My Interview With Galen Strawson, Part I

On Galen’s background, his conception of philosophy, and panpsychism

Galen John Strawson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held a chair since 2012 (having taught previously at the University of Reading, Oxford University, City University of New York, and at numerous other universities as Visiting Professor). Specializing in metaphysics and philosophy of mind, Professor Strawson is the author of numerous articles, essays, reviews, and books.¹

I rather idolized Professor Strawson — Galen, as he’s now long been to me — going into UT as a PhD student in 2013, and it was a great honor and privilege to have him as my supervisor. I was, at the time, properly obsessed with the Problem of Free Will and felt that Galen was one of the few people on Earth who thought about that problem as I did. Because of the nature and significance of the free will topic, my desire to meet him was existential as it was intellectual in origin.

Although admittedly star-struck around Galen for some time, I was quickly disarmed by his kind, gentle nature and his infectious love for philosophical inquiry. He is truly a philosopher’s philosopher, with a delightfully eccentric, energetic aura; an encyclopedic bank of knowledge; and a quick mind which darts from thought to thought, spotting connections and frequently calling upon a (seemingly endless) supply of memorized quotes. Galen’s voice is a rich, elegant British baritone. His blue eyes are kind, pensive, and reflective — and they light up whenever he’s excited by an idea (which is often). His enviable mane of (once-red, now white-ish grey) hair is often disheveled in proper philosopher fashion and easily earns him a place among the ranks of the Great Hair Philosophers. One half of a philosophy power couple, Galen is married to fellow philosopher of mind, Michelle Montague (who was my co-supervisor and is also dear to me; I hope to make her the subject of a post like this in the future…[in future, as the Brits say]).

In October 2022, Galen agreed to let me interview him (I had, at the time, a vision of launching a YouTube channel²). In the interview — conducted via Zoom and unedited³ — we discussed his defense of panpsychism,⁴ his impossibilism about the standard conception of free will,⁵ his understanding of the nature of the self, and his view of “the meaning of life” (a phrase for which, I should note, he — like many contemporary philosophers — does not share my fondness…).

I’ve created a transcript of our interview, which I’ve edited for length and readability. I’ve divided it into two parts. Here I’m posting the first part, which covers Galen’s background (in particular, how he came to be a philosopher), his conception of philosophy, and — most significantly — his defense of panpsychism.

I hope the result provides a valuable glimpse into the workings of a great mind.

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How did you end up as a philosopher?

You’re asking me to provide a narrative…I don't believe in narratives. But I can say something, of course.

It was semi-accidental — I left school at 16, and when I was at university all I really wanted to do was grow my hair and achieve enlightenment. So, for the first two years I read Oriental Studies; in particular Arabic and Persian.

I suppose you could say I had some sort of predisposition towards philosophy, but I never talked about it at home with my father [the great P.F. Strawson], so there's no influence that I'm aware of from him. Insofar as mental styles are inherited, I'd say I got all mine from my mother [Ann Martin Strawson].

But anyway, here's a story of what happened. I did two years of Oriental Studies, but I thought it was uninterestingly taught. I was at Cambridge, so I took up social and political sciences, and after a year of that I thought it seemed like a building that started on the fourth floor; I wanted to know where the basement was. And I thought, “That must be in philosophy”.

So, I decided in my final year to switch to philosophy. But I caught hepatitis in Syria that summer and only got back to university at the end of October. So, my whole undergraduate career in philosophy was only six months!

The plan was to do that for a year and then go back to social and political science, but I got hooked. So, that's it.

The world of philosophy is lucky that you got hooked! What do you take philosophy to be?

What is philosophy? Oh, well, as you know having listened to me a great deal in the past, I tend to just produce quotations now because anything I can think of to say, someone's usually said better. So, I've got my little file here, and I'm going to read it…

I don't think I can do better, to start, than Sellars, who said: “The aim of philosophy is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.”⁶ That was in 1963.

I would add, actually, something that Schopenhauer said because I've actually used it as the epigraph to two of my books, and that is (and I know this by heart): “Philosophy is world-wisdom; its problem is the world.”⁷ I like that because some people think philosophy is “up there” in the Ivory Tower, but really it's to do with reality in the world.

So, that's my definition.

I love that Sellars quote. Transitioning now to your work on consciousness: How did you begin thinking about the Hard Problem of Consciousness⁸?

