Interview with philosopher Jussi Jylkkä

Jussi Jylkkä is a project researcher, Åbo Akademi, Finland. He is a cognitive psychologist with a research focus on consciousness. He is mostly interested in the mind-body problem: his starting point - in line with panpsychism - is that everything is continuous with consciousness. After writing his PhD thesis in 2008 on how words refer to entities in the world, he decided to devote himself to philosophy of mind.

During a sunny winter day in around 2009, Jussi had a profound insight (no drugs were involved): “In hindsight, I’d say that it satisfies the characteristics of mystical experience; it was ineffable and since then I have tried to express it in words. “

Now, he would summarize the insight as follows: “Consciousness is the most concrete and real thing there is, and we know it directly since we are it. Everything else is just models or representations of reality. I know that my consciousness is this, what is happening right here right now. I know that you exist, but I cannot know what you are in yourself, beyond my conscious model of you. Everything beyond my own consciousness is a mystery because it is logically impossible for me to know in my consciousness what is outside my consciousness. This can be illustrated with a Zen-type koan: what is an atom when no one represents it as an “atom”?”

Q: What are you working on at the moment?

A: Right now, I am planning a research project on the philosophy and psychology of psychedelics. This is an interesting field because it combines philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and even spirituality. Psychedelic therapy also challenges the classical biomedical model because its effect is mediated by a mystical experience, or a radical change in worldview. Here philosophy has lots to offer psychology and psychiatry

Q: What is the driving force behind your twitter name: Thing-in-itself "Jussi Jylkkä”?

A: The notion of “thing-in-itself” comes from Kant, who argued that we cannot know the nature of objects (“noumena”) beyond our perceptions and thoughts about them. You have probably heard the Zen koan: when a tree falls in a forest and no one hears, does it make a sound? The modern person might respond that there is motion of air molecules, but no sensation of sound.

But what is “motion of air molecules” when no one represents it as “motion of air molecules”? What is an oxygen atom beyond our abstract, scientific model of it? What is that something, that “hidden cause” out there, that produces observations of oxygen atoms? The point of such koans is that we cannot, even in principle, know. It is a mystery. Knowing is in consciousness, so we cannot know what is outside consciousness.

But what about consciousness itself? When I write these words, there is a sense in which I know the thing-in-itself that produces them, because I am that thing-in-itself. I know that these words are produced by my thoughts and feelings, my mind, This. I am—as a conscious being—the hidden cause of your observations of these words. This, my experience, is what science models call a “neural process”. From the scientific, external perspective, it’s completely material, a physical process. So, this is matter in itself, beyond scientific models and observations.

Q: How does your work combine transcendental philosophy with neuroscience?

A: By transcendental philosophy I mean Kant’s idea that we cannot know things in themselves, beyond consciousness. This is because the way we perceive things is shaped by our consciousness. I think that this can be logically demonstrated, but also modern neuroscience supports it. For example, the integrated information theory considers things out there as “postulates”, something we infer based on our perceptions. Matter is inferred, consciousness is fundamental. Transcendental philosophy entails that we are fundamentally ignorant about the nature of what we call “matter”.

Galen Strawson has written extensively about this. Although we are ignorant of what matter is, there is vast amount of empirical evidence that consciousness is in fact a biochemical (i.e., material) process in the brain. How should we understand this identity thesis? In my view, it means that the thing-in-itself that neuroscientists abstractly model as, e.g., “neural correlate of consciousness”, is indeed something experiental.

Thus, the infamous epistemic gap in philosophy of mind boils down to the distinctness between the neuroscientific model and the thing-in-itself that it is about. So, we can say that experiences are indeed physical, that they are “nothing but” neural processes, and we don’t need to postulate problematic entities like “qualia” to understand them. Consciousness is nothing over and above what science models as “physical”. However, science is limited to modeling or representing reality, and is categorically ignorant of things in themselves. From our own case, we know that reality is this, something experiental.

Q: In your recent YouTube video ‘a brief note on trees’ you exhibit the realisation that you are much like a tree. What do you mean by this and what can we learn from trees?

A: In the scale of the universe, we humans are very much like trees; we have evolved from the same ancestry and share many genes. But what is a tree beyond my representation of it as “plant”, “biochemical process”, etc.? What am I beyond representations of myself as “homo sapiens”, “animal”, etc.?

From the perspective of science, me, trees, and everything else in the universe is physical. In philosophy this is called “monism”, the claim that all is one (or technically put: all belongs to a single ontological category). This is supported by modern science: everything is made of atoms, made of matter.

But what is “physical”? What we call “matter” is, at least in certain configurations, this, experience.

Now the question is: can we know what other configurations of matter besides ourselves are in themselves? Sometimes, like during the video, I get the feeling that we do. There is a sense of unity or connectedness with plants. People also get such unitary feelings, which are felt as veridical (“noetic”), during mystical or psychedelic experiences. Could they be veridical? Could we attain a state of being, maybe what Zen calls “This”, “One”, or “Emptiness”, which is shared with all that exists? After all, we are all made of the same matter.

