luisa Rodriguez: And just to be 100% sure that we’re going to be using all the same language, or I’m going to be understanding your language: so you can be conscious, you can be non-conscious. And borderline consciousness is not referring to this dim light, very little teeny bit of consciousness; it is referring to this turquoise, not-blue/not-green thing that is neither conscious nor not conscious?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Or not determinately conscious or determinately non-conscious. Not determinately blue or determinately green.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. OK, great.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yes, very important to be clear about that, because it’s easy to get confused on that particular issue — especially since borderline consciousness seems so inconceivable, it’s natural for people to hear it as “just a little bit of consciousness.”

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, exactly.

Eric Schwitzgebel: That’s exactly what we don’t want to say. OK, so one plausible way of getting into the idea that borderline consciousness must exist is to think phylogenetically: think about animal cases, think about evolution. It would be a little odd if somewhere across the spectrum of animal cases or somewhere in evolutionary history, consciousness suddenly popped in. Where would that happen?

So let’s say you were to say that this particular species of frog is conscious. This closely related other species is just a wee bit less cognitively sophisticated. And because of that, boom, it’s suddenly a non-conscious entity. If consciousness is psychologically important, and has some kind of functional role, as we were talking about earlier with the US case, then you would think its existence or non-existence would make an important cognitive difference.

So if you thought that determinate consciousness has got to flick on somewhere, then you ought to see a plausible leap somewhere in evolutionary history, somewhere among animal species — between these are the ones that are, say, creative and have self-knowledge, and these are the ones that don’t. And boy, there’s a gulf — and that’s where consciousness happens. But we don’t see that. Instead, we see an approximate continuum.

So you can kind of create the slippery slope case, where if people are conscious, then chimps probably are. And if chimps are, then probably mice are. And if mice are, probably all vertebrates are. And you keep going down. And it could be the case, but it doesn’t seem super plausible that there’ll be a moment somewhere there where, boom, consciousness suddenly flicks in. Or you could ride the slippery slope all the way down to panpsychism again, right? That’s the other possibility.

So you’ve got basically a quadrilemma: four horns. One horn, you say nothing is conscious. Another horn, you say everything is conscious. Both of those seem pretty hard to accept. So you’ve got to either say that there’s a sharp break somewhere between the conscious and the non-conscious organisms, and somehow that sharp break exists atop what seems to be a continuum of biological cases and cognitive capacities. Or you say, no, it’s kind of like the blue-green thing: there are going to be some indeterminate, intermediate cases where it’s not determinately the case that this entity is conscious, and not determinately the case that this entity is not.

I think there’s at least some attractiveness, some initial plausibility to the idea that it’s not going to be a sharp break — that it’s going to be a continuum, like from blue to green. So you get this in animal cases, you get this in evolution. Plausibly, you also get this in foetal development. Let’s assume that babies are conscious when they’re born. I mean, you could think that the moment of birth is when consciousness flicks on, but that’s a little strange. And even birth is a temporally extended process, right? So if you narrow in…

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Is it when their little nose pops out, or is it their eyes, or does the whole foot have to come out?

Eric Schwitzgebel: It’s kind of plausible to think that maybe a nine-month foetus has some consciousness already, at least a little bit. The light is on, so to speak. But again, in foetal development, we don’t see, like, here’s the moment where consciousness winks on, right?

So generally, if we look naturalistically, it looks like there’s a continuum. The kinds of things that we think are associated with consciousness — biological states and cognitive capacities — seem to exist on a continuum, rather than having this wink-on structure. And in general, almost everything in nature that’s large and floppy and complex — like consciousness — is not, strictly speaking, discrete.

If you want to look for really discrete, sharp edges in nature, you kind of have to go down to the quantum level. So is the electron in this orbit around the hydrogen atom or in this other orbit, and you get a quantum jump. You know, it can never be in between the two. But aside from those kinds of cases, almost everything in nature admits of borderline indeterminate cases, where it’s not quite clear where to draw the boundary.

