Philip Goff: Consciousness, Mysticism, and God

Transcripts are produced by Sofer.AI and lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections. 

David Bashevkin: Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore a different topic balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host David Bashevkin and this month we’re continuing our exploration of Jewish mysticism. Thank you so much to our sponsors at SHARE with Rabbi Benji Levy and our dear friends Michael and Megan Englander. Be sure to check out Benji’s latest podcast series, our latest in the series, 18 Questions.

This season we’re not asking 40 Israeli thinkers, we are asking 40 Jewish mystics, so be sure to check that out wherever you get your local podcast. This podcast is part of the larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18Forty.org, that’s one eight f o r t y dot org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. Most works on meditation begin where they ask you to notice your thoughts. We usually do not spend that much time noticing what we are thinking or what our thoughts are.

We spend a lot more time reacting to those thoughts: the things that people remind us of or our triggers or the things that make us feel exhausted, fatigued, excited, inspired, energized. We don’t really spend time just noticing the thoughts. And if you still your mind and you quiet yourself and you close your eyes and you just look at what pops up in your mind, you start to get a flow for how your thinking almost presents itself. And there’s a moment, where if you’ve ever spent meditating, where you begin to wonder like where do these thoughts come from? Where do you actually confront the self, the thinker? Because we spend most of our time, we have access to our thoughts, but so to speak, the self behind the thoughts is the one thing that we don’t actually have access to.

We don’t ever experience our own self essentially. We experience what our self thinks of, we experience memories and different slices of time, but the totality of self kind of exists beyond any individual thought. And it was kind of thoughts like this that would almost have me think from a very young age where the self lies. I have always kind of described myself as being hyper-conscious.

It was very easy for me to become aware of my own conscious experience, my own stream of thought. You almost begin to notice how strange it is, like the way our perspective is framed and how we see the world. I can see the frames of my glasses, etcetera, etcetera. And in many ways the sensation of consciousness itself, the sensation of being alive, meaning not any individual thought but the sensation of existence itself is something that is so hard to describe.

It envelops all of our existence, but it is the most essential way in which we experience ourselves and the world. It is always through the prism of self. And that’s why I always felt a difficulty of sorts understanding the world from a purely scientific lens, looking at the world exclusively through the way that the world can only be described through science which essentially erases any of my own experienced self-subjectivity. When you zoom out on a really macro level, the insignificance of our own lives, the insignificance of our own experience, or even the tangible, like how real is what I’m even experiencing.

These questions can come up and you begin to question self and the world. And very often this is the place where people search for religiosity and they search for God. When I began this search, this search of trying to understand what consciousness even is, yes, I turned to Chassidus, I turned to the works of Rav Tzadok of Lublin, a Chassidic thinker who I think really gives language to the experience of existence and being alive and how thinking works. But I also became more drawn to the science of consciousness, of how is this explained without God.

How do we make sense of existence, of where we are actually living, what self, the experience of self really is, the nature of existence itself? I was always curious, meaning to understand what God is positing. And I always, when people come to speak with me about religious life or theology and try to talk to me about God, I say it’s much easier for me to explain a worldview of a world without God, that the world is entirely an accident and a really atheistic worldview, but in that worldview without God I have a very hard time explaining. Meaning and really giving any significance to my own experience, to the phenomenology of existence itself, what it feels like to be alive, all of that is erased, which is why so much of religious life and particularly Judaism is so counter-intuitive to science. I mean the whole notion of following halakha as if the first question anybody asks, “Does God really care?” and fill in the blank of any halakhic, any formal Jewish obligation.

Does God really care which shoe I put on first, or whether or not I flip on a light switch on Shabbos? And I’ve always really thought, and it helps me make sense of what halakha, what Jewish law is actually trying to do, it is actually the reminder that, yes, it is possible, that does matter. The interiority of your life, the details of your behaviors are significant, which I’ve always intuitively felt, but without God I’ve always struggled with language to even capture it, and genuinely so, it’s not for lack of trying. And that is why I am so excited for today’s conversation, which is really a conversation that I’m proud to say is so unique to what we are trying to build and explore on 18Forty. Today’s conversation is with a philosopher named Philip Goff, who you may or may not have heard of.

Believe it or not, it’s fair to say he may be our most famous guest that we have ever had. He is not famous in all circles, but he is a former guest on the Joe Rogan podcast, he’s been seen by millions and millions. And what I find so fascinating about him, and dare I say whatever small acquaintanceship, little premature to call it a friendship that we’ve developed, is that he takes these questions of self, consciousness, and now even God, extremely seriously. Philip is not Jewish, and he has an incredible journey where he began as a scholar of consciousness exploring how do we describe what consciousness is, why do we experience the world this way, and his studies in consciousness led him to a confrontation with God.

He did not really have a more compelling way to explain the world, and the fact that a very serious world-renowned philosopher is taking questions of God and mysticism seriously is something that I don’t take for granted and something that I continually throughout the conversation thank him for, because we live in a time, and this bothers me deeply, where we seem to be able to take literally everything seriously except God and religion: sports, politics, pop culture—and I take all, I’m not saying not to take these things seriously, maybe not politics, but everything else—I mean definitely take them seriously, enjoy, enjoy sports and all this stuff. But it fascinates me that we are living in a time where those underlying questions, what is the nature of existence, these basic questions, why is there something rather than nothing, and taking that question seriously, not as like a cute little thought experiment, not as like an interesting question you posit to your 11th-grade friends in the basement of your friend’s basement while it’s billowing with smoke, but taking it seriously as these are the most important questions. And what we did, which I think is so quintessentially and uniquely 18Forty, is midway through the conversation I invited our mutual friend of sorts, acquaintance of sorts, Rabbi Eli Rubin. Philip and Eli have been in touch because of Philip’s forthcoming book, which is going to be dealing more explicitly with mysticism, but our conversation, which begins with his approach to consciousness, his understanding of existence, and ultimately what drew him to spirituality and religious thinking, is complemented so beautifully with the thought and reflections of Eli Rubin, who joins us at the end of the conversation and we have some dialogue between them.

So this is really an absolute privilege and pleasure, and in my mind this is the exact kind of conversations 1840 was uniquely designed to facilitate: a world-renowned philosopher in conversation with a gifted and committed Hasid who also happens to have a PhD of his own on the topic of Tzimtzum. Eli Rubin, I should mention his book called Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity, it happens to be on sale right now, I think you can get it 40% off, but check that out online. And it is really my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce our conversation with Philip Goff. It is really my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce a guest whose books I have been enamored with on consciousness and really some fascinating studies about the world and the purpose of the world.

It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce the incredible author and scientist Philip Goff.

Philip Goff: Oh, thank you very much, David, for that very, very flattering introduction. I’m really looking forward to chatting to you.

David Bashevkin: I wanted to begin with your book about the new science of consciousness because I think so many of the ideas that you discuss are so important regardless of your religious background.

Backgrounds or religious faith. And you wrote a book called Galileo’s Error, which is a brilliant title for a book because it’s the perfect introduction to just ask, explain to me, what was Galileo’s error? Let’s start with the foundational error that really so much of science is built on. What are you referring to in this book, Galileo’s Error?

Philip Goff: Yeah, I think we’re not even at first base with consciousness until we understand what a unique problem it is and why we have a problem with it. And I think it’s to do with how we designed science 400 years ago, or one person in particular, the father of modern science, Galileo, and this is really what I’m trying to get to the core of in this book.

So for the past 400 years, science has aimed at a completely objective description of reality, a description that could be understood by anybody, whatever their life experience. If we had aliens visit from another planet, maybe they’d have very different sense organs, maybe they wouldn’t understand our art or our music, but if they were intelligent enough to understand mathematics, they could understand our physics, right? Completely objective. The problem is, consciousness is inherently subjective. Your consciousness is what it’s like to be you.

