Nicolas Rouleau and Michael Levin have a new preprint out: Brains and Where Else? Mapping Theories of Consciousness to Unconventional Embodiments. The gist of the paper is that we should be open to seeing consciousness in places other than brains. While I’m onboard with that general premise, they take it to places that don’t seem productive to me, arguing, for instance, that we could see the liver as conscious. They acknowledge that this can be seen as a type of panpsychism.
There are many variations of panpsychism out there, with some blurring into variants of idealism. But it’s always seemed like it can be broken into two broad groups: fundamental panpsychism and naturalistic panpsychism.
Fundamental panpsychism starts with the theory of fundamental consciousness, discussed a couple posts back, a view which sees consciousness as a property or properties that are simple, irreducible, and fundamentally private. When these properties are only thought to be in brains, we have property dualism. But if the properties are considered to be in all matter, then we’re at fundamental panpsychism.
(I’ve previously called fundamental panpsychism “pandualism”, but panpsychists tend to resist the dualist label. However most do lean into the idea that consciousness is fundamental, so hopefully “fundamental panpsychism” isn’t objectionable.)
Naturalistic panpsychism seems like a minority view that stays firmly within the naturalistic framework. Human and animal consciousness is reducible and explainable in physical and functional terms. However, with this understanding, it can be argued that there is no sharp boundary between systems we consider conscious and those we don’t. One approach, the one I usually take, is to regard consciousness as a hazy semantically indeterminate concept. But another is to argue that consciousness is far more prevalent in nature than conventionally assumed.
That basically seems like the approach Rouleau and Levin take, arguing that many of the popular theories of consciousness actually predict consciousness in fairly simple systems. It seems like a variation of the substitution argument that IIT theorists have argued for before, that many theories of consciousness, if taken literally, imply that consciousness exists in much simpler systems than the theory authors imagine.
However, a counter for this argument is that most of these theories are formulated within a broader context of cognitive neuroscience and biology. They’re not meant to be considered in isolation. So although a local area computer network could be seen as implementing a sort of basic global workspace, a global workspace theorist can argue that too much of the surrounding context is missing, that of a body with sensory organs and action abilities, along with a broader set of cognitive abilities like episodic memory and imagination.
Of course, the more of this context that is required, the smaller the subset of systems we regard as conscious. A naturalistic panpsychist might argue that if we want to include all animal life, as many do, then that inevitably will include a lot else, both living and non-living. Which I think is a valid point.
In the end, it comes down to how strict or liberal we want to be with the word “conscious”. My long standing solution is to split the baby and talk in terms of hierarchies. For example:
- Interactions with the environment
- Automatic behavior (reflexes and fixed action patterns)
- Body and environmental models
- Causal models
- Recursive models of the above
We can of course choose to regard “consciousness” as only referring to 0, in which case it’s widespread. But this has long struck me as pyrrhic. The resulting notion of “consciousness” is not one I find particularly interesting. It changes the question from how to explain consciousness to how to explain human and animal consciousness, and we’re largely right back where we started.
But similar to notions like pantheism, naturalistic panpsychism could be seen as a poetic form of naturalism. It’s not a view I can say is necessarily wrong, although it does introduce the possibility of confusion, particularly with fundamental panpsychism. So in that sense, Rouleau and Levin are making much more of a philosophical rather than scientific argument.
What do you think? Am I missing anything with their view? Are there problems with naturalistic panpsychism I’m overlooking? Or problems with the division I make between fundamental and naturalist panpsychism?
SelfAwarePatterns 
Armed with new reading glasses, I’ve been soaking in papers printed off the Internet, and one I read yesterday bears on the distinction you propose between “fundamental” and “natural” panpsychism — by suggesting yet another distinction. The paper is called “When the Part Mirrors the Whole: Interactions Beyond ‘Simple Location’,” by Alex Gomez-Marin and Juan Arnau.
I’ll get around to this paper on my blog (I’m also trying to pull together something on depth perception), but for now I’ll just wave in its direction and exclaim “What THEY said!” The authors highlight a distinction made by Whitehead between “simple location” and a proposed alternative, which they call “internal relation.” The distinction you propose here would subdivide “simple location.” It assumes simple location as the underlying metaphysics for both types of panpsychism. “Fundamental” panpsychism posits that entities with simple location have psychic properties, while “naturalistic” panpsychism, as you call it, posits that psychic phenomena emerge from entities with simple location.
