0:00 Oh brilliant, thank you very much Daniel. Thanks so much for inviting me. I have a very special place in my heart for Liverpool. So this is where I'm from, where I spent the first 18 years of my life and also kind of just by chance where I got my first permanent lectureship which was a relief and couldn't have been in a better place and we had, me and my wife Emma had three wonderful, wonderful years here. hanging out with cool philosophy colleagues like Daniel here and also living in the centre of this beautiful city so it's absolutely wonderful to be back here again. Okay, well today I'd like to talk to you about a recent experience I had that's impacted me
0:48 quite deeply. It's an experience very different to any I've ever had before and probably different to any I will ever have again. and I can't stop thinking about it and I'd like you to help me think about it a bit. So, quite recently, in very controlled circumstances, under the supervision of a professional therapist, I self-administered a very powerful psychedelic known as 5-MeO-DMT, which is a form of toad venom. And, well, the first thing I'd like to say before I say anything else is I
1:33 would advise people not to do this. It was an absolutely terrifying experience, as I'll get onto. And I do think it's not emphasised enough that psychedelics can be very psychologically dangerous. They're not generally thought to be physically dangerous particularly, or addictive in the way sort of heroin is or something, but they do They can be psychologically dangerous in the sense that they tear apart our ordinary ways of thinking about things. And very often those ordinary ways of thinking are important for psychological stability. And because of the legal situation, I think it's very difficult to get the kind of controlled circumstances that I was lucky enough to have to kind of mitigate some of these dangers. So I wouldn't advise doing it. I'm not going to be doing it again in
2:20 a hurry. But nonetheless, I've done it and I think it was one of the most important experiences I've ever had. And I believe it's given me deep insights into the ultimate nature of reality. And that's what I'd like to talk about today. Okay, so what I'm going to do, I want to do four things in the next slightly less than 50 minutes. So I want to talk about the content of the experience. That is to say... How things seem to be when having it. Okay, so this kind of brackets, is it a hallucination? Is it real? Just how do things seem when you have this experience? And it's a lovely case because this particular substance actually, it's very uniform, almost perfectly uniform. The experience people have on it, I could point you to different people who've written about it. Secondly, the million dollar question, is
3:10 it rational to trust the experience? To believe that things really are as they seem to be? Or should we think it's a hallucination? Thirdly, if we do think it's veridical, which is the technical term for things really are as they seem to be, how does that fit into a broader theory of reality? And finally, I'd like to connect this to my slightly non-standard, mildly heretical Christian faith. Okay, so there's a lot to cover here. I want to take you on a journey from toad venom to Jesus. Okay. All right, so let's start with the content of the experience. So I'm just going to describe
3:57 to you how things seemed. Put them on side, you know, is it real or not? How things seemed. As soon as I self-administered this substance... Again, this is just how things seemed. As soon as I self-administered this substance... I was instantly and entirely annihilated. Philip Gough was wiped from existence and all that remained was an indescribable raging storm of consciousness underlying all things. This was a form of consciousness that was beyond space, beyond time and that didn't belong to anybody. Okay, so let's...