You can’t understand somebody’s consciousness unless you can adopt their perspective, see out of their eyes, hear out of their ears. So just to take a vivid example to make the point, if you’ve got a blind-from-birth neuroscientist, no matter how much they learn about objective physical processes in the brain, they’ll never understand what it’s like to see red because they can’t adopt the perspective of a sighted person. Consciousness is in that sense subjective. So there’s this inherent clash between the aspiration of science to give a completely objective description of reality and the nature of consciousness that’s subjective.

As long as you’re working with a purely objective description, you’ll just leave out consciousness. Now, Galileo understood this from the start. It sounds like I’m being nasty to him saying Galileo’s error, but you’re

David Bashevkin: blaming it all on Galileo.

Philip Goff: I guess it is, in some ways, bit of a provocative title.

But I think he understood this. His great innovation, I mean, he had many great innovations, he was the first person to think we could take telescopes and point them at the sky, you know? But he was also a great philosopher. Now, he wanted, his great philosophical innovation was he wanted science to be purely mathematical, to use the purely objective language of mathematics. For the first time in history, we take it for granted now, but this was a revolutionary idea.

But he understood quite well, here we get into the punchline now, that you can’t capture consciousness, subjective consciousness, in this purely objective language of mathematics.

David Bashevkin: The things you can capture, meaning, it’s almost understood in reverse, the things that Galileo kind of boiled down, the classification of all matter was size, shape, location, and motion. Exactly. Exactly.

And when you boil everything down to those four qualities, you’ll be able to describe those four categories really precisely through math, but you’re going to be missing kind of the very nature of what it feels like to be alive, exactly, which is strangely subjective. Yeah, this is where we’re getting closer to what we now call the hard problem of consciousness. And I want to set this up for you because why is consciousness different than let’s say describing color? You used an analogy of describing color to somebody who is blind, yet there kind of are ways to mathematically express color, I guess. You might not get the beauty or the sensation, but there are ways to mathematically express it.

Why is consciousness any different? Why is consciousness a problem at all? I kind of express consciousness, I figured out through, I guess, ways of looking at brain waves, maybe you look at MRI machines, we know that there’s this lumpy matter in our brain, the same way that we know the eye is processing color, we know there’s a lumpy piece of brain in our skull that is processing the entire world. So someone who’s thinking about this for the first time, why is it that consciousness, the problem of explaining the need for consciousness, is so different than any other phenomenon that we have in the world?

Philip Goff: Yeah, so maybe come back to our blind-from-birth neuroscientist, right? You could give them all the objective information about the electrochemical signaling, the brain processes that go on when someone sees color, but there’ll always be something they’re missing out, what it’s like to see red, the redness of a red experience if you like, that deep red you experience as you watch the setting sun. In fact, I mean, I talk in my book Norby, he’s passed away now, but he was a very distinguished color scientist, but he wasn’t completely blind, but he had cones missing from his eyes, he could only see black and white and shades of grey. And he talked vividly about this.

He said, there are things I can get about color experience, like you can capture some things in mathematics. You can divide color space into a three-dimensional space of hue, saturation, and brightness, right? And you can map out all the colors. And he said, I can get that kind of abstract structure, but I can’t fill in the redness and the blueness, the qualities that fill out that structure. He said he tried to play with it from his understanding of sound, you know, we could swap brightness for volume and he gets some idea, but you’re missing out those qualities.

And so as long as you’re just working with a purely mathematical description of things, you will just leave out these subjective qualities that fill our experience: the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. So what did Galileo do? He took them out of science. This was what he did. He divided reality into two.

He said, right, look, take all the qualities, the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes. We can’t capture them in mathematics. They’re in the soul, they’re outside of science. Once we’ve got them out of the way, once we’ve got consciousness out of the way,

David Bashevkin: now we can focus on the real stuff.

Philip Goff: We can describe everything else with this wonderful objective quantitative language of mathematics, as you say: size, shape, location, motion. Now that was a good move. It sounds like I’m being nasty to Galileo, but that was a good move. It’s gone very, very well.

We’ve got incredible technology. But now we’re at a phase of history where people think, oh, it’s gone so well, it’s the complete truth. It can explain consciousness. And I think if Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear this, he’d say, well, of course it’s gone well because I designed it to exclude consciousness.

You know, Galileo divided reality in two, put consciousness on one side and told scientists to focus on the other side. So now if we want to deal with consciousness, we need to find a way of bringing together what Galileo separated: the subjective and the objective.

David Bashevkin: My next question, and your journey and your thought, it’s just so fascinating, but I think we need one more piece, which is not just putting all the blame on Galileo, but maybe the piece that we need to introduce is why isn’t a purely materialist view, meaning consciousness, yeah, it’s interesting, and I guess I would love it if math was able to capture it, but aw shucks, you know, it’s not part of the mathematical system. But why are we still left with a problem vis-à-vis understanding consciousness? Can’t we just attribute all of it like we have this really complex set of neurons and material called the brain and this is what the brain produces? And your fingers can produce touch and our brain produces consciousness.

So it’s kind of open-shut, it’s no different than any other thing that we experience in the world. A purely materialist to say, look, the brain is complex and it’s able to create this really complex interesting phenomena that we call consciousness. Why for you, and I know there are those who kind of wave away the question, there is no hard problem of consciousness, it’s all just kind of comes down to the complexity of the brain, why would you say you are not satisfied with that approach?

Philip Goff: Yeah, I wonder how much people build in when they, as you just described, they people say the brain produces consciousness, and you almost get this idea like it’s some extra thing that the brain sort of magics into existence. And maybe that would be a view I’d be more open to.

I wouldn’t like it as much as panpsychism, but maybe there’s just this new magic that arises. Actually, that sounds close to what Galileo thought. But actually the physicalist view that I oppose, which is still I guess the standard scientific view, is not that the brain produces consciousness. All there is is electrochemical signaling.

All there is is patterns of neural firings, this kind of activity which can be described in this purely objective mathematical causal terms. And I think if your description of reality is just purely framed in those terms, you’re just leaving out the subjective qualities of experience. You’ve just not included them. We can see that because your blind-from-birth scientist can know all the electrochemical signaling.

Yeah, I get all that, but they don’t know the quality of a red experience. That’s just left out of the story. So basically, I mean the story, the wonderful, I’m fascinated and in awe and work with brain scientists, absolutely wonderful what we’ve learned about the brain, we’ve still got a lot to learn, I think people overestimate actually how much we know, but it’s we’ve made fascinating progress. But that whole story of electrochemical signaling, it just leaves out these subjective qualities: the colors, the sounds, the smells, the tastes that fill every second of our waking experience.

It just ignores them. And I mean, you know, some people now are saying well maybe they don’t exist. But nothing seems more evident than the qualities. the qualities that characterize every second of waking life.

David Bashevkin: You know, I think a lot about experiences like love, or even the experience of theodicy, of witnessing suffering, where someone sees suffering and I know you’ve written about this as being kind of the most compelling question to religious life. But I’ve always found it fascinating that when we witness suffering, we feel this kind of like inherent need for it to be meaningful. And in the materialist view, it should kind of come a little bit more naturally to us to diminish kind of the entirety of our lives to just the chemical processes. Like when I am attracted to someone, we’re just as much a part and at mercy of the world as watching National Geographic or, you know, a piece of stardust in the abyss.

Which is why just my own experience of life never felt purely materialist. I’m obviously biased against it, but I always was frustrated, so why am I biased against it? Why are we kind of programmed to find that meaning? To me, it was always like kind of an indication even the way that I viewed myself. There’s this wonderful author that I’m not sure if you’ve ever read his stuff, his name is Christian Wiman, and he has this lovely book called My Bright Abyss. And he has this line in there that I just want to share with you because it relates a lot to what you write about, but he writes as follows.

He also, he began as an atheist and he found some semblance of faith later, where he says to admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. And I feel like the materialist view kind of does lessen the mystery of enduring human love, meaning there is no such thing as enduring human love, that’s just a construct or what people may attribute to certain feelings, but there’s no real, I guess, like is the word ontological reality to love, to use a fancy term that many of my listeners will bristle at?

