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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:03.394)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Joshua Rasmussen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Azusa Pacific University, and also the creator of the Worldview Design YouTube channel. And we're here today to talk about his book, Who Are You Really? And glad to have you here today, Josh. Talk to us a little, oh thank you, yeah, I have it on Kindle, so it's not as pretty to look at. Thank you for showing us the beautiful cover. There you go.
Joshua Rasmussen (00:25.753)
Thank you, PJ.
Joshua Rasmussen (00:31.909)
cover. Yeah, thank you. It's great to be with you. I'm excited about this conversation together, especially because I feel like we're going to be talking about a subject that might be the most important subject that any human being could possibly talk about. So thank you.
PJ (00:33.056)
Yes.
PJ (00:46.402)
Well, this is a big questions podcast, so that makes sense. Yeah, I think we're on target there. So, first off, just to start with, why this book? Why, who are you really?
Joshua Rasmussen (01:01.109)
Yeah, so this book is about the nature of you and also how you could come to be. So it divides into two parts. The first part focuses on what kind of a being are you, specifically you, and generally the kind of being. And then second, how could, if we can get a clarity about what kind of a being you are, how can something like that ever exist? And there is a mystery here about how conscious beings could exist.
Near the beginning of the book, I talk about the general mystery of how anything can exist. People can get startled by that, like, why is there something? How could there be anything? Right? Maybe philosophers especially get startled and interested in that. But there's this other kind of more specific question about, you know, if there's going to be stuff in reality, why are there the kind of things that can wonder how we got here? Why is there wondering? You know, why is there consciousness in general? Why are there people?
So the subtitle of the book is a philosopher's investigation into the nature and origin of persons. And the reason I wanted to write this book was because I saw a lot of developments, I would say exciting developments, in the analysis of consciousness by philosophers of mind and scientists working in the science of consciousness, some interesting lines of convergence behind the scenes that are not well known in the popular sphere. And so I wanted to display.
some of this progress in our understanding of consciousness. And also I have my own contribution to the field as well, and so I have pieces in there that kind of share my latest thoughts about this. And I think that if people can feel like they can get a handle on the questions and kind of be equipped to think about it for themselves, they'll feel empowered to get a greater understanding of really who they are, how they fit into the world.
So that's why I wrote the book is I feel like there's a lot that people can know about reality that people don't know that they can know. And I wanted the book to help people see that, discover that.
PJ (03:08.858)
So who are some of the scientists of consciousness and philosophers of mind? Who are, like, their work is what's getting you excited? Who are those people?
Joshua Rasmussen (03:16.909)
Well, one guy has kind of come more into the popular sphere. His name is Donald Hoffman. I don't know if you've heard of him, but he's done some very innovative work on the nature of perception, the science of perception. And he's got an article called Objects of Consciousness, very technical, but he shows how you can actually give an analysis of the basic aspects of matter in terms of prior states of consciousness.
And he makes an argument for this from different fields of science, from evolutionary biology and the science of perception, as I mentioned, as well as from some developments in physics. So his work has kind of caught my eye. There are others. I'm more familiar with the sort of analytical developments by the philosophers of mind. And so these are going to include people like John Searle, who's done some work on the nature of consciousness.
David Chalmers is pretty well known. He's the one who coined the term the hard problem of consciousness. I like to tell my students, you know, philosophers, we came up with a name for the problem of explaining consciousness. And the problem is so hard that we named it the hard problem. You know, that's what we call it. So that's David Chalmers. He's the one who coined that term. And there's a reason for that. I mean, there's a reason he calls this the hard problem of consciousness. And we can get into that.
PJ (04:26.315)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (04:41.497)
There are many different philosophers of mine that, I mean, it's hard to name names because it sort of excludes other philosophers. Michael Tooley has been influential in my thinking. Alvin Plantinga has done some work in philosophy of mind. I took some courses with him, or a course with him. I took some courses with him, but one of them was on the philosophy of mind. And all these different philosophers are, in a sense, analyzing common data to try to understand what this...
data is and how it came to be. Again, the nature of consciousness and the origin of consciousness.
PJ (05:17.306)
And you know, even as you started from the beginning of like, there's this thing that wonders, there's this thing that thinks. What influence do you take from Descartes? And what are the similarities and dissimilarities? Because even you start to almost talk about men, there's like, there must be a personal substance, right? And so I was like, I mean, that sounds familiar. So what a
Joshua Rasmussen (05:37.569)
Yeah, right.
PJ (05:44.662)
What are the influences and how are you similar and dissimilar to Descartes?
Joshua Rasmussen (05:49.709)
I love this question because, you know, Descartes sort of known for the argument for his existence in a sense in like, I think, therefore I am, kind of idea. And I think what's going on there is he's actually, I've thought about this, I used to think, oh yeah, you know, you can't deny your existence without existing because you'd have to be there to deny your existence. So it's kind of self-defeating to deny your existence. So I kind of like that argument. But then I got to thinking, but wait, how do I know?
that I'm even denying my existence. Like, how do I even know anything about me and my thoughts? And kind of what I try to do in my project is start even just there, just with this very, very basic question. And I talk about this inner light that you have called introspection. This is the power by which you can be aware that you have thoughts, that you have feelings, that you can form an intention. I think it's by introspection that you can be aware
that certain thoughts and feelings belong to you, and they don't belong, they're not your wife, it's not that your wife is having those thoughts, you're aware of yourself having those thoughts, right? There's a self-awareness implicit in that. And this is a very, very powerful tool that's often neglected, this power of introspection. You're familiar with the sort of empiricists who emphasize the five empirical senses of seeing with your eyes, tasting, touching, smelling.