Luisa Rodriguez: I still feel more drawn to the, there’s a flicking on, a winking on. And I think the reason is that if I try to also do something analogy-y, and still in the world of evolution and phylogenetic groups, the analogy that I come up with is let’s say an eye. It is not the case that we went from one organism to another, and there was all of a sudden eyeballs. We had less sophisticated eyes before we had sophisticated eyes. And before that we had probably photoreceptive, photosensitive cells. And before that, there maybe weren’t necessarily sensitive cells or photoreceptor cells.

And that seems like it feels closer to me that there is a line. It is super early — like going from a cell that doesn’t have the capacity to respond or kind of pick up on light, to one that does. And that is a line. And then after that, it’s like the light getting stronger, so the eyes become more sophisticated. That feels like the most plausible way, or the most intuitive way that I would think about features being picked up and evolved and improved upon over time.

And while I find it very strange to think about the same happening for consciousness — I don’t know exactly what it means to have the first photoreceptor-like cells, but for the case of consciousness — but it still feels very plausible to me that we’re talking about something more like that. That we went from something without any consciousness-like property to a tiny, minuscule consciousness-like property — in the same way that you might get a dim light and then it got brighter and brighter. Why does that not seem like a natural conclusion, or the best conclusion, or even just more plausible than the indeterminate case?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, I don’t know much about photosensitivity.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure. And I don’t either. So it’s possible someone listening would be like, “That’s just a false way of describing that.”

Eric Schwitzgebel: But let me speculate just a little bit.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure. Great.

Eric Schwitzgebel: We normally don’t think of humans as having the sensory capacity to detect electric currents in the way that eels do. But if you stick your finger in a light socket, you will detect an electric current.

Luisa Rodriguez: That’s true.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So if a cell is bombarded with enough intense electromagnetic radiation in, say, the visible spectrum, it might have some limited response to that that’s different than the response it would have in the dark. You don’t want to say that this cell has a photosensitive sensory capacity, but it would be kind of like you sticking your finger in the light socket: with enough energy of that sort coming in, there is going to be a reaction in the cell. So I’m not sure whether in evolutionary cases there is a kind of jump. Sometimes there are surprising evolutionary jumps. So I don’t know whether there would be. But at least it seems to me hypothetically possible that you would have in-between cases of photosensitivity like that. Where you’ve got two cells: one is a little bit more sensitive to that high level of electromagnetic energy, and one is less sensitive, and that turns out to be a little bit of an evolutionary advantage, and then you’re off down the path toward creating what we think of as a more specifically photosensitive sensory capacity.

So that would be, again, a kind of a way of thinking about borderline cases: at what point do you say that this is actually a sensory capacity, versus at what point do you say that this is just the cell reacting in a certain way to an intense energy input?

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, that is helpful. It helps me understand more what the interpretation would even sound like of this case when you’re trying to make the argument that it’s indeterminate and not discrete, but little. Maybe this is actually the perfect segue to prong two, because I’m now like, “But it doesn’t make any sense still!”

Eric Schwitzgebel: It doesn’t make any sense still.

Luisa Rodriguez: So then what do you do?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So before we get to prong two, as a little bit more of a segue to it, let’s think about human cases. Generally speaking, most people would think that when we’re awake, we’re determinately conscious. And on some, but not all, mainstream theories of sleep, we have some periods in which we are not conscious.

Now, not all sleep theorists think this. There are some sleep theorists who think that you are always to some extent conscious when you’re sleeping, even if you’re not dreaming. But I think that’s a minority view in the literature. And intuitively, we often think that there are moments of just zero consciousness when you’re sleeping, and then we suddenly transition into waking. Or alternatively, we suddenly transition from non-conscious sleep to conscious dreaming. Although this is a little bit at variance with how some people use the word “consciousness” in ordinary language: we sometimes say that when you’re sleeping, you’re not conscious. But in the sense of consciousness that we were talking about earlier, that there’s something it’s like; you’ve got an experience when you’re dreaming. Dreams are conscious experiences.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, definitely.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So in the human case, we have what seem to be pretty sudden transitions between either non-conscious sleep and conscious dreaming, and non-conscious sleep and conscious wakefulness. And when you’re kind of disoriented and half-awake, you might say, “I’m half-conscious.” But again, that’s not really the way of thinking about it. It’s more like you’re determinately conscious, but you’ve got this kind of confused sense of where you are, or you’re disoriented in a certain way.

