Galen Straussen, welcome to the show.

Hello, good to be here.

You are a physicalist, that is to say, what some people call a naturalist.

You also describe yourself as a panpsychist, or at least sort of aligning yourself with these terms in relatively specific ways.

I want to get into that, because I think my audience will find it interesting.

But first, just before we started talking, you said that the trouble with speaking about this

kind of stuff is that it's just so difficult to get people to agree with you. What do you

think is the sort of unintuitive central claim that when you start trying to explain your views

to people, they just switch off?

Well, one of the part of it is that there are a whole set of blockers, as I see it, and one of the blockers is just an normal meaning of the word physical in everyday life. People think that it

actually carries as part of its meaning meaning the idea that the physical is

not intrinsically conscious or is not in its fundamental nature conscious in any way at all.

And it's very hard to get it.

That's the first thing that it's very hard to get over.

And so what I do, I mean, you must stop me at any

time, but what I do is start by saying that you have to look at physics. And there's this great

theme I have, which is I call the silence of physics, which if you look at physics, it doesn't

make any claims at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff whose structure it describes with equations.

So the field should be understood to be open to the idea that there might be consciousness in some form,

even at the very fundamental level, and there are many advantages in that view.

Yeah, this is a really important point about physics that I talk about all the time,

which is to say that it essentially describes relations, but it doesn't tell you about the nature of the things which are related.

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