4:47 Enough poetry. This is, I mean, this is honestly a description of how things genuinely seem, and it's absolutely terrifying to be instantly kind of killed, annihilated. But we needed to start doing some philosophy, because it already seems a bit of a paradox here that may be popping up. It's like, if I wasn't there, who was having the experience? You know, there must be some sense in which... the experiences are sort of in this brain rather than someone else's. I mean, to make that vivid, suppose Daniel here was having an ice cream at the time, right? So I'm having this insane pure consciousness experience and Daniel's having an
5:34 ice cream. I was thinking, like, surely there's some sense in which, you know, there's two experiences here. There's this pure consciousness experience and there's an ice cream experience and the... Pure consciousness experience is something to do with the brain of the organism we call Philip Goff, and the ice cream experience is something to do with the brain we call Daniel Hill. Surely that's got to be true. Well, yes and no. So, again, it's the last time I'm going to say it, just describing how things seem in this experience, I would say what is experienced... is a region of reality in which there is
6:20 no differentiation at all. There is no distinction between I and other. There is no distinction between this and that. There is no way of dividing up reality into distinct countable aspects. So, yeah, just as soon as this was finished, I was like thinking, I think... At first, I thought I didn't have the cliched one with everything experience. But then I was thinking, well, that's because I was thinking of that as sort of your mind fills the cosmos. And it definitely wasn't like that. But even, you know, suppose that happened and your mind fills the universe. You'd still be able to distinguish different bits of your consciousness, you know, like your experience of the planets or your experience of the
7:07 sun or something. Just like in ordinary consciousness, you can distinguish the left and the right halves of your visual field or something. But this was a region of reality in which there is no sense to distinguishing anything, right? These concepts have no application. And so that's the sense in which I was not there, or I was everywhere, depending on how you look at it. Now, let's get a little bit more analytic philosophy techie. You might think, is there any propositional content here? Is there any sense in which there's a truth claim? Because if there's just... you know, no kind of
7:57 structure at all. I think I want to say it's great applying the tools of analytic philosophy to this kind of stuff. I want to say there was a propositional truth claim here, but the propi- not, you know, you're not entertaining a proposition when you're in the moment of this experience, but afterwards, thinking back, I think I can form a proposition based on my memory of the experience. Some paradoxes about how I can have a memory of it, but anyway. But I would say it's a completely unstructured proposition. So it's not a proposition with any subject, predicate, structure, quantification or structure. It's not saying there is a X such that X da da da. This is just a completely unstructured propositional truth claim. But nonetheless, it's a proposition. And I
8:46 could say I believe that or I don't believe that. OK, so just I mean, it's not just that there aren't there isn't more than one thing. I would say, and this is a familiar thing when you read mystics throughout history, there isn't even one thing, right? That's what I mean when I say there's no quantification or structure. It's not even there is an X such that... Okay, so that's what I want to say about the content of the experience. So, strictly speaking, there wasn't even one thing, but you're going to have to cut me some slack. Maybe I'm going to call this pure consciousness. I'm going to speak as though there is a thing, represented in this experience called pure consciousness. Okay? Even though,
9:36 strictly speaking, we're talking about a completely unstructured truth claim. I might occasionally talk about me having the experience, even though if the experience was not a hallucination, I was not there. Okay, it's all very slippery, isn't it? Right, so that's how things seem to be. Let's get to the question we all want to ask: Was it real? Here's the wonderful William James, all-time hero of mine. Everyone should read William James if you haven't already. This is him pictured in Brazil, late 19th, early 20th century. Apparently these clothes were not fashionable at the time. He was just kind of being a bit of a hipster. He's a very cool guy.
10:23 Anyway, all right, so is it rational to trust that this really happened? Well, it depends on your theory of justification. That is to say, your theory about what makes it rational to believe something. What is it that makes it rational to believe something? So we'll just have to think of different theories of what this consists in. I'll start with my favourite one, the view known as phenomenal conservatism. So this is a view of Michael Huma, very interesting philosopher, also on YouTube a lot. Don't like his political views, but like his views on everything else. Sorry, I got lost in a train
11:09 of thought there about politics. Anyway, okay, so phenomenal conservatism, let's start with the techie definition. If it seems to S that P, then in the absence of defeaters, S thereby has at least some justification for believing that P. So, basic idea is, if it seems like something is true, and there's no reason to doubt that, then you've got at least some reason to think it is true. Okay? Um... And the reason to take this seriously, the reason I think that's most pushed by people like Mike Huma, is you're gonna have to accept something like this if you're gonna get out of skepticism. How the hell, how do
11:55 I know I'm not in the matrix? Right, we're getting to foundations here, epistemological foundations, how we know, and how do I know I'm not in the matrix? How do I know there's really a table here? People here. I'm really giving a talk. I really have hands How do I know any of this at the end of the day all I really have direct access to is a seeming It seems as though there's a table in front of me It seems as though there are people around me if you're gonna have if it's gonna be rational to believe in an external world It's gonna have to be because it's rational to trust how things seem to believe on the basis of seemings and if there's no evidence to
12:45 the contrary, right? That's a very important qualification, so it's not a free-for-all, right? Just because something seems a certain way doesn't mean it is, doesn't mean you should believe that, because you've got to take into account all the seemings and balance them out, including, crucially, the seemings that do allow us to believe in an external world and get science going, and that's going to limit a lot of possibilities. But you've got to have as the starting point something like this or you're never gonna... you're not gonna be able to... it's not gonna be rational to believe anything basically beyond my consciousness right here and now. I mean, you know, if Descartes had worked out it'd be a different story. You know, Descartes tried to start with what we
13:31 know for certain and build everything else from there and I think these days nobody thinks that works. So if we're gonna get it beyond skepticism we're just gonna have to think it's rational To trust how things seem. Okay. So a defeater means something to the contrary. Something that negates the seeming. Casts doubt on the seeming. Okay, so now let's think about the experience I had. This Toad Venom experience. Well, firstly, it really bloody seemed to be real, right? I mean, most anyone read on this, tends to be the case of psychedelics, it seems more, far more real than ordinary experience, right?
