Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Philip Gough, thanks for joining us. How are you? Hello Stephen, I'm very well. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.

Our pleasure entirely. I was just looking over some of your writing before when it was announced that he was coming on the show and I think I think we're going to have a cracking conversation

actually given where we're both coming from. Maybe you could just let our listeners

an audience know what it is you do what keeps you busy?

I'm a philosopher at Durham University in the cold north of England and I spend most of my time trying to work out the

ultimate nature of reality.

I'm particularly interested in consciousness.

Perhaps the biggest challenge of contemporary science and philosophy

is how the brain manages to produce this inner world of colours and sounds and smells and

taste that we all enjoy.

And I've defended the odd sounding view that the best explanation of this is panpsychism that consciousness

goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of reality which

sounds a bit odd but has been taken much more seriously in recent years.

All right do I detect a slight merseys

I am well spotted I am a Liverpoolian people from Liverpool can never spot it, but I am a Liverpoolian

I'm in Manchester Alarms go off straight away when there's a scoused in the in the vicinity

We can be friends I hope for I. I hope so. I like to transcend

tribal rivalries myself. But especially since I'm looking forward to getting

getting into this because these are the big topics, aren't they, like fundamental to the meaning of life, really?

So, like you say, consciousness, that's the spooky one, isn't it? That's the mysterious one.

You know, that I suppose the debate really would tip, you know, usually at its most polarise would be between people who would say, you know, consciousness is sort of just a product of the brain and it ceases to exist at death when the brain is you know completely

destroyed people usually monotheist religious types would say actually our

...