Which one am I missing? Seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. Right, those five senses. And there's kind of this idea that, well, those senses give you contact with reality. Okay, those are the primary modes to know. If you can't get to it through some kind of empirical detection, it's not even real. But what's interesting, PJ, is that you wouldn't even know that you have those five senses without introspection. Because think about it, by what sense do you sense that you have senses?
PJ (07:20.054)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (07:46.901)
It's not with your eyeballs. Your eyeballs don't see... Okay, your eyeballs see shapes and colors, structures of shapes and colors, right? So if you see a leaf, you're seeing a structure of shapes and colors. But you're not seeing...you're seeing of shapes and colors with your eyeballs. That's another power that you have. That's the introspective power. It's the light by which you can know that you even have those five senses. And it's a very important light because it's by this light that you can...
I would say verify Descartes' idea there that you think. You can be aware through introspection that you think and that you exist, right? You don't even have to argue for your existence if you can just have immediate awareness of that. So that's where it's not so much that I would disagree with Descartes. I would actually kind of show how it is that you know that he's right about that. Now people might think of Descartes' particular view of the nature of persons.
And what I like to do in this book is kind of start from scratch, not really start with existing paradigms and try to defend one of them or argue against, but just kind of start with introspection and begin to collect some data and then begin to make a case for, well, it's not even so much a case, it's more of a, I almost just want to say like a painting of some aspects of you. So you feel, you think, you can intend, you have value, you can discern these things through introspection.
There's you, there's also a body that you have. What's the relationship between the two? Now here I do make some arguments that you can discern a distinction between your spatial aspects and your conscious aspects. And so there I use that tool to sort of highlight who you are or what you are most fundamentally.
PJ (09:36.69)
So I just want to make sure that I'm on the same track with you. It seems like the major difference, if I understand correctly, between you and Descartes is that for you, you see introspection as this sense, which there's kind of this positive, we feel this, whereas, and it really does govern the path that you take versus the path that Descartes takes. Descartes is like, the only thing I know for sure is that I doubt. And then everything after that is like...
He just keeps doubting, right? And so for you, it seems like a little more, like it steers you in a more positive direction. Is that fair?
Joshua Rasmussen (10:10.141)
I have more resources. Yeah, I like how you put that because I have a theory, I have a chapter on perception. And this chapter is about your many modes of knowing. And so I make the argument that your senses are like windows into reality. So your vision is a sense into shapes and colors. Hearing is a sense into pitches and sounds. You can use introspection to have awareness of thoughts and feelings and intentions. I think you even have another power of reasoning to...
to detect logical lines of deduction from different statements, right? I think you have a moral sense to sense distinctions of value, right, from wrong, things like this. And then there's a further question about the nature of the things that you're sensing. So if you're sensing a leaf, for example, is that leaf something that can exist apart from a mind? Or does it only exist in a mind? Do leaves only—are leaves mind-dependent?
So it's interesting because I mentioned Donald Hoffman. His work is kind of pointing to the idea from physics and from vision science that perhaps, and he's kind of humble about this. He says, it's not that I believe these theories. It's just that, you know, yeah, it might be true. Perhaps, maybe more likely than not. So he's a good scientist in that respect. Here's my hypothesis. But perhaps what you're actually seeing when you're seeing the shapes and the colors of the leaf with your eyes.
PJ (11:27.79)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (11:40.777)
is something that depends on a background, a mental space or a mental quality or mental substance if you will, or perhaps not. And so what I'm saying here is that I don't think we have to resolve these deeper questions about the nature of what we see to recognize that we see. And I think sometimes people go down a pit of skepticism because they feel like they have to resolve other questions.
about the nature of what we're seeing in order to recognize that they're actually seeing. And I think that we can recognize that we see things. And so that this gives us a broad sort of palette to kind of build our theory because we're seeing not just through introspection, not just that we doubt, right? People sometimes associate Descartes with a kind of strong foundationalism where there's a small set of things that you can know for certain.
This kind of small set, and then everything else gets inferred out of that. Whereas, now this would be a difference, is I think that we actually have a broad set of things that we can know in kind of a basic way through our many different senses. And I don't think we just have five senses, I think we have at least ten, depending on how you divide these. And that these give us powers to fill out basic knowledge about the world.
PJ (13:02.862)
I had, and you specifically said this, so if you don't wanna go this direction, that's fine, but you said you didn't want to rely on previous frameworks. I had Dr. Malibu on to talk about Kant's view of the transcendent. Are there connections there to this sense of introspection when you talk about, like, you know, the way to think about that is he talks about the mirror, the self-reflection. Is that kind of a similar?
Joshua Rasmussen (13:18.469)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (13:31.335)
sense or faculty.
Joshua Rasmussen (13:33.369)
Yeah, absolutely. The way that I kind of would think about it here is that you can have an awareness of objects as they appear to you, okay? And that's real, as they appear to you. But there's this view, and this is often associated with Kant's view, called phenomenalism, and this is in my chapter on perception. And according to phenomenalism, all that you're ever aware of—
are what you might think of as like paintings in your mind. They're not windows into a reality beyond your mind. These are just appearances within you, including mirrors of reflection of yourself. So you're never actually seeing outside of yourself. Now I end up arguing against that view, although I think that it gets some things right. I think there's, if I could put it this way, there's kind of a...
