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the jurogan experience and you know i think we shouldn't be surprised that physical science has this difficulty of consciousness because the scientific paradigm we've been operating in for the last 500 years was designed by galileo to exclude consciousness um should i talk a bit about that yes so yeah so this is why i defended my book galileo's era so really the most important well i shouldn't say that a key moment in the scientific revolution right is 1623 galileo's decision that mathematics was going to be the language of science right uh this was the start of mathematical physics what is not discussed much is the philosophical work galileo had to do to get there right because the problem was before galileo people thought the world the physical world was filled with qualities right so you have colors on the surfaces of objects smells floating through the air tastes inside food and this was a problem for galileo because you can't capture these qualities in in the purely quantitative language of mathematics you know an equation can't capture the the redness of a red experience so galileo got around this so galileo you know you wanted to describe it all in math um so galileo got around this problem by proposing a radically new philosophical theory of reality so we think of galileo as a great experimental scientist which he was but he was also a great philosopher so he proposed this new philosophical theory of reality and according to this theory the qualities aren't really out there in the physical world right they're in the consciousness of the observer right so if you're looking at this uh is that black you're looking at that you know the blackness isn't really on the surface of the pen it's in the consciousness
of the person looking at it or if you're eating a spicy curry the spiciness isn't really in the curry it's in the consciousness of the person eating it so galileo strips the physical world of its qualities and after he's done that all that's left are the purely quantitative properties size shape location motion properties that you can capture in mathematical geometry so so in galileo galileo's world view there's this radical division in nature between two domains the quantitative domain of science science you know the physical world with its mathematical quantitative properties and the qualitative domain of consciousness you know consciousness with its colors sounds smells tastes which he took to be outside of the domain of science so this is the start of mathematical physics which has gone incredibly well but i think what we've forgotten is that it's gone so well because galileo gave science this narrow specific focus galileo essentially said you know just put consciousness on one side just focus on what you can capture in mathematics so this is so important so i think people were now living in a strange period of history where people like sean carroll for example think oh materialism has to be true because you know look how well physical science is done you know it's explained so much surely it's going to explain consciousness the irony is it's done so well precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness so i think if we if we want to bring consciousness fully into science we need a new world view we need to find a way to bring together what galileo separated to bring together the quantitative domain of science and the qualitative domain of human consciousness and that's what pan psychism does it gives it away i'm not getting how galileo excluded consciousness that doesn't it doesn't make any sense i do understand that
mathematics are what he felt was the underlying building blocks of all things but even if you're talking about how like spicy curry for example spicy curry doesn't exist in the curry it exists in the consciousness of someone who eats the curry but it's not really true because there's a chemical reaction there's we know what the ingredients are in the curry that causes it to have a spicy reaction to the human being that's taking it in it's a very distinct very definable chemical reaction that we know these plants have uh excreted these chemicals to discourage predation that's why they're so spicy in the first place we know all these things like this is in a way mathematics it's mathematics engaging with consciousness yeah so look this there's definitely a lot we can we can do mathematically with the tools in mathematical science yeah you can capture the chemical composition of the curry you can capture the changes it makes in your brain right but then at some point the resulting brain activity goes along with the sensation of spiciness well you recognize that's where the miracle happens how is it a sense but you're recognizing against your pain sensors in your tongue and the the the sensations of taste they're all this is mathematics right like there's there's certain compounds that cause certain reactions we even attribute genes to those compounds like the genes for with some people cilantro tastes like soap and some people would taste delicious like that those are there's a genetic we we know for sure that there's a genetic component to that we can actually isolate the very very specific genes that cause people to have that reaction so i think i think that the chemical story can the physical story can explain how people react to the taste how people store information about it how that impacts on their later behavior right but all of that story could in principle go on in in what we call a zombie in without any kind of inner life any kind of experience of spiciness you you know it's conceivable that you could have a