As the authors put it in the Abstract, “Our work aims to criticize the notion of simple location, even in the framework of emergentist accounts, so as to contribute to a ‘relational turn’ that will conceive ‘inter-identities’ as ‘intra-identities’ in which interactants are not enduring substances, but internally related processes.” Later in the paper they write, “To put it plainly, one can emphasize dynamic interconnectedness in order to defend a process-based view of nature while still (perhaps unknowingly) embracing a substance-based view.”
While the paper builds on Whitehead’s critique of simple location, the authors reiterate that “we are not demanding organicists to embrace Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. We are calling attention to the metaphysics that operates underneath one’s theory (which in turn frames the data we collect and how we interpret it).”
Beyond the metaphysics of simple location, we can discern at least one other type of panpsychism, which might better be called “pan-experientialism.” For this type, experience is neither a property of substance, nor emergent from substance. In a world that consists of mutually experiencing processes, our fixation on substance as the ground or explanation of experience is a fallacy.
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I forgot to add that I’m not completely on board with your proposed terms. I’d call them “innate” or “inherent” or “latent” panpsychism, and “emergent” panpsychism. In the latter case we can go on to question the “pan” prefix, quietly undermining the general idea.
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I need to pick up new glasses myself at some point, although I’m still able to read computer screens without any, providing the text isn’t too small. But my distance glasses are pretty ancient at this point, and I’m becoming increasingly aware I need an update.
I’m not quite seeing the connection between location and panpsychism here. Although as I noted on your blog the other day, my take is that location is a functional and relational concept, one that, along with spacetime, may not be fundamental. That doesn’t mean it isn’t real, at least to me, just that it may be emergent from some other underlying reality. I’ll keep an eye out for your post!
I can see where you’re coming from with the “innate”, “inherent”, or “latent” terms. It might match what I’m saying with “fundamental”. But the “emergent” one feels less on point. Rouleau and Levin probably would agree that human and animal consciousness are emergent, but emergent from simpler systems that are themselves conscious. (For that matter, I think even a fundamental panpsychist would say that, although the manner of how that happens seems like the combination problem.)
But I’m not sure Rouleau and Levin would argue that electrons, for instance, are conscious. If not, then emergence does eventually become an issue, just at a much lower level than it does for most people thinking in terms of consciousness being emergent.
On panexperentialism, I actually think most people who call themselves panpsychists mean this. It’s not that everything has a mind, but that everything has some incipient level of conscious experience. Myself, I see this separation as problematic, but I recognize most people who see experience as fundamental don’t.
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When I rechristened “natural panpsychism” as “emergent panpsychism,” I meant just this. It “basically seems like the approach Rouleau and Levin take,” and it’s one that exempts us from thinking of electrons as conscious. As I put it at the time, we can go on to question the “pan” prefix. To put more snappily, the idea of “natural panpsychism” encourages us to take the “pan” out of “panpsychism.” But then what’s left of it? So I don’t think it’s a helpful category.
The connection between location and panpsychism has to do with whether the nexus of things is really built on physical locations – this building here, this atom there, that quark there — or whether this is a confusion, an oversimplification, a “misplaced concreteness.” Relativity and quantum mechanics appear to be telling us so, but with the wax of “simple location” still in our ears, we aren’t getting the message. Once we see that the world isn’t really made of this atom here and that quark there, we are open to asking what it is made of, and this appears to be interactions or relations. This opens the way to a Berkeleyan account of intermingling presences with what we can only call, helplessly, a sort of “mental” character — an account which as a physicalist you have no intention of entertaining. Nevertheless, as Gomez-Marin and Arnau argue in their paper, “the notion of internal relations has a strong theoretical power to overcome some fundamental difficulties in the study of life and mind.”
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On Rouleau and Levin’s panpsychism, right. A lot depends on just how strict we want to be with the “pan” part. Does a view that sees pervasive experience, just not down to the elementary particle level, count?
I’m not sure how they’d react to the “emergent” part however. Consider the first paragraph of their conclusion section, where they admit that this may be panpsychism.