14:21 Far more real. It seems like you're sort of... I have a vivid sense, like the actual experience is almost completely indescribable, but a very brief period of going into it of just... Having a strong sense that my ordinary ways of thinking are very naive and you're sort of seeing things, seeing through something and seeing kind of more clearly. And that remains after the fact as well. So in terms of the basic seeming, you're on good ground there. This really seems real. It seems, you know, closer to 2 plus 2 is 4 or I'm feeling pain or something. Then there's a table here. So
15:07 what we need to know is, are there any defeaters? Are there any, is there anything that's going to cast doubt on that seeming? And we can distinguish two kinds, right? Undercutting objections or defeaters and rebutting objections. So an undercutting objection is a reason to doubt. So cut out the jargon. We're looking for reasons to doubt. So it seems true. And phenomenal conservatism tells us if it seems true and there's no reason to doubt, you can believe it. It's rational to believe. So it seems true. Are there any reasons to doubt? So an undercutting objection casts doubt on the way you form the belief. Gives
15:54 you reason to think there's something dodgy about the way you form the belief. OK, and there's going to there's an obvious candidate here that I hear again and again and again. Well, you bloody took a drug, didn't you? There's a drug messing with your brain. People know Paul Taylor here, right? Paul Taylor, your PhD student, who's the cameraman on Jack Syme's podcast that I went on this weekend. And he was very sceptical about this afterwards. And I said to him, will you tell me what's the difference between my experience at this table and this pure consciousness experience? And he said, "The difference is, mate, you licked a toad." That's what he said. You
16:41 don't actually lick a toad, it's vape. But anyway, um, okay, so you understand. So the idea is, look, this experience is caused by messing with your brain. Of course it's messed up. You've got a reason to doubt it. But it depends what the drug is doing. Okay, so I guess the thought that Paul is having is it's creating a hallucination, obviously. But here's another way of, another possibility of what it's doing. So let me return again a little bit to how things seem. A metaphor I came, an imperfect metaphor I came up with after having the experience is as follows. Imagine my mind is a light bulb wrapped in cotton wool.
17:28 Okay? I had a picture of this, I forgot to put it. And the cotton wool is like what's particular to me, Philip Goff. And Daniel's got his cotton wool. You've each got your cotton wool. And then this light bulb is this pure consciousness that is universal, belongs to no one, that's at the core of the being of each of us. So the light bulb is the same in me and the same in Daniel. It's a sort of multiply located light bulb. So what it felt like in the experience is... the cotton wool was sort of ripped off and this pure consciousness sort of shines through, shines out once it's stopped being
18:17 smothered by the cotton wool. So if you're thinking about what the drug is doing in relation to that, what the drug is doing is stopping, pausing the neural activity that sustains my conscious mind, sustains Philip Goff's conscious mind. It's stopping that and thus revealing, in some sense, this consciousness that's the base of everything. Okay? So it's sort of smothered by my conscious mind. And if you look at, you know, the neurophysiology of it, and I took conversations with Christoph Koch,
19:02 the famous neuroscientist who's had the same experience, it kind of looks like that that's what's going on. I mean, it's all a bit uncertain, but some recent papers suggest that there is... It's... it is lowering, dramatically lowering neural activity, sending the brain into low frequency oscillations. Okay? So there's just basically... it's very unclear, but there's two things that the drug could be doing. It could be creating a hallucination, or it could be temporarily destroying my mind to reveal this thing that's underneath. So until you have strong evidence that it's the former rather than the latter, I don't think we have here a
19:49 defeater, a reason to doubt. Okay, so what about rebutting objections? So rebutting objections is just we've got independent knowledge that how things seem to be is wrong. Okay, so this would be, for example, you know, someone seems to really like you, but then you've been told on very good authority they really hate you. You've got, there's a seeming, but there's something undercutting it. Rebutting it, sorry, not undercutting it, rebutting it. So here it would be, you know, is how things seem to be in this experience. So how things seem to be is this
