Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.

Long time listeners, readers, etc. will know that I'm not someone who thinks that

consciousness is a separate ontological category out there in the world.

We've talked about consciousness on the podcast, a number of times David Cholmer's

Philip Goff and other people, and a lot of people, including those two,

Cholmer's and Goff, think that we can't just explain consciousness as the motion of material stuff in the universe, right?

Pure physicalism. We need to have separate categories for mental actions and properties and so forth.

It's a little bit vague in my mind what other people want. I don't want that.

So people like me go around saying consciousness is emergent from an underlying purely physical structure.

And we can go into what that means. It's not that we know how it emerges.

I'm not claiming that, but we know enough about the underlying behavior of the physical stuff that it's very, very difficult to imagine adding in new stuff that would somehow be responsible for consciousness.

And so the word emergent in that set of claims plays an important role.

And the people who are skeptical of people like me will often say like, what do you mean by emergence?

Like you're just, that's just as magical and wish hoping as our idea that there's a separate ontological category.

And that's completely fair, right? I mean, we do understand a lot about the underlying stuff, the electrons and protons and neutrons and the different forces that push them around.

That stuff we understand very, very well to say that at some higher level of description.

Complicated things turn into consciousness without adding any new ingredients is a big leap.

And we would like to understand that better. So forget about consciousness.

It's really important to understand what you mean by emergence.

What is it? What does it happen under what physical circumstances does a complicated system exhibit emergent behavior?

So today's guest is a nilseth who is a leading researcher on consciousness.

And in fact, a nil has a new book coming out that I can recommend to you called being you a new science of consciousness where he pushes this line that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon out of the physical stuff.

...