Philip Goff: I mean there are different ways of basing your opposition or your concerns with the physicalist materialist worldview. I’m very open, as I’ve written in my more recent work, to taking mystical experiences seriously, where people have a profound sense of a greater reality at the core of things, maybe that they’re deeply unified with that deeper reality, as we find in the mystical traditions of kabbalah in the Judaic case, and we find analogues in Islam and Christianity. I’m very open to taking these experiences seriously, I still think probably the best starting point for thinking about these experiences is the great William James’s chapter on it in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The great 19th century psychologist and philosopher, James is an absolute hero of mine. You read him now and he’s just still feels like such a fresh contemporary thinker.

David Bashevkin: Philip, it’s so funny you’re mentioning William James now because the quote that I just said from Wiman, I actually published it in a chapter in my book, the name of the chapter is Jonah and the Varieties of Religious Motivation. 

It was a tribute to James, who I also love, but please continue.

Philip Goff: Most of it’s a very interesting psychological study of these experiences, but at the end, James says, would it be rational to trust these experiences? You know, if they seem to be putting you in touch with this greater reality, can we trust that? And then a lot of people say, no, no, it’s just some chemicals in your brain doing something funny. But James says, well, that seems to apply a kind of double standard. We all think it’s okay to trust your ordinary sensory experiences, we couldn’t do science without it, and you know, they could be a delusion, we could be in the matrix, it could be all a dream, we can’t get outside your consciousness to check, but we think it’s okay to just trust them.

If it’s okay to trust your ordinary experiences, why can’t the mystic trust their mystical experiences, which seem more real to them than ordinary experiences? It’s a sort of double standard. So, yeah, I’m very open to thinking about those kind of experience-based concerns with a physicalist worldview. But actually, I think there’s a more pressing worry just with, forget the spiritual, forget the grand transcendent stuff, just with ordinary consciousness, feeling pain, seeing color. I mean, another way to get at this, you know, it’s very hard to establish scientifically whether fish feel pain, whether snails feel pain, because whatever you learn about their physical processes, the physical goings-on, it just is silent on whether it has feelings or not.

It could just be a mechanism, that’s the only information you get from physical science is something consistent with it just being a mechanism.

David Bashevkin: Meaning we don’t know what it feels like to be a snail or what it feels like, famously, to be a bat, you know? Yeah, that’s the famous article.

Philip Goff: Nagel’s famous example. Or if there is anything, you know, if aliens came and saw us and they’re very different to us, they might not know whether we’re conscious.

They could be just complicated mechanisms. We only know about consciousness from the inside, right, by being conscious, by being just directly aware of our feelings and experiences. So there are just these two different ways of knowing about the world, the sort of objective mathematical story and the private reality of consciousness we know from the inside. Now Galileo wisely separated them out.

But at some point we need to bring them back together. So I don’t actually like this phrase the hard problem. I mean, I’m a huge fan of David Chalmers who came up with it. He was very much a mentor and a friend for me.

David Bashevkin: David Chalmers is the writer who studied consciousness and he was a student of my introduction to this, which is really the writings of Douglas Hofstadter who wrote a bunch of books on consciousness, but kind of the intro to kind of this meta-thinking, thinking about thinking, is his book \which was really transformative for me. And he was Chalmers’ teacher, and Chalmers is the one who came up with this language called the hard problem of consciousness. Why don’t you like that?

Philip Goff: Yeah, I think it gives people the impression now this isn’t what Chalmers intended and if you read into the details, this is not what he means, but I think this is how people hear it. They hear it as: okay, we start with the physical, we start with the electrochemical signaling, how do you get consciousness out of that? But that’s privileging a certain perspective, because well, we haven’t got to it yet but the panpsychist view I prefer turns that upside down.

It doesn’t start with the physical and try and get consciousness out. It does it the other way around. It starts with consciousness and tries to get the physical out. So I sort of think if you state the hard problem, it gets people already thinking we’ve got to take the physicalist approach.

Well, it’s exactly that, really. It turns it upside down. So the last 400 years have been premised on separating out the subjective and the objective. How do you bring them back together? The panpsychist approach says, you know, you can’t explain the subjective in terms of the objective, but you can do it the other way around.

So well, we could get into that, but I think a good way into panpsychism is you can see it really as a continuation of something that’s been going on for some time now, which is again at the start of the scientific revolution, we thought we were the only conscious ones. Like we were the only ones with feelings and experiences. Animals are just complicated mechanisms. And that was nice, because we can do objective science on everything except us, you know? And then as time’s gone on, we’ve attributed consciousness to more and more other animals, you know, starting with primates, mammals, I think a lot of people it’s only recent, but a lot of people are on board with birds and fish now.

There was a recent letter signed, I think, by hundreds of scientists saying reptile and insect consciousness is a serious possibility. The panpsychists just take that to the logical extreme. So not only the simplest forms of cellular life, but also the atoms, the molecules, the subatomic particles have very, very simple forms of experience. So what we end up with is a universe filled with consciousness.

We are conscious creatures in a conscious universe. So that’s the panpsychist position, basically.

David Bashevkin: It’s a deeply moving idea and I know that some I’m sure scientists and philosophers kind of bristle at such an all-encompassing idea that can’t be tested exactly because of the way that we’ve structured science in a way. But what really fascinates me about you in particular is that David Chalmers is not a religious person.

He openly says that the hard problem of consciousness is not enough to get him to consider spirituality, even using the word God or deity you know, we could get caught up in a lot of the different terms that people have. But what’s so interesting is these studies kind of led you to really reconsider the very nature of existence itself, where you were a philosopher who is focused and I don’t want to call you an avowed atheist but somebody who this was their worldview, which I very much understand. You and I alike have not heard the explicit voice of God or probably haven’t seen obviously open miracles. And because of these studies, it sounds like you were drawn a little bit closer to maybe questions that we all have become comfortable with, just comfortable like not paying attention to.

And you allowed these questions to kind of take you down a different direction. So I’m wondering if you could help set up the connection between studying consciousness and your move towards reconsidering the very nature of existence.

Philip Goff: Yeah, it’s been quite a journey here. Just to say, since you’ve mentioned Chalmers and his attitude to religion, I think there is a big split in the panpsychist research community.

Some, like Chalmers, Luke Roelofs, Angela Mendelovici, are very secular, reductionist, none of this spooky stuff. Whereas there are other people like myself, Hedda Hassel Mørch, Itay Shani, who see a consonance with panpsychism and certain spiritual convictions. I mean, I was raised Catholic, actually, in Liverpool because of, I guess, the Irish ancestry in Liverpool there’s a lot of Catholics in a very vibrant… church community, but decided when I was about fourteen God obviously doesn’t exist and a happy atheist foras fourteen-year-olds do, refused to get confirmed, upset my grandmother.

I suppose what I’ve come to more recently is to see panpsychism offers a kind of middle way between very traditional forms of theism and very traditional forms of atheism. A few different ways into this. We were talking a moment ago about mystical experiences. One thing James doesn’t take into account when he’s thinking should we trust these experiences, one thing he doesn’t think about is how well does it fit with your worldview more generally? This is often what we take into consideration when we think about whether to trust an experience.

If I seem to see a dragon flying past, I’m going to think oh my god I’m hallucinating because my worldview doesn’t fit with dragons existing. So suppose you’re having a mystical experience and you’re thinking whether to trust it, well I think it depends on your view of consciousness. If you’re a physicalist and if you think ultimately it’s just particles and fields, the kind of stuff physical science talks about, consciousness just emerges in the brain and it’s evolved to track predator and prey and stuff, then you’ve got to think a mystical experience is a delusion because your consciousness couldn’t possibly on that worldview put you in touch with ultimate reality and reveal a certain unity with it. Whereas if you’re already a panpsychist and you already think reality at the fundamental level is constituted of consciousness, if we’re directly aware of our consciousness and reality is just made up of consciousness, it starts to look a lot more like what you seem to experience in the mystical experience fits with the worldview you already have, so it’s much less of a leap to trust that experience.