20:37 pure consciousness underlying all things. Here the question is, is that ill-fitting with what we already know? That's the next question. Well, it depends on your worldview, on your philosophy. Suppose the late, great Daniel Dennett smoked some toad venom, right? So Daniel Dennett is a... a very strong physicalist. So I maybe I'm I I think at least in I think Daniel Dennett would have some reason to to think he's hallucinating if he had the same experience I did because it is ill-fitting with what he already takes himself to know about
21:25 reality. Okay interestingly not necessarily that the radical unity that the experience suggests because Quantum entanglement is very strong evidence that there's some kind of radical unity at the base. But insofar as this experience suggests that there is consciousness at the base of reality, Dennett thinks he knows that to be false. He thinks there's non-conscious particles and fields at the base of reality. And also I think what would be ill-fitting with his worldview is... how the experience suggests that we have direct access in this experience to fundamental reality what I'm saying is this experience suggests through the memory it's
22:11 given me direct insights into ultimate reality On Daniel Dennett's physicalist worldview, it's hard to see how you could accommodate that, right? If consciousness is a local neurophysiological phenomenon that's evolved to represent features of the environment for survival purposes, it's hard to understand in that picture of things how our conscious minds could somehow give direct insight into ultimate reality. Okay, so yeah, so if Dan, if Dennett did this, had this experience, he'd have reason to think he was hallucinating. But it's a very different situation if you have this experience
22:58 as a panpsychist, like myself or Hed Hasselmerg pictured here. Jeff Lee is not a panpsychist. This was a panpsychist conference on an island in the Barrier Reef many years ago. I was just googling pictures of Hedda Haslemurk and that came up. When I had more hair and a nice cardigan. A lot of the coral's gone now that I saw when I was swimming there. Anyway, climate change. Right! Stop rambling. My thoughts going off. Okay, so I want to say if you're a panpsychist and you have this experience, there
23:44 is nothing in your world view, your picture of reality that rules out or casts doubt on what the experience suggests is true. So there's clearly no problem with deep unity. We can just pick that up from physics as well, like the physicalist. The experience suggests there is consciousness at the fundamental level of reality, but as a panpsychist, I already think that! I already think there's consciousness! So, there's no clash there. If there is a clash with panpsychism, it's going to be this element that in this experience gives us direct insight into the ultimate nature of reality. Now, certainly that's
24:30 not an essential part of panpsychism, but I want to suggest there's not really a tension here. So if this experience is veridical, veridical is the technical term for not being a hallucination, if it is veridical, I think we could think about what it's claiming as something, a claim about the structure of consciousness. That all conscious goings-on, by their very essence, have this universal element at their base. What I'm calling pure consciousness. I think, you know, that as a panpsychic, it could be true, might not be true. And if it is true, then it's plausible, that we could have direct awareness of
25:17 this universal element, just in the way we ordinarily have direct awareness of our conscious experience. Of course you've got to say something about why we don't have cognitive access to it most of the time, but I think I've already suggested how one can think about that. The idea would be that this universal element, this pure consciousness, is generally smothered in ordinary by the busyness of consciousness feelings, thoughts, emotions seeing colours and it's only when maybe after prolonged meditation talking to Pascal, a graduate student here had some deep experiences from prolonged meditation. So if we're calming
26:03 the mind, or in the quicker way I did it, switching off the mind, that this pure consciousness, this universal element sort of shines through. Okay, so basically I don't think anything, it's not an essential part of panpsychism, but nothing in panpsychism casts doubt on this being a genuine, veridical experience. Okay, so my first big conclusion here is if you're a panpsychist and you have this experience, it is rational to believe that you're really experiencing how things really are. I am a panpsychist. I had this experience.
