Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff), a professor of philosophy at Durham University. His main research focus is consciousness, but he is interested in many questions about the nature of reality. He is most known for defending panpsychism, the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. Fifteen years ago, panpsychism was laughed at, if it was thought of at all. Goff has led a movement that has made panpsychism a mainstream position, taught to undergraduates and widely discussed in academic journals.
Goff is the author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness and Why? The Purpose of the Universe. He has published 50 academic articles and has written extensively for newspapers and magazines, including Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Aeon and the Times Literary Supplement.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: Philip, let’s kick it off with a question about another interview, which I very rarely do, but in this particular case I think it will offer us perhaps a road into tying a few things together for people who are listening. And this relates to an interview by Pulitzer Prize winning author Gareth Cook, which ended up being one of the most viewed articles in Scientific American of 2020. Philosophy can get very abstract, it can really get out there, it can become hard to grasp or in the minds of many, hard to apply. But let’s begin with what made that interview stick. What do you think some of the concepts or ingredients or lines, anything was that made that resonate with so many people?
Philip Goff: Rather than anything I’ve done, I think just consciousness and this strange view I’ve built my career defending known as panpsychism is something that it’s a view that somehow resonates with people in all sorts of ways.
And it’s been an incredible journey because it’s a view that 15 years ago was ridiculed insofar as it was thought about at all, at least in my Western philosophical tradition. But in this short time period, it’s come to be a mainstream academic position that is taught to undergraduates and is widely published in academic journals. So it’s been an astonishing transformation really, and it’s really been exciting to be part of that. Why does it resonate so much with people? One part of it is I think people who’ve had psychedelic experiences. Many of them have this sense that consciousness pervades the universe in a deeper sense than in the more familiar ordinary scientific view of things.
In fact, one of on the questionnaire for mystical experiences, the proper psychological questionnaire, one of the boxes you tick is: Do you have a sense that there is a living presence in all things? And so, I suppose, this has not been from my academic starting point, this was not the route I took to panpsychism. I think it solves a lot of the mysteries and paradoxes of consciousness that are cold-blooded, intellectual reasons to go for it. But many people reading about my work, who’ve had psychedelic experiences, something about it makes sense. And I’m open to thinking about that too, very much.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s define some terms because sometimes I think panpsychism gets a bad rap or maybe just needs a rebrand like Patagonian toothfish being renamed Chilean sea bass. Maybe that’s what panpsychism needs. I’m not sure. But I want to talk about the cold-hearted intellectual reasons or arguments for panpsychism, but in simple terms, because I think some folks can maybe conflate it with something akin to animism, and add on a few layers that are perhaps unnecessary. What is, in simple terms for a lay audience, panpsychism?
Philip Goff: That’s a good starting point. In terms of the rebrand actually, my good friend Annaka Harris, who’s very sympathetic to panpsychism, she’s always saying, “This is a terrible name. We need to rebrand it.” But I think it’s a bit late, it’s stuck. Panpsychism is the view that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality. Perhaps a way into that is if you start with human consciousness that is incredibly rich and complex, the result of millions of years of evolution, but consciousness comes in all shapes and sizes. The consciousness of a sheep is simpler to the consciousness of a human being. What it’s like to be a snail is simpler to what it’s like to be a sheep.
And as we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of conscious experience. For the panpsychist, this keeps going on right down to the fundamental building blocks with perhaps fundamental particles like electrons and quarks having incredibly simple forms of conscious experience to reflect the incredibly simple nature. There’s a common misunderstanding. People always think, “What are you saying? Electrons are feeling existential angst or wondering if it’s Tuesday or something?” But the idea is that’s human consciousness. Don’t be anthropomorphic about this. This is very, for panpsychists, human consciousness is a weird, highly evolved form of what exists throughout the universe.
Tim Ferriss: So there’s so many different directions we could go here, and we may get into some rather gnarly questions quickly. So just to reiterate and to clarify for myself or for listeners also, so from human to sheep, but all the way down to, we can certainly go to quarks and so on with the way you described it, but you would have a pool of water, maybe the water droplets, rocks, trees, the constituent parts of trees, and so on as you reduce down to, how would you think about that?
Philip Goff: Just one small qualification though, yeah, it is a common misunderstanding that panpsychists think absolutely everything is conscious and it’s understandable. That’s actually what the word means: pan, everything; psyche, mind. But panpsychists don’t necessarily think literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental building blocks are conscious in some very simple way. Maybe electrons and quarks like the example I just gave, but maybe not. It’s a question for physicists, not philosophers like me: what are the fundamental components of reality?
These days, many theoretical physicists are more inclined to think that our universe is made up of universe-wide fields, and particles are just local excitations in those fields. So if you combine that with panpsychism, you get the view that the fundamental forms of consciousness underlie these universe-wide fields. This gets closer to a former of panpsychism known as cosmopsychism, that the universe itself is conscious. Although again, we need to be careful. That doesn’t necessarily mean the universe is God or the universe is, it could be just the universe is just this messy, blobby, nonsense consciousness.
So that’s the idea. The basic things are conscious and that many other things, of course, are conscious — humans and animals and our consciousness is somehow built up from these simpler forms of consciousness. But it doesn’t mean every random combination of conscious particles makes something that has its own unified consciousness. It doesn’t necessarily mean rocks and socks and tables and chairs. I remember teaching this to our undergraduates and I had a PowerPoint slide up with socks on and saying, “Your socks might not be conscious.” And one of the students obviously took a photo of that, put it on social media. This is what we’re learning in my classes. But anyway, I think that was all lighthearted.
But yeah, so although some panpsychists do think literally everything is conscious. I just mentioned Annaka, I think she thinks that. My friend Luke Roelofs, very good, very down to a scientific panpsychist philosopher, but he does think literally everything is conscious. But even then, it’s not going to be the kind of consciousness a human being has. That is a very specific, highly organized form of information processing. Whereas if a table is conscious, it’s going to be just some meaningless, fragmented, disunified nonsense. But yeah, that’s the basic idea.
Tim Ferriss: Okay, so first things first, I want to give a nod to Annaka Harris. She has a very extensive audio documentary that relates to consciousness if people want to do a deep dive into these subjects. But this word consciousness may be bothering people at this point in the conversation, like a pebble in a shoe because for most people wandering about, going to Starbucks, and watching Netflix and so on, consciousness, they may have not taken the time to define it precisely. But the intuitive sense is something along the lines of awareness. Maybe it’s awareness that you are aware, but there’s some degree of awareness. So when you talk about a table or socks or rocks, I understand that you didn’t imply that everything has its own consciousness, but how should they think of this word when applied to what people would consider inanimate objects, for instance?
Philip Goff: It’s a really important question because it is a little bit of an ambiguous word. And I agree with you when I’m talking to public, the people often think that it means something quite sophisticated like self-consciousness or awareness of one’s own existence.
Tim Ferriss: And Philip, could I interrupt you for one second?
Philip Goff: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: I thought what I might do is just line up some support before we go too far into this. And are there any physicists? Because some people might think of them as the most refined plumbers of reality. Sorry, guys, if that’s insulting. I just came up with that on the fly, but architects, maybe. Decipherers, detectives. There we go. Choose your label. Are there any physicists, credible physicists who would more or less agree with some of the positions and theories that you are describing related to panpsychism?
Philip Goff: Well, one person that stands out here is Roger Penrose, who’s a Nobel Prize winning physicist. Fascinating, very interesting thinker. I was lucky enough to have one-to-one lunch with Roger Penrose once. By chance at a big consciousness conference.
Tim Ferriss: That’s lucky. He’s getting up there in age.
Philip Goff: I was in the queue, and one of the organizers sat him down and we just sat together and we had a lovely chat about our different views. But he’s defended a view that’s very close to panpsychism. The quantum collapse is connected to the generation of consciousness. One thing, I don’t know how much you want to get into his view.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s get into it. Let’s get into it.
Philip Goff: He’s influenced by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. Which, not getting into too much detail, roughly proves that for any finite set of axioms, you’re not going to be able to generate algorithmically all of the truths of mathematics. This was the fascinating thing Gödel proved. And so that leads Penrose to think, well, there must be something non-computational about human mathematical thought. Because if it was just algorithmic and computational, we wouldn’t get all those truths of arithmetic that we are able to comprehend. And then where that leads him is he thinks, well, it must be at the quantum level, rather than at the level where we have classical physics.
And this led him in combination with scientist Stuart Hameroff, to explore the less common position that consciousness is connected to quantum stuff in the brain in what we call the microtubules. And so yeah, that’s absolutely fascinating position that Roger has got into. Another question that might be more pertinent is what about neuroscientists? Because I suppose consciousness is in the purview of the neuroscientists. The science of consciousness I think is part of neuroscience.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s hop to that, but I want to give you just a bit of trivium related to Penrose. So I followed Penrose’s work and Hameroff, very deeply interested. And I ended up by a number of lucky coincidences doing a week at Wadham College where I believe he is a fellow. And his book was in my room where I stayed and I asked someone about him and I feel like I just missed him by a week. And I was very sad about this.
Philip Goff: He’s so open-minded. He’s searched so many areas of thought, just a really fascinating figure.
Tim Ferriss: So neuroscientists, let’s hop into that arena.
Philip Goff: The first thing you should know about the science of consciousness is there is no consensus. That famously, I don’t know whether you’ve heard this, 25 years ago, the neuroscientist Christof Koch bet the philosopher David Chalmers, that this would all be wrapped up by now. We would attract what we call the neural correlates of consciousness, those aspects of brain activity that perfectly correspond to consciousness. And he bet him a crate of fine wine and it was a public bet. Well, was it last summer or the summer before? He publicly conceded defeat on that because there is no consensus.
But one of the major possibilities, one of the major views that is disputed and debated is the integrated information theory. And that gets us very close to panpsychism or is even itself a form of panpsychism because it entails that consciousness is more widespread than we ordinarily take it to be. And it certainly goes into the inanimate realm. There’s two reasons this is getting thought about. Maybe psychedelics is a third reason, but there’s two reasons. One is the newfound philosophical interest, but also this interest in the integrated information theory.
But also just finally, I think from what we’ve already said, it becomes clear with consciousness, it is not just a scientific issue. The science is absolutely crucial and the experimental work, but with consciousness, there are so many philosophical questions we need to address. And I think actually what we’ve found is that’s part of the reason we haven’t achieved consensus. Because actually forget the big philosophical questions. How you interpret the scientific data on the brain and consciousness depends on your philosophical assumptions. There’s a dispute among scientists about whether consciousness is at the front or the back of the brain. And actually, I think the split on that is something to do with the philosophical assumptions. So we need scientists and philosophers working together.
Tim Ferriss: So I want get back to that. Because that is a very meta examination of science and the scientific method that I want to get into. But since I’m a stickler for terms. The integrated information theory, can you speak to that for one moment? And I funded a fair amount of science also at Johns Hopkins and other places, where I believe they developed the mystical experience questionnaire, at least in part. The integrated information theory, could you define that for us? Before we get back to the, and for people listening, don’t worry, I keep good notes and I have a good memory. We are going to get to the definition of consciousness, outside of just the broadly layperson interpretation of say awareness, haven’t forgotten about it. But just because that might take us down a bunch of side alleys. I want to stick where we are for a second. The integrated Information theory, what is that?
Philip Goff: So this is one of the proposals of, we can maybe distinguish the scientific task of consciousness from the philosophical task. As I say it, the scientific task is which brain activity goes along with which kinds of conscious experience. And more generally in general, what is required from a physical system to get consciousness? And integrated information theory is one proposal. And roughly it says that consciousness corresponds to integration. You get a conscious system when the way in which information is stored in the system depends upon the integration between the parts of the system.
