In this episode Trent interviews philosopher Josh Rasmussen on his research that shows how the phenomena of consciousness provides good evidence for the existence of God.
Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic answers.
Trent Horn:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic answers apologist and speaker Trent Horn. Joining me today is Dr. Josh Rasmussen. He is professor of philosophy at Azusa Pacific University. And we are here at the Capturing Christianity Conference. I know this looks like a basketball court, because it is a basketball court. It’s where everyone’s taking their lunch breaks for the conference. I gave some breakouts earlier, I had a debate last night. That was a ton of fun.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. That was awesome. Everybody loved it.
Trent Horn:
Well, here’s the thing. The thing that makes me most nervous doing a debate like that is not people in the audience, it’s not a debating, Ben. It’s a philosopher, like you, sitting in the front row.
Josh Rasmussen:
Critiquing. Oh yeah. I was analyzing line-by-line.
Trent Horn:
I was like, he knows all the fallacies. He knows all of them.
Josh Rasmussen:
I was judging you. I’m just kidding. It was wonderful. You did fantastic.
Trent Horn:
Fallacies of [inaudible 00:00:54] Oh, well, thank you. I really, I appreciate that.
Josh Rasmussen:
No, it’s true. Yeah. I would tell you if you didn’t.
Trent Horn:
Well. No, I appreciate that. And it was a lot of fun and it’s been really enjoyable to sit with you and have philosophical chats about a lot of different things. And so what I want to do today, so this conference, the theme is, By The Way God Exists. Cameron Bertuzzi, very nice slogan. I love it. And so we’ve had a lot of different arguments that were presented. I thought it’d be fun for you to talk about an argument that was not presented at this conference, but it’s something you’ve been working on. Well, you kind of presented a little bit on your breakout and that is the relationship between consciousness and God. The argument for consciousness or what is consciousness, how it relates to who we are, what God is, tell us more about that.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. So one thing I’ve been thinking a lot about and researching is the nature of consciousness and also the origin of consciousness. In my breakout, I focus in on the nature of consciousness and I made the argument that thinking, feeling, desiring. Those things I don’t think those are analyzable purely in terms of third-person geometric material states. So I think there’s more to you than just matter.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So say that I am having the experience of interviewing you, I can see you, you’re holding the microphone, we’re here in the gym, that experience. Because we can think, for example, if there was just space, time, matter, and energy, we could reconstruct it in a comprehensive description.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah, right.
Trent Horn:
Like where all the particles are. Like, if I was detailed enough, I could re-describe this gym around us.
Josh Rasmussen:
We could duplicate you, atom for atom, we could duplicate all of this situation.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. We could re-describe it and not lose any of the essence, except for, even if you describe all my neurons, everything that’s physical, it’s not consciousness though.
Josh Rasmussen:
I’m not going to figure out what it’s like to be you, thinking about me, just by looking at your brain. So I would have to still ask you, right? Like, what’s it like to be you thinking about me? Do you like me? Now, maybe there’s some correlations between the brain states that people have identified as connecting to desire states. But that only happens because they ask the person.
Trent Horn:
So it’s sort of like, what was it? Thomas Nagle’s essay.
Josh Rasmussen:
What it’s like to be a bat. Or what it’s like to be something.
Trent Horn:
What it’s like to be a bat.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So that, that’s that’s one question is like, what’s the nature of consciousness. And then the second question is, should I be talking to you guys?
Trent Horn:
We can talk to each other. You guys are all watching, you know?
Josh Rasmussen:
You’re all in.
Trent Horn:
Well, what’s funny actually about consciousness when I was a little kid, I think I was like six years old, and I asked my mom, “Mom, what is it like to get older?” And it was funny. And she said to me, we were in the drive-through at McDonald’s, I have wonderful parents, no, taking your kids to McDonald’s is a fun thing. That was back when they had fries, dipped in beef tallow, back in the early nineties, and they replaced it. Never [crosstalk 00:03:52] the same and the good Happy Meal toys. But she said, “Well, Trent, you get older on the outside, but the way you see things is still the same.” And I thought that was a very profound and it’s always just kind of stuck with me. And I feel like-
Josh Rasmussen:
Even the idea that there’s a you. That’s the same you. Even while you change physically and even psychologically, there’s something else, the one who has the physical properties, the one that has the mental properties, the you. Right?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What is that? So that’s the thing you’re trying to answer.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. So that’s the kind of the first stage, right? Like what is it? And one of my conclusions is, well, whatever it is, it’s like what you said, you’re not going to be able just to describe matter in motion. And then that is not enough to describe all of you. That’s not going to include you.