“Once we see that the world isn’t really made of this atom here and that quark there, we are open to asking what it is made of, and this appears to be interactions or relations.”
Are you familiar with Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics interpretation? He also sees relations and interactions as the primary elements of reality. As a structural realist, I’m with him up to that point. But to explain quantum randomness, and preserve an epistemic view of the wave function, he posits that relations only exist during the interactions, which is where I struggle. Still, it’s an interesting view.
“an account which as a physicalist you have no intention of entertaining”
I actually try to entertain all kinds of accounts. It’s just that I hit obstacles with most. I try never to summarily reject a serious view. Of course, I do end up rejecting most of them, but for specific reasons, blockers which I usually do try to discuss with the proponents, when possible, and see if there’s a way through or around them I’ve missed.
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While I’m all for an increased awareness of experience beyond the human, I think the “pan” in “panpsychism” has to mean something. By definition, the view that experience isn’t pervasive cannot count as any form of panpsychism. It might count as a form of vitalism.
In the quoted passage, I interpret Rouleau and Levin to be proposing something less than panpsychism, and mistakenly calling it “a kind of panpsychism.” Really it’s just an acknowledgement of the possibility of experience beyond the human. For some reason, they feel that experience still has to be confined to the biological. (The reason isn’t given in the quote.) Panpsychism makes a stronger metaphysical claim, and this is precisely what makes it interesting. But again, broadening the candidates for experience is at least a move in the right direction.
The reference to “the scaling and transformation of embodied minds from physical dynamics” sounds something like emergence, but there’s more to be said. When the authors contrast sharp phase transitions and brain-specific theories, they point out that these theories still have to explain sharp discontinuities and “emergence.” I interpret the authors to mean, not that appeals to emergence are unacceptable, but that brain-specific theories by their nature try to avoid the need for “novel natural kinds.” Such theories prefer to explain everything in the natural kinds proper to brain science. If this proves inadequate, then they will have to account for the emergence of other natural kinds after all; this is all the authors are saying when they put “emergence” in quotes. For their part, they’re willing to entertain a novel natural kind from the outset — call it “psyche” — and they look for it beginning somewhere on the continuum between atoms and human brains.
But if its appearance on this continuum is not spontaneous and not emergent, then what? I haven’t read the paper, so I’m not sure whether Roleau and Levin explain why experience is confined to the biological. If they do so without appealing to emergence, I’d be interested to hear the argument.
I am familiar with Rovelli, and in a few places I’ve compared his ideas to Whitehead’s. Rovelli is keen to distance himself from panpsychism, which smells to him of thunder-gods; more inquisitive than that he declines to be, despite his insistence that science must remain open-minded (I’m thinking particularly of his lecturing in Helgoland).
You do try to entertain all kinds of accounts, Mike, and I apologize if my observation came off as brusque. If you ask me, the blockers that cause you to reject most of these accounts involve limits of discourse, which I might compare to strange attractors confining a viable range to the local minimum. Certainly if you’re struggling with the idea that relations only exist during interactions, I can see how you’d have difficulty making sense of a process approach. I find it helps to watch the waves down at the harbour. To paraphrase a well-known koan, “What is the peak of one wave interfering?”
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I’ve learned not to debate definitions. We can debate about what people most commonly mean by terms, but not which definition is the one true one independent of convention. Maybe the authors can fit their view into emergent panpsychism or panprotopsychism. I’m not in any of these camps, and so have no dog in this hunt.
I don’t think they actually see consciousness as being confined to biology. They mention AI several times in the paper. But I think they’re both biologists. (I know Levin is.) So it make sense that they focus on biology in their analysis.
I do take them to be anti-emergence, at least in the way it’s normally discussed. They emphasize throughout the paper their view that there is smooth scaling through all the layers. They do reference the brain a lot, but I think that’s in reaction to the way most consciousness scientists think about it.
Sorry, didn’t mean to imply I was offended or anything. I was just pointing out that I do try to mentally “try on” views when people present them, to try to see them from the perspective of an enthusiast. The blockers I discuss are generally the ones that prevent me from being one of those enthusiasts, if indeed I’m not one.