Attention between two ideas. So one idea is that the only things that you know are mind independent external things Sometimes empiricists sort of lean in this direction, you know, I can see it over there That's a tree that exists apart from me completely everything that I'm seeing with my eyes exists completely apart from me My consciousness has nothing to do with what I'm you know seeing and then on the other side it's like the only thing that you see are
paintings or, you know, images or conscious states of yourself. That's all you ever know. Consciousness, appearances of yourself. And I think actually, both of those are too simple. I think the truth is more in between those. So I end up arguing against both of those. This is why I have a window theory of perception. On my model, I think that you can be conscious of things directly, like shapes and colors. But it
it doesn't follow from your consciousness of those things that they depend on your consciousness of those things. That doesn't follow. And in fact, I think there's good reason to think that some of the things that you're conscious of don't depend on your consciousness. And an example that I give in the book is about logical relations. So, for example, I think that if something is true, then it's not at the same time not true. Okay?
Joshua Rasmussen (15:50.669)
And I think I can actually see this connection between truth precluding not true. I can actually see that preclusion there in my mind through reason. But that preclusion doesn't depend on my seeing it, right? Like people can take math tests and logic exams, even if Josh Rasmussen is not seeing these things, even if I don't exist. I think I have good reason to believe that those things, those logical relations are there and they hold.
from my own awareness of them. And so there, I think what's happening is that I'm having an internal consciousness that's within me of something that doesn't depend on me. So this is why I say it's a window of awareness to things that don't necessarily depend on me. And this opens up the possibility—I say possibility because further considerations might rock the boat a bit—but it's the possibility that even when you're aware of a leaf,
the shapes and the lines of the leaf that you're conscious of don't depend on your consciousness of them, that the leaf is independent of your own consciousness. But I do say that depends on other considerations, because when you start looking into the nature of matter itself, it does start getting a little bit weird how those things really even could exist apart from consciousness. So, but we can sort of bracket that, that weirdness over there. But the idea is that you have these powers to look into reality.
PJ (17:13.092)
Yeah.
PJ (17:16.61)
And if you go with a window versus a mirror, for instance, you still have the capacity, or not the capacity, you still have the, as part of it being a window, the window can get smudged, right? So even as you're talking about logic, third grader, I homeschool him, and we are working hard on just nailing down our times tables. And so the other day it was six times eight, and he's like,
Joshua Rasmussen (17:34.029)
Yes. That's good.
PJ (17:46.21)
46 I'm like No, it's not like this is mind independent like So
Joshua Rasmussen (17:50.909)
Yeah.
That's right. That's great actually because that shows I love the smudging of the mirror or the window because there's something in your mind that's not out beyond the window. It's the mistake that's in your mind. But there's a truth that's beyond your mind that you're also able to see. Yeah.
PJ (18:07.998)
Yeah. So I understand. I think I just say where you're going with that. Now you mentioned this earlier, the hard problem of consciousness. Um, and, uh, you know, with such, um, you know, it's a hard name to remember, but, uh, the, uh, very, very difficult name, but that's very complex. Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. The, um,
Joshua Rasmussen (18:28.229)
It's very complex. It's hard to remember that name, the hard problem.
PJ (18:34.902)
But can you talk to us a little bit about what that is and then how that differs from what you call the constructing problem of consciousness?
Joshua Rasmussen (18:42.741)
Yeah, absolutely. So just last week, actually, I was having a conversation with Alex O'Connor from The Cosmic Skeptic, and we talked about this, the hard problem. And I mentioned to him that I count at least seven different construction problems, where the hard problem I think of is just one of many, many different construction problems. So the construction problem as I think about it, and now the construction problem, that's my term. That's a term that I've...
coined in my work to kind of organize other problems as well. But the general construction problem is just the general problem of seeing how to construct a conscious being by any means. You know, like, so I've got some Legos here in my hand, and there's a question about, like, could we put these Legos together so that when we put them together, in a certain way, we've constructed a conscious being that's having its own private experiences and hopes and dreams and...
It's rotating images of purple dragons in its mind. It's not that the building blocks are purple. The building blocks have their own colors. But once you get them organized in the right way, you construct a conscious being that can have a visual imagination and hope that it not be destroyed. That's the general construction problem. And then this general problem has, the reason why there's a problem is because there are many specific problems with constructing conscious beings.
There's the hard problem, I'm going to say a bit more about that. There's a binding problem of how you get a bunch of different things to be unified into a single thing. There's a binding problem of consciousness. There's a causal exclusion problem. I think I mentioned Jaegwon Kim, a philosopher who's championing this particular challenge, which has to do with how you as a conscious being could actually do something in the world without your actions being causally excluded by more fundamental—
micro-physical things, particles, atoms, fields like this. There's an identity problem of what explains why you are specifically you and not a duplicate of yourself. Imagine you swap all your atoms out from my atoms and your original atoms get arranged in the same way as your original body. So now you have a duplicate of yourself, but yet you are still specifically you over there and not over where your duplicate is at.
Joshua Rasmussen (21:08.185)
So there are deep puzzles and questions about how that works, and so on. There are other problems, and these are problems for everybody. Everybody faces these problems. In my book, I talk about, you know, if you believe in God, you don't just roll away the problem just because you believe in God, because if you believe in God, presumably you think that God is at least a possible being. If you think He's an actual being, He's got to be a possible being. If you think He's a possible being, that means that God—
doesn't have impossible powers. You know, if he's a possible being, he doesn't have impossible powers. And so, if it's impossible to make square circles, for example, circles that are not circles, if that's impossible, then not even God can do that. If it's impossible to take a bowling ball and grow a dragon out of that, if that's just an impossibility, the nature of the bowling ball won't do that, then not even God could do that. So, I actually spent some time in the book,
arguing that there are some deep, deep constraints about how conscious beings could possibly emerge. And this is a puzzle for everybody, including myself. And there are certain theories where, yeah, like not even God could turn a rock into a conscious being. And I mean that sincerely. I think that's as impossible as making square circles because of those particular problems. So just to kind of focus in on the hard problem just a little bit, without going into
much detail on all the other problems, just to kind of focus in on this. This is a problem of seeing how you can explain the emergence of qualitative states of consciousness, like the smell of coffee, or the experience of listening to a symphony. How you can explain the emergence of these things purely in terms of the vocabulary of physics, talking about the positions of particles moving and hitting each other.