So our human experience seems to be that mostly we are in determinate states of either being conscious or non-conscious. So that makes it hard for us to think about or remember any in-between cases. Maybe they don’t even exist in the human case, or maybe they’re rare. There might be, during sleep, some borderline cases. There might be, during slow falling asleep or slow waking, some borderline cases. There might be, say, for people who are in vegetative states, some borderline cases, but we don’t really know whether that’s so.

If you look at the neurophysiological literature, there seem mostly to be sharp transitions between conscious and non-conscious states, but there are also brain states that seem to be not quite either conscious or non-conscious. And then how to interpret that is going to be super complex. But even if it’s typical for us to engage in sudden state transitions from conscious to non-conscious, it’s not established that that’s universally the case; there can be states that are intermediate between these typical states.

So we have a lot of trouble imagining or conceiving of what an in-between conscious state might be. And that, I think, is the source of our sense that this is impossible or inconceivable.

What we want to do is we want to imagine what it would be like to be in a borderline conscious state. But that is a contradictory demand, right? You’re asking, “What is it like to be such that there’s not determinately something determinate that it’s like to be that thing?” It’s like saying, “Show me a case of a borderline green that is also determinately green,” right? That’s just a contradiction. It would be saying, “I want to imagine or remember what it’s like to be such that there’s not something determinately it’s like to be that thing.”

So that’s the contradiction. So I think we’re drawn intuitively toward this feeling of, I don’t really understand what borderline consciousness would be unless I can imagine or remember it in a certain way. But that’s what we want, is something that’s impossible to get and is illegitimate to demand.

One analogy here is imagine a middle school kid who’s being introduced to imaginary numbers. They’re like, “What is this 3i thing?”

Luisa Rodriguez: It’s true. I remember this feeling. I still have this feeling.

Eric Schwitzgebel: I can’t picture or imagine 3i sheep. I can’t hold 3i pebbles. Imaginary numbers, despite their name, are in a certain sense unimaginable in the middle school standard of, like, what would it be to imagine 3i. The middle schooler can’t do it. So they might be like, this is unimaginable, incomprehensible.

Luisa Rodriguez: This is fake math.

Eric Schwitzgebel: This isn’t really a number. It doesn’t fit on the number line. It’s just some pretend game.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. 100%.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. So that’s kind of what it feels like to have an imaginative demand that’s not being met, and it’s frustrating because you feel like it should be met. So my view is that when you say, “I just can’t imagine what it’s like to be in one of these in-between states; that seems inconceivable,” you’re being like that middle schooler.

So that’s the two prongs. The one prong is to say that most large natural processes admit of in-between fuzzy cases: think about development, think about evolution, think about different kinds of animal cases. And doesn’t it seem like there should be this in-between range of cases, because that’s generally how nature works? And the cognitive processes and biological processes that we normally assume underline consciousness also tend to be vague and fuzzy. To assume a sharp border in nature atop what seems to be a continuum of fuzzy processes.

That’s prong one, and then prong two is to say here’s why we shouldn’t take so seriously the intuition that this is inconceivable.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK. This one my brain is fighting with everything it has, and now I’m like, “Maybe I’m just a panpsychist. Maybe I like that better.”

Eric Schwitzgebel: I mean, that’s one way to go. Panpsychism is really bizarre, but its beauty is that it gets you out of a lot of these problems.

Luisa Rodriguez: It does. I do like being out of these problems.

Eric Schwitzgebel: But you do have to be a radical panpsychist, right? So if you’re a panpsychist like Philip Goff, who’s probably the most prominent panpsychist right now, he still has this problem, because he thinks rocks aren’t conscious. At least, I don’t know. His view may be changing a little bit. I’ve been seeing him flirting with some other views, but at least his view as of his 2017 book was that although fundamental particles are conscious, not every aggregate of fundamental particles is conscious. So you still end up needing a bright line between the non-conscious rocks and the conscious protons.

