Jack Symes

Some people who engage in such meditative practices claim that they've uncovered the fundamental nature of the world, which is a unified field of consciousness.

So, hypothetically, if something like Goff's view of this fundamental consciousness is right, and the Buddhist monks tap into this, and they tell all of their mates in the town, and they all come to see it to be true, and they all contribute towards it, then that is meaningful. If you sit on your ass in a cave doing absolutely bugger all for your whole life, you never tell anybody about it.

then I don't see that as being as meaningful as being an NHS worker or fighting to defend your country or something like this.

Yeah. Or like when you've, like kids, right? If they're sat around doing nothing, just playing video games, something, you go, get outside, stop. We say stop wasting your life, right? There is something better for you to be doing, something for you to contribute towards individually and holistically. But the problem, I think, and why I don't embrace this for you myself is that

There's a problem in philosophy of mind and consciousness, which is, let's say, you contemplate your own being, let's say, and you look inside of yourself. What's it like to be a physical entity? And you look inside your mind and there's this consciousness, there's this... qualia or being or experience.

People like Schopenhauer say that because we don't know the inner nature of things, and Galen Strawson here at University of Texas at Austin says, if you think physics tells you about the inner nature of things, you don't understand physics. It doesn't tell you about, it tells you what things do, but not what things are.

So let's say, for the sake of argument, underlying all of this physical stuff is consciousness. And then you want to bring in the philosophy of religion. And you say that as a whole, All of the universe is one big conscious mind. You've got a problem there, which is either the combination problem or the decombination problem, which goes something like this.

You take all of these little conscious particles in the table. How do they add up to one unified mind like they do in my brain? I don't have loads of little experiences going on now. I have one coherent stream of consciousness seeing you, hearing these sounds, seeing these lights. It's not like there's loads of little conscious experiences happening.

So how is it that they all come together to form one unified experience? And you have the opposite problem for this pantheistic view, which is if you've got this great big global mind, this ocean of consciousness underlying everything, how does that big godlike mind...

decombine into little minds like why is my experience not your experience why is it here rather than there and it doesn't seem like although we might have some like knee-jerk reaction answers to that question philosophically we can't draw the boundary like the skull and my brain seem like arbitrary boundaries when i'm saying that the whole thing is well let's let's explore it like what would be the reasons why we would have individual experiences and a collective consciousness

You could have reasons for it.

There could be benefits and there could be reasons for it. In terms of, let's paint this pantheistic picture of, again, the reason and the goal of the universe and life. If I see myself as here rather than there, perhaps it allows me to better my community in this location and add to the value of it as an individual. Actually, it's time to think about it.

I'm not sure from the perspective of God what reason there is to break these things apart. Maybe it's better for God if you have lots of disjointed egos that transcend them and make the world a better place, despite the fact that you just want to buy private jets and look after themselves.

Aspire to be the person.

You're a fun person. Be the person. Yeah, okay. These are good reasons for perhaps why, like, you break up the mind in that way. But they don't tell us how. They tell us why the universe would want to do it. But still, it doesn't carve out the boundaries between why our experiences are different from each other's if we're a part of this big global mind.

This still gives you a good why, like a really strong why. It seems that... the better world is one full of lots of individual subjective experiences, like loads of individual minds, like you say, all able to do lots of different things. I saw this clip of Musk speaking about this recently, right?

And I was quite surprised because in the past I came, I was teaching philosophy of mind at Liverpool and I remember showing them one of these clips and it was of Musk talking about like the origins of consciousness. And I was using it as like, this is like the general public opinion of it. You learn more about the brain. This is like his Neuralink stuff. And you solve the problem.

And we spoke about like how that won't happen. But recently, he came out and said something I thought was really interesting, which is essentially the view we're talking about here, panpsychism, the view that consciousness is everywhere. He said...

Well, in order to have consciousness, there'd need to be some rudimentary consciousness or experience in the inner nature of stuff in order to get complex and interesting kinds like me and you. But in the origin of the world and the Big Bang, it was just hydrogen. So what hydrogen gets more and more complex until it gives rise to consciousness.

And he gave this line, which is essentially where philosophy of mind is right now. He said, either consciousness is nowhere, as in it's just an illusion, it's a trick of the brain, it's pulling a rabbit out of the hat when there's not really a rabbit, or it's everywhere. And I think given that you can hear me and see me now, and this is what Descartes' cogito ergo sum is, right?