Trent Horn:
Now there’s some people who do try to do this. Maybe you can speak to this a little. There is a philosopher couple, Paul and Patricia Churchland. And they, it’s interesting, they’ve endorsed a view called eliminative materialism-
Josh Rasmussen:
Materialism. Right.
Trent Horn:
Which is the idea that, Josh, just don’t worry about your consciousness because it’s basically just an illusion. It’s like folk psychology.
Josh Rasmussen:
And even illusions aren’t real, right? If you think about an illusion in terms of an experience of something that doesn’t match reality. There’s no experiences, right. All there are, are brain states and matter in third person describable [crosstalk 00:05:16]
Trent Horn:
So from their perspective, there can only be material states described by the laws of physics. So what we think of as consciousness can’t really exist, even though it sure seems like it’s there.
Josh Rasmussen:
Well so they have a very interesting project and it’s to explain all of our talk and all of our thinking about consciousness, in scientific terms. And so I think it’s kind of an ambitious, sort of, project of science, really.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. Like I think once they gave an example that where you would say, I have a headache, they just say, “Oh, the blood vessels in my brain are inflamed right now.” As a way to just like catch yourself from doing that.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Right. And so there is that option to eliminate the consciousness. My own view is that you can witness consciousness through introspection. People debate whether introspection is a reliable tool, but I would argue that without introspection you actually won’t be able to do science. Because science is based on observations and in order to know that you’ve made observations, you have to use introspection to be aware of your own sense of things. Otherwise, how would you know that you’ve made an observation?
Trent Horn:
Do you think sometimes when people are very attuned, they want this realist view of reality, science is very predictive. So it’s got that going for it to make technology and things like that-
Josh Rasmussen:
It works. Science works.
Trent Horn:
Science works. But it seems like we forget the role of the scientist in all of this and that’s where consciousness would come in.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Right. I think that it’s kind of strange if a scientist comes to believe that there are no scientists.
Trent Horn:
Right.
Josh Rasmussen:
Right. I mean, I did meet a philosopher who expressed skepticism about the real existence of persons.
Trent Horn:
Wow.
Josh Rasmussen:
And this actually leads to the second stage of my research, which is not just about the nature of consciousness, but its origin.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay.
Josh Rasmussen:
And in my friend’s words, he thought that getting conscious beings that have that first person self, out of a sea of third person particles in motion, was just impossible. And so that’s the hard problem of consciousness as you know.
Trent Horn:
Right. Yeah. So how do you get for the fact that we know brains exist. Though, what’s interesting here is there’s always, how do we know that? It seems like we do introspection on data, since data-
Josh Rasmussen:
We posit brains to explain our experiences. We don’t posit our experiences to explain our brains. That’s where I think the sort of the elimintavist sometimes just has it backwards. Because the elimintavist takes for granted the existence of brains. But then if anything’s going to be taken for granted, it’s what we experienced in our own consciousness. Like I’ve never seen my brain. Have you seen your brain?
Trent Horn:
No. I, well-
Josh Rasmussen:
How do you know you have a brain?
Trent Horn:
Yeah. All I can say is, I mean maybe on a medical chart, I saw somebody try to convince me it was a picture of my brain.
Josh Rasmussen:
A picture. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
But to see my own brain. I think the only time that… I mean, it’s possible if someone were in surgery, you could put up a mirror and maybe they could see a bit. Even there, I could imagine faking that with somebody.
Josh Rasmussen:
Right. Now, guys, we’re not really skeptical of brains here. Right?
Trent Horn:
Right. But it’s interesting-
Josh Rasmussen:
But the point is, is that consciousness, if anything, is clearer.
Trent Horn:
It’s like we’re making that inference. It’s like when I get a letter from my Nigerian prince friend telling me that I have a $50 billion fortune waiting, it’s like, oh, well it’s certainly out there. No, the only thing I’m sure of is I have the letter in my hand. So it seems like with brains, it’s like, well, I have this letter in my head telling me I have this wonderful prize, this brain. And I know the letter is there and I just happen to really trust the letter. It’s not like the Nigerian sales. But that trust is something that was built over time or even an assumption. So yeah. But I just think this is so-
Josh Rasmussen:
I love that metaphor. That’s nice.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. See, that’s the great thing. That’s what philosopher’s work with, it’s just like, what’s your tool bag. I have these metaphors, thought experiments to help understand.
