What do you think this microphone in front of me is made out of?

I think it's made out of mental states, mind states, and the matter that we attribute to it

is an extrinsic appearance and an image of mental states. Okay, quite a concise answer to

what can be in this context quite a complicated question.

And perhaps one that's already raised a few eyebrows.

I think that if you ask the average person on the street, what is a microphone made out of?

They might tell you it's made out of metal.

It's more metal is made out of and you sort of keep going down until you get to, it's made out of atoms, and you ask what's an atom made out of, well, it's made out of, you know, electrons and what's an electron made out of.

And they kind of begin to struggle a little bit. And this is an idea that I've been interested in recently, and there's this growing popularity in the suggestion that once we get down to the foundation of reality,

we're talking about something like consciousness or mind. I've been talking about that in the context of panpsychism.

You have a few choice words for panpsychism, which hopefully we can get into and we can critique it.

But I think they kind of come from the same kind of starting point, which is that this assumption of materialism, that everything is kind of made up

of stuff like, you know, inert atoms that bump into each other, is somehow mistaken. Bearing

in mind that probably the majority of people who are listening are materialists, I would assume,

how do you begin getting into a

discussion about what the world is really made of and trying to argue that materialism is false?

Well, we need to get out some of the false implications that people usually derive if I say

that a microphone is made of mental state. I'm not denying metal.

I'm not denying what appears to perception and measurement as matter as atoms.

These things are empirically verified.

We can measure this stuff.

There is something out there that goes by the name of atom and metal and aluminum and so forth.

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