Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about panpsychism

Sorry for the armchair philosophy, this is a topic I like to think about.

We know that time is the 4th dimension, all things exist in 4-dimensions and we just experience one 'slice' of this dimension at a time. The concept of something having 'not happened yet' really means 'we haven't experienced it yet' - it'd be like saying that the house 5 blocks away isn't on fire 'yet', simply because we haven't walked 5 blocks over and seen it yet. If we were able to move through time as freely as we move through other dimensions, then a house that catches on fire 'tomorrow' is really on fire 'now'('now' really isn't the right word here, but I don't think a better one exists) - we just have to walk down the street into tomorrow and see it.

In this way, we also exist as infants and as old men and women at the same time. We experience on infinitesimally small slice of ourselves at a time, each slice being a moment in time. Why don't we experience this all at once? Our body IS existing in the past and the future and the now, we are all tasting our 60th birthday cake right now, but we don't experience it yet.

There are two possibilities: Consciousness is the one thing that exists outside of time, such that instead of existing throughout our whole lifespan consistently and experiencing our whole life at once and constantly, we move through time experiencing one moment at a time, and maybe move into and out of time via birth/death. If you start thinking about memory this gets very interesting(as does the other possibility) in so far as memory is represented by the physical state of your brain and memory stores 'past' events. Basically implying that for some reason the 4D shape of your brain is such that on the 'future' side of your brain there are neurons arranged in such a way to describe what the state of your brain is on the 'past' side.

OR, consciousness does exist within 4 dimensions as our bodies do, and we ARE experiencing our entire lives at once. I don't know about you, but for me it FEELS like I'm only experiencing this single moment right now. But that doesn't mean I'm not also experiencing every other moment right now. At this moment in time, my brain is in a certain state(in terms of neurons and neurochemicals), that state encodes my memories and feelings that I have at this moment, personally I think that state encodes all the qualities of my consciousness, but I know this could be argued. So if I were experiencing all moments at once, then this moment would feel exactly like it would feel if this were the only moment I was experiencing. I would also be experiencing moments in the future, and in those moments this moment would be just a memory. So how do I know whether I'm experiencing those other moments as well right now, this current moment clearly feels unique to me and it seems like the only moment I'm experiencing, but maybe that's how all moments feel. Maybe there is a different 'me' experiencing every other moment right now, and I happen to be in this moment typing this message BECAUSE this moment IS the one where I happen to be sitting here typing this message. The me that's eating my 60th birthday cake is also doing that right now, and not thinking about the nature of consciousness, but maybe has a vague memory of this moment because the physical structure of my brain encodes 'previous' brain states as memories in 'future' brain states for whatever reason.

To paraphrase, you're saying that you experience an experience, but this experience isn't real, therefore you're not experiencing it. This is a contradiction, and it doesn't make sense: Consciousness is the act of experiencing something, even if this "something" is not real. For example, experiencing a drug-induced hallucination is still a real phenomenon, even if the content of the hallucination is not real.

> I think my brain is sensing pain and telling me to perceive the pain in the context of "self".

You're using the words "I"/"me" and "perceive". Consciousness is the "I" that "perceives".

> This isn't a good argument. There's no hard evidence that there isn't an invisible elephant sat next to you right now.

I have (soft) evidence that I have a consciousness. I cannot share this evidence with you, therefore it is not hard evidence – this is the as yet unsurmountable problem with consciousness. In contrast, I have neither hard nor soft evidence that there's an invisible elephant next to me.

I'm sorry, I don't know how to explain this phenomenon to you. Maybe you're not conscious, and I'm figuratively trying to explain colors to a blind person. I consider it much more likely, however, that you're in denial of the evidence you have right in front of your inner eye.

Not knowing where definitions land is tough, but it's wrong to think that ground reality gives a damn that you find it hard. I don't know precisely where consciousness starts when a human develops. I don't know what point its heart start beating either. None of this has any clear bearing on what the objective truth is, or how it's implemented.

It's not like we don't know anything about consciousness. We know consciousness is not metaphysics, because we can talk about it and affect it with physical actions. We know consciousness is a property of the brain, for similar reasons. The only sensible way of satisfying the prior two points is that consciousness exists at program-level (aka. it's not some opaque oracle hiding in protons), so we know that too.

But I don't think this makes discussions about consciousness useless. If you tell me something about your consciousness I can check if it fits my experience, and you can test something I say for yourself.

What this means is that there might not be an absolute truth about this, only relative truths.

But then, this applies to anything, as no experience can happen outside of consciousness, so all of science is the same way.

You seem well versed in the matter, can you recommend sources to learn more about all this ?