Some people say, well, you just need more complexity. You need enough particles, right? But we have this kind of intuition that sometimes complexity won't work if it's the wrong category. It's like, how complex does a number have to be in order for that number to be a bowling ball? It's like, no, complexity there doesn't make a difference. If you have mental images, I was thinking about this actually today. I was with my kids at the park, and lo and behold, I was thinking about consciousness with them.
PJ (23:34.562)
Hahaha!
Joshua Rasmussen (23:34.725)
I mean, they were running around, but I was like thinking about... So, I was like thinking about this material problem of how can you get consciousness with the wrong material? And one way of kind of illustrating this is just coming up with examples where kind of everybody would agree, you can't build a conscious being out of that material. And I was thinking about the materials within consciousness. So, like, materials like while you're dreaming, you have a scene of, let's say, some mountains.
And imagine that in your dream, the scene of mountains kind of explodes in little particles in your dream, right? And then you could ask yourself, well, could those little dream particles have images of purple dragons? Could those fairy particles be conscious? Not could they be in your consciousness, could they have their own consciousness? Could they turn into a conscious being and then hope that you don't wake up because then they'll go away, right? Is that possible?
And I would say that we actually have a power through insight into the nature of these things to see that, no, that's not possible. Now, the hard problem is saying something a little bit more modest. What it's saying is that we don't really see how to explain. We don't have a way of seeing how it is possible just by understanding the nature of the items and then organizing them in certain ways.
Okay, now here I was talking about the brain imagery, but now let's shift to particles of sand. You know, can you take some particles of sand, get the wind to blow in just the right way, and the particles enter into a formation that is simulating a nervous system, okay, or a brain, like a little brain, right? And how do we know, you know, maybe that happens, right? But the idea is that there's no description of the...
of the positions of those particles, of the motions of the particles, of the number of particles, that from the knowledge of that description you can just see that, oh, those particles would have private conscious experiences. I think you can actually—I kind of make the argument—you can actually see that they can't. You actually have a way of seeing that's the wrong material. But the hard problem is saying that at least we can't see that they would be conscious.
Joshua Rasmussen (25:56.389)
And the reason why this is relevant is because it provides a motivation for a number of philosophers to try to kind of minimize mystery beyond, we don't want to multiply mystery beyond necessity. So, if you can't really see how you can derive the one from the other, then one way that you could go is just say, hey, you know, maybe the consciousness is deeper in to reality. It doesn't emerge out of these things. Because if it did, then you have this explanatory gap problem.
can't explain, you can't see how the particles in the wind or in a brain or whatever would start having feelings. It's not an argument from ignorance, it's an argument from the knowledge that we have consciousness together with wanting to not multiply mysteries beyond necessity. So, we have consciousness, there's no need to assume. This is a little bit difficult actually to articulate because for some, the story that consciousness emerges later out of brains
is almost just taken for granted. So that for me to even tell this alternative story, it can sound a little bit confusing. But I wanna just say, there's another paradigm. It's like, you can just turn the airplane around, just flip the airplane around. There's another way of explaining all of reality where you take what's known, would be conscious beings, consciousness, and the contents within consciousness. You take what's known.
And then instead of explaining that in terms of posits that aren't known to exist, you explain the physical things that are known to exist in terms of categories that are also known to exist. So, you're explaining the known in terms of the known. And so, you have a framework where you have consciousness being fundamental and then the physical stuff gets explained in terms of that.
And there are different ways of fleshing this out, but this would be one way of responding to the hard problem. Of course, it is not the only way, but it is sort of one kind of solution, and it's why a number of philosophers care about that problem.
Joshua Rasmussen (28:07.513)
Questions, comments, push back.
PJ (28:10.348)
When you say it doesn't, we don't need to multiply mysteries. You talk about a personal substance. Is that something that we are, in your explanation, is that just what consciousness is? Is the mental substance or the personal substance?
Or is that something you're positing alongside it? Does that make sense?
Joshua Rasmussen (28:37.989)
Good question. I love this question. Yeah, absolutely. So I think of the substance as the thing that has the consciousness. And in my book on the self, I talk about these different arrows that point to this thing that I think you can actually also know, in addition to your consciousness, which is yourself having that consciousness. One of the arrows is the arrow of, I call this the perspective arrow. So there's a question about, I first heard this question when I was in grad school.
school, and one of my professors asked, how do you know which body in this room is your body? It's kind of like, it feels like a silly question, you know, like only a philosopher would ask this, like, how do you know which body is yours? Well, it's like, okay, well, how do I know? You know, so it's like, well, it looks like this is my body over here. Well, how do you know that's the one? And one answer is, well, it's because you can control that body. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, so the body that's yours is the one that you can control. But how do you know which body you're
Here's kind of a deeper answer. It's because I can be aware that there are certain bodily motions, so here my fingers are moving, in response to certain mental states. So I'm intending to move my fingers and then my fingers move, okay? So far, so good. But now, as a philosopher would, we can press the question, right? How do you know which mental states in the room are your mental states? There are a lot of mental states in the room. How do you know which ones are yours?
You need to be able to know which mental states are yours in order to be able to know that it's your mental states correlated with these bodily motions, right? Because otherwise it's somebody else's mental states and then you're not in control of your body. And this is a very deep question, but I think it points to a power to know something very, very familiar. It's so familiar. You talk about the windows of awareness. It's almost like we look through the windows and we don't...
see the window itself. It's so familiar that we look past it. But I would say it's self-awareness. So, you can be aware, and I talked about David Hume, he had a kind of skeptical argument with respect to self-awareness, but I diagnose his argument and I end up myself making the argument that his own considerations actually point to this power of self-awareness that's implicit.