mechanism that had all those reactions um and all those responses but there was no feeling of spiciness um i mean he's i mean it's sometimes it's sometimes a bit more more vivid with color if you think about so i mean here's another way of putting it right suppose suppose i wanted to explain in your in a neuroscientific theory the redness of a red experience right okay why red experiences have that red quality so the first issue is i don't think you can and this is essentially galileo's insight you can't capture the redness of a red experience in the language of neuroscience and the way to see that you know you couldn't convey to a a blind neuroscientist what it's like to see red by you know getting him to read your theory in braille right you couldn't convey that to him so that's a descriptive limitation right that the language of neuroscience this purely quantitative language can't express the redness of a red experience so that's just a descriptive limitation but i think it entails an explanatory limitation because if i wanted to present my neuros my brilliant neuroscientific theory that explained the redness of a red experience my theory would first have to describe that quality and then explain it in terms of underlying physical processes but if the theory can't even describe it then it can't explain it so i think in principle a neuroscientific theory cannot explain the qualities of our experience galileo 500 years ago realized that and he said if we want science to be mathematical we have to take consciousness out of the story and that was a good move but we've sort of forgotten that that's what we did so now we're in a weird period of history where people think oh it's gone so well but yeah it's gone so well because we took consciousness out of the story because you can't capture those qualities
in a purely quantitative language but what if it's both what it what if it's both conscious and chemical that seems more likely right yeah but that i mean that's essentially the pan psychist view right but look the question is what comes first so both both the pancitis like myself and the materialists like sean carroll for example you know many many people are materialists we both think you know in some sense consciousness and chemicals go together the question is which is more fundamental i think that we get physics and chemistry out of consciousness we don't do it the other way around it's it's very easy to still understand why you think that because i think so we've got a choice well we've got there's three options really right here here the three options on consciousness either matter is a consciousness is explained in terms of matter that's the material all matter is explained in terms of consciousness that's the panzerkiss view or we've got a third option hold on break that down again so either either consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain okay that's that's the materialist view of say sean carroll second option no the brain is explained in terms of consciousness that's my view right that's the panzerkist view third option is they're just they're two separate things that's the duelist view but it's also every soul is separate from the brain everything has some sort of component of consciousness yeah but this now that's what i don't understand how do you make that leap because i don't you've gotta you've got these three choices i don't think i i think look i basically think the materialist view is incoherent you you just you can't you can't account for the qualities of experience in in in the in the purely quantitative language of physical science right that's galileo's insight aren't the
qualities of experience quantitative in and of itself so you i mean yeah it's good so you some qualities you can to an extent capture the structure in quantitative terms so like color experience has a mathematical structure we can analyze it red we can analyze it in terms of hue saturation lightness and we can map out a color space in terms of those three dimensions spectrum so that's yeah it's not that they they obviously have that quantitative structure but you can't fully pin down i would argue maybe you disagree the redness of a red experience in that language is i mean i took him a book about the uh the color scientist not norby who's who's um a color scientist who's got some cones missing from his eyes and so he's only ever seen black and white and shades of grey but he's a color expert and he talks about this and he says when he tries to think about color he he compares it to sound so he thinks of brightness maybe like like loudness um and he says he can get some grip on the the structure but he says you know i'll never fully understand you know the redness that that underlies that structure because he's colorblind because he's colorblind so so i'm saying the qualities of experience can't be totally pinned down in language example the qualities of his the that experience can be pinned down to a problem in the structure of his eyes it's chemicals yeah we that's we all agree yeah so look we all agree that the kind of experience you have is dependent on the structure of your brain right we all agree on that right that's but then as the question is what explains that is that because the experience is explained in terms of the brain or is it the other way around that's the philosophical question the materialist says the experience is
explained in terms of the brain activity right i i think that's doesn't work out i do it the other way around i think it's it's much more straightforward at least to explain the brain activity in terms of the consciousness but the quality of the experience can be explained based on the way the brain works so if you add things to the brain it changes the quality of the experience if you add certain chemicals certain dopamine serotonin you add things to the experience it literally changes the way you view an interface so so yeah i agree with what you've just said which is basically a claim about correlation that certain kinds of brain activity go along with certain kinds of experience right and certain kind of definitely are responsible for certain types of experiences being different well i i would just say that they go together i would put it more neutrally they always go together and that's the science concert said if you go to a concert and you take acid you're gonna have a very different experience and if you didn't take that acid absolutely absolutely so so definitely certain kinds of chemical activity go along with certain kinds of and that's the scientific question the hard problem of consciousness is why why do certain kinds of experience go together with certain kinds of um sorry certain kinds of brain activity go together with certain kinds of experience and there's two just two ways of explaining that you explain the experience in terms of the activity the brain activity or you explain the brain activity in terms of the experience