And they have a mathematically precise way of defining this. They represent it with the letter phi. And the proposal is that at the exact moment when a system has more integrated information in the whole than in the parts, that’s when the lights come on. That’s when you get consciousness.
Tim Ferriss: That’s when the lights come on.
Philip Goff: That is what is so striking about the brain. In fact, the parts of the brain that are associated with consciousness are not necessarily the parts that have the most neurons, but they do seem to be the parts that involve deep, deep integration. Each neuron being connected to hundreds and thousands of others yielding trillions of connections. Maybe to connect to how computers work. If the integrated information theory turns out to be true, computers that are anything like what we currently have are actually not going to be conscious, because the way in which information is stored in a computer is a less dependent on integration.
If you take out a bit of a few transistors, you won’t necessarily lose that much information. But if you take out a small part of the brain, at least comparatively, you lose a hell of a lot of information because the way in which information is stored is so much more holistic, and to do with integration. And so the theory basically says that is the hallmark of consciousness. That’s what it’s all about.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s perhaps make a contrast of styles and then, because I don’t want to hold out and tease people for too long, we’ll try to take a stab or I will, I’m using the royal we, I’ll ask you to take a stab at just giving us a working definition of consciousness that doesn’t depend on a table asking itself “Why am I here? What’s going on?” And before we get to that though, contrast in styles perhaps, the integrated information theory seems to imply, and this is something I have zero familiarity with, so I could get this wrong. On consciousness as an emergent property. So things are simple, they get more complex, and when they reach a requisite level of complexity where the sum of the parts is greater than the whole, as you would expect it, the lights turn on. And maybe I’m misinterpreting that.
But I’m wondering if that is accurate, if you as someone who has looked at this very deeply through philosophical lenses, would agree with that, or does it start from the very beginning with the smallest constituent parts? Does that make any sense? I’m not sure I’m asking that as a coherent question.
Philip Goff: It does make a lot of sense. And here you’re focusing on a key big question here. Chicken or egg, which comes first? The physical world or consciousness? And the standard scientific assumption is, well, it’s the physical universe that’s first. Particles forming complex systems, brains, and then in some of the complex electrochemical signaling in brains, consciousness pops up. It’s emergent, as you say. Whereas the panpsychist actually turns that on its head and says, “No, no, no. Consciousness, some story about very simple conscious entities, is the foundational story. And in fact, physical reality emerges from that more basic story about consciousness.”
Now, you asked about integrated information theory, or they call it IIT for short. And I’ve always been a little bit unsure. The key figures here are Giulio Tononi and Christof Koch, who I mentioned earlier. We had a conference recently in Sweden bringing together philosophers working on panpsychism and leading proponents of integrated information theory. And we really wrestled it out. And I actually was pleasantly surprised to realize we’re actually on the complete same page as this. I think at least the leading proponents of integrated information theory, those neuroscientists are, like us philosophers, of the view that it’s consciousness that’s fundamental actually, and everything else flows from there. Everything else comes out of consciousness.
Tim Ferriss: Now is that a close cousin, or does it rhyme, with what Max Planck, icon, German physicist, said so long ago — I have never had the full context of this quote, and this is as good a time as any after you answer this, just to give us a working definition of consciousness that can be applied in the way you would like to apply it. So, Max Planck, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness, everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing postulates consciousness.” So, Max Planck, 1852 to 1947, Nobel Prize winning German physicist and the father of quantum theory. Was he referring to more or less what you are discussing? Or did he say this in a different context?
Philip Goff: It’s fascinating what you point to though, and it’s not just Max Planck. It was a fairly widespread view among many physicists at the time. A colleague of mine who works in the history of philosophy tweeted something recently that was a quote from a physicist from the 1930s. Oh, God, I can’t remember now who it was, saying, “Of course all physicists think consciousness is fundamental now.” It’s just like, “What?” I think something happened in the post-war years, where this all went out the window, and we moved to dominance of what we call materialism, roughly that the physical world is fundamental. We can leave it to the historians perhaps to work out what was going on there. But what was the interest of Max Planck?
I’m not an expert on Max Planck, but I suspect it might be something to do with quantum mechanics, and some of the mysteries that have emerged since those early days of quantum mechanics. I mean, the weird thing about quantum mechanics is that, if we just take the core bit of mathematics, what we call the Schrödinger equation, it seems to describe this weird world of what we call superpositions. And don’t ask me what a superposition is, because nobody knows. But it’s something to do with, the particle is not in this location and not in that location, but sort of in both, and neither at the same time, or captured with the famous Schrödinger cat thought experiment. Where, if you just apply the Schrödinger equation, you’ll find that before we open the box, the cat is living and dead, and there’s many cats, or some of them living, some of them dead.
But of course, that’s not what we ever observe. Whenever we actually observe the particle, it’s in a definite location. Whenever we actually open the box and look at the cat, if we were cruel enough to actually do the Schrödinger’s cat experiment, we’d see a definitely living cat or a definitely dead cat. What on Earth is going on there? And what the early pioneers of quantum mechanics said is, “Well, when you make an observation, things change.” And a different bit of mathematics, what we call the Born rule, comes in and tells you what you’re going to observe, or at least the probability of what you’re going to observe. So there’s a sort of bridging principle that takes you from this weird world of superpositions, to the definite reality you are actually going to observe.
And you know, the early pioneers of quantum mechanics like Niels Bohr, they didn’t want you to ask questions about that. In fact, they hated — Niels Bohr. You know, people talk about him. The people who knew him just say he was this incredibly charismatic figure. People compared him to Jesus or Socrates. But he also ruled like a communist dictator in crushing opposition. If you ask questions about what is going on in reality to make quantum mechanics make sense, your career would be over. They didn’t want you asking those questions. But you know, one answer that some people reached in the 1960s, Nobel Prize winning quantum pioneer Wigner, well maybe it’s consciousness that’s making the difference. Maybe that’s what’s the difference between before you’re observing the particle, and it’s in many locations, and when you observe it, or before you open the box to see what’s going on with the cat.
It’s the interaction of consciousness that changes reality from this wacky world of superpositions to a definite reality. And that’s been somewhat neglected over the years. But actually some friends of mine, David Chalmers, who I mentioned, and Kelvin McQueen, have actually taken that view and explored it in rigorous detail. They don’t necessarily think it’s true, but they think there’s value in just analytically exploring this position, laying it out rigorously looking at the pros and cons. So maybe that natural connection between consciousness and quantum mechanics was something to do with it, but I’m not totally sure.
Tim Ferriss: All right. So we can go down a number of different paths from here of course. What is a good placeholder definition of consciousness for the purposes of how you’ve been using it in the context of panpsychism?
Philip Goff: The way the word consciousness is standardly used, I think in both science and philosophy, it just means subjective experience. Your consciousness is just what it’s like to be you. So you know, right now you’re having an auditory experience of my voice speaking to you, visual experience of the room around you. If you pay attention you’ll notice the subtle tactile sensations of the chair beneath your body. This is just all part of what it’s like to be you. And that’s all we mean by consciousness. So now we can start to see that, it may make a little bit more sense that this could exist in very simple forms. Because we’re not necessarily talking about conceptual understanding or awareness of your own existence, we’re just talking about experience. And you know, maybe bed bugs could have experience, maybe something even simpler could have very, very simple forms of experience.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Thank you. And if people want to impress or confuse their friends at the next cocktail party, could they call those things qualia? Would that be a word they should throw around perhaps, or a quality in a different thing entirely?
Philip Goff: Yeah. No, no, that’s the philosopher’s lingo, I suppose, to mean, I guess the qualities we encounter in conscious experience. And some people think that’s really at the heart of the challenge here, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the taste. Consciousness seems to involve rich qualities. You know, the smell of coffee, the taste of mint, the deep red of a sunset. And maybe it’s that, that physical science struggles with so much. Because physical science since Galileo has aimed to be purely quantitative, purely mathematical, purely objective and third personal. And so it’s hard to see how you can bridge the explanatory gap between that purely quantitative world of physics and physical science and this subjective, qualitative world of consciousness.
And in fact, one final thing, physical science kicked off with Galileo taking consciousness outside of the domain of science for this precise reason. Because he thought correctly I think, you can’t capture those qualities in purely mathematical language. If we want mathematical science, we’ve got to take consciousness out. And I think that’s really — I mean, this is my book, Galileo’s Error. I think that’s really at the root of our current predicaments of consciousness. We need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated 400 years ago.
Tim Ferriss: Now, this may be a naive question, but if we can explore quantum mechanics in mathematical form, and if we move from kind of Newtonian billiard balls to quantum mechanics. If quantum mechanical effects, at least in part explain consciousness, it’s a big if I suppose, but if, couldn’t we then reincorporate it into mathematics? Or do you think that’s a fool’s errand?
Philip Goff: No, no. I mean, you’re making the case, I suppose, that the materialist will want to make the person who thinks, “No, no, we can do this.” I mean, I suppose everyone agrees we haven’t done it yet. We haven’t got even the beginnings —
Tim Ferriss: Here’s your case of wine.
Philip Goff: — of an explanation of how electrochemical signaling can somehow make a feeling. But yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people inspired by the success of physical science think, “Come on, let’s, we can get there in the end. We just need to keep pushing at this.” But I suppose that’s why I think we do need to reflect maybe on just the intellectual, philosophical starting points of science with Galileo, this moment when Galileo kicked things off by taking consciousness out.
Tim Ferriss: How did Galileo strip consciousness out? Was it incidental? Was it very deliberate? Because it was just like, “Okay, this is the misbehaving kid in the classroom, we need to put him in the corner.” How was that done? What was the error, so to speak?
Philip Goff: Yeah. So I mean, Galileo wanted, and this was such a revolutionary innovation, wanted science to be just purely mathematical, that had never been done before. But he understood that the problem is, the qualities we seem to encounter in our experience, the colors, the sounds, the smells, and the tastes. So he said, “You know, how do we get rid of them?” You can’t capture them in mathematics, you can’t. I mean, you can capture a lot. You can capture with color experience, you can divide up color into the dimensions of hue, saturation and brightness. And you can map out a three-dimensional space there. But you can never convey to a blind from birth neuroscientist with that sort of information, the redness of red, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
Philip Goff: You know, what it’s like to see red. Actually, there’s a great neuroscientist, Knut Nordby, the late Knut Nordby, he’s passed away now, who was an expert color scientist who had cones missing from his eyes. So he could only see black and white and shades of gray. And he was interested in the philosophy, he talked in wonderful, rich ways about how he understood the structure of color experience, but he couldn’t quite get at the colors, the qualities themselves. So Galileo said, “Right. Well, we need that to be outside of the scientific domain.” So what he said, he stripped the physical world of its qualities. He said, “You know, the colors, they’re not really in the objects.”
You know, this Batman mug I’ve got here, you know, the blueness and the yellowness, that’s not really on the surface of the cup. That’s in the conscious experience of the observer looking at it. Or the spiciness isn’t really inside the curry, it’s in the conscious experience of the person eating it. So he strips the physical world of all these colors, and sounds, and smells, tastes, where are they? They’re in the soul. They’re in the soul, that’s outside of science. And once he’d stripped the qualities away, you’re free rein to capture everything else in mathematics. Now, that was a good move, because it was the start of mathematical physics, and it’s led to incredible technology and consensus on this body of information. But I think we’re in a period of history where it’s gone so well.