Joshua Rasmussen (31:01.885)
in your awareness of mental states belonging to you. So here's my answer then to how you know which body in the room is yours. It's because you have a power of self-awareness which gives you a power to be aware of which mental states are yours, which gives you a power to be aware of which body you're controlling, which allows you to know which body is yours. So here's kind of an argument. You can know which body in the room is yours. You couldn't know which body in the room is yours unless you had the power of self-awareness.
Therefore, you have the power of self-awareness. So this goes to your question, you know, are you positing the personal substance in addition to the consciousness? And I would say it doesn't have to be a posit. It can be. I had long conversations in graduate school with the philosopher about this because he was saying, I do think I exist, but I think that I have to posit my existence. All right. Well, as long as you've arrived at your existence somehow, then great. We can build from there.
But I think you also have a power to be directly consciously acquainted with your own self, having thoughts and feelings. And so that would be a personal substance. You can call it a personal substance. So notice I'm not positing souls outside of your consciousness. That's why I kind of hesitate to even use the word soul. I use the word self and I claim that you can be self-aware. Even while you're dreaming, even while you're not aware of your body, even while you're not aware of your brain.
You don't have to be aware of your brain to be self-aware, which already indicates that the self is something else that you can know immediately. So I don't think that's a posit. And so I do think that if you build your worldview on what you can know—and of course this is sort of up to each person to kind of check for themselves, you know, I mean, don't take my analysis, you know, just kind of think, you know, what do I know from my own perspective—then I think you can actually, in a way, have a simplified—
an explanatorily powerful worldview if you make use of conscious beings as, how do I want to say this, kind of building blocks for analyzing other things.
PJ (33:13.658)
or you make them primary, right? That's the, in the, actually that was my next question. Perfect segue, thank you for doing that. No, at the end, in the conclusion, you give that, your conclusion is that persons are primary and you give three different ways that they are primary, through the order of nature, the order of knowledge, and the order of value. Do you mind talking about what, why those conclusions are important?
Joshua Rasmussen (33:15.301)
Primary. Exactly.
PJ (33:43.458)
and just talk us through those conclusions in general. Just like those three different primary in those three different orders. Like first of all, what are those orders? Cause it's like order of nature. It's like, all right, as a, you know, it sounds like an Amazon thing, you know? Like I ordered some nature, you know, it's coming in like my new shampoo or something. Sorry, couldn't resist. That's, it would be without the E though, right?
Joshua Rasmussen (33:47.321)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (34:00.685)
Right? Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Nature. No, I love it. Yeah. Well, this is this is just a kind of
Right, yeah, just to sort of frame this. Now, these are conclusions at the end of a kind of a long journey going through what I call the cave of consciousness, where we kind of look at the different aspects of you and then use reason to analyze those aspects. So we collect observations, we use a kind of scientific method to collect observations, we use reason, we work through these different construction problems, and then after all of that I arrive at these conclusions. And these conclusions, yeah, I like how you said that.
PJ (34:10.774)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (34:38.333)
It has to do with the primacy of personal beings or personal reality. People are primary. And kind of a theme of the book is that we are deeper into reality than many of us maybe realize. Even deeper in that I thought. Okay, to be honest, because when I started this project, I was kind of leaning on a lot of the courses I had taken in graduate school and some of the publications I had contributed since then and some works that I had read.
But I really wanted to do a deep dive, so I was kind of reading a whole wave of recent work in science as well as philosophy, and then just taking long walks and trying to think about it. And so, in the course of writing the book, I actually came away thinking, oh, it's not just that consciousness is deeper in than I thought. Like, I'm deeper in. In order for me to move my body, I have to be able to not be a puppet.
of particles that are deeper and more fundamental than I am. It's like I think I used to kind of have this idea that, well, particles, you know, they existed before I existed, they're more fundamental than me, they build up a brain, and then somehow I exist sort of in connection with that brain. It's a bit puzzling how that works. But that I came away thinking that, no, actually in order for me to affect my brain, and I think that causation is two ways, so my brain affects me and I affect my brain, in order for that to work.
I have to, in a way, be primary to even the motions of the molecules. We could take this all the way to the quantum field. There's a way in which, by intending to form a thought, to send a love letter to a friend or whatever, these intentions that I'm forming create these ripples in the quantum field which affect particles in my brain and propagate out into visible motions. So I'm deeper in.
than these physical things that we see. And so I say there's the primacy of nature there and I'm thinking of that in terms of kind of like what exists. So my existence is prior than the existence, my existence in who I am, my identity is not derived out of atoms. One of the reasons, and I have to just kind of sketch this because it takes work to really draw this out in detail but one of the reasons that I say that I'm
Joshua Rasmussen (37:02.853)
prior to my identities, prior to the atoms, is that it's the, that problem of
what happens if my atoms get swapped out with replacement atoms? But I'm still over here, I'm not going with my original atoms. But if my original atoms carry my identity, then I should go wherever those original atoms go. Okay? Now, if you say, well, it's not just the atoms that carry my identity, it's the atoms plus their arrangement. Sometimes people suggest this. It's like, once the atoms are arranged in a certain way, okay, well then take those original
Joshua Rasmussen (37:42.661)
brain that I had when I was a child. Okay? Or even the brain that I have right now. Get them into a duplicate copy of my current brain. Do I have a first-person conscious awareness now of being over there? Do I like suddenly shift over there? I mean, because it seems like I am aware of myself, even as atoms are going in and out. And it doesn't seem like I'm going with those atoms. And so if those atoms get arranged in the same way, now we have the same atoms in the same arrangement.