I think everybody's bound to as soon as they start, or very soon. I certainly had always been a materialist in the philosophical sense that I've always thought that there was nothing supernatural and that everything in the universe was wholly physical. So, of course, I faced the standard problem: How could consciousness be physical?

I was also pretty interested in psychoanalysis — I read a lot of Freud in my final year at university — and in the theory of evolution, so I guess those things fed in.

But it hardly needs explanation why one gets interested in the so-called “Hard Problem of Consciousness” because it seems - although I think it's not - like such a big problem if you're someone like me who thinks everything is physical. How could consciousness possibly exist?

That leads nicely into my next question: Do you think the existence of Consciousness could be sensibly denied?

No.

…You probably need to ask me what I mean by “consciousness”.

What I mean by it is what I think you mean by it - and which is what most people who are talking about it today mean by it: the what-it's-like of everyday experience: color-experience, taste-experience, my experience of pain. But also the kind of overall experience you and I are having right now in talking to each other that is not just colors and sounds…There's the experience of understanding, etcetera.

So, I just mean everything it's like for us to live. I don't know how to put it better than Ned Block, lifting a quotation from [the great jazz musician] Louis Armstrong, when he was asked what jazz was: “If you've got to ask, you ain't never gonna know.” And I would say if somebody comes along and asks me what consciousness is, I'm going to say the same thing: “If you gotta ask, you ain't never gonna know.”

Given that, why did it become a common view among some philosophers of mind, and some scientists, that consciousness is an “illusion”?

Wait, you're triggering me!

I can give you a sociological explanation first. As [Bertrand] Russell said - “there are things that only philosophers with a long training in absurdity could succeed in believing.”

There's a nice quotation I also like from [the late psychologist and author of the popular book, Thinking Fast and Slow (2011)] Daniel Kahneman (and this is based on, as it were, experimental work): “We know that people can maintain an unshakable faith in any proposition, however absurd, when they are sustained by a community of like-minded believers.”

So that's, as it were, the sociological explanation.

But there is, of course, an explanation of how people came seriously to think this, and I guess it goes like this. First of all, they're materialists (like me): They think that everything in the universe is wholly physical. Let's call that Premise One. Premise Two: Consciousness isn't physical - couldn't be physical. The conclusion follows immediately: [Consciousness] doesn't exist.

But that's a bad argument, and what's wrong is the second premise.

So, my argument would go like this: 1) Everything in the world is wholly physical; 2) Consciousness certainly exists - there is nothing most certain than that consciousness exists; conclusion: Consciousness is wholly physical.

Next Step: So, the physical is not what we thought it was when we naturally thought that consciousness couldn't be physical. We've got to completely rethink what the physical is. So, that's how I would go.

And what is it that drives this prior conviction that physicalism must be true?

Really, when I say that I just mean that I'm a monist. I think there's only one kind of stuff.

I'm fully aware that when I say I'm a materialist, or a physicalist, people are hearing that word in a way that I do not mean because most people think that means that you think that they can't be conscious. So, I'm really saying there's only one fundamental kind of stuff.

Why do I call it matter? Well, because it's certainly the thing that physics is about. You might not think that was a good enough reason…

It's a good question because it makes me say that, really, I just think there's only one fundamental kind of stuff, and I think a lot of physics is true — but I know that consciousness exists! So, I have to accept that the stuff that physics is about also involves the existence of consciousness.

Is it on the basis of parsimony-type considerations that you prefer monism to dualism?

No, I think I'll put it like this: I think there's never been a single good argument for dualism. (So, I'm challenging you to say something!)

Okay, I can say something; I’m more sympathetic to dualism than you are. It seems like a thought is a different sort of thing from my table. So, there's a natural idea that there are two different sorts of things in reality: one mental and one physical.

Absolutely. But then I could say well, you know, taste is very different from vision. In fact, they’re just radically different. So, that would be the first reply.

But then I would say something like, “Well the fact that it seems very different to us human beings — why should that show that there are two fundamentally different kinds of stuff? Especially since — if you become a dualist — you immediately face the famous Problem of Interaction [i.e., the problem of accounting for how two radically different kinds of substances could causally interact], and I think it's widely agreed that there's never been any sort of remotely plausible account of that.⁹

Plus, there's a lot of basically empirical evidence about what we call the causal closure of the physical [this is the idea that universe is a closed physical system in which all effects have physical causes¹⁰]. If there were a non-material substance causally affecting a material substance, you would have to see cause or change starting up on the material or physical side that had no material or physical antecedents, and all the evidence is that we have never seen that.¹¹

I'm not saying it's not impossible, but that's a large empirical objection — and my general position is this that I would take causal interaction to be a sufficient condition of same-substancehood. That is, the mere fact that two things causally interact - and the dualists definitely want that - is enough for me to say, “It's best to think that the same kind of thing can have causal effects on itself in that way.”