Luisa Rodriguez: What does he do with that?

Eric Schwitzgebel: He doesn’t have an answer yet.

Luisa Rodriguez: Oh, no.

Eric Schwitzgebel: He thinks there is a bright line. He’s a bright line defender, but he doesn’t know where to put it or exactly how to defend it. So he still ends up with this continuum problem. The only way to really get out of it through the panpsychist move is to go full Roelofs.

Luisa Rodriguez: Right. Just rocks are conscious.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Which just says rocks are conscious, because every combination of everything is conscious.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yep. And here I am again with the thesis of your book just horribly ringing in my ears. There are no good options for me. Every possible option makes me want to curl up and stop thinking about philosophy forever.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Well, that’s the wrong reaction!

Luisa Rodriguez: No, I actually love it. It’s just fun to feel like you know something, and it’d be nice to have that. But it is also fun to be like, “Holy crap, my brain cannot comprehend.”

Eric Schwitzgebel: I just think we ought to celebrate that. That’s the kind of the mood that I prefer to encourage. I mean, I can see how someone might despair. All of the options seem ridiculous, and how could we figure out what the truth is? I’m gonna give up and, you know, go become a chemist or something. But I think another reaction is to just be struck with awe and wonder, and think it’s kind of amazing and to see the world as richer with possibilities.

So you might have initially thought that panpsychism is totally absurd, not even worth thinking about. And I still am disinclined to think panpsychism is the right answer. That’s not where the bulk of my credence lies. But this way of thinking, to me, opens up, “You know what? I can now see the attractions. And now the space of possibilities for the universe has grown larger for me.” The world has kind of become bigger in a certain sense, because now there’s this live possibility which wasn’t previously live. Like, “Wow, maybe consciousness is ubiquitous. That’s interesting to consider. Let’s think about that.”

Luisa Rodriguez: It is pretty cool. Yeah, I’m with you now. I’m with you. I think probably I just genuinely have a part of me that is like, “Run away!” and another part of me that’s like, “Incredible! Wow!” So I’ll try to do more celebrating of the latter.

Are we dreaming right now? [01:40:29]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, let’s turn to another topic that’s weird any way you look at it: whether we’re really, truly awake and here where we are, or whether we’re in a dream, or maybe a simulation, or a brain in a vat, or this weird thing called a Boltzmann brain that we may or may not get to. What’s the argument that we might be dreaming right now?

Eric Schwitzgebel: So, let me say first that I’m pretty sure I’m not dreaming. I’m 99.9% confident that I’m not dreaming. But I’ve got this little nontrivial, niggling worry that I might be dreaming.

Luisa Rodriguez: 0.1% is not trivial.

Eric Schwitzgebel: It’s nontrivial, although small.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, sure.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So here’s one way of thinking about it. What is the evidence that I’m awake? Well, I seem to be having all of these sensory experiences that are pretty rich in detail. And if I pinch my hand, I feel the pinch. And I’ve got this paper here, and I’m going to read some text. And I usually think that in dreams, text doesn’t stand still. It’s a little hard to look at it. It flutters away. A lot of people have that experience, or report having that experience in dreams.

But now, if I think about all of that evidence, it’s consistent with at least some theories of dreams. So some major, important dream researchers think that we sometimes have very realistic sensory experiences in our sleep, and that dreams are not always full of bizarreness. And some people report that they can read texts in their dreams, and that they can feel pinches. And sometimes we have false awakenings. I definitely have had experiences where I am dreaming that I’ve woken up, and dream that I’m judging that I’m awake and having ordinary experiences. And then I wake up again, and I’m like, holy crap. And then I momentarily worry, am I going to wake up still another time?

So all of the evidence that I have, I think, is some kind of support for the fact that I’m awake. Because the odds that I’d be having an experience like this during sleep, a certain kind of theory of dreams has to be true. And maybe this kind of experience isn’t exactly a totally typical dream experience, because it’s a little more well organised and less bizarre than a lot of dream experiences are.