Here’s a way of summing it up in a slogan: I think panpsychism makes hippies scientifically credible. That’s the kind of way of thinking about it. So this is what I’m exploring in my new book actually, provisionally titled Heresy, is panpsychism can make taking these spiritual experiences seriously something we can take intellectually, scientifically credible. That’s one way into this.

David Bashevkin: I very much appreciate your worldview and it happens to be when we first started more than five years ago I actually had a conversation with a friend of mine who we studied in rabbinical school together and he left and later became an atheist. And I invited him on just to talk about religious ideas and one of the things I asked him is what do you think is the strongest case for God? And this is more than five years ago and he said two things which are the exact two things that you point to. The first is the fine-tuning problem, which is it seems like the entire world is geared for the existence of life, very difficult to explain otherwise how precisely the universe is organized. And the second thing he said was consciousness.

How long did it take you for you to be able to, I hate to use this terminology because it’s sensitive, but to come out of the closet in the philosophical community and say I think I might be into God? Was there a period where you were almost embarrassed by your own thoughts or where this had led you?

Philip Goff: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think in Western intellectual circles we’re trained to be really alert of religious bias, do you just believe that, you just want to believe it?

David Bashevkin: Do you think there’s an old man in the sky?

Philip Goff: I was just arguing for X as I do too much and someone saying about fine-tuning actually, saying it’s just motivated reasoning. And it’s just why assume because someone’s got a religious view that it’s motivated reasoning? I think you see all the time there’s a certain secular bias.

There’s a bias for every worldview because it’s the position that gets established. I feel very silly standing up in front of my peers and making a case for cosmic purpose. I do feel silly and it’s hard actually. I sort of like the challenge in a way and something about me is disposed to do that, but it is hard and there is a groupthink mentality.

Look I think as a scientific community we are in denial really about the fine-tuning of physics for life. This is not controversial physics. Again people on X all the time say it’s just not true that the numbers need to fall in this very narrow range for life to be possible and I wind people up by saying this is like climate change denial. I think it’s a similar thing.

It’s just a certain ideological conviction, no God stupid, and they just deny the science. Look I’m not saying there’s not things to debate here, there are things to debate and there are interesting, but

David Bashevkin: No I think what you’ve done is you’ve made it respectable to have these conversations. That’s why I feel so indebted to you that these are conversations that should not just be taking place in religious study halls and people who aspire to be religious leaders, but taking existence seriously, taking consciousness seriously, asking basic questions why is there something rather than nothing, what is the actual meaning and nature of existence? These are human problems. Every human being should be concerned about this.

Norm Macdonald who was a comedian who passed away, brilliant comedian, he used to talk a lot… Lot about this. He was very enamored with conversations about theology. He one time reacted, he said, scientists found a new planet or something, he’s like, where are the scientists trying to figure out why the world exists? Is anybody working on this problem? We need more people.

So the respectability that you brought to these fundamental questions is something I appreciate so much.

Philip Goff: Oh, well thank you very much.

David Bashevkin: You don’t have a traditional view of God, and you restrict yourself to a language that can cohere with the modern world that we live in. You don’t demand religious authority, trust me, I know, I have the book or whatever it is.

How should people find purpose in the universe? Somebody’s going to ask you, okay, I’m sold, what is the basic case of how people should find purpose in their lives? The lowest common denominator. Not talking to a Jewish audience or to a Christian audience, you’re given the mic to humanity and say, look, here’s the basics that we do know. We should optimize our lives for some basic purpose, and here’s how to do it. What’s that basic purpose that you’re trying to center, you’re trying to convince the world that they should take seriously?

Philip Goff: So you’re talking about in terms of how you live this out?

David Bashevkin: Yeah.

You’re not advocating for people to pray, you’re not advocating for people to keep the Sabbath. What exactly are you advocating for? How should people find purpose?

Philip Goff: I think what we talked about mystical experiences, I think more and more people are on board with that, the spiritual but not religious group is growing and growing. Part of what I’m trying to do in this book, look, religion, organized religion of the familiar sort has things to offer. Centrally, connect your spiritual life to a community, to a tradition, to a structured practice.

And people get so hung up on the belief aspect. And look, religions do come with doctrines and there’s a time and a place for thinking about those, thinking about how plausible they are. I sort of self-identify as a slightly heretical Christian. 

But don’t focus just on the belief stuff. Think also about those positive benefits of connecting your spiritual life to a community and to something bigger. I’m part of a project with a few universities at the moment, actually, on beliefless spirituality, about connecting to organized religion either because you think it’s all just a big metaphor or because maybe you’re taking it seriously but you’re very uncertain. Well you tell me, maybe this is what Jewish people have done for a long time to take these things seriously.

I suppose a lot of people in the philosophy of religion community now are trying to get Christians to catch up on this and don’t forget about the doctrines, but we need a more holistic picture here.

David Bashevkin: And I would say absolutely, I have a long-standing argument with a student of mine. I have a student, wonderful person, who was raised actually in a Chasidic community, is no longer Chasidic. And he has a lot of trouble because I think in more insular communities, they talk about the religious truth claims in a much more literal sense.

And my approach is always to build as much breathing room as possible with religious truth claims and I essentially rely and I’ve been convinced of the approach of Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein basically eradicates almost entirely the very notion of truth claims where when somebody says “I believe in God”, what is that doing linguistically? It’s much more forming a shared community of language than cohering with any specific vision or idea. And I think part of the resilience and beauty of Judaism is that theology is something very internal, but it gives you a lot to hold onto externally in terms of community and ritual, where the meaning is something that emerges, but it’s not something that is dictated. People misunderstand some Jews who say Jews don’t even need to believe in God.

We definitely have a God, a biblical God in the Torah and in our lives. However, I think we really law, law as a vehicle for meaning, law in the way that it connects you to community, society, others, ritual. Law isn’t the right word, we call it Halacha, which means to walk, to go about. That cadence that gives a rhythm to your life, it almost to me it almost automates purpose in a way where you actually, you don’t have to think about it constantly, where do you find purpose? It reminds me in some ways of Bob Odenkirk was just in an interview, he’s the actor from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.

Oh yeah. And they asked him what’s the role that you miss most? And he said the role I miss most, and he was being totally sincere, is being a dad because there’s something about family and he said this, you don’t have to think about meaning and purpose. It’s right there in front of you. You don’t have to ask yourself, you don’t need to use rational choice theory to figure out whether or not to get that satisfaction.

So I invited a mutual friend of ours and this is really the perfect time to To introduce him. He is a previous guest on 18forty and someone who we’ve spoken a great deal about mystical ideas. It is my dear friend and yours. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually met him.

Eli Rubin is joining the conversation. Eli, thank you so much for joining Philip and I.

Eli Rubin: Hi David and hi Philip. Wonderful to be with you.

Philip Goff: Hi Eli, lovely to hear. We’ve emailed a lot, haven’t we? But we’ve never actually spoken either in person or virtually. It’s great to meet you and thank you so much for all your help on trying to get some kind of basic grip on Kabbalah that I talked about a little bit in my forthcoming book and you were just totally invaluable on that. Thank you so much.

David Bashevkin: We are so excited. We’re gonna be the launching ground for this new book. We’re gonna be the first PR stop for the book, again, it’s called Heresy, coming out next year, God willing, no pun intended. One question that I wanted to kind of talk out together is kind of understanding the Jewish view and how Judaism views this notion of panpsychism, of the world in itself, all matter having an element of consciousness.

Eli, maybe you could share a little bit. When I am conscious, that’s like the never ending movie experience in my mind. Is that God I’m experiencing? And does our notion of God allow kind of all matter to have some tether or connection to this conscious experience? How would you frame the way Philip’s ideas cohere with Kabbalah? You’re obviously in the line, the school of thought of Chabad, but you could speak more generally. How would you explain how these two ideas do or do not cohere?

Eli Rubin: Just first of all, just very broadly speaking, we’re coming at this from two very different perspectives.