These considerations have led you to defend panpsychism — and I want to give you a chance to set the record straight because I think that you're often misrepresented. What is panpsychism, according to Galen Strawson?

Alright, well, I could say it's the same thing as it is according to the Oxford English Dictionary, for a start: That is, it's a materialist view; it's the view that all matter has — involves — consciousness, in some way. David Lewis, the king, the hero, of analytic philosophy — he himself says (I've got a quotation somewhere, but I don't think I can access it) that anyone who thinks that materialism rules out panpsychism doesn't understand what materialism is. So that's the first point: I said already that I am a materialist, so I better be able to say that I could be a materialist and a panpsychist.

Let me give you what I see as the kind of the basic argument for panpsychism, if you're already a materialist or a monist. It goes like this. 1) Materialism is true — everything in the universe is wholly physical. 2) Consciousness certainly exists. (The first two premises are the same as before). 3) No radical emergence: Consciousness could not possibly arise from something that was in its fundamental nature wholly and utterly non-conscious. So, conclusion: Consciousness must in some way be already there at the bottom of things.

And that's pretty much the standard panpsychist view: That consciousness is already intrinsically part of the nature of physical stuff, from the start. (That’s not to say it’s anything like human consciousness.)

I think that all biological consciousness, or interesting consciousness, is evolved. I'm a complete naturalist on that front,

And how does panpsychism differ from other monist theories that don't deny the existence of consciousness, like neutral monism or idealism?

Well, I don't know what neutral monism means anymore. When it began, it was really above all some kind of epistemological thesis, and it changed into something else. So, I need someone to tell me exactly what it means before I answer that.

As for idealism: well, that's another hopelessly messed up term. Most people, when they use the word “idealism”, have [George] Berkeley in mind, and he says that there's a fundamental sense in which all the tables and chairs are just ideas in people's minds.

But I think that tables and chairs are really “out there”, and I think that the physics description of them as made of electrons, protons, and neutrons is cottoning onto something real. What I think about the stuff they're made of is what some people say is best thought of as simply energy; I think of that kind of energy as already intrinsically consciousness-involving.

One more thing I should say straightaway: You can think that — let’s just talk in terms of electrons — the electrons that make up the chair are (in the sort of fizzing energy that constitutes their being) somehow consciousness-involving without thinking that when you put them together into the shape of a chair you get a new, as it were, subject-of-experience.

It no no more follows from the fact that there's a sense in which the stuff the chair is made out of is consciousness than it follows that a football team is a conscious subject because it's made up of conscious subjects.

So the view is that whatever stuff is fundamental, consciousness is its nature. But it's not the case that every composite made up of that essential stuff has its own special brand of subjectivity.

Yeah, I would think that of larger things that are conscious, probably they're all biologically evolved. That would be my bet.

I guess maybe just to press that point a little bit further: Why are you so conservative there? Why are you resistant to the idea that all composites have their own perspective?

Well, because I think it seems grossly implausible! But, some people would say the whole view is grossly implausible! Yeah, that's right…

Well, now it's partly because I think that interesting animal consciousness biologically evolved for a purpose, and that wouldn't happen in the case of the chair.

And, empirically, I think it’s highly plausible that you need some incredibly complicated electrochemical shenanigans to get interesting consciousness — and chairs don't have it. My brain has it, and the molecular structure of a chair just doesn't have the kind of electrochemical goings-on of the sort that would be needed for interesting consciousness.

Just to stave off any potential confusion, your view is not that consciousness itself evolves: You don't think that consciousness can evolve.

Oh, that's important. No, no, that's the whole thing: consciousness had to be there already for it ever to come into existence at all.

Put it like this: Evolution needs something to work on. So, look: We've got these fantastic opposable thumbs to them that are meant to be what made us smart. Well, evolution had something to work on: It had matter and bodies. It couldn’t just make it out of nothing.

Your thought is that if consciousness is there so that natural selection has it as a resource, then it might create agents — because agents are able to solve all sorts of problems. And those agents are going to have a perspective that allows them to solve problems. But you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness.