I generally don’t have a problem with a process ontology (which I consider functionalism to be a form of). It seems like every substance above quantum fields reduces to underlying processes. But the idea that relations only exist during interactions doesn’t make ontological sense to me. I can buy we don’t know the relations until an interaction, but the idea that they don’t exist until that interaction, and cease to exist between it and the next one, strikes me as requiring justification. It’s one of the reasons RQM doesn’t work for me.
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“Meaning is use,” as Wittgenstein says, and if the consensus is that “panpsychism” doesn’t imply that everything in the universe has some sort of intrinsic consciousness, then so be it. However, I think we’re far from such a consensus about the word, and the other side of this issue is the misuse of words. George Orwell’s famous essay “Politics and the English Language” comes to mind. I have a long-standing interest in the study of propaganda, and I’m aware (perhaps too keenly so) of how the imprecise use of a word can be applied for a hidden agenda.
In this case, I don’t think anyone deliberately intends to undermine alternatives to the received metaphysics. But commandeering “panpsychism” for views in which the world is still made of stuff with no intrinsic consciousness is, probably in an unconscious way, a means of shunting an uncomfortable alternative aside. When Carlo Rovelli, in his 2021 essay “Relations and Panpsychism,” points out that “20th Century physics has already vindicated a—very mild—form of panpsychism,” he is already setting himself up to ignore the significance of the fact. He goes on to say that “This is perhaps not panpsychism, because there is nothing specifically psychic or mental in the relational properties of a system with respect to another system.” This claim does not follow from anything; it’s just a metaphysical assertion, which allows him to ignore what panpsychism, and perhaps even his own theory, really implies. His “very mild form of panpsychism” makes about as much sense as a “very mild form of physicalism” would in the contemporary scientific arena, or “a very mild form of freedom” in the arena of politics.
I haven’t read the paper by Roleau and Levin. Maybe they are seriously entertaining panpsychism as a new way of thinking about reality, and not just misapplying the label to the usual box. I guess I should read it before making a judgement.
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Well, I read the paper, and I suppose I can’t complain, because Roleau and Levin go a long way toward panpsychism. For some reason, although they mention AI from time to time, they keep dropping the ball when it comes to non-biological substrates. I think this prevents them from going somewhere truly interesting.
The paper basically questions the emphasis on neural correlates of consciousness, arguing that non-neural correlates not only deserve consideration, but actually make more sense based on current evidence. Reviewing current theories of consciousness, they try to see which theories can survive the substitution of “neurocentric language” with “aneurocentric or generic terms.” To my larger point, none of the 20-odd theories (from Seth & Bayne, Theories of Consciousness) entertains true panpsychism. In virtually every description, it “arises” from something, or is an “effect” of something, or “depends” on something, or is “identical” to something. The panpsychist position is that these are all strained attempts to account for something that’s just there.
Roleau and Levin work toward a functional definition of consciousness, one that is substrate- and scale-independent (meaning it doesn’t have to involve a brain, and it doesn’t have to be macroscopic), but as I’ve noted, they don’t follow up on the implications of non-biological substrates. The non-neural substrates they consider are always biological.
I shouldn’t be too hard on them. When they say that “consciousness in a collective intelligence made of cells is not a wild claim – indeed, it is the only kind of consciousness we’ve ever seen, because each of us is a collective intelligence,” they are taking a page right out of Whitehead, and teetering on the edge of the “combination problem” — which for panpsychists is what we really should be thinking about.
Unfortunately the whole notion of “correlates” depends on our prior intuitions about what can possibly count as conscious. Only humans? Only larger animals? Only animals? Only animals and plants? Only biological entities? Their paper goes a long way down this road, inviting us to consider spaces of affordance that extend even to disembodied AI. Yet frustratingly, they don’t ask the question that this invites: biological and non-biological entities? At a couple of points they tease the idea, but they never follow through.
I’ll take it as a milestone on a promising road.
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Glad you read it! I really think their focus on biology is because it’s just their field. I know Levin often talks in terms of biological algorithms, which I’ve always taken as an indication that he’s good with the possibility of machine consciousness. But I suspect you mean consciousness in other natural systems. The closest I remember them coming was reference to pre-cellular mechanisms. I guess they took it as far as they felt they could discuss with any professional authority.
