Where Does Consciousness Begin? | Philip Goff

[00:00:00]Philip, the question of how far consciousness goes on the phylogenetic or biological hierarchy is has become more of a a public policy issue in terms of how we treat animals, medical experiments, and and general scientific philosophy. Are invertebrates conscious and how should we treat them if we're going to eat some of them as an example.

[00:00:29]As a panpsychist, what can you bring to the discussion what living things are conscious?

[00:00:38]Yeah, I think I think there has been a tendency over time to attribute consciousness to more and more things. We used to think just human beings were conscious. Descartes famously thought all other animals are just mechanisms with no feelings. We used to think babies aren't conscious.

[00:00:56]Until very recently, we thought fish weren't conscious. And I think there tends to be over time we we expand expand consciousness to to other living creatures.

[00:01:08]One thing that influences my thinking here is I'm inclined to think consciousness can't be vague. When philosophers use the word vague, they mean fuzzy, indeterminate boundaries. So there's no precise hair that you lose that makes you go from not being bald to being bald. There's no penny that makes you go from poor to rich, young to old.

[00:01:35]There's there's a fuzzy boundaries.

[00:01:38]But does that make sense with consciousness? Could there be Eric Schwitzgebel thinks that snails might be a kind of creature that it's not that they're definitely conscious. It's not that they're definitely unfeeling mechanisms, but they're sort of in between, neither one nor the other.

[00:01:57]To my mind, that that doesn't make any sense, it doesn't make sense to have a kind of gray area where there's something which is in a borderline case between feeling and not feeling.

[00:02:06]Something either has feelings or it doesn't. Now, if that's the case, when we're getting down to simpler and simpler organisms, if we're going to have the consciousness cut up at some point, it's going to have to be utterly sharp because there's no fuzzy boundary.

[00:02:21]And that inclines me, and it's partly connected to that panpsychism, that inclines me to put consciousness going down and down and down, basically to the to the start of life itself. And so under that scenario, all life would be conscious in in some form, but not a fuzzy form. It'd be a conscious and maybe it'd be very simple. But it would still be a real consciousness. I'm inclined to think so. I think in in the in, you know, panpsychists don't necessarily think everything is conscious, despite despite the etymology of the word, pan, everything, psyche, mind.

[00:02:58]Panpsychists think the fundamental building blocks of reality, maybe particles and fields, have some very rudimentary form of consciousness. I guess I'm inclined to think outside of the biological realm, consciousness is probably just at the level of fundamental physical entities in these very simple forms.

[00:03:19]But in the biological realm, I'm inclined to think it's teeming with conscious life of of radically different forms, some complex, some simple. We're not saying, you know, ants are feeling anxiety or existential angst or something or wondering whether it's Tuesday yet. That's a very sophisticated form of consciousness that only highly evolved creatures enjoy.

[00:03:42]But some kind of very simple form of consciousness, I think goes goes pretty deep.