And yet I'm not over there. My identity was not tied to those atoms or their arrangement. And so this is kind of part of a larger analysis that I think points to who you are, most fundamentally, is not derived and determined by mindless bits of reality.
So, you're deeper in, you're primary to the mindless. The mindless comes out of the mind, actually. This is kind of a weird way of talking about it, but if you think about it, your thoughts and your feelings, they don't have their own minds, so they're mindless. Okay? So, there's a way, do you know what I mean? It's not that they don't come from a mind, it's that they don't have, they're mindless in the sense, they're mindless in the way that a sandcastle is mindless. The sandcastle maybe was formed.
PJ (38:48.844)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (39:01.429)
a mind, putting the particles into the form of a sandcastle. But the sandcastle doesn't have its own mind. So, in that sense, the sandcastle is mindless. My thoughts, in that sense, don't have their own mind. My feelings don't have their own mind. The mental images don't have their own mind. So, I would say all the mindless things, those come after the mental fabric of reality is prior, primary, to the mindless aspects of reality. So, that's the order of nature.
The order of value is sort of similar, that your value is not derived from mindless things. I have a whole chapter about your value not being able to be defined in terms of the changing states of matter. Like you have a firm value that I argue you can actually be aware of your value. You can be aware of your own inner worth. This is an evidence of your, I would say evidence that you can be aware of your value is that if somebody disrespects you, you don't like that.
because they're saying something against something that you actually intuitively know, you know that you have that value. If I could go ahead. Oh, yeah.
PJ (40:07.054)
Uh, when you say, go ahead. Uh, when you edit, go ahead, go ahead.
Joshua Rasmussen (40:12.621)
Well, I was just going to say I had a story that I wrote into a draft of the book, but I ended up taking it out just for efficiency. I couldn't put everything in there. But the story was back when I was doing substitute teaching and I was teaching a class with some students and they were in sixth grade. And two students during the teaching just started getting upset at each other, started fighting, hitting each other. Now I'm the substitute, so I'm supposed to be, you know, managing the situation.
PJ (40:39.438)
Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (40:43.317)
And the guy who was kind of more of the aggressor, who was like really punching the other guy, I came to them and kind of, you know, broke them apart and then talked to them. And I looked first at the person who was punching, kind of the aggressor. And I told him, I said, I just felt such compassion. And he looked scared, like he's gonna get in trouble. I didn't even tell the teacher. I just didn't, I just, I was probably supposed to, but I didn't.
But I looked at him, I said, I understand, I know why you punched him. It's because you have a knowledge of your value. You actually have self-respect. You know who you are. And this guy was attacking and going against your value. And so you're going against that. And so after I said that to him, I think he must've felt validated and known. He put out his hand to the other kid and apologized, which I was just like very happy about that. And I saw that kid another time when I was...
teaching and we definitely formed a bond over that. But I'll never forget that because it illustrates to me that even when we're sort of fighting other people, because we feel disrespected, it's because we actually have a knowledge inside that we have value, we have worth. And that this value doesn't depend on the color of your nose. Okay, you expect I'm gonna say the color of your skin. Well, it doesn't depend on any color.
Like, we intuitively know that if somebody takes some white chalk and just wipes it on your cheek, you know, you don't lose your value. And I draw this out because it takes a little bit of kind of analytical surgery to sort of trace these lines to the logical implications. Like, okay, so if I change shape, will I suddenly no longer have that intrinsic worth? No. It doesn't depend on shape. What does it depend on?
So this is the kind of value challenge, like what does your value depend on? And I end up making an argument that it doesn't depend on anything in the spatial material world at all. You're prior, you're deeper in, your value is deeper in. There's no way of just arranging spatial things to take away your value or to give you more value.
PJ (43:00.446)
One, I'm really looking forward to your upcoming book, Joshua Rasmussen, Confessions of a Substitute Teacher.
Joshua Rasmussen (43:10.744)
Yeah, that's right. Never did tell that teacher. Somebody probably listening to this is going to report this. Well, it was years and years ago, so.
PJ (43:18.447)
Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. It's like, for legal purposes, this story never happened. No, names and dates have been changed to protect the innocent. So when you talk about this value, and it's not based on your molecules arrangement, one, this does sound like it's bad news for Jim bros, but...
Joshua Rasmussen (43:24.332)
That's right.
PJ (43:43.538)
As we kind of look at this, it does seem like people do attach, you're talking about this awareness of, inward awareness of value, but that doesn't seem to be, and I'm going to get the, is it incorrigible? In the same, I can't remember, if you look at the verification hypothesis, they talk about like, there's certain types of statements that are just like very obvious, like two plus two equals four.
Joshua Rasmussen (44:12.097)
Yeah, you can't doubt them. Yeah.
PJ (44:13.106)
Self-worth, yeah, self-worth is definitely doubtable. And it can be, and people definitely arrange, like their self-worth can be based on the arrangement of their molecules, right? So how does that?
Joshua Rasmussen (44:24.493)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Their sense of their self-worth, their feeling that they have self-worth because of external voices, right? I mean, we come up with these standards. Like you only have value if you win this race. And I mean, I think we kind of intuitively understand that, no, it's not really that you have to win this race, but we come up with these external measures, right? And let me just say that, even though I do think you can have these powers of knowledge that are direct, you can get knowledge.