But none of that’s really compelling in the sense of bringing me all the way to, say, zero credence or even one-in-a-trillion credence that I’m dreaming, right? Once I think that, on some theories of dreams that I can’t decisively reject, I could have experiences just like this during sleep — once I kind of get myself in that mood of recognising and realising that fact — it’s a little hard for me to feel 100% confident now that I’m awake, or to justify that confidence.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah, yeah. So I feel a little bit open to this. And it is interesting and compelling to me that some dream theorists, including prominent ones, think that these kinds of dreams that would feel a lot like the experience I’m having now can happen. I personally have no memory of ever having a dream that’s anything like what it feels like to be me, with a lifetime of memories that I can look at and that are all very logically consistent and coherent, with richness that feels orders of magnitude more — whether or not it even makes sense to describe it that way — than I’ve ever had in a dream.

So it would at least feel surprising to me that despite the fact that me in a dream right now, dream Luisa, potentially has never had anything like a dream this vivid, that this happens to be the one dream that feels like it’s years long and has the richness of an entire life.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. So it feels like it’s years long. But of course, in dreams it’s plausible to think sometimes we have the experience of feeling like we’ve spent years in whatever dream reality we’re in. So that’s part of my reaction.

But actually my main reaction is to kind of agree with you. My own preferred theory of dreams is an imagery theory on which dream experiences are more like images than they are like sensory experiences. There’s a debate about this in the dream literature. Some people say that dreams experientially are more like daydreams, which are images. And that’s pretty different experientially from the vivid sensory experience of actually seeing something.

Luisa Rodriguez: That does resonate with me.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So I’m inclined toward that theory. But I should say that Jennifer Windt and Antti Revonsuo, two of the top theorists of dreams, disagree with that theory. So I’ve got maybe 80% credence in this theory, but I don’t think I could justify much more than 80% credence, given that some of my favourite theorists of dreams disagree with it.

So contingent upon that 80%, it would be very unlikely that this is the one exception. But I think what we need to do is say that maybe that’s not the right way of thinking about dreams. Maybe your impression, and my impression — that dreams kind of lack this vividness of sensory detail — maybe that’s an error on our part, a memory error; we don’t really remember the experience of dreams maybe as well as we think we do.

There’s this whole interesting literature on dream memory and how accurate or inaccurate it is. I think it might be pretty inaccurate. One interesting sign of the inaccuracy, and I don’t know if we want to get into this, but I did a whole research project for a while on the fact that people used to think they dreamed in black and white.

Luisa Rodriguez: Really?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Yeah. In the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States, the majority of people said that almost all of their dreams are black and white.

Luisa Rodriguez: How does that happen?

Eric Schwitzgebel: And that was not the case before the 19th century, and it was not the case after, say, the ’70s or ’80s.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow.

Eric Schwitzgebel: It corresponds with the rise and fall of black-and-white filmmaking. So my theory here is that what happened was people were over-analogising: they don’t remember their dream experiences very well, and they’re over-analogising their dreams to black-and-white movies. Their dreams are like movies. Movies are black and white, and I don’t seem to remember the colour of these particular objects in my dreams, so I guess my dreams are black and white too.

Luisa Rodriguez: Wow. Weird.

Eric Schwitzgebel: And we confirmed this. I did a cross-cultural study with some people in China. So in the year 2000, in rural China, media were predominantly black and white, and in wealthy urban regions in China, media were predominantly coloured. And there we found — this is collaborative with some Chinese researchers — that the rural population were more likely to say their dreams were in black and white than the wealthy urban population, and the poorer urban population was in the middle. So we maybe don’t have such great knowledge about our dream experiences.

Luisa Rodriguez: Sure, yeah. So then another thought I have is just, does it even matter? I guess I’m interested in this question because there’s a whole can of worms that I sometimes look into and then close back up that’s like, should I actually care a lot morally about the experiences that I and other people have in their dreams? Because they’re really terrible for me a lot of the time, and I think some people have wonderful ones, and that’s great. But if we were to put more moral weight on the experiences people have when they’re dreaming than we do — I think we basically put none on it now — then that would be pretty crazy.