What most fascinates me and interests me is not so much about how everything lines up really neatly—it doesn’t always—it’s more how you seem to be building a kind of bridge across a kind of chasm between different worldviews really, which people assume cannot be bridged. And the way that you’re reaching across that chasm is really interesting and it creates a bridge, it creates points of possible meeting, but in some ways, first you’ve got to start with a chasm. First you’ve got to start with where the differences are in order to think more coherently about what the potential meeting points are. So having said that, speaking broadly about the Jewish tradition, the idea of a soul is certainly connected very much to the divine and that’s something which you can find in many thinkers.

If we go back to, let’s say, Maimonides, if we think about the intellect, the soul being the intellect, which is in the image of God, the very possibility of having a rational consciousness, being able to think clearly is certainly associated with the divine. But when you come more particularly to Chabad, Chabad reads Maimonides in an interesting way, in a novel way, in a way that Maimonides himself might not recognize, but which I think brings us much closer to panpsychism. And that’s part of Chabad‘s synthesis of Maimonidean thought, of Maimonidean text, Maimonidean rationalist tradition with the Kabbalah, especially the modern Kabbalah, which we call Lurianic Kabbalah, which begins in the 16th century with Rabbi Isaac Luria. So Rabbi Isaac Luria, he understood everything to be shot through with divinity, not just souls, but certainly souls are the most explicit manifestation of the divine within the cosmos, but more broadly, he certainly understood there to be a divine spark even in inanimate things, even in matter.

So that speaks to something like consciousness and Philip obviously has a very broad conception of consciousness. Philip’s idea of consciousness isn’t just what human beings experience as consciousness, but you could have much more reduced or infinitesimal variations or manifestations of consciousness in inanimate things, if I understand Philip’s way of thinking about this correctly. And there’s something similar going on, I think, in Lurianic Kabbalah. But what I want to say about Chabad‘s synthesis between the Maimonidean view and the Lurianic view, the Kabbalistic view, is Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad, in his foundational work the Tanya, he quotes Maimonides, which you could also say this as a quotation of Aristotle, that God is the knower, the knowledge, and the thing that is known.

So when human beings know things, there’s the self, there’s the thing that you know, and there’s the consciousness which kind of connects the knower to the known. So the knower, the known, and the knowledge—and those are three separate entities. There’s a bifurcation or it’s a compound phenomenon. Whereas in the case of God, God also has knowledge according to Maimonides, but that knowledge is not like our knowledge.

It’s a singularity. There are no three components. God’s knowledge is self-knowledge. Again, it’s an Aristotelian notion.

But what the Chabad masters do with it is that they turn this from a theological statement to a statement about physical reality, about the world, about the cosmos. And that is to say, instead of this just being a question of God’s singularity, this also becomes a statement about the nature of the cosmos itself, the created world. If God knows the world and the world itself or anything that God knows is nothing other than God’s self, then the world itself is divine. And you can interpret that or read that as a panpsychist statement in everything being a manifestation.

manifestation of the singularity of God’s self-knowledge. God’s consciousness of God’s own self. Now, I don’t think that’s what Philip is arguing for, but that kind of puts in place a notion of panpsychism which correlates in some way, stands upon a spectrum of possible panpsychist visions or theories which can be connected. So I think that’s a place to begin the conversation about Jewish panpsychism.

David Bashevkin: One thing I was wondering, Phil, when you were drawn to religion, what always fascinated me is you were drawn to kind of what you described as a heretical Christianity. And I get what you mean heresy, you don’t subscribe to all the doctrine. I’m just curious from your perspective, did you ever look at or examine Judaism? I am not introducing it, and Judaism is not into proselytizing, I just want to make that clear. What I’m really asking is what did you think of Judaism from your eyes when you were looking around? Was it like, oh, that was like their older brother, or whatever it is? Did you give it examination when you were on your religious journey?

Philip Goff: That’s a really fascinating question.

One thing that’s important to insert in here, I suppose, it depends how we’re thinking about faith for how important it is to check out all the religions. Because if you think faith is about certainty, or even if it’s about belief, I understand belief as sort of very high confidence, then you want to know the right religion. You want to know the religion that’s proved enough that you can believe it. And I think that’s what people think when they think about am I going to be religious? They think is it definitely true, is there one possible objection or something? But if you’re open to maybe a kind of fictionalist view where you’re taking more things metaphorically, or even forget that, I think a view where it’s not so much belief, it’s about hope or trust, acceptance, commitment, living something out, then I think the relevant question is maybe just is it a credible possibility? I think these things are always going to be so uncertain, but you don’t want to have faith in something that’s just wildly improbable.

I shouldn’t have faith that I’m going to be king next year or something, or aliens are going to rescue us.

Eli Rubin: I like to say there’s a distinction between faith and gullibility.

Philip Goff: Good, that’s a lovely way of putting it.

Eli Rubin: You can’t believe in everything, then you’re just gullible.

Philip Goff: Yeah, so I think is it a credible possibility? But that opens up the possibility that more than one religion might be a credible possibility and that opens a kind of pluralism that’s not just saying they all believe the same thing, it’s accepting that there can be more than one religion that has a serious possibility of being true. But where I’ve found my spiritual home, I suppose, is the combination of the mysticism of the Eastern Church. I combine that with the liberal flexibility of the Anglican Church. The Anglican Church, same as the Episcopal Church in the US, it was set up because the king wanted a divorce and the Pope wouldn’t let him have one.

So it doesn’t have that ideology that many Protestant churches have, so it’s sort of like much more flexible Catholicism. I was raised Catholic, but I returned to religion with the Anglican Church. You have women priests and that more flexibility. So that’s where I’ve found my home.

Sure. To answer the question, to be honest, I didn’t seriously think should I be a Jew, should I be a Muslim, should I be a Hindu, but maybe it was more because I was sort of thinking I just need to think is this a credible possibility? So here’s another point. I think these things are so uncertain, it could be reasonable for someone to choose on the basis of their cultural heritage and what feels comfortable to them. Suppose you think a religion of a very different culture is slightly more probable, but I think God will understand if you stay with the religion that’s going to make sense to you and help you connect with the divine.

But just connecting to what Eli was saying before, that was really interesting, that Jewish version of panpsychism. When I talk about panpsychism, we tend to think of conscious particles, but actually most theoretical physicists tend to think that our universe is not made up of little billiard balls, but is made up of universe-wide fields. This fits better with quantum field theory, and particles are just sort of local excitations in those fields. And moreover, we know from quantum entanglement, which Nobel Prize was won a couple of years ago for really establishing that beyond reasonable doubt.

Sure. Einstein didn’t like it. He didn’t like spooky action at a distance. But what I think we learn from quantum entanglement is that the whole is more fundamental than the parts.

The whole has a unity. It’s not Lego, it’s not built up from Lego bricks or Legos as you US people call it.

Eli Rubin: It’s starting to make more and more sense to think of the universe as a kind of singularity of some kind, or the universe as a field. Yeah.

Philip Goff: So if you combine that with panpsychism, we get that the universe itself is this deeply unified conscious thing, and our consciousness is a sort of complicated local excitation of that deeply unified whole. This is why I think mysticism becomes scientifically credible because it looks like what the mystic is experiencing in the Eastern tradition, Eastern Christianity, it’s God and us are not the same, but they share the same form of existence. or they will ultimately share the same form of existence. So there’s a very close oneness, but it’s not quite identity.

In Hindu mysticism, Advaita Vedanta, it’s quite identity. But we find this deep theory of unity in all the mystic traditions and in modern physics, at least if you combine it with panpsychism. So yeah, I’m just learning more and I’d love to learn more from you, Eli, about how this really spells out in Jewish mysticism.

David Bashevkin: Eli, I definitely want to hear that, but one thing I was wondering if you could integrate into your response, because I was talking about this with Philip a bit before, and it’s really what he said, which is there is this general underlying search for unity in the world that animates many religions, and then we have kind of the truth claims of the belief of each religion and how God works and interfaces with the universe.