People now think, “That’s everything, we found the way forward.” But we need to remember it’s gone so well because it was given a limited focus, because consciousness was put outside of the domain of science. So I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about these challenges of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, “Of course you can’t do that. I designed physical science to exclude consciousness.” If you want to bring consciousness back in the scientific story, we need to rethink those foundations. We need to bring together what Galileo separated. And I think that’s what panpsychism gives us a way of doing. It’s not telling us to do science differently, it’s telling us to have a more expansive scientific method that brings consciousness back into the story.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, I want to explore that last part. And I would just say, I mean, for folks listening, and please excuse me, I’m operating way above my pay grade here, so I’m probably going to make mistakes. But, Newtonian physics for instance, works fantastically well for so many things. But once you have quantum mechanics introduced, it becomes very clear that it’s an excellent toolkit, but it doesn’t have a complete range of applications, let’s just say. And if you talk to any good doctor, I don’t know if this joke exists in — it’s not really a joke I suppose, but, sort of a philosophical epistemological quip, which is 50 percent of what we know is wrong, we just don’t know which 50 percent.
If you talk to any really good doctor, they’ll tell you that. So there’s no reason to believe that we have anything approaching complete understanding of the physical world through the tools that we have available. You said expanding, if I’m recalling correctly, sort of expanding the scope of science to include panpsychism. Do you have any thoughts on how that might be done?
Philip Goff: Yeah. Well I mean, I think coming back to this question of we just need to explore different explanatory projects. For many decades now, we’ve been pursuing the following project, trying to explain conscious experience in terms of utterly non-conscious processes in the brain. And that project, despite a lot of time and energy and money, has gone precisely nowhere. I mean, which is not to say the science of the brain has gone nowhere, we’ve made incredible progress. But on that particular question of how electrochemical signalings on the brain could make a feeling, we haven’t even got the beginnings. So the panpsychist says, “Well, let’s just try it upside down. Let’s try the reverse of that explanatory project. Let’s see if we start with consciousness, can we get physical reality out of that?”
And I just think it’s turned out that that’s a much more fruitful explanatory project. I think actually the mysteries have been solved, essentially. And I think a lot of the resistance is, it just kind of feels weird. It takes time to adjust to these things. But look, I would just say, just contrast these two explanatory projects. Starting with physical science, trying to get consciousness out, starting with consciousness, trying to get physical reality out. Which works? And I think the latter, we’ve just made much more progress on it.
Tim Ferriss: I was just doing a little bit of searching on Perplexity for people who are interested, which AI tool I am using, which tends to focus a lot on avoiding or minimizing hallucination. I thought you were metaphorically referring to front and back of the brain when you were discussing how your philosophical beliefs — or, what would we even call this, sort of philosophical undergirding, would affect your scientific exploration or interpretation? But I put in a question: what do neuroscientists believe is the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness? And the first thing that pops up, so IIT is here, integrated information theory, but global neuronal workspace theory, man, they could use some branding on that, but that’s okay.
GNWT [Global Neuronal Workspace Theory], this theory championed by Dr. Stanislas Dehaene, I’m probably pronouncing that incorrectly, suggests that consciousness arises from the integration of sensory information in the frontal parts of the brain. The front of the brain acts as a sketch pad, where sensory signals are combined with memories and emotions, and this information is then broadcast across the brain. IIT posits that consciousness emerges from a grid-like interconnection of neurons at the back of the brain. And it goes on and on. And then there are many other theories. The thalamus and its interaction with the cerebral cortex, the occipitotemporal area, the claustrum. That one has come up a bit with neuroscientists I’ve spoken to at a few universities.
A thin sheet of neuron is connected to the neocortex, okay. Now, what do you think of the — let’s put IIT aside for a second, but just this general pursuit, the pursuit of some neuroanatomical seat of consciousness? Because the answers we get are only going to be as good as our questions. And while science is an excellent scientific method for testing hypotheses, it’s not always, it doesn’t always give you a great set of tools for generating the best or better questions. So, do you feel like this is worth pursuing? Or is there something that scientists have as a blind spot that perhaps dooms this question from the very outset, the neuroanatomical seat of consciousness?
Philip Goff: Absolutely we need the science. We’re not going to make progress on consciousness without science. And what you pointed to is a really important debate. I mean, maybe just touch on another way of seeing why this is so hard to make progress on. And the reason is, consciousness is not publicly observable. I can’t look inside your brain and see your feelings and experiences. I can’t look inside a fish and see, does it have feelings? And this leads to all sorts of ethical problems. I mean, what you can do if you’re dealing with a human being is you can ask them. While you’re scanning their brain, maybe you can stimulate a bit of the brain. So what did that feel like? And that’s really essentially the tool for doing the scientific task of trying to mirror together the invisible world of consciousness, and the visible world of the brain.
It’s very hard, but that’s what we try to do. But really, I think that’s where the limit is with science in regard to consciousness. Because consciousness is not publicly observable, that is all you can do. It’s very important, but that is all you can do. Try to get those correlations in the human case, and then try as best you can to extrapolate to the non-human case. But that will always leave open the why question. Why does brain activity go along with consciousness? Why should brain activity have anything to do with consciousness? And I think at that point you need to turn to the philosophy, and just look at the various possibilities that we’ve discussed.
Well, maybe the physical world is fundamental and consciousness emerges. Maybe consciousness is fundamental and physical reality emerges. Maybe they’re both radically different. This is what’s called dualism. Maybe consciousness is in the soul, and that’s just separate from the body and the brain. And this is actually, for what it’s worth, been the most popular theory in human history of consciousness, that consciousness is somehow separate. But like the scientific data on consciousness, important as it is, it’s just neutral on all those possibilities. This is what I’m so passionate about getting across to people. And I understand why people find that frustrating and they think, “No, I can’t be doing an experiment.”
And maybe you should say, “Well, we just don’t know. All we know is the correlations and we just don’t know.” Or, we can try and do some philosophy. We can try and see if, can evaluate these different options, maybe in terms of simplicity, Occam’s razor? Maybe that will get rid of the soul. Or how well their explanatory aims have gone. And I think when we do that, panpsychism just looks more plausible. Well, I’ve talked a bit long there. If I could say one more thing about how we make progress. I think it might get to the point where what we need to do is fragment the discipline a little bit into communities of scientists and philosophers. That is to say, scientists doing experiments under certain philosophical assumptions.
And that’s really actually, with IIT and global workspace theory, that is kind of already going on, but not explicit. But maybe we just have to do that and see what bears fruit. And some neuroscientists I know don’t like that, and they think, “Oh, we’re not going to be taken serious as credible science. We won’t get funding.” And I see that, I feel that. But unfortunately, if you’re going to deal with consciousness for all the reasons we’ve discussed, it’s not publicly observable. Science was set up from taking it out the picture. You just need to do some philosophy. So maybe what we need to do is just get society to take philosophy more seriously, and to see the role that has to play in the project of finding out about reality. And then I think we’ll make progress on consciousness.
Tim Ferriss: So people want to get really squirrely and explore consciousness as something perhaps non-localized, or not limited to the brain, they can read a collection of different writings called Mind Beyond Brain, which was edited by David Presti. Now, if David Presti were just playing singing bowls and swinging copal around the public square, walking around in rags, it would be one thing. But he’s a neuroscientist at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology for nearly 20 years. Still teaches, and also has worked as a clinical psychologist in the treatment of addiction and PTSD and so on at the Department of Veteran Affairs, medical San Francisco and SF. Very interesting. Not all chapters in my opinion are strong, but a few will definitely provoke some very bizarre questions. So that’s something people can dig into if they’d like.
Let me ask you about a hypothetical situation, which is, if we made another bet, so let’s say that you bet me, you’re like, “You know what, 20 years from now we’re going to figure it out. Crate of wine, your choice.” It’s like, “Fantastic.” And it gets figured out. We somehow determine, maybe it’s with the help of quantum computing and harnessing the power from other universes. By the way, if people haven’t listened to the discussion of quantum computing I had with Steve Jurvetson quite a while back now, go back and listen to that if you think what I just said is strange, it is. But let’s say it gets figured out. What is the payoff? This might sound also like a very dumb question. Is it trying just to resolve some deep angst in the not knowing as it relates to consciousness? Or is there more to the potential payoff if we were to somehow figure it out?
Philip Goff: You know, I actually think there are very important practical, ethical concerns here. I mean, one thing we’ve touched on slightly is animal consciousness, which animals are conscious? And I mean, actually the direction of travel has been going more and more things are conscious as time has gone on. There was recently a letter written by dozens of neuroscientists, arguing that we need to at least take seriously the possibility that insects are conscious. I mean, there was a time people didn’t think babies were conscious and used to do quite horrible things on babies without anesthesia.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, surgery without anesthesia. God, that was not that long ago, this is not 1400s we’re talking about.
Philip Goff: Yeah. You know, it’s only recently people are thinking birds and fish are conscious. You know, those panpsychists have taken it all away, and we’re just waiting for people to catch up. I’m being slightly ironic. But plants, I don’t think people are at the stage necessarily where they are. Well, there are some biopsychists who think — well, they’re not panpsychists, but they think all living things are conscious. But we have learned incredible things about plant intelligence, that plants can be subject to conditioned learning. Which was incredibly surprising that the extent to which trees communicate into the ground and share information. And between species there’s cooperation and sharing of food and nutrients, and there’s just some incredible buzzing community beneath the ground.
So I think as we learn more about animals and plants, it is leading people to ascribe consciousness more and more widespread. But look, I mean, this is a very serious ethical question, which things are conscious? People often think, “I’m going to be a vegan.” But it makes it harder if you’re a panpsychist. If you’re not a panpsychist or a biopsychist, you’ve got a nice, easy, ethical dividing line. You know, “Plants aren’t conscious, I just won’t eat things that are conscious. But I think trees and plants are conscious, and I’ve got to eat something.” There really is ethical issues here. The other one is, people in comas who we can’t communicate with in the normal way at least, are they conscious? Can they hear us?
You know one of them, fascinating, it was maybe 10 or 15 years ago now, that scientists were able to communicate with somebody in a coma through asking yes or no questions, and saying, you know, “For the yes question…” I can’t remember the details now, you know, “Think of playing tennis.” And then they observe, they scan the brain to see if the motor region was activated, and communicated with someone through scanning their brain, and found out that they did have meaningful thought. So I mean, those are the two big ethical questions, I suppose. But look, I don’t think we should underplay questions that just don’t have practical significance. But a part of what it means to be a human being in the sense of the noble project of trying to have our best guess as to what reality is like.
I think human life isn’t just about, you know, building bridges, curing disease, working on the economy. As important as those things are, I think we want to know what is this world we’re living in? And how do we fit that into our own understanding of our meaning and purpose in this life? And so, consciousness is important for that purpose too.
Tim Ferriss: And there’s also oftentimes practicality on the further side of something that seems impractical, or at least not immediately practical. That happens all the time in science, happens all the time in medicine, all the time in pharmaceutical development.
Philip Goff: Exactly. I could give you two good examples of that actually. Do you —
Tim Ferriss: Please.
Philip Goff: Where blue sky thinking has gone in. Well, the Reverend Thomas Bayes was annoyed by the atheist David Hume in the 18th century with his argument against miracles, that we should never trust miracles because it’s always going to be more likely that it was deceit or error rather than a break in the laws of nature. Thomas Bayes, Reverend Thomas Bayes is like, “What’s going on?” And he wrestled with this, and he came up with a little bit of mathematics that we now call Bayes’ Theorem.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, Bayes’ Theorem —
Philip Goff: Which is our core mathematical way of understanding evidence. It was very important in tracking the COVID pandemic. It informs a huge bit of neuroscience we call predictive processing. Another quick example, I mean, Bertrand Russell, my hero, and Gottlieb Frege, were wrestling with the very abstract question of can we reduce mathematics to logic? Why the hell would you be worried about that?