26:49 I believe it's given me deep insights into the ultimate nature of reality. Interesting questions about whether you should believe me. We could maybe talk about that in the Q&A. OK. Right. So that's the first big conclusion. Get your objections ready. But what I want to talk about next is, oh, gosh, let's I'm going to skip over this. But I've just talked about one theory of justification. But there are different theories of justification. I think proper functionalism. I think proper. Anyway, but for the sake of time, we could come back to other theories' justification. But I think pretty much it ends up
27:34 the same. It's just really good and important to apply the tools of rigorous analytic philosophy to this topic. Okay, but let's skip over that for now. Okay, so where we're up to now, I believe that... There really is this pure consciousness that was witnessed in my experience. How does that fit into a theory of reality more generally? Well, the simplest theory would be that pure consciousness stuff is the only thing that exists. And what the Toad Venom experience does is allow you to see through the
28:20 illusion. see through the illusion that there's really a difference between me and Daniel and different people. No, really! There is no differentiation, there is just pure consciousness. Very good philosopher, Miri Al-Bahari, This is her interpretation of Advaita Vedanta, which is the form of Hindu mysticism, perhaps best known in the West. And she defends this view, a wonderful paper, Universal Consciousness Fit for Ground or something. I find this impossible to believe. And I recently debated Miri on this. I mean, so I want to say...
29:06 what was experienced in that experience is real but I also want to say what is experienced in ordinary consciousness is real. The table here. I'm different to Daniel. Sorry, I keep using you as an example. I want them both. I was... I'd already been debating Miri before the experience and I was curious to see whether it would change my mind and I'd say, "Oh no, Miri's right!" But actually, my experience seemed compatible with a slightly more modest view. Well, and really it connects with this light bulb covered in cotton wool thing. I didn't feel like the experience was seeing the self was an illusion. I think it felt like,
29:51 and reading other people having the same experience, it felt like the self was being annihilated. Something real was being temporarily destroyed or paused. Cotton wool ripped off the light bulb. So, I'm inclined to a slightly more modest view that I'm calling a two-level theory. That physical reality involving differentiation is real but non-fundamental and pure consciousness is the only fundamental thing. That's not what I think but that's that seemed compatible with my experience. And this is another way of interpreting Advaita Vedanta. I was believing Miri that that was the way and then there's I've
30:37 heard different people have a this slightly more modest way of understanding Advaita Vedanta. Ask an expert, which is correct, I don't know. But, so, so this is one view, right? All there is at the base of reality is pure consciousness, what Advaita Vedanta people call Brahman, and then everything else is less fundamental, it sort of emerges from that. But I don't like this either, and I don't like it not because of the experience I have, but on more theoretical grounds. I wanna say, if all, if your only foundational thing is this pure, impersonal, timeless, spaceless consciousness, how do you get anything else? Why
31:25 does the universe exist? Why is it fine-tuned for life? Something I've worried about, you might know from my work. Like, if you, if you're just starting with pure consciousness, Brahman, how do you get out of that ignorance? Or suffering? How can you get... It just seems like if you start in a pure consciousness, that's all you'll ever have. So I want more of an explanation. And I'd invite it if it's down to people saying, well, it's a brute fact. No! Sorry, that's a bit loud. I want more of an explanation. So where I've found something a little bit more satisfying for me
32:12 is the theology of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. So a very important... thing in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is the division between two aspects of God what they call God's essence and God's energies so God's essence is sort of God's fundamental nature core identity which they think is completely unknowable inaccessible wholly other whereas God's energies is God as an active living force imminent and accessible So if I'm looking, I'm thinking of my experience through the lens of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, what was encountered in my Toad Venom experience was
32:58 God's energies, right? But there's this other, deeper, unknowable aspect of God, God's essence. And it's in God's essence that I would locate purpose, goal-directedness, in terms of which we explain why the universe exists. Why the universe is fine-tuned for life. So basically, I think we need both these aspects of the divine. We need God's energies to account for what I experienced. But we need God's essence for these more philosophical, theoretical questions. Why the hell does the universe exist? Okay. all right the final thing i'd like to focus on for the last five five
33:45 five minutes started about five past didn't we take ten minutes ten minutes yes i can ramble for a bit the other day no i'll stop okay well i'd like to finish by so that's where i'm oh no no i've got another slide before i get to that so where i end up with so this is the second big conclusion i guess or is it third Where I end up with is a sort of overlap view where God and the universe overlap. Okay? So we've got the bit of God that's completely separate, the white bit here, and much of physical reality is not divine. That's the red bit. But then we've got this region of reality
34:34 where God and the universe overlap. And I think that was what was witnessed in this experience.