Josh Rasmussen:
Organize the concepts. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. So the idea is then so consciousness, so we agree that it’s a real thing, and it is distinct from the brain, the mind and the brain are not the same thing. The introspection of self is real. Why do we have that in a world that seems to just be material?
Josh Rasmussen:
No. So I want to be very careful here. So I do think consciousness is not reduceable to the brain, but when you say the mind and the brain aren’t the same. The reason why I want to be careful here, is because some people eliminate consciousness and some people eliminate brains.
Trent Horn:
Like substance doulas?
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Or reduce brains to mental phenomenon.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay.
Josh Rasmussen:
And so I actually feel more confident that consciousness is real, than that brains aren’t themselves fundamentally reducible to aspects of consciousness themselves. So that’s why I want to be very careful here. That really my view minimally would be that I’m one being, and I have different aspects, including consciousness. Right. And then this comes to your question still, right? Like whether there are brains, whatever the nature of brains, there is consciousness. And so how does that exist?
Trent Horn:
So we have this gap though, the physical brain, and then the immaterial reality of consciousness arising. How could we use this to point towards, let’s say the existence of God without committing a kind of God of the gaps fallacy here in saying like, I don’t know how the brain makes consciousness, so God must be doing it. Is there a way that’s, maybe it’s not a proof, but it’s persuasive to say this points towards God being some kind of ultimate source of our consciousness.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. So I think there’s kind of two general strategies. One, we already kind of pointed to it when I talked about how you can turn mindless matter into a conscious being. Like think about this thing here. I won’t get too far from the mic, but like, is this thing producing thoughts?
Trent Horn:
The windscreen of your mic, I’m assuming it does not.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. And probably it couldn’t, right? The hard problem of consciousness is that it looks like this material is the wrong kind of material to explain consciousness. And what’s true of this third person material, is true of any different arrangement, because differences in arrangement, aren’t relevant to explain first-person experiences.
Trent Horn:
Right. Ultimately, that windscreen of the microphone and the brain at the most fundamental level are the same kinds of like quarks and electrons.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Exactly. It’s the same kind of thing.
Trent Horn:
[crosstalk 00:11:28].
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Yeah. So that would be one strategy, is to argue from the hard problem or from the construction problem. It’d basically be to accept Alexander Rosenberg, who’s a philosopher of physics, his premise that from physics, you can’t get thoughts.
Trent Horn:
Yes. He’s the author of The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, and he says that intentionality, the idea that something… How could something about Antarctica, frozen Antarctica, be in my 98 degree brain cells, in my head.
Josh Rasmussen:
I love that.
Trent Horn:
There are a lot of properties my brain cells could have, they could have the property of having an electrical current, they could have the property of being composed of carbon based matter. But the property of about Antarctica seems totally different from that. So Rosenberg says, well, it just doesn’t have that property. But I can, I’m doing it right now, Alex, I’m thinking about Antarctica.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Well, it’s interesting because you might think, well maybe your brain can somehow represent Antarctica. Like a map can represent things. Right? But the problem there is that representation itself seems to depend on, or presuppose, this more basic notion of aboutness or thoughts. So like in a map case, you have a key, and the key tells you which things stand for which things. Well, how do you know how to interpret that key? There has to already be a mind that assigns the meaning.
Trent Horn:
Right. And I think it gets even worse. Because sometimes when I think of like qualia or… Jargon talk. Jargon alert for [crosstalk 00:12:54].
Josh Rasmussen:
What it’s like.
Trent Horn:
Yeah. What things are like. I love how philosophy is like, well, we need a word to say what things are like, qualia. Qualia. How about qualia? Did you just cough into the microphone at the philosophers conference and they just had to run with it.
Josh Rasmussen:
That’s hilarious.