But anyway, can we just explain all of maths away? Philosophers worry about numbers. What the hell are numbers? Where are numbers? Plato, back in the dawn of Western philosophy, Plato thought numbers are really out there. Some philosophers think, “I don’t want to believe in this magical world of numbers, Platonic Heaven. Maybe we can just get it all reduced to logic.” And they wrestled with this, and it didn’t really work out, but they came up with predicate logic, which has been hugely important in computer science, and God, huge, loads of areas of science. So look, we don’t need to worry about just focusing on the practical questions. We need space for blue-sky thinking and trying things out, because you don’t know where it’s going to end up.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to come back to Bertrand Russell, which I was planning on hitting regardless. But first I thought we could explore, a little bit, your experience with virtual reality. And this was in the seven pages that you sent to me. Some other reading related to the present moment, which we don’t have to go too in-depth, but specifically, the experience you had with VR, if you could just speak to that. Because part of my hope with conversations like this is just to point out to people what we take for granted as the ordinary is so crazy on so many levels that it’s worth taking a pause very once in a while to revisit it. And I thought your experience was a very eloquent way of putting that into perspective.
Philip Goff: Thank you. Yeah, this was a funny one. I suppose just, when you first try VR goggles, it’s just like, “Oh, my God, this is this world, and I can interact with it.” And unfortunately, I was with my two little kids, and they wanted their turn, and obviously I only have five minutes. And I was like, “Ugh, it’s not fair. Why do they get to do…” So then I was thinking, I was just, I wasn’t going to have another go, because my kids were playing with it. I said, “Ah, back to boring reality.” And recently it dawned on me, actually, normal reality, even this kind of mundane living room I was sitting in is so much richer than the best VR we have. The subtlety of touching a leaf, or stroking a carpet, or breathing the air, if you pay attention to the air going in your nose. And I mean, there’s just so much richness in every present moment.
The only problem is for some reason, I don’t know, it’s something to do with evolution, probably, humans are sort of set up to get bored of it very quickly, and we just want the next thing that we want to — get me a Netflix drama, get me a drink to just sort of drown my sorrows. But I just think that really dawned on me in a deep way, the importance of just trying to calm that restless boredom, and just get back to the richness that the present moment has to offer. I just want to share one more about my kids, actually, I didn’t say this in the pages you kindly read, but I found actually — I’ve got a four-year-old and eight-year-old, actually playing with kids can be kind of meditative, like a spiritual experiment. I mean, I’ve got a friend, I remember a colleague when they first had kids, and they said, “It’s really boring, isn’t it? Playing with kids?”
And in a sense it is, but at first it’s boring, playing role-play, playing teacher. One of my kids want to play teachers all the time, and it’s boring at first. And you want to, “Oh, I want to do something else. I want to do something more” — but then if you just bear with it, and you let the restlessness calm, and then you absorb in it and you see the wonder of the weird way they’re thinking, and the strange expressions, and their unusual behavior, and the richness of the present moment. And I mean, I suppose it’s just a different way of thinking about the value of meditation, or mindfulness, or just trying to calm yourself in the present moment. That’s the beginning of happiness, I think, isn’t it? Just getting yourself settled in the present moments.
Tim Ferriss: All right, as promised, Bertrand Russell, and this is going to take us into some fun territory, I suspect. Why is Bertrand Russell one of your heroes? And maybe you could speak to William James as well, and answer that same question.
Philip Goff: Yeah, Bertrand Russell, I think of Russell as the Darwin of consciousness. I think he, in very important work in the 1920s, he sort of solved all the mysteries. And it got, actually, sadly forgotten about for a long time, and it’s only in the last 10 or 15 years it’s really been rediscovered. Not that it was literally forgotten about, but it’s been examined again. And this has led to this new wave of panpsychist thinking in contemporary philosophy.
Another figure to throw in from the same period, the 1920s, is Arthur Eddington, who was incidentally the first scientist to experimentally confirm Einstein’s general theory of relativity. And that made Einstein an overnight celebrity. And it was a big moment, actually, because it was, was it between the wars, I think? And it was an English experimental scientist confirming the theory of a German or a Swiss German scientist and a Swiss German scientist, not only confirming their theory, but their theory that overturned a couple of hundred years of Newton, right? Newton had the theory of gravity. Eddington’s observation showed that actually, Einstein’s slightly more nuanced theory did better than Newton’s.
So anyway, but they worked together and they thought about these questions around consciousness in a really fascinating way. And without wanting to get into too much of the technicalities, I think their essential insight was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is. Now, when I first heard that, I honestly thought, “That’s ridiculous. What are you talking about?” You read physics, you get this rich story about the nature of space and time and matter.
But their point was, well, of course important and rich as that is, ultimately at base physics just gives us mathematical structure. And so in a sense, physics doesn’t care what matter is, it doesn’t care what physical reality is, it just cares what its mathematical structure is. If you get the right mathematical structure, that’s all physics cares about. And Stephen Hawking famously captured this on the last page of A Brief History of Time when he said, “Even the final theory of physics won’t tell us what breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe.”
So really, I mean, the way we conventionally think about consciousness, people tend to think, “Ph, we know what matter is, we know what the brain is. We don’t know what consciousness is. We don’t know what this weird consciousness thing” — Russell said. “It’s precisely the other way around. We know what consciousness is by being conscious. You know what pain is when you feel. It’s the brain, it’s physical reality. We don’t know what it is. We just know it’s abstract, mathematical structure. We don’t know what fills out that mathematical structure.
And so building on these insights, I don’t know how much you want to get into this, but building on these insights, philosophers have worked out ways of, if we started with the postulation of simple networks, of simple conscious entities, so long as through their interactions, they had the right patterns, the right mathematical structures, we’d get physics out of that. So we could get physics out of consciousness. I think we know, from Russell, I think we know that can be done. We don’t know if we can get consciousness out of physics, but we know we can get physics out of consciousness.
So that means, panpsychists say, “Why are we still banging our head against a brick wall, thinking ‘How can we get consciousness out of physical stuff?’ When we know it can be done the other way around. We’ve made sense of that. Let’s just at least run with that as an option.” I know it feels a bit weird, but that’s just a cultural thing.
Tim Ferriss: Where does William James fit in to your life, and why such an influence?
Philip Goff: I think even more than Russell, William James is my big hero. I think just something about his intellectual character, I think. If you read James, he feels like someone in the present moment, he’s just so up-to-date, and sharp, and reasonable in his thinking. But I mean on all sorts of areas. I mean, he wrote wonderful things on panpsychism. In terms of the challenges to panpsychism, actually, the big discussed challenge of panpsychism, how do little conscious things come together to make big conscious thing, has become known as the combination problem.
But William James is actually the first person wrestling with this. But I also like the stuff he wrote on religion. People talk about religion, they talk about Pascal’s Wager. It’s interesting, Pascal’s Wager, but you need to read James if you’re interested in that kind of stuff. And his great paper, “The Will to Believe,” which he later thought, I think rightly, should have been called “The Right to Believe.”
And he was challenging this idea that a contemporary of his, Clifford, put forward, but later, Bertrand Russell on the other side put forward, that in terms of belief, you follow the evidence. All you need to do is follow the evidence, and you’ve got to strictly — anything beyond the evidence you can’t go for.
And James reflects on this, “Well, look, it’s a bit complicated.” The worry with going over the evidence is, well, you might believe false things. But there’s another risk, isn’t there? You might not believe true things. And so to some extent, he tried to justify, to some extent, we can tentatively, in certain, limited circumstances where there is uncertainty, where our rational argumentation and experiments can’t settle matters. Maybe it can be rational to choose to believe. And he made a real case for that. And it was absolutely fascinating. And you appreciate you’re taking a risk, and you’re not making an intellectual error, because you know you’re taking a risk, you’re going beyond the evidence, but you’re, in your right mind, prepared to take that risk. And it’s just a beautiful discussion, and all sorts of wonderful analogies and explorations. Everyone should read William James, he’s the patron saint of great intellectual thinking.
Tim Ferriss: If people needed to start with one or if they were only going to read one, where would you have them start? I would suppose the most recognizable of his writing, for at least an American audience, would probably be The Varieties of Religious Experience. But would you start there or would you have people start somewhere else?
Philip Goff: I think, well, the one I just mentioned, Will to Believe, if that sounded interesting to you, is fairly readable. But yeah, the other, I mean, The Varieties of Religious Experience, that is still one of the best explorations of mystical experiences, the chapter on mystical experiences, which is, a lot of it’s a psychological study, and an attempt to define mystical experiences, and his definition still stands to this day.
But at the end, actually, it’s interesting, he says, he asked the question, “Would it be rational to trust a mystical experience?” Suppose I’m having this mystical experience. It seems to me there’s this higher form of consciousness at the root of all things. Would it be rational to trust that? I think many of you would say, “Well no, it’s just something funny going on in your brain. It could be a delusion.” But James says, “Well, we all think it’s okay to trust our ordinary sensory experiences, but that could be a delusion. We could be in The Matrix. This could all be a dream.” And you could say, “Well, we could test our senses, but only by using your senses.” So it’s kind of circular.
So all knowledge has to start with just a decision to trust your experience. And so James says it’s a sort of double-standard if you say it’s okay to trust ordinary sensory experiences, fallible as they are, but it’s not okay for someone having a mystical experience to trust what that seems to be telling them about reality. There’s a sort of double-standard. What justifies that? And I mean, there’s a big debate, but it is a really important and challenging point in foundational thinkings about knowledge.
Tim Ferriss: Highly recommend William James. Also, if people want an adjunct to that, there’s a book called The Varieties of Spiritual Experiences, this is a newer book, 21st Century Research and Perspectives, by a scientist named David Yaden, Y-A-D-E-N, out of Johns Hopkins. And that is also worth taking a gander at if you are particularly interested in mystical experiences, what that means, and the different, I suppose, flavors of reality that can entail.
Let’s come back to Bertrand Russell, and the way I’m going to make this segue is I’m going to read something from your notes that you sent me as possible exploration for this conversation. So your last book, Why?, explored the middle ground between God and atheism. Now I’m going to paraphrase this just to make it third-person — or second-person, I guess.
You came out as a heretical Christian, which caused a big reaction, a heated discussion within the philosophical community, the traditional Christians saying you weren’t really a Christian, because you didn’t have the correct beliefs, quote-unquote, and atheist philosophers saying that you’d lost your mind.
And Bertrand Russell has a book called Why I Am Not a Christian. And I’m wondering, you can edge into this however you would like, but I’m curious what you think he gets right or wrong in that book, since you seem very familiar with his work. And then I would love for you just to explain what it means for you to be a heretical Christian.
Philip Goff: Maybe I could just do those the other way round, because it might —
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Let’s do it the other way around.
Philip Goff: — help to see where I’m coming. I mean, this has been quite a journey, really. I didn’t think I would return to religion. I mean, I was raised Catholic, actually, going to church every week. I was a terrible altar boy. I was always forgetting to ring the bells at the right time. Anyway, but by the time I was 14, I decided God didn’t exist, and I refused to get confirmed, upsetting my grandmother.
My mum sent me to see the priest who tried Pascal’s Wager on me, but it didn’t work. Anyway, I spent the next 30 years an atheist, but I think I’ve always been a spiritual person. I’ve always, talking about mystical experiences, in some sense, had a sense that there’s a deeper reality at the core of things, but I engaged with it in my own way through engagement with nature, meditation, yoga classes, and so on.