One of the things that I find very unique about Chabad, which is the branch of Chassidic thought that you are a part of, is how much time you spend on the mechanics of God, of the detailed mechanics which are, I guess at the end, I don’t know if you find this, is it fair to call them speculative or spiritually speculative? I don’t know how a Chassid would phrase a long discourse on how God’s unity appears. What I’d love to hear from you is kind of how you understand the truth claims of religion and specifically Judaism, we’ll talk about Judaism, the one that we believe in, and moreover, how do you understand, why is it emphasized in such a granular, detailed way, the workings of God? Meaning, I kind of appreciate what Philip is saying, which is like, look, let’s broad strokes over here, everybody’s got their own tradition, but like we don’t have to get into the nitty-gritty of the truth of each specific story. I’m curious for you, what role do truth claims play, and how does Chabad understand why we spend so much time on kind of this speculative theology?

Eli Rubin: That’s really several questions all at once.

David Bashevkin: Yeah, I’m sorry.

Eli Rubin: I think one of the places to start is that first of all, in Judaism itself, of course, we have massive conflicts over matters of faith. One of the subjects at the heart of my recent book, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity, is the debate about whether God actually is present in the world or not. Is God transcendent and therefore not one, not united with the universe, but really outside of the universe? And that’s a debate within modern Kabbalah, within Orthodox Judaism, over the course of the last four, five hundred years. Chabad takes the view that God is immanent within the cosmos, and the cosmos is united with God, but there were other great rabbis who even Chabadniks acknowledge were great rabbis, who had very different views and would have characterized, and did in fact characterize, the Chassidic view as heresy.

David Bashevkin: Book coming out next year.

Eli Rubin: Right, Heresy coming out next year, exactly. So that’s just for starters in terms of truth claims, how do we hold a faith in the truth of the Torah in all its diversity, including mutually exclusive truth claims, how do we hold that together? That’s a massive question which I’ve devoted some attention to, but I don’t think we can deal with properly now, but it’s just something to take note of that this is something that we do need to deal with and our way of thinking about faith is broad enough to encompass that problem. Number two, I want to say something about consciousness and human experience, human psychological experience, human phenomenology as a gateway to understanding the truth of God.

That’s very central in Chabad thought, and I think this is actually related to that broader conflict of whether God is immanent in the world or not, relates very much to the question of is God immanent within the self? Can you find God through the self? If you believe God is completely transcendent, you know, there may be certain almost magical ways God has provided us to be in touch with him to do the right thing. God has given us the Torah, God has given us certain Mitzvos. If we do those Mitzvos, we’re doing God’s will and so therefore we’re connected to him, not because those things have any inherent divinity or value in themselves, only because God chose so. That would be a more transcendent view of God.

God is really inaccessible. But if you believe that God has made himself available, has manifested himself in the world, in the cosmos itself, then the question is, in what way is God available to us? And the primary way, very similar to what Philip was saying about the human mind or the human consciousness being this extra-excited area of conscious activity, so the place where God is most manifest is in the soul. And so we can explore our souls by thinking about our own experiences in a deep way. What motivates a human being? What is intellect, what is emotion, what is desire, what is pleasure? We can kind of use those to map out a theology.

If we can explain our own motivation for acting in terms of desire and pleasure, well maybe we can explain God’s motivation for acting in terms of desire and pleasure, and that’s all predicated on the assumption that God has made himself manifest primarily through the human soul. And that relates to the idea of a truth claim. The truth claim obviously comes from the fact that we have a certain amount of respect for the tradition, for righteous, saintly rabbis who reach unparalleled degrees of holiness and so on and insight, spiritual insight, but it also lies in the fact that we see those people as people who were very in touch with their own souls. And it’s by virtue of them being very in touch with their own souls that they have the authority to speak also about the nature of the divine.

David Bashevkin: Interesting. And that is a very I wouldn’t call it exclusive to Chabad, but when Chabad writes about kind of the processes of the divine and has debates about it, is there usually an analog like to the human self? And deliberately so. Are we supposed to be taking this kabbalistic system and also viewing our own self through this prism?

Eli Rubin: In Chabad, that is the case. I think in other kabbalistic systems or other interpretations of Kabbalah, it’s seen more maybe in a mechanical sense like maps of the universe where the different strata of the kabbalistic cosmos cannot necessarily be decoded in terms that are coherently understood by ordinary human beings.

They’re a kind of divine parable which we can never fully fathom. But the Chabad belief is that these kabbalistic maps of the spiritual cosmos are not just parables that have no key and that can never be unlocked. No, on the contrary, these are parables that can unlock real knowledge of the divine because they do have an analog or the analogy is the human soul and the analog is God, right? And there’s a correspondence there. And so for example we have the questions about language, the nature of language.

Where does language begin? Is language just something that begins in the mouth when we formulate words orally? Is that where language begins? Or does it begin in the mind, in thought, or does it begin even deeper in our psyche? And in theological terms, that becomes a question about where does divine communication, the representation of God, begin? Is that only an external thing? Can we only ever have access to an externalization of God? Or is the divine language rooted in the divine essence and therefore it can make something intrinsic to God accessible to us? And what is the language of God? The language of God is in part it’s the world, it’s the Torah, it’s the commandments, it’s the human soul. These are all ways in which God communicates himself and in the Chabad worldview, language is taken extremely seriously precisely because we have this assumption that God is communicating in some way through the cosmos, through ourselves, and making the divine accessible to us. And so when we think about what language is on the human level and when we debate what language is on the human level, that has direct theological implications.

David Bashevkin: It brings back, coming back full circle to Galileo’s letter to the Grand Duchess, where he kind of wrote this letter where the Grand Duchess was having I think religious crises of faith given what Galileo discovered, and he was talking about the different languages of God, that mathematics is one language that we have, but it gives you the option of maybe imagining that there are other languages that real truth can be communicated which brings us back to our original point where we began with Philip of Galileo’s error.

I wanted to kind of wrap up by allowing you to kind of maybe ask one another, what is the question that you’re most curious about from the other’s perspective? Eli speaking to a panpsychist which I don’t think I pronounced correctly just now and Philip speaking to a Chabad chasid. What do you think is the question that makes you most curious about the other?

Philip Goff: Well, just to say a little bit about what Eli said, it really resonates with me what you said then. I think what was so alienating to me about religion as a child, although I did appreciate the community and really all the community came together to celebrate the changing of the seasons and the big moments of life, so I think I did appreciate that, but theologically if you like, I just had the idea that God was totally separate, supernatural, elsewhere, usually disapproving. And I think the core of my spirituality is God understood as something which is right here, right now, in our midst.

And also part of the attraction of that maybe getting more philosophical is how we know about it, what philosophers call the epistemology, how we know about God. Actually something I’ve been thinking about quite recently, people might be surprised a lot of secular philosophers believe in objective morality. Don’t, most people don’t know what philosophers think but it’s a very standard position. Philosophers believe there are objective facts about value and also about mathematics.

Basically a lot of philosophers think Plato was right. So Plato thought there’s the physical, contingent universe we see with our senses but there’s also equally real the world outside of space and time, the world of mathematics and the world of value and good and bad. And a lot of philosophers believe in that. But here’s what they don’t have an answer to: how do we know about it? Right, Plato had an answer, he thought before birth we were in this other realm and he taught a slave boy mathematics and thought he was remembering when we do mathematics.

But most people don’t think that. So how do we know about this other realm if it’s totally separate? So what I’ve been thinking is well maybe a mystical understanding can help a little bit because if you think maybe necessary reality and contingent reality aren’t so separate. Maybe God is being itself with a capital B and being itself has a mathematical and a moral essence and we’re somehow manifestations of that. And then how we know about mathematics and morality starts to make a lot more sense if they’re more intimately bound up.

But I think for most philosophers, oh no, it starts to sound a bit mystical or something. Oh yeah, there’s all sorts of things here. Meister Eckhart who was tried for heresy, died before the trial was finished. But he had the idea that the ground of the soul is identical with the ground of God which connected I think to some things Eli was saying there.