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Speaking to the question of fundamental vs naturalist, the only relevant difference I see is irreducible vs reducible. But what if a theory explains how the high level (human brain) is physically reducible to the fundamental level (specific basic physical process)? Is that fundamental or naturalist.
*
[asking for a friend]
[ahem]
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Assuming the fundamental level isn’t itself conscious, then it would be more naturalist. But if you still see that fundamental level having consciousness, then that implies that it itself is fundamental.
Personally I’m leery of declaring anything fundamental. What seems fundamental to one generation might be reduced in future generations. I think we can talk about more and less fundamental things, and we could use “fundamental” to refer to the most fundamental things we’re currently aware of, but making a stronger statement then that seems to invite being quoted in later centuries as an example of how limited our understanding of things are.
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The way I see it, both sides of your distinction suffer from a prior commitment to physicalism, which means they are not a particularly fruitful distinction at all. The fundamental p.p. sees sentients roots in the very fabric of matter whereas the naturalistic p.p. sees it within larger material phenomena. I do not think any meaningful progress can be made in the study of consciousness without recognizing its completely different character from objects of physicalist scientific sttudy. Of course, some immediately erect a verboten zone around this idea, applying the perjorative “dualism” label to it. I don’t care about that label; I care about what is phenomonologically justifiable. Thomas Nagel intuited all this as well, but was roundly ignored.
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Most panpsychists I’ve read, or read about, seem to see physicalism as insufficient to account for consciousness. They see their position as distinct from physicalism. (Galen Strawson, I believe, attempts to redefine “physicalism” to include the necessary elements, but that’s still an attempt at expanding the ontology.) Naturalistic panpsychists like Rouleau and Levin, argue that we don’t need to expand the ontology, but when viewed correctly, it still involves consciousness being universal (or near universal), however their view seems firmly in the minority, at least currently.
From what I’ve read, Nagel started out with property dualism but moved to panpsychism at some point. Although I heard he may have moved away from it later, so I’m not sure what his current views are. But in 2013, based on his NYTimes article, he definitely seemed to believe in some form of fundamental (irreducible) consciousness.
But you’re right. My view is reductionist, functionalist, and mechanist. I’m always open to being convinced that something else is needed, but I need evidence or a compelling argument.
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Strawson isn’t merely expanding the ontology, since he buys into a certain tenant of physicalism—determinism. He claims we have no free will. In this, I think he has too much of a commitment to physicalism….not his expanded version, but old-school physicalism, physicalism as we normally understand it.
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That’s interesting. I wouldn’t have expected him to be a hard determinist. I wonder if he’s an explicit epiphenomenalist.
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I doubt he’d call himself an epiphenomenalist, but it’s hard to say.
BTW, a note about his anti free will argument—he claims current physics can’t answer the question of free will and that his argument against it has nothing to do with what physics has to say on the matter. But I’m interpreting his free will argument as essentially the same as old school physicalist determinism:
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/your-move-the-maze-of-free-will/
Notice he talks about genes and social influences being determining factors from which we can’t escape. Essentially, we can’t choose who we are so we have no free will. (LAME!)
Hugely disappointing coming from someone who claims to take experience seriously.
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He seems to be talking about libertarian free will. And he makes the point that determinism vs indeterminism makes no real difference. I’m with him on that. But I don’t see that as particularly meaningful, except maybe for theologians.
My view is compatibilist, that it’s productive to hold people accountable for decisions for which they are capable of foreseeing the possible consequences. In that view, how we are is exactly what is being judged.
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Right. I complained that this makes him an epiphenomenalist as far as the experience of agency goes in the post on dueling dualisms, though not as far as qualitative experience goes.
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The prior commitment to physicalism is my concern also. But any complaints about dualism as an unacceptable alternative presuppose the validity of physicalism as the background. Physicalism is the supposedly essential component that forces the discussion. As such, physicalism carries the seeds of dualism into all its conversations, as whatever is left over when its account is asserted to be complete (as it constantly is). Physicalism is essentially dualism trying to shake the mud off its boots. It is dualism with one eye defiantly closed. It is that half of Cartesian dualism which has been approved for polite discussion, while the discussion is carried on anyway in essentially Cartesian terms.