I was a part of the ever-growing grouping of spiritual, but not religious, but just I suppose as more recently, I suppose, I guess at least for me, I’ve come to see the value of the things I had in that religious community in my upbringing. I think for all its faults, I think religion has a unique way of bringing the community together, through rituals that mark the changing of the seasons, and the big moments of life, birth, coming of age, marriage, death, through rich tradition, going back thousands of years.
And so I suppose at some point it seemed to me that being spiritual but not religious, and I’m just talking for myself now, was starting to feel maybe a bit lonely, a bit unstructured, almost aimless. And I guess I’ve come to think over time that there are — and this is what my new book I’ve just started this week is on, there are ways of engaging with traditional religion, maybe get into, that avoid some of the real worries that people have with religion, about dogmatic certainties, or things we could go into, but which also allow you to gain some benefits, like a community, structured practice, a rich tradition.
And I suppose what I’m interested in is just, I’ve come to find that works for me. And I suppose I’d just like to raise that possibility for others. So I’m not here saying, “Oh, this is the one true faith you’ve got to believe.” I’m just saying, “Look, there are” — I’m interested in different experiments in living, and I think there’s a way of engaging religion that perhaps not everyone is fully aware of. And so that’s what I’m trying to do there. But anyway, Bertrand Russell. Yeah, well, I mean I’ve talked more about the sort of personal things there, but on the intellectual matters, yeah, there’s this bloody perennial debate between believers and atheists.
We have to fight with people like, “Whose side are you on? Richard Dawkins or the Pope? Who’s right, which team are you on?” And I’ve just come to find over time, I think both sides are getting something right and something wrong. I think there’s things traditional believers in God, at least the Western God, struggle to explain, like the horrific suffering. Why the hell would God allow cancer, and earthquakes, and all that? But I think there’s also things that atheists, traditional atheists struggle to explain. One thing I’ve focused a lot on recent work in my Why? book is the fine-tuning of physics for life. The surprising discovery that for life to be possible, certain numbers in physics had to fall in an incredibly narrow range, such that it’s actually incredibly improbable that a universe like ours would have the right numbers for life just by chance.
And so that’s something that’s hard to make sense of on a normal atheistic picture. So what I tried to do in the Why? book, really, is just, let’s just have a think about middle-ground options. Maybe there are elegant middle-ground options that can avoid the difficulties on both sides.
I’m now coming to Russell, you might think I’m like a politician dodging the question, but well, this fine-tuning of physics for life wasn’t there when Russell was alive. It’s just since the ’70s, ’80s, I mean, the late ’90s, the cosmological constant, which has to do with dark energy and the acceleration of the universe, that was only 1998, I think.
So this just wasn’t there for Russell. And I annoy people on X. I’ve really wound people up by saying that Bertrand Russell would probably believe in cosmic purpose now, because he followed the evidence where it leads. But the evidence wasn’t there in his day, but I think he would’ve followed that evidence. It’s hard for human beings to do, isn’t it? To sort of, you get used to one thing, and the evidence changes. And the economist Keynes has a famous incident, that a journalist said to him, “You didn’t used to think that.” And he said, “Well, when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” That’s really hard for human beings to do. But yeah, that’s where I’m up to with that.
Tim Ferriss: So let’s talk about Bertrand Russell following the evidence and cosmic purpose, because I want to explore this. I know very little about, I suppose, how you might describe cosmic purpose, and I would like to hear more. So when people hear you, perhaps, refer to the constants for life on Earth, right, the 30 or so fundamental constants. I mean, there is an argument to be made that, well, life would only appear if these things existed, therefore yada yada yada. But we don’t need to delve into that. What I’m curious about is when people hear you say that and that it is incredibly unlikely to happen by chance, they might take that to imply some type of primary mover, aka a God of some type. Does cosmic purpose require someone to be a theist, to believe in a god or gods?
Philip Goff: No. No. I mean, I wouldn’t go for the very traditional idea of God as all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good, because then you’ve got the problem of suffering. So I’m bothered by what both sides struggle with, and this is why I annoy everybody, because I’m annoying both sides of this debate.
But yeah, I think there are options, middle-ground options that can deal with the fine-tuning in terms of some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness without going to the very traditional God and getting to suffering. So in the Why? book, I explore a few different possibilities.
One is, maybe, laws of nature with purposes built into them. So we don’t have some kind of mind behind the universe setting things up, there’s just a sort of fundamental tendency in reality towards certain goals, maybe the emergence of life. Now, this sounds, in itself, a bit wacky and mystical, but actually a couple of our most rigorous philosophers, Daniel Nolan and John Hawthorne, have actually given a very detailed, rigorous, mathematical account of what we call teleological laws, so telos, from the Greek purpose, laws with purposes built into them, would look like. So I think it ends up being, you could just have a scientific proposal of just a different way of thinking about laws of nature. It’s a very weird one. I mean, it’s weird in a cultural sense, but that is one option.
I mean, another option is something closer to the traditional God, but a tweak on it. I’ve explored the idea of, maybe a God of limited powers, who’s just not able to do whatever they want, and I think we could be quite precise about what those limitations might be to yield the world we find. Or the simulation hypothesis Nick Bostrom’s famous for exploring, and David Chalmers in his recent book, Reality+. Maybe we’re in a computer simulation, and there’s some random software engineer who set it all up.
Very finally, I’ve talked too much already. I mean, the view I explore in most detail in the book is the idea that the universe itself is conscious, which again, sounds a bit extravagant at first, but actually if you’re already a panpsychist, I think that’s already a plausible view. And you already think perhaps that the universe is conscious, because you think fields are the fundamental physical things, then it’s perhaps not too much of a step to think, well, this fundamental conscious thing might have certain goal-directed states, even if it’s a very alien, strange mind, very different to us. So yeah, there are a few. I just think we get stuck in these dichotomies. Let’s just explore these different options.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. So question for you on the intersection of your childhood with where you are now, I suppose. Or maybe the trajectory. How did you decide to become an atheist at age 14? Was it the omnipotent, benevolent contradiction with suffering in the world? Was there something else that triggered it? How did you decide on that?
Philip Goff: I think it was a mix of things. Yeah, the problem of evil and suffering was part of it on the intellectual side, also ethical things. I thought Christianity had backward views on women and sexuality and at the time, I was questioning my sexuality. And also, I mean, I think fundamentally, I just thought Christianity in particular was very unspiritual. I thought Buddhism is spiritual, but Christianity is just about sort of doing what the old guy in the sky wants so you get to Heaven.
But I mean, what I’ve discovered more recently, and this is part of why I’ve returned to this slightly non-standard form of religion, engagement with religion, is the mystical traditions of Christianity, which have always been there right back to the start, but are perhaps more prominent in the Eastern Orthodox Church where there’s less emphasis on sin.
My childhood Catholic, it was all about sin. But for the Eastern Orthodox Church, there’s nothing to do with God wanting to find someone to punish for our sins. That’s not a part of the picture at all. In fact, that was invented by the Protestant reformers 500 years ago. A lot of people in the US think that’s the essence of Christianity. Anyway, but for the Eastern Orthodox Church, the fundamental story is about God and the universe becoming one, entering into a deep state of unity. And that’s really the core of it. And I mean, this I had nothing about in my Catholic upbringing, but it’s something that deeply resonates with me and makes sense of a lot of my deeper spiritual experiences.
I suppose it’s those elements of mysticism I thought were just in Hinduism, Buddhism, but are actually present, not just in Christianity, but you’ve got Kabbalah in Judaism, you’ve got Sufism in Islam. That’s what I’m researching at the moment, these wonderful Islamic traditions. I’m reading a classic book, connecting, looking at the exploration between Stoicism that I know you’re interested in, and Sufism in Islamic, the mysticism of Islamic philosophy. So yeah, I think that these ways of engaging with — there’s always been that mystical component and a way of engaging that’s less dogmatic and certain, maybe you don’t know it’s true. Maybe it’s something you hope is true. Maybe you take it as a beautiful metaphor. There are these ways of doing it.
And I think churches and synagogues would be a more interesting place if they were full of people, more full of people, engaging with it in this way. I like conservatives. I don’t hate conservatives and traditionalists, but I think there can be a natural balance of progressives and conservatives. The conservatives saying, “Let’s not throw everything away too quickly.” And the progressives saying, “Hold on, we need to update a bit.” And in religion, it’s gone a little bit too much dominated by traditionalists. And I think it would be nice if we mixed it up a bit. And that’s what I’m trying to press in the book I’ve just started.
Tim Ferriss: So we’re going to come back to some of your deeper spiritual experiences. I’m wondering if you could share one or two, but I also want to say that a lot of people listening or watching probably associate me with Stoic philosophy, Stoicism, but I actually have more books and more poetry related to Sufism in my house than anything related to Stoicism. I have quite a bit on Stoicism, but also sponsored a statue here in Austin in a statue garden. And this particular statue is of St. Francis of Assisi. And we could talk about Merton. I mean, there are mystical origin stories that involve mystical/direct experience in most, if not all, of the major traditions people listening would recognize. And The Immortality Key is actually quite interesting read for people who haven’t checked it out, Brian Murorescu. But let’s come back to your deeper experiences. Are you willing to share one or two of those?
Philip Goff: Yeah, yeah. Well, I’ll have to get some recommendations from you on Sufism. I mean, I suppose what I’ve found, what I’ve been thinking recently is what I like about this Eastern Orthodox way of thinking about mystical experience is that it’s very close to certain things we find in Hindu mysticism like Advaita Vedanta. But the end goal that you’re aiming at still involves love and sociality.
I mean, I was watching something by a very good Hindu mystic who I’m actually going to be in conversation with in a few months, talking about a metaphor that the ultimate goal is with the analogy of an ice cube melting in the ocean. You lose your identity, you’re sort of absorbed in the divine. Whereas in the Eastern Orthodox conception of Christianity, the ultimate goal is it involves unity, but still difference. It’s unity with God, with other people. And I mean, I suppose that’s what I see reflected in the Eucharist. And it’s sociality, a mystical sociality that is a deep sense of kind of binding people together and to something bigger. So I suppose that’s part of what’s really resonated with me.
And this is not some big, overwhelming, mystical experience, but it’s making sense of those experiences that have always been there at my more spiritual moments. I find actually that the soft light of first very early morning or dusk, I find somehow most spiritual. I don’t know why that is. Making sense of these experiences. Actually, just one more thing, it was just Ash Wednesday this week, the start of Lent, I’m in an Anglican church where you get the ashes. And it really touches me what they say when they say, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust, you shall return.” And I think what it does to me is, I’ve had some worldly success in academia to an extent in public stuff, and I think at the moment of that being done, I think it was maybe last year, I think I had a very vivid sense of how my sense of myself was getting a bit reliant on that and dependent on success and my sense of who I was. And that just being told, kind of brought me a bit to tears. That you are dust, and to dust you —
I’ve been reading actually the great Christian mystic who was tried for heresy, Meister Eckhart, and I always thought, I guess the focus on sin, that was always from my childhood, I thought like again, for Lent, abstaining, I thought that’s about sin and punishing yourself, and you’ve got to feel sad. But the way Eckhart sees it is, and the way he interprets passages from the Bible about sacrifice, it’s just about getting away from your reliance on these things, your sense of yourself, your sense of happiness, getting down to something more real and fundamental at the core.
And so yeah, these are some of the ways in which through engaging with a rich tradition, I’ve delved deeper into and explored my spiritual experiences, I suppose.
Tim Ferriss: So you spent the next 30 years as an atheist, so it seems like you’ve in some form come back into the fold. Maybe you have some sunglasses and a fake mustache, but you’ve come back into the fold in some sense. What triggered that? What was the, I mean, maybe the straw that broke the camel’s back isn’t the right metaphor to use, but was there a conversation, a moment, a period of difficulty? What catalyzed that?