I don't think that therefore you can't have doubts about it. In fact, I mean, I wouldn't write this book if there were no doubts about the things I'm talking about. I actually think everything can be doubted. I think you can doubt your own existence. So you know, even as far as like Descartes goes, like, I doubt therefore, you know, I exist. No, I think you can doubt your own existence because there are ways in which obstacles can roll in.
to, there's two ways this happens, I think. So one is that you actually aren't really paying attention to the things that you can know. So for example, maybe there's a mathematical proof of something and it takes some time to trace those lines to the conclusion. It's not easy to know. There's no blame about it. It's just, it takes some time. You're not just born like knowing all of these things. And so you actually have to apply your conscious attention to notice these things. I think this is true with
noticing your own self, even noticing your own noticing, I think takes a bit of work. You're not just born noticing your noticing. That takes some work, noticing your consciousness. So that's the first kind of barrier that I think can roll into the knowledge of your self-worth, is that it takes a certain amount of maybe life experience or paying attention to, okay, what is going on? Like, why am I feeling mad? Like, what's the root reason?
Why do I want to win? Like, what does winning mean to me? Why do I want these shapes? Why do I want that external approval? And then you sort of trace those whys to something deeper and something core, and then you can have this awareness. Oh, there I am. I have value. That's why I don't want to be destroyed, because there's something about me that is worth something. Now, maybe it's actually, in a weird way, easier to do this for others. That person has value.
Joshua Rasmussen (46:50.317)
That four-year-old over there who's lost her parents and nobody even knows who she is. It's not that she doesn't have value now because nobody values her. You see her over there and you think, you know what, she has value and she had value even before I saw her, even before I knew her situation. She herself, let's say, doesn't know that she has value. She thinks she's trash. She's just left out to the wind. But intuitively, I think we understand there's something special over there. There's value there.
So that's the first thing is it takes certain awareness and that awareness can be doubted. The second, I think, reason for doubts has to do with, I think so much about this, because I think people can actually be acquainted with something and still doubt it because external voices or other reasons are louder. I had this experience when I was looking for the broom, our broom to sweep our house, and I couldn't find our broom. And so if I can't find something, you know.
What am I going to do? If I can't find something, I'm going to ask my wife. Rachel, where's the broom? Now, before she could respond, my eyes saw the broom between my refrigerator and a wall in a kind of like dark space. So I saw the broom. It was there in my mind. And she said, the broom's outside. I believed her. I went outside. My body was like programmed to go outside. Even while I saw the broom.
Inside, I went outside, I verified it wasn't out there, I went back in, and I pulled it out of the place that I already saw it. And I love that example because it's a real example. Like, I knew that I saw it, but I didn't believe what I was seeing because of my wife, the power of her authority. And I think it illustrates something that is so common, actually, on a deeper level, which is that oftentimes we'll just inherit belief systems. We'll have...
maybe people in reputable positions, maybe a pastor or a scientist that we look up to, and they carry more authority over our mind than our own direct conscious awareness. Like you are directly consciously aware that you have thoughts, but you can't believe it because you've been reading these scientists and philosophers who are illimitivists who say we don't have thoughts because of neuroscience and all this stuff. And you're like, yeah, I guess we probably, I'm not sure if I can believe that I have thoughts now, right?
Joshua Rasmussen (49:16.349)
even though you're directly consciously aware of them. So I think that's possible. I think it is possibly directly aware of something and then still doubt it. And that's why I think it's important to pay attention to kind of what you're aware of and work through that. Yeah, go ahead.
PJ (49:26.754)
So.
PJ (49:33.71)
So we are, persons are primary in the order of value, but that is smudgeable to just continue to belabor this metaphor that we set up. Yeah.
Joshua Rasmussen (49:48.233)
Absolutely. Yeah, it's smudgeable in the same way that getting the addition wrong, you know, is smudgeable, right? Absolutely. Yeah. You can, you can fail to believe something that's true. That is possible.
PJ (49:56.513)
Um, and then.
PJ (50:02.634)
And that kind of takes us to that last one, which is the order of knowledge, right? Which is, so talk me through that if you don't mind.
Joshua Rasmussen (50:06.594)
Yes.
Joshua Rasmussen (50:12.965)
So this is so interesting to me because I think sometimes people flip the truth 180 degrees. And I used the metaphor of the airplane before because I heard that apparently it used to be that airplanes would sometimes get upside down and there'd be just one pilot and they would think the airplane was right side up and so they would pull up and crash the plane. And you can imagine scenarios like this. Imagine the plane comes over a lake and you can see it's like.
The lake is reflecting the sky. You look the other way, there's the sky. It's like perfect symmetry. And I'm not even saying this happened over lakes. I mean, this has happened in various places. You get the plane upside down, but you think it's right side up. And so, I've noticed that I think worldview is like this. I think sometimes we get our worldview upside down, and we're so used to that, we interpret everything in terms of that, that it feels right side up, but the truth is exactly the opposite.
And I think knowledge is like this. So I think that your knowledge, most fundamentally, the clearest things that you can know, are the things that are within your own direct consciousness. So like you can know that you, if you had coffee this morning from an immediate experience that you have, even while there's no scientific investigation or literature on your experience.
That doesn't mean that, well, now it's just your opinion and it's doubt, you know, you should doubt that or something. The scientific consensus on a topic is less sure, I think. And here's why. It's because the way that scientists arrive at a consensus is by individual people having first-hand experiences. And those first-hand experiences are the sources of the knowledge. And then the scientists can interpret those, give an inference.
write it in a paper, and you're reading the paper, and there's inferences that you have to make that are not 100% certain. You have to make the inference that, you know, this paper was actually written by who claimed to have written it. You have to make the inference that, in fact, your experience of the paper is not just in a hallucination, that you're not just dreaming, right? You've got these inferences.