But if we just assume that that is a reasonable thing to do for now, would that imply that the experience I’m having right now is not morally relevant? Or maybe we should go the other way, and say this is all pretty morally relevant, because it seems like we are having an experience and there is something it is like to be me, even if I’m in a dream.

Eric Schwitzgebel: That’s a complicated, interesting question. There is a recent paper on this that came out in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. I’m forgetting the author’s name, unfortunately, but the idea is: if we accept a utilitarian ethics — which would be a view on which what you try to do is maximise the balance of happiness or positive experiences minus the balance of negative experiences or pain in the universe — and you accept, as seems plausible, that during dream experiences you can have positive or negative affect — even though maybe you don’t feel the pain of the pinch, it’s agonisingly terrible to feel like you’re being chased by a monster or whatever, or wonderful to have an experience of flying — if you accept all that, and you accept a utilitarian ethics in which the ethical imperative is maximise pleasure, basically, then we ought to be investing a lot of work into improving the quality of our dreams. This is what this article argues. But we don’t.

So you could either do modus ponens or modus tollens with this. Modus ponens would be: utilitarian ethics says we should invest a lot more in improving the quality of our dreams. There are ways you can improve the quality of your dreams. For example, you could learn to be a lucid dreamer. So therefore let’s invest a lot of time and energy in improving our dream quality. That’s the modus ponens direction.

Or you could do modus tollens, which is to say, “Utilitarianism says we should be investing a lot of time in improving the quality of our dreams. I reject the idea that we should be investing a lot of time in improving the quality of our dreams. Therefore I reject utilitarianism.” That’s kind of travelling the other direction down the implicational arrow.

I briefly made the modus tollens argument in some earlier work, in a chapter in my book, A Theory of Jerks and Other Philosophical Misadventures. But the modus ponens direction — the idea that we should be investing a lot of energy — has been recently defended elsewhere.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. So I am more inclined to be like, I buy utilitarianism. Let’s all invest more in dream improvement research. Does that mean that it’s not super consequential to me whether I’m in a dream right now at all, in terms of I guess I’m a moral patient? Because I think that was my first off-the-bat, intuitive reaction to this, like, “If I’m just in a dream, then none of this matters.” But maybe I actually don’t have to conclude that, because dream people matter.

Eric Schwitzgebel: So your experience right now, on a utilitarian view — and on my view, although I’m not a utilitarian — would matter insofar as you’re having positive experiences, hopefully, instead of negative ones. I don’t know. Maybe this interview is a total disaster and you’re miserable.

Luisa Rodriguez: No, you’re blowing my mind. It’s very good fun.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. And insofar as that’s going on, that’s good. And we want that to be going on. But if this is a dream, whatever you’re doing for the long term is useless, right? So you’re working hard to make this a good interview where the pieces will fit together, and you’re thinking about the next question. But if this is a dream, odds are no one else is ever going to hear this interview. So in that sense, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve asked a good question for a prospective audience, because there’s no audience that’s ever going to hear it. So your momentary experience would matter, but the long-term consequences would be sharply discounted.

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, you just threw a whole wrench in my coming to terms with maybe I’m in a dream, and maybe that’s OK. Yes, I would find that distressing. Maybe I’d also find it a relief.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Liberating?

Luisa Rodriguez: To know that bad things are not so consequential.

Eric Schwitzgebel: I think one of the consequences of allowing a tiny sliver of nontrivial credence in the dream possibility is that decision theoretically it slightly reduces the value of long-term consequences. So if you are on the cusp between doing something with a short-term gain and a long-term loss, versus doing something with a long-term gain and a short-term loss — and say you’re rationally right on the cusp between those two things before you think about the dream possibility — as soon as you think, “But I should invest a tiny credence in this being a dream,” then that will discount slightly that long-term benefit, and so it will tilt you toward doing the short-term-benefit thing instead. So that would be one decision-theoretical practical consequence of thinking that you might be dreaming.