Yeah, exactly. That's the key. You can find people throughout history holding the same view — but if you were to ask me, it's not as if I can give an argument for the view that consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. That is, as it were, a fundamental commitment.

If someone just comes along and says, “Well why not?”, I don't know there is an argument you can give against it. But we don't appeal to this notion of radical emergence such as would be the emergence of consciousness from the utterly non-conscious. We don't appeal to that anywhere else in science. So, methodological naturalism¹² tells us that we ought not appeal to it.

You could sort of shift the burden of argument; it's almost the burden of embarrassment, as it were: “Why are you so desperately anxious to say that consciousness isn't down there in the fundamental nature of the physical? What is it? Just a great big prejudice, or what? Because you create for yourself an enormous problem.”

People sometimes object that this all just depends on an intuition; they’ll say that you have this mere intuition that you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness — but (they’ll then say) we can't really trust our intuitions. What do you say to that?

I mean, where did they get the idea that matter is non-conscious? There is zero evidence for it, apart from intuition.

Now you've just triggered me, and I'm going to give you some quotations from some Nobel Prize winners for physics.

Okay, so first of all, Ernest Lawrence — you know, a famous guy — he says, I quote, “The mental and the material are two sides of the same thing.”

Louis de Broglie, you know, another Nobel Prize winner, says, “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one thing.”

Max Planck: “Consciousness is fundamental in the matter derivative from consciousness.”

Okay. So, weirdly, it's the philosophers who've gone truly crazy, in my view, but physicists are not with them on that. I mean, some of them probably are, but they’re much more sensible.

Since you're citing all these people from the past: Is panpsychism, as you understand it, a new view? Did you just come up with this in the 1990s?

Of course not. I mean, I'm not good on the history but there's a book by David Scribino called Panpsychism In the West which basically is just an amazing compilation of quotations, showing how persistent the idea is.

Russell is on the verge of it, though he's never going to say it outright…From his famous 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy: “Commonsense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects, and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes as a strange the truth about physical objects must be strange.”

Okay, more Russell fifteen years later — 1927: “We know nothing but the intrinsic quality of the physical world, and therefore we do not know whether it is or is not very different from that percept; percepts are mental occurrences.”

And here's another one I particularly like (still 1927): “If there is any intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is intrinsically quite unlike that of percepts, this is a reason for supposing that there is not this complete unlikeness.”

And, of course, there is a huge intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is quite unlike that of mental goings-on: It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

I would say that thoughtful commonsense supports panpsychism. I’m not saying there aren't problems with the theory. I'm sure you're going to mention one later. But it's the natural view.

Does panpsychism have anything to say about the potential for AI to be conscious?

I don't think for a moment that any current or foreseeable future machine could be conscious, and I obviously would resist the idea that something is conscious just in case it behaves in a sufficiently complex way. But I certainly wouldn't rule it out a priori. I just don't know.

I mean, one question would be whether the kind of electrochemical complexity you find in a computer could somehow be sufficiently of the same kind as the electrochemical complexity in our brains for there to be larger scale consciousness.

Certainly you can't rule it out a priori, so it's not the case that the panpsychist must take a particular position in that in that debate.

We've got to touch on the one the one perennial objection to panpsychism: The Combination Problem. How do you get a single, unified subject-of-experience if that subject-of-experience is composed of countless little conscious bits? To flesh that out further: My brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons, and each of those neurons is composed of yet smaller conscious bits. All of those little conscious bits somehow, together, produce me — and I experience myself as a single subject-of-experience. How could that be the case, on panpsychism?

I mean the objection was put famously by William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology — and yet even in that book he basically thinks that panpsychism must be right.

But yeah, the idea is you can't sum subjects; individual little blips or blobs of consciousness can't be fused into a single large conscious subject of the thought that you are.

I think it must happen, but I don't know how. The picture of all the little bits isn't really right. We have to operate with a field theoretic conception of the nature of the physical, as in relativistic Quantum Field Theory.

Now maybe there's a worry from the opposite direction: How do we get individuated subjects on this field picture, where it seems like the natural view might be that the universe is one big mind. But you and I experience ourselves as individuated subjects within that larger field. So, how does that work?

Yeah, well, again I’m not saying any of it is easy!

However, there's some sense in which there is one single thing, the universe — and this is what I call Thing Monism. It's not Stuff Monism, or Substance Monism, that says there's only one fundamental kind of stuff. Instead, it’s the view that there's ultimately only one thing, and I think that's probably the right thing to say about the universe.