Joshua Rasmussen (52:33.473)
And so, let me be careful here. I'm not saying you can't have scientific knowledge or that you can't be reasonably sure of things that scientists are giving us. I think you can, absolutely. But I think sometimes we disempower ourselves because we actually think that the most certain things are things that are external to our conscious awareness that have to be reported to us by people in perceived authority. And I really want to kind of flip that around for people and help people to see that
All authoritative statements are themselves either not based in reality or if they are based in reality they're based in somebody's first-hand conscious experience. You know, like somebody experiences seeing a bird in the sky and then reports it to a friend and then the friend knows about that, right, through that. So it's those first-hand conscious experiences that are the primary sources of knowledge.
And you are one of the people, you're one of the beings. So I like to tell my students, like, you are carving a unique path of experience that you know about, and nobody else knows that experience firsthand, only you do. And that's actually one of the things that you carry, one of the things that are valuable is that you have treasures of understanding of things that are unique to you. And just because other people don't know about it and it hasn't been approved by the scientists doesn't mean you don't actually know.
through first-hand direct experience. You do know. So that's why I say persons are primary in the order of knowledge. Knowledge starts with individual persons. And the knowledge of persons, the knowledge of ourselves is prior to the knowledge of impersonal things. We know persons through firsthand experience of ourselves. And then the existence of like rocks and trees, those things out there.
that aren't persons. Sure, they're real, but I mean, I'm just saying that the knowledge of them is even less certain than the knowledge of yourself. But I think sometimes people flip that. They think, oh, we know the material world. That's what we know. And it's a spooky religious posit that in addition to the material world, there are these things that kind of like what you were saying, personal substances you have to posit in addition. Isn't that what you don't know? You don't know that there's a personal substance. That's what you have to posit. And I would say, no, it's exactly the opposite. If there's anything you know with perfect clarity.
Joshua Rasmussen (54:59.169)
it's that, or at least can know, is that there are personal substances. There's, you don't have to call it a substance, but there's personal beings, there's you. There's persons, yes, absolutely. So I hope that makes sense, yeah.
PJ (55:05.782)
There's persons, yeah.
PJ (55:13.358)
Yeah, even, you know, and I've probably said it too many times in this podcast, but I just love it so much. As you're talking about the plane example, it reminds me of Wittgenstein defining philosophy as getting the fly out of the glass bottle, which really, I've actually heard people talk about it as being like very obscure, and to me, it made immediate sense because I hate it when I get a mosquito or bee.
in my car and you can't, and it's stuck on the windshield, right? And it's like, and you can't, and you're just like, look, for the both our sakes, please go out the window. And, um, and so there, there's this constant to like, uh, we think we're there, we think we have it, but it's, it's get, understanding that this is actually a dead end. Um, well, in the plane example, uh, dead end is probably a little too appropriate, but, um, the
Joshua Rasmussen (55:45.185)
I know.
Joshua Rasmussen (55:54.606)
Yeah.
PJ (56:09.678)
Kind of as we wrap up here, I want to be respectful of your time What is one thing you would leave our audience thinking about or what's one thing you would recommend they do This week after listening this episode
Joshua Rasmussen (56:24.185)
I think sometimes we take for granted the things that are the most familiar. You wake up in a bed and there you are. You. You are there. That's a very familiar piece of reality right there. But we think about other things. We think about, okay, we've got to get to work, get to school, got to take care of the lawn, got to do this, that, that. There's all these things sort of external to ourselves.
We're looking out into the world through the window of ourselves, and we look past our very selves. And maybe if there is one thing to sort of do is to just take some time in the week and contemplate your own reality. You can actually make some observations. Like, what are you thinking? What are you feeling? What are some aspects of your thoughts? Can you notice if you've
focusing on a feeling that feeling has colors? Oh, it doesn't have colors. Okay, what does that imply? How could a colorless feeling relate to gray matter in your brain? And be careful not to rush to, oh, well, we know what the science is. Just take some time to just focus in because the scientific data is open to interpretation. And I think that sometimes people rush to interpretations
leave out very crucial first-person data. The data that you can have from your own first-person perspective. And it was, I mean, honestly, like today I was with my kids in the park there, running around, and I was just doing this very thing again, even after having written this book, and just collecting some new data actually, that I hadn't really gotten quite so clear. I was like focusing on the images in my mind, and thinking about how those images could have their own images.
Like could a purple image have a red image in its mind? How would that work? And I'm drawing this out and then making connections between brain states. Well, what are brain states? Are they things in space? Are the things in my images in space? They seem to have spatial, if I'm dreaming of a spatial thing, like what is that? So you can do that. Like you can actually pay attention to yourself, pay attention to the familiar and then ask yourself this question.
Joshua Rasmussen (58:51.629)
How could something like me exist? And you might be sort of startled by the challenge of answering that question. Like no matter what your worldview is, whether you think that it's like mindless bits that produce everything else, or you think that there's some kind of supreme mind at the base of reality, either way. I mean, how could God make you? That's gonna lead you somewhere probably into a wilderness that...
isn't protected by fences of orthodoxy, either in religion or science. You're going to just see, oh, this is, there's something uncharted over here. And the other thing I think you'll come away with doing this, just paying attention to the familiar, is, I hope this is the case, is an awareness of your own significance, an awareness of the profoundness of your existence, that you're included within reality. And
There's something very profound about that. That would be kind of an echo message of the book is that whatever you think, whatever perspective you come from, that you are a profound piece of reality. And I think the significance of your existence just cannot be overexpressed or overstated.
PJ (59:52.233)
Uh.
PJ (01:00:09.922)
What an encouraging way to end, Dr. Rasmussen, Joshua. Wonderful having you on today, thank you.
Joshua Rasmussen (01:00:16.813)
Thank you.