Philip Goff: I’d say again, as with leaving, it was a mixture of things. I could talk about the intellectual stuff we’ve already touched on, I suppose, was starting to think both sides of the God atheism debate have something right and something wrong. And —
Tim Ferriss: There’s got to be more to it though. There’s got to be more like direct experience.
Philip Goff: That was the intellectual stuff. That was the intellectual stuff. And that’s what led to my Why? book, which was earlier, at least when I wrote it, it was earlier to all this. But then on the spiritual level, well, I guess it’s what I said, learning more about — just from conversations with different kinds of Christian thinkers. Joanna Leidenhag is a young panpsychist theologian who writes on how panpsychism fits much better with a spiritual conception of reality. And actually, I should say there’s a bit of a divide on this, many panpsychists like David Chalmers, Luke Roelofs, Angela Mendonovici, a very secular atheist. I think Chalmers is a bit annoyed that I’m getting into religion. It’s like we’re trying to get this taken serious science, but people are going to think it’s all just religion. But other panpsychists, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Itai Shani do see a consonance with panpsychism.
So learning about the mystical traditions, learning about these conceptions of God, where God and the universe are not totally distinct. I’m not even sure I want to use the word God, but I’ve started now.
Tim Ferriss: Tricky one, that. Yeah.
Philip Goff: Maybe there’s some overlap, maybe like a Venn diagram, there’s God on one side, us on the other, and there’s sort of overlap in the middle. I interpret Meister Eckhart as holding something like that. Maybe that’s why he got in trouble. So that was part of this. And I don’t know, one final thing. I don’t know how much of interest this is, but I always have problems with the resurrection. Because I mean, it’s not just there being miracles, although that’s part of it, but my answer to why there’s suffering, if there is a God in whatever sense, they can’t do anything about it. Or just there isn’t a God who’s letting that happen. But if there’s a God who can raise people from the dead, then we’re back to, well, why don’t you do that more often?
But anyway, reading one of my favorite biblical scholars, a guy called Dale Allison, he’s a wonderful freethinker. He’s always exploring both sides of a position and ending up places he wouldn’t like to be. Maybe on a certain point of biblical interpretation, he’d like to be more liberal. And he ends up having a slightly more conservative — anyway, but he’s got a wonderful recent book on the resurrection, exploring non-standard versions of the resurrection. For example, that the resurrection experiences of the first Christians were visionary, almost mystical experiences, rather than seeing and touching a body. And I was debating that, it’s been a busy week, I was debating that on Wednesday with, I don’t know if you’ve heard of William Lane Craig, who is perhaps one of the biggest, most influential Christian philosophers, but he’s very, very, very, very traditional. I mean, if you’re not Christian, you’re going to Hell. Very traditional.
And we had a lovely, very, very fiery debate this week where, as I knew he would be, he studies his debating opponents and he was straight in there. Panpsychism is incoherent, unscientific, this view of the resurrection is unhistorical. It doesn’t make sense. But anyway, had a good — I responded. That’s not out yet, but maybe it will be out. But yeah, so I suppose it was those three things. This has been a bit long-winded.
It was the intellectual stuff that there’s these middle ground options between God and atheism. It was the spiritual stuff discovering these mystical traditions that resonate with me deeply. It was this weird view of the resurrection. It was discovering, actually, there’s been a big movement in philosophy of religion, thinking about the nature of faith. Reading, actually, Karen Armstrong, a wonderful historian of religion who has argued that this focus on belief being so important in religion is like a modern corruption. She traces it back actually, if we look at the word pistis in the New Testament that we translate as belief, it actually doesn’t mean belief in the modern sense. It has connotations of trust, engagement, commitment.
And interestingly, when we first translated the Bible into English in, was it 15th, 16th, 17th century, the word believe, the English word belief was closer to that. It’s close to the German word, belieben, to love. It had connotations of commitment, engagement. She quotes from a Shakespeare play, All’s Well That Ends Well, I think. There’s a character, Bertram, who’s looking down on Helena because she’s low-born and he’s told, “Believe not thy disdain. Believe not thy disdain.” So that means sort of don’t have your heart in it.
So actually then the word believe changes meaning with the Protestant reformation and the scientific revolution. Now it means just sort of intellectual commitment to a hypothesis about reality. So now you read the New Testament and you feel like Jesus talking about belief and you think, oh, he really cares about what propositions of reality you believe. That’s what salvation — whereas actually it was more about commitment, having your heart in things. So I think realizing there are — the ways of engagement, you don’t have to think, this is definitely true. I felt like was like in my Catholic upbringing, this is the answer. It’s definitely true. You can be highly uncertain. You can take it as a metaphor, you can take it as a hope, you can trust it, you can be a bit heretical.
And so yeah, all of these things opened up this way of engaging. And once I went down there, I’ve just got so much out of it. It’s the structure, the community, the depth of engagement has really worked for me.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s dig into that just a little bit. I would love to ask a few more questions because a few things hopped to mind. The first, and I have in fact checked this, I’m no religious historian, so my apologies to anyone who’s offended by this, but I recall someone credible, I won’t mention their name, saying to me, they’re like, “It’s really a shame there’s so much friction oftentimes, at least in the Middle East, between Jews and Muslims because they have a few things that are quite similar.” And the way it was positioned to me was in Christianity, it’s very important what you believe. But in Judaism and in Islam, it’s more important perhaps what you do and heavily ritualized. That can also be true in Christianity, of course.
And I’ve thought about that. And then I’m going to make an awkward transition to my friend A.J. Jacobs, who wrote a book called The Year of Living Biblically, in which he tried to follow all the rules of the Old and New Testament. It’s intended to be a funny, but also very informative read. I learned a lot about religion from that book. But the way he put it, when he was describing his upbringing, he was raised Jewish, he said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I was raised Jewish, but I am to Judaism as Olive Garden is to Italian.” So Olive Garden is, of course, just this fast food chain here where you can get free breadsticks.
And so he was socially and culturally Jewish, but not ideologically, religiously Jewish at that point. And this is going to be a whole word salad of things I’m throwing out, but I wonder then how well you can build a community or have that social fabric that religion provides, which I am often hungry for if I’m being honest. I think there’s uncontroversially an epidemic of loneliness, and there are a million reasons for that, only some of which I’m sure we’re even aware of. But mental illness, diagnoses of chronic anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, etc. All seem to be in some type of parabolic incline.
And I think connection is, I don’t want to say the antidote, but one of the strong countervailing options for addressing that. And religion is appealing on that level. My parents started going to church maybe 15 years ago after never going to church precisely for that reason. But I’m wondering how well you can cohere as a community if you don’t truly believe. And there’s an article, I suppose an essay, called “Why Strict Churches Make Strong Churches” that talks about this and the freeloader problem and things like that. But what has been your experience in terms of the benefit you derive from a community and the degree of belief in scripture? Because man, oh, man, if we’re talking about Deuteronomy, Leviticus, I mean, if you start taking all that stuff, literally it paints a pretty rough picture for things. So how do you think about that? Is true belief in scripture a prerequisite for adherence to the type of rituals and so on that help bond a community? Or is that not the case?
Philip Goff: These are great questions that I’m still reflecting on and I’m still thinking about. And I think you’re certainly right that in the present moment, at least, in the Jewish community, there’s more of an openness to this being a cultural phenomenon and belief being less important. I remember, what was the context now, a young Jewish woman tweeted at me, maybe when I was talking about this religious stuff. Oh, yeah, my rabbi said when I was going to have my bar mitzvah and I said, “Well, I don’t believe in God.” And the rabbi said, “No, no, don’t have any gods but me.” So it’s a negative, it doesn’t matter if you don’t believe at all, just don’t have any other gods. That was a nice twist.
I suppose what I’d like to see is just a little bit more openness to that in the Christian community. And to what extent is it possible? I mean, certainly Karen Armstrong thinks that this kind of focus, strong focus on belief is a more recent adaptation. I mean, her great book, The Case for God, which is a bad title, I think because you think —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a strong title.
Philip Goff: You think it’s going to be some proof of God or something.
Tim Ferriss: Or maybe aggressive. Yeah.
Philip Goff: It’s not at all. It’s a history of religion. And she divides religion into two epochs. Part one, which she calls the Unknown God, which goes from 50,000 BC to 1500 AD, and then what she calls the modern God is from 1500 AD to the present moment. So she thinks there is some radical shift in this focus with the Scientific Revolution and the Protestant Reformation on belief, which propositions do you believe? Of course, it has always been true in Christianity from the early centuries at least, we’ve got from the fourth century, when the Roman Empire under Constantine became Christian, he got this council and we have the official creeds.
But it’s another question, it’s a subtly different question. Did you have to believe them? So there’s a big fight about which are the correct ones, but do you have to believe them? Armstrong thinks if we’re to be more accurate historically, what beliefs should mean is commit. So instead of saying, “I believe in one God, Father Almighty,” you should be saying, “I commit, I engage with that. I have my heart in that.” And that’s really what they meant by those terms. And the emphasis on the non-literal, with the mystical traditions that have always been there, they would look at an allegorical understanding, as in some sense deeper.
I mean, Origen, I’ve been researching for this new book, when’s Origen, second century? I think he was, in a sense, a bit of a heretic, but he was sort of before it was properly defined. But he’s one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the early days, one of the fathers of the church. And he had this idea of the three levels of understanding scripture. The first level is the literal meaning, what people did, if there’s miracles and so on. Yeah, that’s okay. But then the next stage is the moral, what is the moral meaning? And then the deeper and higher stage he thought was the allegorical and what is going on here at a spiritual allegorical level.
Tim Ferriss: What would be an example of an allegorical understanding of a portion of the Bible or a story?
Philip Goff: Well, let’s just take the central idea of Jesus. I mean, what has always resonated with me with that, even when I had a long period of not being any part of this, was the almost sort of turning upside down of worldly values that were identifying God, not with the king in the castle, but with the naked executed peasant, the guy who hangs out without castes. I mean, this wonderful recent book Dominion, by Tom Holland, which is again, the history of the influence of Christianity. What a radical idea that was. It was ridiculous. Some of the earliest critiques of Christianity very, very early, was sort of the figure of the crucified Jesus with a donkey head on. It was just ridiculous that this was the most humiliating punishment and this is supposed to be God?
I mean, whether that’s literally true, but what it stands for, to me, it reveals something deep and ultimate, whether or not it’s literally true, deep and ultimate about what is important and what is of value. Another thing, the first shall be last, the last shall be first. And I don’t know, sometimes with Christianity at the moment in the US, it seems like this is a little bit forgotten, but I mean, Holland talks about what an impact it had on the Roman Empire that suddenly the poor and the weak had moral value to Roman aristocrats. This is like, wait, what are you talking about?
Another thing he talks about, actually, I’ve always thought, I don’t have a traditional view on sexual ethics in Christianity, but he talks about, actually, how valuable no sex before marriage was in those early days, because we’re talking of a time when slaves and women had no rights, obviously, and to an extent, obviously a limited extent, it prevented rape because if you were going to be a Christian Roman, you had to wait till marriage. And obviously this didn’t work, but you could see a role for it. Maybe it’s a role that we don’t need to so much cling to that original meaning.
I mean, like in the way, here’s a good example of what’s changed with Christianity. It used to be totally universal you couldn’t charge interest. That was a sin. These days, yeah, usury, these days, no Christians that I know of hold that because of our understanding of the modern market economy, we reinterpret these things. But what about being gay? Why haven’t we re-understood that? I mean, many Christians have, but many Christians haven’t. A modern understanding of sexuality. I think that’s because there are fewer liberals and progressives in the church now.