This prior commitment to physicalism, and everything it entails, is my concern also. But imagining an alternative does not mean adding something to physicalism, something that had a different character and needs to be recognized as well. It means rethinking physicalism completely. I think this is what Nagel was hinting at in The View from Nowhere when he talks on p. 51 about an “integrated theory of reality” that “when it arrives, probably not for centuries, … will alter our conception of the universe as radically as anything has to date.” To my mind, the new conception is nearer than we think, and post-Newtonian physics is pointing the way, along with some preliminary guidance from an “early adopter” named Alfred North Whitehead.
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Well said. This is what I was trying to get at in my dueling dualisms post.
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As you point out, there are so many panpsychisms out there. Some, in my opinion, probably don’t deserve to be so called, as they are really just forms of materialism that have taken the label for whatever reason. Others, as you note, are closer to idealism. These are the ones I tend to prefer, of course.
For “fundamental panpsychism”, can you give examples?
“One approach, the one I usually take, is to regard consciousness as a hazy semantically indeterminate concept. But another is to argue that consciousness is far more prevalent in nature than conventionally assumed.”
I would think the first would naturally lead into the second. Unless those who view consciousness as a semantically indeterminate concept are making a more epistemic claim and simply aren’t willing to allow that we can know what’s conscious and what isn’t.
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“as they are really just forms of materialism that have taken the label for whatever reason”
I think a lot of panpsychists would regard naturalistic panpsychism that way. Like pantheism, it seems vulnerable to criticism that it disguises one view with another (atheism with pantheism, and eliminativism with naturalistic panpsychism).
“For “fundamental panpsychism”, can you give examples?”
I’d say the majority of people who call themselves panpsychists fall into this category. Consider the opening sentence from the SEP article.
“Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world.”
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
This makes the authors, Philip Goff, William Seager, and Sean Allen-Hermanson, examples of fundamental panpsychists. Others might include Bertrand Russell, Thomas Nagel, and Galen Strawson. I say “might” here because I haven’t read these guys at length on panpsychism, and almost all of them are maddeningly evasive at times. Goff himself once pondered if quantum spin might be consciousness, which by itself could be more naturalistic, although I’m pretty sure he would consider it to have “experiential properties” in addition to the physical manifestation.
“Unless those who view consciousness as a semantically indeterminate concept are making a more epistemic claim and simply aren’t willing to allow that we can know what’s conscious and what isn’t.”
My view isn’t that it’s epistemic, a fact of the matter which we can’t learn, but instead that there’s no fact of the matter to learn. It depends on which version of “consciousness” we’re talking about. If we define “consciousness” as having interactions, then everything is conscious. But as I noted in the post, this makes the concept seem trivial. If we restrict it to self reflection, then the list of conscious things is much smaller. And of course there are uncountable positions in between.
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Thanks for the clarification, Mike, and on the semantic issue too. I wonder, are you thinking of panpsychism as ‘everything is conscious‘? That’s understandable given the meanings of the words ‘pan’ and ‘psychism’, but it’s a bit of a misleading term. I don’t think most panpsychists would say everything is conscious. Many simply want to reinstate qualitative properties into matter, but qualitative properties are not necessarily conscious.
I ask because I found it strange that you characterized fundamental panpsychism as “a view which sees consciousness as a property or properties that are simple, irreducible, fundamentally private, and infallibly known.” I wondered if you were thinking of Leibniz, since that somewhat describes his view (except the ‘infallibly known’ part, I don’t think he’d talk about monads in that way). I think what you’re describing sounds more like some contemporary forms of dualism, though, than contemporary panpsychism.
When you think about it, let’s say I believe in some sort of atomistic panpsychism where there are proto-conscious phenomenal entitites or properties that make up the qualitative aspect of matter, the aspect which science doesn’t describe. The notion that these entities or properties would be characterized as fundamentally “private” makes no sense because they have no ‘what it’s like’ because they’re not conscious. They must combine to create consciousness, the ‘what it’s like’.
As for “infallible”, think of it this way: I doubt many panpsychists would say a dog has infallible knowledge of its own experience, and yet at the same time I doubt anyone these days would say a dog is nothing more than an automaton and that consciousness only ’emerges’ in us. It would be stranger still to characterize properties in this way. How can a phenomenal property be infallible? What would that even mean?