David Bashevkin: He had a beautiful phrasing: the eye with which I see God is the same eye that God sees me. That’s an Eckhart quote that I’ve always loved.

Philip Goff: But coming back to, so what is the question? What I first want to know, what I would love to know is just, it seems this idea of closeness, this idea of unity is present in all of these mystical traditions but I’d like to know from Eli how it’s specific in Judaism in Kabbalah. This connection with God, this closeness, this intimacy, and how it would differ from Christian mysticism, Sufism, Advaita Vedanta in the Hindu tradition.

What is it that’s specific about the understanding of it in Kabbalah? That’s what fascinates me.

Eli Rubin: The main distinction that I would point to is the fact that the Kabbalah always presents itself as the inner dimension of the Torah. And the external dimension, the outer dimension of the Torah, which is one with the inner dimension, is the system of laws that govern Jewish life on a daily basis. It governs society.

So there’s laws about on the seventh day of the week you keep the Sabbath. There are laws about what you eat. There’s a whole set of laws that really calibrate a person’s lived life on a daily, weekly, yearly, there’s the calendar with all its holidays which prescribe particular ways of celebrating the seasons. And the Kabbalah presents itself as the inner dimension of that legal framework.

So if you just have the legal framework then you have something very rigid, very demanding, which might not connect at all to your sense of self. If you only have the inner dimension, the Kabbalah, so then you have this kind of spiritual mystical set of ideas but that also doesn’t really have anything to do with you as a person in your life. You might identify with it, it might make sense to you, but what do you do with that? How does it shape you as a human being? And what’s particular about the Kabbalah then is that you have a particular way of manifesting these ideas in your life. You have a set of practices that are very simple.

Twice a day in the morning and the evening you say the Shema, which is a declaration of the oneness of God. So there are two ways to think about this obligation. One is that you’ve got to get out of bed at a certain time in the morning in order not to miss the cutoff time when you’ve got to recite the Shema. So you could be totally focused only on this almost incantation, right? There’s this magic verse that you have to pronounce, articulate with your mouth and it’s just a ritual.

And you can use the ritual and not think about what it means at all. Or you could have a sense, first of all, just of the simple meaning this is the declaration of the oneness of God. And of course this is one of the verses that’s most interpreted by the mystics. And there’s a huge amount that you can think about and meditate on while you’re reciting that to the point that it will literally change your worldview, your experience of yourself, your experience of the world.

And you have a regimented time in the day, in the morning when you wake up and at night before you go to bed. And that’s a really life-changing experience if you put those two elements together. In its the particular way it’s applied and lived out, it’s very particular to Judaism. And to the point that even secular Jews know the Shema.

The Shema is the prayer, the declaration of Judaism which people will say on their deathbed. People who know nothing else will probably still know how to say the first verse of the Shema. They might not have ever thought about what it means though. And the Kabbalah gives you that insight, that reservoir of spiritual information and interpretation that allows you to take that ritual and make it not just a legalistic exercise that you’re obliged to do but one that actually transforms you.

David Bashevkin: I actually really love that response and it connects to what I was talking to Philip about earlier. Really the beauty of Jewish mysticism is its integration with non-mystical life. It’s not on the mountain tops. This is the book that you wrote about, social vision, which is how the mystical program of Chabad translated into the most mundane of things like prison reform.

Those were areas that were mystically motivated but we want to address prison reform. We want to address what the public school experience is like. Which I’ve always found remarkable about what your work. As an analogy, Philip, I always point out that in the most mystical times in Chabad, which is where all the Chassidim, all of the followers would sing together, if you’d always notice the Rebbe, I think almost always, would always sing with his eyes open.

Most people, when they have a mystical experience, they close their eyes, they go elsewhere. The Rebbe, if you notice at the most important moving moments, always kept his eyes open because I think there’s something about Chabad that privileges what’s in front of you and its mystical significance over just the purely abstract. But Eli, I wanted to give you an opportunity, what’s a question that you are curious about that as someone with a background in Chabad would want to ask Philip given his background in consciousness studies?

Eli Rubin: I want to move in a slightly different direction. We’ve spoken so much about panpsychism, but I think one of the really interesting things about Philip’s recent book Why? is the focus on purpose.

And that’s something that really fascinates me. I guess my question is what made you go there? Because in a way purpose in the scientific world, thinking about the question of the purpose of the world has been regarded as something that is not a scientifically valid question. We can describe the what of the world, but the why of the world, which is in the title of your book, is a kind of heresy, right? What was it that pushed you to go there? Was it just simply your religious background that put that there almost like in your blood, in your culture, in your cultural assumptions about the world that there must be a purpose? Or was there something else that pushed you to break out of the assumption that the question of why is no longer a legitimate philosophical question?

Philip Goff: Yeah, I think this head and heart thing is going on here. We’ve talked a lot about mystical experiences and that’s one way one can connect to spirituality.

And I think most of my life, despite not being religious, I was a spiritual person, I was spiritual but not religious, I took spiritual mystical experiences very seriously and that’s one aspect of it. But then it’s a further step to say there’s a purpose here. There’s a directionality. I think a lot of people are happy with oh yeah, there’s something going on but that there’s a purpose seems a bolder step.

Eli Rubin: One thing that makes me ask this question is that purpose also puts a kind of obligation on the person. To say that you’re one with the universe is really a kind of a self-centered kind of idea, right? That spirituality can be self-centered, but when you put purpose in there, it shifts the gears of what we talk about when we talk about spirituality. It places a kind of obligation or a direction that’s not of your own choosing necessarily.

Philip Goff: Yeah, that’s good and I don’t want to disagree with that although that almost makes it, I mean to many people might think oh I don’t like the sound of that, it’s going to constrain me.

And maybe that’s not a bad thing. But there’s also very positive, not that that’s negative but more obviously positive things. I mean what I’ve found I’ve really got out of it, look, I’m in a very lucky privileged position, I’m sort of in a safe part of the world and enough money to live a normal life and the thing I struggle with is being too ambitious. It sounds like a first world problem to say oh I’m but just being so driven and obsessed, I’m not driven by power or money but I’m driven by success and wanting to be a great philosopher and it can distract you from just enjoying life and enjoying family and my wonderful children.

And so what I’ve found actually one benefit I’ve got from religion that’s connected to purpose is I’ve found connecting to a greater purpose, seeing what I’m doing, not it’s important but it’s always just going to be one tiny contribution to some bigger thing, has really taken the pressure off me. So I’m not I’ve got to be successful before I die. It’s like I’m just doing the best I can to contribute to some bigger thing. And that has freed me up to live in the present moment.

So that’s part of what I do when I pray. I meditate in the morning, maybe the more the mystical spiritual experience side, but I pray at night so I’m listening to God in the morning, talking to God at night. And I think one thing I’m doing when I say for example the Lord’s Prayer, let thy will be done, I’m trying to orientate the things I’m trying to do in my life ultimately as contributions to something bigger that’s going on. So that’s the life benefit.

But why take it seriously? Well, one thing we touched on before you came, Eli, just the fine-tuning of physics for life. I think is in our most straightforward way of thinking about evidence, which is given by something called Bayes’ theorem, it is evidence for cosmic purpose. And I think the reason it’s not taken more seriously is just cultural bias. Science has ruled out God, that’s silly, that’s stupid.

I make my students do a bit of Bayes’ theorem actually because they think they can do Richard Dawkins’ approach, which no philosophers of religion, whether they be believers or atheists, take Richard Dawkins seriously. It’s very intuitive and not very, and they want to give their Richard Dawkins’ intuitive rejection, oh I don’t care about that, I don’t… No, we have a mathematically precise way of understanding evidence and you’re going to apply that and tell me why you think it’s not evidence. So that’s one thing.

I mean another thing maybe it’s a bit too late to get into it but more to do with consciousness, there’s a deep mystery of why consciousness evolved because natural selection is just interested in behavior. It’s behavior that matters for survival. Why didn’t natural selection just make mercilessly torn apart when he came up with his book 12 years ago, Mind and Cosmos, arguing for cosmic purpose. Horrible reviews.