Luisa Rodriguez: Interesting. And that, I guess, would also apply to some of these other cases that we didn’t talk about. Simulations, for example — which I actually put a little bit more weight on than dreams, the idea that we might be in a simulation. And a simulation could be turned off, and that is some reason to discount the future more than I would otherwise. And that can have really big consequences.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Right. And I think one of the things that hasn’t been sufficiently emphasised or appreciated by defenders of the simulation hypothesis, like Bostrom and Chalmers, is that if we’re living in a simulation, then there’s not particularly good reason, I think, to assume that it’s a large, long, enduring simulation. It could plausibly be a pretty small or short-term simulation — in which case, much of what we believe and expect about the past and the future and distant things could be false. And if you find that distressing, then you should find the simulation possibility also somewhat distressing, maybe more so than Bostrom and Chalmers, than the tone that you get from reading defenders of the simulation hypothesis.

Luisa Rodriguez: Yeah. Oh, there’s so many things we could talk about there, but we don’t have time today, so we’ll have to have you back on another day.

Will we ever have answers to these dubious and bizarre questions? [01:56:16]

Luisa Rodriguez: OK, I’m going to ask just one last question, which is: do you think that we will ever have defensible answers to any of these questions that have these qualities of being dubious and bizarre?

Eric Schwitzgebel: Maybe. For consciousness and a lot of these cosmological questions, I don’t see it happening in the next 30 years, the foreseeable future. But I don’t see why, in principle, we couldn’t come up with answers. I’m really struck by how science can sometimes make progress on things that you might have thought there’s no way we could figure that out.

One example of this is the Big Bang. Consider it abstractly: how in the heck can we — just by looking up in the sky — figure out all the bizarre stuff that happened in the very first second of the Big Bang, and all the weird transitions that are going on there? You might think that basically it could be a TV screen out beyond Pluto, for all we know. But nonetheless, science has come up with a very plausible theory of some pretty amazing things that are pretty far removed from what you might have thought we’d be able to figure out.

So I’m not a principled sceptic about ever figuring out the right theory of consciousness or the right interpretation of quantum mechanics or any of this other bizarre stuff. I think that in academia, people tend to be rewarded for being overconfident, or at least those are the ones who publish about these kinds of things. So I don’t accept the level of confidence that a lot of people who publish on the issues tend to have. But I don’t see why, in principle, we couldn’t learn the answers to some of these things.

But one way of thinking about it is there’s this nice analogy that is sometimes attributed to Einstein, although I don’t think Einstein did originally say it, that as the circle of light expands, so does the ring of darkness around it. So I think whatever knowledge we have… Right now, we know about the Big Bang. So now there’s like, OK, was there something before the Big Bang? What, if anything, caused the Big Bang? So as the circle grows, there’s this penumbra of shade, where we could kind of peer into the darkness around the ring and think about those things — and maybe not get decisive answers, but get kind of shapes of the possible structures of answers.

And that’s often where I think philosophy operates, right? In this kind of penumbra around the ring of stuff that we know scientifically. So even if we do find answers to some of these questions, my prediction would be that there would be then further penumbral questions beyond those that would become the new territory of philosophical speculation.

Luisa Rodriguez: Well, that is both exciting, thrilling, daunting, distressing. But I really appreciate all of those things. Thank you for helping me celebrate them a bit more. And thank you for coming on the show. My guest today has been Eric Schwitzgebel.

Eric Schwitzgebel: Thanks for having me on. It’s been wonderful chatting with you.

Luisa’s outro [01:59:41]

Luisa Rodriguez: If you want to learn more about philosophical views on consciousness, or you just liked this episode and want to hear more philosophy, I can’t recommend our interview with David Chalmers highly enough. That’s episode #67 David Chalmers on the nature and ethics of consciousness.

All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

The audio engineering team is led by Ben Cordell, with mastering and technical editing by Milo McGuire, Simon Monsour, and Dominic Armstrong.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site, and put together as always by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.