Of course, I can be quite sure that trees don’t think philosophically like I do now, but maybe I could learn from trees a state of “pure being”, just existing, without thinking, without striving consciously.

Q: “I suspect disconnection from non-human nature is a major cause for the current eco-disaster. We’re not alone on this planet.” Can you speak more about this?

A: There are philosophers and psychologists with much more expertise about this than me. But as far as I know, there is empirical evidence that a sense of connectedness to nature can lead to attitudes and actions that are more sustainable. How to attain such connection? There is evidence that psychedelics can promote it. In fact, Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD thought of this as one of the main benefits of psychedelics.

A sense of unity can also be fostered philosophically, through forming a monistic metaphysics where everything is seen as fundamentally continuous with consciousness as we know it. This is compatible with materialism, which holds that consciousness is a physical process. But from the premise that all is one it does not yet follow that all that exists has some intrinsic value, or that it is worth preserving.

Maybe one could formulate an argument for the intrinsic value of nature from our own case, starting from the premise that our experiences have intrinsic value—say, pleasure is intrinsically good, pain is intrinsically bad. From there, we could proceed to justify the intrinsic value of all nature, possibly depending on its level of complexity, which according to some theories like IIT corresponds to experiental richness. I’m unsure about how feasible such a strategy is. However, there is evidence that in a psychedelic experience one may get a strong feeling that all is one, which also leads to ecologically more sustainable behaviors.

Philosophy has major role in integrating such insights by conceptualizing them in a way compatible with the scientific worldview. In short, if during a mystical experience one gets the ineffable feeling that “all is one”, philosophy can aid them to conceptualize that insight, and thereby integrate it into their worldview and life narrative.

Q: Which philosopher would you say has had the greatest influence on the way you think and why?

A: Would Stanley Kubrick count as a philosopher? My first philosophical awakening was as a child, around age 6, when I saw 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time. It raised a fundamental sense of mystery: what is the Monolith?

As an adult Alan Watts greatly influenced me. After reading his book “The Way of Zen”, I quit philosophy altogether for a decade, because I saw philosophy is merely word games that distance us from reality. I still think that way, but also that philosophy can instrumentally aid in seeing the artificiality of our conceptual constructs—although this is paradoxical.

Galen Strawson has also had a great influence on me by emphasizing our ignorance of matter and the fundamentality and concreteness of consciousness.

Q: What do you find most interesting about consciousness?

A: Consciousness is all there is. I cannot conceive of anything beyond my consciousness. My consciousness is my existence; it ceases only when I’m unconscious or dead. When people say that a person is “braindead”, they should rather say that there is no longer person at all, no mind that is the person. I cannot conceive of myself being dead or unconscious because imagining happens in consciousness. I can imagine my dead body, but that is merely an image in my current consciousness. So, consciousness is, in this sense, fundamental and absolute.

Q: What do you think is the biggest challenge in your field of work?

A: To produce a shift of consciousness where one sees that consciousness is fundamental. Many consider material objects as somehow more real than consciousness, when it is the other way round: consciousness is a thing in itself, whereas science is merely a model of reality. It is like the difference between a picture and the pictured, a symbol and the symbolled.

As René Magritte writes in The Treachery of Images “This is not a pipe”, we can note that a neural image is not the depicted thing in itself—an experience is. However, it is also important to notice that although science is limited to “depicting” objects, it is highly likely that the scientific pictures refer to real things out there: atoms and molecules do exist, it is just that we don’t know their intrinsic nature.

Moreover, to say that science is limited to modeling does not entail that there would some extra properties in reality that are not modeled. We can hold that science can model all properties there exist, and simultaneously acknowledge the limits of science.

This is related to the question about “qualia”. I agree with eliminativists like Dennett and Frankish that qualia in the classical sense do not exist, if the term means something that science cannot model. Thus, I balance between panpsychism (beyond scientific models, everything is continuous with consciousness) and eliminativism (qualia don’t exist). Communicating this somewhat paradoxical idea is challenging.

Q: What is the most important lesson you’ve learned in the past 10 years?

A: From a philosophical perspective, it is certainly the insight that we cannot know things in themselves, except for our own consciousness. A model should not be confused with the modeled, or a picture with the pictured. A word is not the object. But how can we get beyond words and representations? Can we know consciousness in itself? Certain Zen scholars say that the lay person is already enlightened. Thinking about existence and consciousness moves us further from the thing in itself; the symbols distance us from the real thing. Existence is this, consciousness is this, in this present moment. Consciousness is always present but when we try to grasp it in words and symbols it escapes; yet even the process of trying to grasp consciousness is in consciousness. Zen philosophy captures this paradox best.

Jussi’s forthcoming paper “Mary on Acid” will be published soon… and we cannot wait! To read more about Jussi’s work check out his papers here, and for live updates on his thoughts and recent developments, follow him on Twitter.