I mean, it has changed. It has. In my church, we haven’t gotten all the way to gay marriage, but we’ve got blessings on gay couples. But yeah, so what my aspiration really is, get more liberals involved in these things. Not to get rid of the traditionalists, but to have that beautiful, healthy equilibrium. There’s always been radicals, there’s always been progressives that have been mixing it up and moving it forward. Aquinas was bloody radical at the time, now it’s the official Catholic Church philosophy. So yeah, look, I think there’s possibilities that are unexplored here.
Tim Ferriss: Without your childhood experience with Catholicism, do you think you would have returned to, in some form or re-entered, Christianity, or do you think, since you mentioned at one point at least you felt that Buddhism or Hinduism were more spiritual, do you think you would’ve perhaps ended up in a different camp, slightly different camp?
Philip Goff: I mean, one thing I will say, just to preface that, is that it’s not obviously wrong to me that you will choose what you feel culturally comfortable with because I think these matters are very uncertain. I mean, if you get to a point where you think, no, this religion, this other religion different to the one I was raised, it’s definitely, definitely true. Then okay, probably the rational thing to do is to convert. But if you’re in a situation where it’s very uncertain whether any religion is true, it’s very uncertain which, I think it makes sense if you’re from a Muslim background that that’s fits with your identity and it will be such a shift to become a Christian. Maybe even if you think, happen to think, I’m not saying they should think this, but if they think Christianity is a bit more likely to be true. But if it’s still so uncertain, I think it could be rational to just stay with what’s going to really work for you and fit with your community and your identity. I don’t think God cares that much which —
Tim Ferriss: Which team you’re on?
Philip Goff: William Lane Craig would absolutely kill me for saying that, but I suppose it matters if you think you’re going to hell if you’re not Christian. He’s got a good answer, I researched him a lot for this debate we had this week, and I discovered he’s got a good answer to the question of, what about countries who’ve never heard of the gospel? And so, don’t become Christian? Moreso in history, but even to the present day. His answer is, “Well, they wouldn’t have turned to Jesus anyway because God knows what you’re going to do, and God set things up that they wouldn’t have become Christians anyway. So it’s okay that they’re going to hell.” Yeah. Anyway, I mean, he’s a great philosopher. Very bright guy, and probably the most influential Christian thinker at the moment. So we need to balance —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a tough one. I mean —
Philip Goff: But anyway —
Tim Ferriss: — that type of theological determinism raises questions about the value of all those missionaries that have been sent about, or then we get into free will —
Philip Goff: Yeah. He’s got a complex story.
Tim Ferriss: — all sorts of stuff.
Philip Goff: He’s got a complex story. He does believe in free will. He thinks it’s compatible to say, you’ve got free will, but God knows what you’re going to freely do. This is part of what we debated actually. I don’t think that makes coherent sense. But anyway, just to answer your question. I mean, who knows? It’s partly cultural. I mean, this Eastern Orthodox way of mystical tradition makes a lot of sense in my spiritual experiences. I think, at the moment, for me, more so than the Hindu stuff I used to believe in for me, personally, at least. I do love the teaching, and character of Jesus. I did a talk recently. I don’t know if I should say. I did talk recently at a very, very right wing audience in Oxford on this stuff, and I said, “For those of you who haven’t read the Bible, Jesus is pretty damn woke.” I was just trying to wise people up, but anyway.
Tim Ferriss: That’s a hell of a Molotov cocktail of an opener for that.
Philip Goff: You had a bit of a gasp.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Philip Goff: Yeah. The story of the Good Samaritan, and people don’t always appreciate that Jesus told that story because he was asked, “Who is my neighbor?” And why did he tell a story about a Samaritan? Because they were the hated ethnic group of His listeners. So I said to this audience, if He was telling that story today, that the Good Samaritan would be, I don’t know, a Muslim immigrant, or a trans woman.
But then I added a thought to try and have a bit of going against polarization, or maybe if Jesus was talking to a load of liberals maybe the Good Samaritan would be wearing a MAGA hat. Who knows? I don’t know. But basically, say, look, the people you hate, or the people who are different, they should be. But that’s just radically light years ahead of its time. I mean, Tom Holland makes this good case that the ideas of human dignity which shaped the abolition of slavery and the Civil Rights Movement, were rooted in these radical ideas of equal human dignity. So I do think there’s something very special for me there, but at the end of the day, these matters are very uncertain.
Tim Ferriss: I have to ask again, forgive me. But aside from the beauty of the liminal spaces during the crepuscular hours of dawn and dusk, and the beautiful red of a sunset, have you experienced anything you would describe as a mystical experience?
Philip Goff: I would say not full-blown. So the two terms I choose, I suppose, I think a mystical experience is the more full-on thing. But then, there’s this wonderful term, numinous to mean this sort of —
Tim Ferriss: That’s a great word.
Philip Goff: — sense. A sense of maybe mini mystical experience.
Tim Ferriss: Mystical light?
Philip Goff: I mean, I did psychedelics when I was a teenager and had some very deep experiences. I don’t know why I didn’t in my 20s, and 30s. But now that I’ve got young kids, it’s hard to find time to do some psychedelics, or have a —
Tim Ferriss: Go to the 17th dimension? Yeah.
Philip Goff: Have a 10-day meditation retreat. Annaka Harris is always telling me I’ve got to do a 10-day meditation. I don’t know why I didn’t actually do that when I had the chance, but yeah. Actually, before I proposed to my wife, she didn’t know I was going to propose. I was talking about when I retire. What do you do when you retire? You play golf. I want to have a sort of semi-monastic existence. Kind of a long period. And she was like, “Why are you telling me this?” “I don’t know. I just wanted you to know.”
Tim Ferriss: She was like, “Oh, fuck. What did I sign up for here?”
Philip Goff: Well, I wanted her to know this before I asked her. We were in the mountains in Austria, and then we went outside. And I said, “Do you want to marry me?” Anyway, but yeah. So I think I would like to maybe when the kids are older. As I get older, I don’t want to carry on trying to be, what am I trying to do? I don’t know. Be successful in whatever I’m trying to do for the rest of my — yeah, this is one thing, actually, that religion has helped me with I think. You never find happiness that way, do you? It’s never enough. You want to sell more books, or get more views, or get more money. So I have an idea that I want to, as I get older, slowly lapse into monasticism. Maybe with a bit of help from some ayahuasca or something.
But yeah, so maybe I’ll have more mystical experiences at that point. But I think at the moment, I would say I’m confined to the numinous. And to that extent, evidently it’s not that significant. I’m open to it could be a delusion, but I’m choosing, thanks to William James’s inspiration, I’m choosing to trust these numinous experiences. And to trust this Christian mystical way of understanding them and to work with them, and engage with them. And I’m loving it. I’m getting a lot out of it. And people think religion’s all about the afterlife, or something. But I’ve found living in hope of a greater purpose has made me less bothered about my personal success, and it’s just really opened me up a lot more to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer. Friends, family, and so on.
Tim Ferriss: So I want to explain something I said earlier, which was related to the number of books on Sufism.
Philip Goff: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And the reason for that is not a particular interest in Islam, although I do think there are interesting aspects of that to explore. And if you’re interested in Dune, the book and not the movies, although I thought the movies were very well adapted, but they basically stripped all Arabic and Islamic influence from the book like Lisan al Gaib, one of the many Arabic phrases, the tongue of the unseen. So digging into some of the etymological origins of the words used in Dune adds another layer of fascination to it. But the reason for these books is because I enjoy the poetry, and I find the poetry to be beautiful and capture for me the, I suppose, essence of mystical experience, which I’ve been fortunate enough to have myself on a number of occasions, incredibly well. Without using the G word, or other words that I rightly or wrongly have developed somewhat of a mild allergic reaction to.
So Christian mystics have some beautiful writing, but it tends to be a little heavy on God and Jesus for my, not for my taste. It’s just that the strong connotations lead my mind to wander when I want to be immersed in the poetry itself. And so if we’re looking at, say, Haleh Liza Gafori’s relatively new translations of Rumi, as an example, or much of the poetry of Hafez, both of which I would recommend. I can work with taverns. I can work with getting drunk on wine. I can work with many of the metaphors that are used, the caravan. I mean, many of these evocative phrases are enough to immerse me in the language. And I think what’s trying to be transmitted without pulling me into some type of political distraction, or childhood experience that subtracts rather from adds to the experience. So a lot of it is poetry. Not all, but a lot of it is certainly poetry.
And then broadly speaking, I suppose, mystics. And I’m sure people would disagree with this, but accounts of first-hand experience with what they may consider divine. These make for fascinating reading for me. And certainly if you really take a microscope to the origin stories of a lot of these religions, I mean, it becomes very plausible that most, if not all of them, started with direct experience of some type that rhymes with many of the descriptions you would find. And the books that I’m looking at on my bookshelves, as an example. So Stoicism can be a little sterile. I’d say Stoicism, for me, incredibly helpful. Incredibly powerful as a tool for reducing suffering. But it doesn’t, to my reading of it, give you a whole lot in terms of increasing joy. And subtraction alone doesn’t add the good. So for that, I tend to stray from Stoicism into Epicureanism and different types of mysticism, and so on. So that’s the background.
Philip Goff: That’s all absolutely fascinating. Well, I’d love to get some of those recommendations for this soupy literature and poetry. And yeah, it sounds that is really working for you, and that’s wonderful. And yeah, I think you’re definitely right that the great religions do seem to begin with experiences. I mean, in the Christian case, it seemed to be what they called the resurrection. Seemed to be this explosion of strong experiences that the early Christians had after Jesus had died. And you can make of that what you will. I prefer to think of it as vision, visionary, rather than seeing and touching a body. But that does seem to have been. Some historians think and even atheists, I mean, Bart Ehrman is our best atheist Bible scholar.
Will certainly concede that there were these radical experiences by people like Peter and Mary Magdalene that kick-started the Christian movement. So I think you’re right, it comes back to experience.
I mean, I share your issues with the connotations of the word Jesus, the word God. First of all, what I’m trying to do is shift things. One thing I wrote on this when I had my going public as a heretical Christian, I wrote this thing for Aeon magazine people might be interested in. And I borrowed something from another writer whose name escapes me now. Rather than using the word Jesus, used the Jewish word Yeshua just to kind of —
Tim Ferriss: Just to defuse a little bit.
Philip Goff: Yeah. I think of a certain kind of US Christian, a sort of kind of very distinctive which is not what I’m talking about, and not my experience. And the word God as well. Yeah, well, what do you think I should use for God in this book? What should —
Tim Ferriss: Oof, that’s a tough one.
Philip Goff: Should I just talk about the transcend? Actually, do you know? William James used the term “the More” with a capital M.
Tim Ferriss: I like that. I like that.
Philip Goff: Or the divine, or —
Tim Ferriss: That has a nice —
Philip Goff: Yeah, I don’t know. So I’m still wrestling with it.
Tim Ferriss: Divine’s tricky too. I like the More.
Philip Goff: And you call God a he.
Tim Ferriss: I’m going to get a bunch of angry posts on social media. I have nothing. I don’t intrinsically, I don’t have anything against on some fundamental level the word God or anything with Jesus either. It’s just that oftentimes God is not defined well enough to justify the life or death debates and fighting that happens around the term, if that makes sense. And there are a lot of words that cause trouble in life if not defined.