I would have partly to appeal to evolution. Things have evolved that move around, and have to survive in an environment, and consciousness has been wholly driven by that. I would quote Orgel's Second Rule: It says, “Evolution is cleverer than you are”.

There shouldn't be any more problem about how there can be these seemingly isolated consciousnesses like yours and mine than there is about how there can be seemingly isolated things like tables and chairs and human beings. So, something along those lines.

Let me say again that it's not as if I know exactly what to say — and, in fact, I don't hold out any hope for, as it were, an interesting science flowing from this position. I don't think there's much that can be done. I just think that there are extremely powerful general metaphysical, philosophical reasons for thinking that panpsychism is, to paraphrase the economists, the least worst metaphysical view.

Do you have any other things we didn't get to on panpsychism?

I just think it's very important to stress the point that it really was a commonplace a hundred years ago that physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the physical. That just got lost in analytic philosophy after the 1960s, so from then on everybody seems to think they can know for sure that the physical is in no way conscious in its basic nature, and so we went backwards. We went seriously backwards. And we haven't yet fully recovered.

What do you think the future holds? Do you think things are getting better in this respect?

I have no idea. I mean, we live in a world with sort of daily proof of monstrous irrationality and people believing anything as long as others in their gang believe it, in the way that Kahneman describes. And I find that profoundly sad and depressing.

So, who knows. I hope that we'll make some progress in getting back to the commonplace of a hundred years ago.

It seems to me that maybe the conversation has opened up a little bit in the last 10-20 years?

Very much so. And, funnily enough, I suppose about 15 years ago when one of my students, Philip Goff,¹³ was applying for jobs, he would write to me asking, “Should I say on my application that I'm sympathetic to panpsychism?” And the view was you better not say that because you will not be taken seriously. I think we’ve moved on from there.

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That concludes our discussion of consciousness and panpsychism. Part 2 of the interview will appear soon!

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1. His books are fascinating, deeply engaging, and quite accessible. They include: Freedom and Belief (1986, 2nd edition 2010); The Secret Connexion: Realism, Causation and David Hume (1989); Mental Reality (1994, 2nd edition 2009); Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (2009); The Evident Connexion: Mind, Self and David Hume (2011, revised paperback edition 2013); Locke On Personal Identity (2011, revised paperback edition 2014), Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? (2006, revised and updated 2nd edition 2024), and Stuff, Quality, Structure: The Whole Go (2024).

2. That vision has returned and, indeed, has now taken the form of an active intention…more on that to come.

3. Save for one attempt at editing, which resulted in the bungled introduction that I intended to delete being moved to the end of the video…

4. Panpsychism, broadly, is the view that consciousness is an essential property of matter, such that “what-it’s-likeness” is built into the material, or physical, itself. Galen is perhaps the most important figure in the recent revival of panpsychism in contemporary philosophy.

5. Impossibilism is the view that free will, as ordinarily conceived (the “folk” notion of free will), is impossible.

6. This famous line is from Sellars’s highly influential article, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, published in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, Robert Colodny (ed.) (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962): 35–78.

7. This quote is from Schopenhauer’s The World As Will and Representation (1818).

8. The Hard Problem of Consciousness (a phrase coined by David Chalmers) — is the problem of accounting for why it’s like anything to be us — why we are not zombies (creatures with no first-person awareness). It’s generally understood be a particular problem for materialists, insofar as matter is (at least at present) not widely conceptualized as itself being conscious.

9. For the record, I would disagree with Galen here: dualists (and there are contemporary dualists!) are not generally impressed by this problem. My own sense is that those who think the causal interaction problem is decisive tend to be those who are already unsympathetic to dualism and inclined towards monism.

10. To my mind, the causal closure principle just amounts to an assertion of physicalism which no informed, convinced non-physicalist would see reason to affirm.

11. I do wonder what it would mean to “see this”. A dualist is apt to say that it’s seen — experienced immediately — every time a decision gives rise to an action.

12. Methodological naturalism is the according to which, when doing science, the scientist should proceed as if naturalism were true. It contrasts with metaphysical naturalism, which is the metaphysical thesis that there really are only natural kinds and properties (whatever those are).

13. Readers might be interested in Goff’s popular 2019 book defending panpsychism, Galileo’s Error. Galen penned a review of it which can be found here (interestingly, despite holding the same view, they do so on the basis of somewhat different considerations).