I haven’t got that same treatment, not because I’ve written a better book, but just I think that’s a sign of there’s more openness. I got five-star review in Popular Science magazine. They didn’t agree with it, but they said this is, so I think there is a mystery of why consciousness evolved, why we’re not just mechanisms, why we have not just consciousness but consciousness that’s conscious understanding of what things are and mean. Why does natural selection care about that? And there’s a complicated story, but I think you need some radical departure from a purposeless universe to make sense of why consciousness evolved.

But that’s a big story. So look, I think the head and the heart came together for me. I think I was getting these intellectual reasons to take cosmic purpose more seriously, even though I felt silly arguing for it. I was learning about the mystical traditions, the mystical traditions in my own tradition of Christianity, more so the Eastern Church, and here’s a way of connecting the kind of spiritual convictions I’ve always had, making them make intellectual sense and connecting them to a tradition and a community, and it’s all very uncertain, but it’s made me a lot happier, I think.

David Bashevkin: This has been absolutely extraordinary, Eli. I’m so glad you were able to jump on, and I was able to make this matchmaking in the Jewish world is known as a shidduch, Philip. So this is an intellectual shidduch. You have two people whose ideas have animated my thought.

Philip, if you’ll allow me, and Eli, you can hang on for this, but you’ve already done this twice, I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid-fire questions. My first question is we’ve recommended both of your books, Why? The Purpose of the Universe and, of course, Galileo’s Error. If you had to recommend a different author that you think helps make the case for thinking about consciousness and these kind of cosmic why questions, are there other authors who you would recommend to our audience from outside of the Jewish canon obviously, that would be interesting and compelling for a Jewish audience?

Philip Goff: Well, Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel is a great book, The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. There’s lots of good books that are maybe a little bit hard, there’s a wonderful book, Purpose in the Universe, by Tim Mulgan.

I love the sort of middle ways between very traditional theism, very traditional atheism. That’s another, it’s maybe a bit of a challenging book for a general reader, but I’ve got a review of it on my website. Universes by John Leslie is another sort of very non-standard theist who believes in God, believes in an infinity of Gods, but doesn’t actually think God is the foundation. He thinks goodness itself or facts about value brought the universe into existence.

Anyway, there are a few examples. I’m sure I’ll think of some others afterwards.

David Bashevkin: I really want to emphasize these conversations that you’ve brought respectability and substance of intellect to these conversations is something we are all indebted to you for, Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists alike. My next question is I’m curious if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back to school for as long as you needed to to get another PhD, what do you think the subject and title of your work would be?

Philip Goff: Oh, I’ve got no doubt.

I’d want to study physics. I think my biggest regret in life, and it’s a sign of how lucky I am that this is my biggest regret, is not doing mathematics after the age of sixteen. I’m fascinated by physics, more so than neuroscience, actually, because those really foundational questions. I do do some philosophy of physics, usually in collaboration.

I’m doing it with a philosopher of physics doing a paper on quantum mechanics recently, but I tend to need to collaborate. I’d love to get into the maths, into the physics, and give that deeper engagement with these foundational questions.

David Bashevkin: Great response. Hopefully you’ll have that opportunity.

And my last question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Philip Goff: I always wake up in the night for 90 minutes, two hours, and I used to really stress about this, but now I just go to bed 90 minutes, two hours earlier, and I wake up and I have a little routine. I read for half an hour, I meditate for 20 minutes, I say a long poem in my head. There’s two long poems I know off by heart: “The Night Before Christmas,” the famous poem about Santa Claus, and Philip Larkin’s poem about death and how we’re all going to die and so life is pointless.

I say these in my head and I repeat that twice, so I know when I’ve fell asleep again from where in that two-hour cycle. But this is what I do, usually do meditation, and then if I don’t wake up in the night, then I meditate when I wake up. I guess I try to be in bed 10:30 to read, go to sleep by 11:00, and my kids wake me up at 7:00 at the latest, but 6:00 or 7:00. Okay.

Can I share two quick things? Yeah, please. One actually, we’ve mentioned, advertised a lot my forthcoming book, but my wife Emma did the illustrations and one of them I love is she’s done a new illustration of mystical body of God in Kabbalah. Yeah, so she’s done this wonderful image of it and Eli helped me with maybe I wanted to say some of the descriptions of it differently.

David Bashevkin: Oh, I would love to see it.

Philip Goff: And of Plato’s cave, actually. Do Google images of Plato’s cave, I don’t think there’s that many great images, but she’s done a really good image. It’s hard to do because there’s so much going on. The other thing I was going to say, just when I started talking about religion publicly, a young Jewish woman on X tweeted at me and said she was an atheist, but when she was having her Bar Mitzvah, she said to the Rabbi, “I don’t know if I believe in God,” and he said, “It’s okay, the commandment is ‘Have no gods but me,’ so as long as you don’t have a different God.” I don’t know, that kind of made me laugh, I don’t know why.

David Bashevkin: I very much appreciate it. Philip, Eli, thank you both so, so much. I hope we get an opportunity to do this again. This was so lovely.

Thank you.

Eli Rubin: Thank you, David. You’re a great shadchan.

David Bashevkin: When it comes to panpsychism, which sounds so outlandish and so wild, but what I find so amazing and compelling is the way Philip in his books, he quotes all of his critics, he quotes all of the competing theories, and he really walks you through a line of questioning that at the very least take existence seriously, take the way that we experience existence seriously.

And once you start pulling on that thread and imagining, what if the world was created by God with a purpose? What could that purpose of the world be? It really, I think, opens up your eyes to a radical way of reapproaching life itself. And these are things where the fact that it is so revealed is its very source of concealment. The fact that we experience the entirety of the world through our own consciousness, it is so revealed, it is the canvas with which we approach the entirety of the world, it is so infrequent that we allow ourselves to actually see what is hidden behind that revelation where revelation can lead to concealment itself. And we have to draw behind the curtain of conscious experience and ask why is this how we experience the world? How do we explain this? Why is this necessary? Why does it feel this way to be alive? And I’ll just close with a passage in Talmud that I believe that I have cited before, but it is one that I think of often during these kinds of conversations, and it is a passage in Talmud that appears on the tenth page in tractate Brachos that talks about the similarities between the soul, if we’ll translate it that way, the Neshamah, to God himself.

And the Talmud says just as God fills the entirety of the world, so too the Neshamah fills the entirety of the body. And just as God sees but is not seen, so too the soul sees but is not seen. It is that self, so to speak, that lies behind thinking itself. It is not the thinking and it is not the thoughts, but it is roeh ve’eino nireh.

That is the language of the Talmud. It sees, but it is not seen. And it reminds me of a very powerful quote from a Christian mystic, but I think it flows beautifully from this passage of Talmud, and that’s Meister Eckhart who says, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” When we talk about seeing God, we’re not referring to a physical phenomena, we’re not referring to something that is tangible, but in a similar way, when we think of ourselves, our true self, our most essential self, what are we referring to? We’re certainly not referring just to our body, we’re not referring to our current thoughts and our memory. There is a self that lurks behind all of this that is roeh ve’eino nireh.

It is what sees all, it is what absorbs our entirety, is what absorbs all of existence, yet it cannot be seen. And I am just so grateful to both Philip and Eli, and both of their books are incredibly accessible and worth reading. Philip’s book called  and Why? is the name of his second book, “Finding Purpose in the Universe,” and Eli’s book, of course, is called Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity. But more than anything else, of any specific path, what I am grateful for is people who take these questions seriously, people who don’t gloss over the foundational questions of existence, but sit a moment and allow themselves to sincerely consider what is the purpose of life, what is the purpose of existence, and how, in the seemingly microscopic space that we fill in relation to the universe, how can we contribute to that ultimate purpose? So thank you so much for listening. This episode, like so many of our episodes, was edited by our incredible friend Denah Emerson.

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