I should also just qualify when I mentioned the direct experience, I was not referring to necessarily the stories in the Bible, but also the possibility that for instance, the acacia tree is prevalent in parts the Middle East, the root bark of which it might be the leaves actually, if somebody could correct me here. I might be mixing things up, contain DMT, NNDMT. And then also the prevalence of Syrian rue, which contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors. What else is a combination of those two things? Ayahuasca is an example. So the point being to render the NNDMT bioactive, it is entirely possible that people in the ancient world as people and animals by the way, have figured out that certain psychoactives can be sort of orally bioavailable.
So this comes back to Brian Muraresku and some of his writing if people want to explore that. But it’s definitely a clear and present topic on my mind, the place of religion and the seemingly — people might come after me for this also, but evolved instinct for something resembling religion. I don’t know if it’s functional, if it’s vestigial, but could be that, and this would be my position. I don’t think humans are unique at all in being conscious, but I do think we may be unique in our awareness of mortality and ultimate death. And that presents quite a quandary. And religion offers some, at the very least, salve for that. Anyway, that isn’t a very pointed question. It’s more of a rambling, but.
Philip Goff: No, yeah, I mean the fascinating possibility is the role of psychedelic substances in formation of religion. And I would say that wouldn’t undermine it, right? I think that doesn’t mean these experiences are delusions. And I’ve got hope. I think as we have engaged more with psychedelics and there is more of an openness. Actually, I mean I wrote this book I modestly titled, Why? The Purpose of the Universe. I mean, a similar book was written more than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, nearly by the great philosopher, Thomas Nagel.
Tim Ferriss: Yes, Mr. Bat.
Philip Goff: Called Mind and Cosmos. And he got absolutely destroyed in reviews. People saying, oh, he’s lost his mind. Whereas now this sounds like I’m boasting. Thomas Nagel is a better philosopher than me. I’m not saying this is a better book, but it had a much warmer reception. It got a five-star review in Popular Science magazine. I’m honestly not saying this to boast, it’s a sign of cultural change. Most of the reviews said, I don’t agree with this, but it was a good book. But anyway, I think that’s a real sign of that there’s a greater openness to some of these things that are going. Certainly a greater openness to spirit. I think new atheism is a bit passe now, isn’t it? And I think there’s great openness to spirituality, I suppose I’m exploring whether that can connect with traditional religion in a very uncertain, mildly heretical way, and whether for some people could get something out of that. And I’m just trying out that option I suppose, if you like. But yeah, I think something interesting seems to be happening, I think.
Tim Ferriss: For sure. And I remember a few years ago I was at an event and the topic of the table, we were organized into small groups for every dinner. And you would have set topics and somebody would try to facilitate the said topic or question. And the topic was something along the lines of what are your predictions for the next three to five years? And this was I guess two or three years ago. And one of the people at my table was one of the strongest figures, biggest figures in the Evangelical Christian movement in the United States. And we all had a fantastic conversation. I ended up going first or second, and my answer was, I think there’s going to be an explosion of interest in religions that have seen an exodus on some level over the last few decades. And there’s also going to be a proliferation of new religions, new churches to meet the hard-to-verbalize needs of a populace who is struggling with pervasive and acute loneliness.
And that the ability to absorb the mass communication through social media and separate the signal from the noise from a scientific, rational, materialist worldview is going to become so hard. I’m not saying it’s not a worthwhile objective, but so hard and really impossible for the vast majority of people who are not trained to filter through those things and don’t have firsthand access to scientists that there will be for all of those reasons and more a return to religion. And if you look at also then adding the accelerant of psychedelics to that, which I have very mixed views on these days by the way, which is just to say the Eleusinian Mysteries. Okay, if you have a handful of people after a long time are inducted into consuming some derivative of ergot, which would be similar to, say, LSD, that’s one thing. But when you have the potential of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people taking these substances, nothing like that has ever happened before in the history of humankind.
So we’ll see what type of mixed blessing that is. But it’s been fascinating to see how many new churches have been established in the US which on some level I think are largely created to provide constitutional protection if you are using psychedelics as a sacrament. So it’s a legal protection. But how, once the horses are out of the barn and people have formed these churches and religions, they actually become interesting in and of themselves as religions, even without the added psychedelic sacraments. And so you see, say former conservative Mormons in Utah splintering off and creating religions that incorporate both Christianity and psychedelic use. And I mean, there’s some itch that these things, whether the sort of Abrahamic traditional religions or the newer religions scratch, that is, it’s difficult to put a finger on, but it’s also pretty hard to refute it seems to me. I don’t know, anyway.
Philip Goff: Yeah, well, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I mean, there’s been an increase in paganism here, and my wife was thinking about, my wife’s not religious. I take the kids to church on my own. And she was thinking of exploring Wicca at some point. I would’ve loved to say in church, “Where’s your wife?” “Oh, she’s a witch.” But yeah, I don’t know. For me, I think spirituality is important and I think more and more people appreciate that there’s a role for something structured that brings people together. Now there are powerful forces in the world, maybe powerful forces sowing hatred, division, something that grassroots brings people together, connects them to something greater. I suppose that’s what I believe in and that’s what I would like to encourage. I’m trying one way of doing that, engaging with in a slightly different way with the traditional religions, but I’m excited if other people are trying different things and to see where it goes.
Tim Ferriss: Let’s see where it goes. Indeed. Two last questions. These are pretty quick ones, I suspect. This is the billboard question. So if you could put anything on a billboard, metaphorically speaking, to get it in front of millions, hundreds of millions of people take your pick. Can’t be anything commercial of course, but it could be a quote, an image doesn’t need to be your quote. Anything at all, something you’d want to convey to a lot of people. Do you have any thoughts for what you would put on it?
Philip Goff: As always, I’m torn between the more intellectual things, the drier things or the things to do with meaning. I mean, on the former, I suppose I’m more passionate about the importance of philosophy and we need to, sometimes you can’t just do experiments. Sometimes you need to make judgment calls, but that’s kind of boring and dry. I mean, I suppose in terms of more meaning of existence kind of things, I think touching on what we said earlier, I suppose, I think one of the things I feel I’ve learned as I’ve got older is the importance of trying to not start from what do I want? What’s going to make me successful to try and orientate yourself to, “What contribution can I make? How can I make the world a slightly better place?” Because I think if your fundamental life goal is making me more successful, that’s not going to end well because it’s never enough, it never — I mean, I think I’m kind of lucky that I’m not that bothered about money.
I’m not into power really but I do have a bit of an ego. Do you know what I mean? I want to be a respected philosopher, but it’s never enough. You’re always sort of jealous of someone who’s doing better. So I think the more one can try, and it’s not easy to just continually orient your life to reality outside of yourself and just trying to make a contribution, actually that’s what I do in prayer, actually. I pray late last thing at night and meditate first thing in the morning. Talking to God at night, listening to God in the morning. And I think in prayer I just orientate myself to sort of try, and it never works perfectly, but try and make your life goal, making some kind of contribution.
And I find that just takes the pressure off you and does really just free you up to just enjoy what the present moment has to offer. So yeah, so I suppose, remind me, I was trying to think. You talking about billboards, you saying about this before we get, and I was thinking, it made me think of these signs used up in the war saying, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” That’s in a sort of spirit of nationalist war effort. That’s not what I’m getting at. But maybe something like, don’t ask, “What do I want?” Don’t start from “What do I want?” Start from “How can I contribute?” I sort of think happiness flows from that. So something like that. A bit more. I need an editor, don’t I? So sharpened up a bit will be on the billboard.
Tim Ferriss: We’ll take it to Madison Avenue, we’ll figure it out. And Philip, where are the best places for people to find you? Is it philipgoffphilosophy.com? Is that the best place to find people?
Philip Goff: Yeah, that’s my website that I try and update regularly. It’s got academic stuff and popular articles and lots of videos and a complete archive of the media stuff, I’ve done that. Yeah, I try to keep up to date. I spend too much time arguing on, well, I used to be X and then all the liberals have gone to Bluesky and I’m doing both. I kind of worry about this bit of a divided community. So I’m arguing on both. And it’s interesting the different reactions you get on. But yeah, I spent too much time arguing on. That’s been really useful actually for learning this thing.
I think when my book first came out and I was on sort of Joe Rogan and stuff and I didn’t really know how to, I think he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. It was like my fault. But part of what’s helped me communicate with the general audience I think is arguing with ordinary people on X and Bluesky. And yes, if you want to have an argument, it’s getting a bit, I can’t keep up with it these days, but have an argument with me there if you want to. I have a substack just started. I try and do something every month on the substack, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: If you want to pick a fight and have an argument with Philip, then I suppose X is the best gladiatorial arena for that.
Philip Goff: With the books, Galileo’s Error and Why?, they’re a —
Tim Ferriss: Check them out.
Philip Goff: — great read, I hear.
Tim Ferriss: And as far as the great place to argue goes, the dose makes the poison, folks. So just be careful with your dosing. Phil, this has been so fun. Thank you for taking the time to have such a wide-ranging conversation. I really appreciate it and took a bunch of notes for myself. I’ll be revisiting the show notes when they’re put together. And is there anything else you’d like to say or point people to, any formal complaints you’d like to lodge publicly? Anything at all you’d like to add before we wind to a close?
Philip Goff: No, that was just to say thank you. I think you’re right. It has been a wonderful, we had a good session on the panpsychism and a good session on the religion stuff. And I’ve learned a lot actually about Sufism and lots of, yeah, I think a lot of things I want to follow up there that are going to be very useful for this book I’ve just started that. Hopefully I’ll write if I can spend less time arguing on X. Philip_Goff. But yeah. Yeah, thanks so much.
Tim Ferriss: Absolutely.
Philip Goff: Stay in touch.Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, Philip. And for everybody listening, as usual, we’ll have show notes with links to everything we discussed and probably more at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit kinder than is necessary to others and also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
Comment Rules: Remember what Fonzie was like? Cool. That's how we're gonna be — cool. Critical is fine, but if you're rude, we'll delete your stuff. Please do not put your URL in the comment text and please use your PERSONAL name or initials and not your business name, as the latter comes off like spam. Have fun and thanks for adding to the conversation! (Thanks to Brian Oberkirch for the inspiration.)
Hi Tim,
Can I challenge an assumption?
Goff asks whether matter has consciousness.
What if that’s the wrong frame?
What if matter is the result of consciousness?
The materialist lens — Galileo, Descartes — gave us precision, but science and medicine split us into body parts. A machine.
The brain is now a predictive computer. [huberman] Education [and mealtimes] modelled on the factory system – compliance.
Now, even emotions are processed as if they’re data.
Writers feel redundant next to AI because it thinks faster.
But that’s like feeling inferior to a car because we can’t outrun it on the motorway. Wrong metaphor. Wrong paradigm.
Philip Goff argues for panpsychism, but keeps the word spiritual at arm’s length, maybe out of fear of being dismissed.
Math was understood as cosmic language long before Galileo.
How can a philosopher of consciousness overlook the roots of sacred geometry?
And the “hard problem”?
Zhuangzi grasped it millennia ago:
The gap between describing an experience and knowing it.
That’s what writers bridge with the rule “show, don’t tell.” .
Apologies for the edge:
My son’s a quantum physicist at Durham [same as Goff] & I’m working on a book with Bloomsbury on creativity & spirituality.
My barrister hubby flees dinner when we ‘discuss’ spirit/ energy
What if we start with the idea that humans are matter & spirit?
And we’re brave enough not to misappropriate Quantum Physics to explain subtle energies?
The aura/chi/ prana are not electromagnetic – otherwise, as my son says — science could prove we have a biofield –
And what if you tiptoe back to the tree of forbidden knowledge — and steal its apples?
Consider that spirit generates both matter & consciousness?
Worth a re-read of Steiner – he only wrote 350 books on this.
Thanks if you read this far!
best
Lucy