Trent Horn:
It’s like where they come up with these things. Quarks actually I think it comes from… Who’s the author of Ulysses? James Joyce. He wrote a poem and there’s a line in Ulysses, or a poem James Joyce wrote, and it was “Three Quarks for Muster Mark.” And then some physicists was like, that’s a good, weird word for this weird particle. We’ll call them quarks. But it gets weirder I think, it’s not just like I represent an image of Antarctica. Like I feel like I can have a conscious recollection of the feeling of putting an ice cube on my tongue. And so not just a mental image, but I’m really recalling what that sensory perception was like.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Trent Horn:
That gets even harder for the aboutness of a sensory perception to just some kind of material thing in my brain.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. And the thought isn’t that it’s not integrated into a brain. It’s just that it’s different from, and not explained just in terms of the brain. So the first strategy then is the construction problem. How do you construct first person consciousness from mindless matter? The second strategy is kind of more modest. And I think this might even be kind of more effective in conversation, is to think in terms of predictive success. So you just ask, if fundamental reality has conscious capacity or people building resources, okay. If it’s a supreme being right, that would successfully predict that reality can unfold to produce conscious beings like us.
Trent Horn:
Right. So we think, okay, if the ultimate foundation of reality are quarks, that would predict other quarks or fundamental particles. Great. And so we see that. But if the ultimate foundation of reality is a being with causal power, that has intentions that can bring about conscious states and be aware, then it has causal power and can bring about these things, we would expect, at the very least, you would expect other observers, if not conscious observers, and physical things for them to interact with.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. It predicts the materials for consciousness. It predicts that there’s a mind that can produce that, if you have the fundamental physics, quarks [inaudible 00:15:14] These things don’t by themselves… Even if in principle, they could produce consciousness, even if we could overcome that heart problem, still, they don’t predict in their own rights consciousness.
Trent Horn:
Right. Well, this gets back to another issue in philosophy about philosophical zombies or P-zombies. This idea that, well, perhaps you could have, let’s call it, we have world… I love a philosopher talk, it’s fun being with another philosopher because we can joke about other philosophers. You’re the real philosopher because you have a PhD, I’m just having fun with this, but you can have world one and then world prime, which is a physical copy of our world, that lacks consciousness. And it seems like you could have that because it’s physically identical. Could you have that and just the laws of physics allows things to continue and there’s just nothing going on. [crosstalk 00:16:09]
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Well, right. I’ve created computer programs to simulate evolution and those programs never produced conscious beings. Again, even if it’s possible in principle, that doesn’t mean it’s predicted or remotely probable. Right. And so if it’s improbable on mindless matter to get consciousness, but more probable on theism to get consciousness, then consciousness is evidence [inaudible 00:16:34] … This is kind of a modest argument, evidence four points to Theism.
Trent Horn:
The fact that consciousness exists, consciousness exists.
Josh Rasmussen:
Points to. It’s a clue.
Trent Horn:
Right. It is more likely if God exists and it would be something we would not expect if there were a God, but if God does exist… Sorry, consciousness is surprising on atheism, but expected on Theism.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. At least it’s more surprising on atheism, then on Theism, it seems to be.
Trent Horn:
More surprising. Yeah. It would still be a surprising thing, but it’s far more surprising. Well, great. Well, hey, can you point our listeners, you have a great new book out. What I love about your work is you take all the philosophical hottey tottey talk and break it down for people to really, to understand. So can you tell people about your recent book and where they can get that and learn more about what you do?
Josh Rasmussen:
Okay. Yeah. So, well, How Reason Can Lead to God, that one’s published and out and people can get that. The book I’m working on is not out yet, but it’s on consciousness.
Trent Horn:
Ah, okay.
Josh Rasmussen:
So they can’t get that yet, but it’s forthcoming.
Trent Horn:
So right now it only exists right here.
Josh Rasmussen:
Well it exists on paper.
Trent Horn:
Oh, okay.
Josh Rasmussen:
The draft is done, but it just not yet out into the bookshelves.
Trent Horn:
I see.
Josh Rasmussen:
Right. But people can get more resources. I have this worldview design training center and it’s just go to worldview-design.com and you can get access to that or send me an email for more information about that. And that’s where you can get lots of resources. And there’s lots of people in there, Christian philosophers, and other philosophers, and apologists in there thinking about these questions. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
Okay. So that book will come out soon. For now though, I also recommend people get your great book, How Reason Can Lead to God.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. That one. Yeah.
Trent Horn:
All right. Well, thank you guys so much. Be sure to check out Josh’s work. I’ll leave some descriptions in the link. Sorry. Some links in the description of the video below and hey, thanks for stopping by The Council of Trent.
Josh Rasmussen:
Yeah. Thank you. This is awesome. Thank you.
Trent Horn:
I’d love to have you back on. And thank you guys for watching and I hope you all have a very blessed day.
If you liked today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit Trent Horn podcast.com.