Also, ‘irreducible’ is also problematic given that some panpsychists believe consciousness is reducible to proto-conscious entities or phenomenal properties (like ‘atoms’ of color, for instance) that make it up. This is important because the appeal (for some) is to be able to build qualities back into the objective picture of reality without straying from the basic scientific causal framework (Strawson). For them, it would be important that consciousness be reducible to proto-conscious phenomenal realities or to phenomenal properties.
“If we define “consciousness” as having interactions, then everything is conscious.”
Yes, which does indeed seem trivial. This is why I think the notion of consciousness being fundamental is more about there being gradients of consciousness rather than full-on self-reflective consciousness at the human level imposed on anything that can get jostled in the wind, which is just flipping stupid.
It sounds to me like Goff was probably just riffing on the indeterminism of quantum spin, since many seem to like the notion of indeterminism amounting to causal agency.
I think Strawson is right about physicalism, but he is kind of obscure about it, I agree. It took me a while, but I think I’ve come to see his point (on my own, somehow). I think it comes down to this: Physicalism isn’t clear on what counts as physical; science doesn’t even know what counts as physical (as opposed to non-physical) anymore. We used to think the concrete, tangible world counted as physical, but ‘substances’ are out. Now that we’re dealing with quantum realities, observer-independent reality can’t be the defining feature either. The problem for physicalism is this: what does it mean for something to be not-physical? If there is no such thing, then does physicalism have any meaning?
According to physicalism “there’s nothing over and above the physical” and “everything supervenes on the physical”. But when you think about it, those two definitions contradict one another. What is this “everything” that supervenes on the physical if there’s “nothing over and above the physical”?
Maybe this will be clearer:
“the physical” = “real” = “everything we can talk about”
But if everything’s physical, then ‘physical’ turns out to signify nothing at all.
Personally, I would rather preserve our common sense notion of the physical as being ‘tangible, given, concrete’, but that position isn’t open to most physicalists who want to preserve a scientific worldview. So anyway I think Strawson is pointing out that physicalists have some explaining to do when it comes to defining the physical. He’s doing this in a rather flashy way by throwing panpsychism into the face of physicalism. It’s a way of showing rather than telling physicalists that they have no power to deny panpsychism, because based on their own stated views, panpsychism fits perfectly within the realm of the physical too.
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“I wonder, are you thinking of panpsychism as ‘everything is conscious‘?”
I’ve read enough from panpsychists to know that most are actually panprotopsychists and/or panexperentialists (as opposed to pancognitivists). But it’s still understood that the proto-phenomenal building blocks are special in some sense, intrinsic properties (quiddities) undetectable by science (that is, fundamentally private). And they obviously can’t be reduced any further, except into simpler components which are still proto-phenomenal. There remains a separate ontology all the way down as far as the fundamental panpsychist is concerned, one that never reduces to just the physics.
I’m actually only glancingly familiar with Leibniz’s views, with monads being the main thing I remember, and his mill argument. But his view does seem like an example of fundamental consciousness. That seems to be what the mill argument is going for, that no reduction is conceivable. That said, I haven’t read him at length, so I’m sure it’s more nuanced that the quick summaries I have read.
The phenomenal side reductionism does lead to a problem of course, the combination problem. Which to me seems like just the hard problem all over again. It’s supposed to be easier, because now an a priori relation should be possible where supposedly it wasn’t before, but there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on what it actually looks like.
(Of course, I believe an a priori mapping is possible between the mental and physical, but it does require giving up on the theory of fundamental consciousness.)
Sounds like you know more about Strawson’s “real physicalism” argument than I do. He had a chapter in a book on Mary’s Room, which is where I read his views. But I find him so strident that it’s hard to read him at length. (In fairness, Dennett is also strident to a silly extent in that book, and in a way that I can’t see being convincing to anyone who didn’t already agree with him.)
I’m not going to defend physicalism as a concept. I’ve discussed the definition problem myself. But really it cuts both ways; what is the non-physical? It’s why I often say that physicalism is a good approximation of my view. What I really am is a causal mechanist, or perhaps more fundamentally, a structuralist. To the extent some form of physicalism agrees with that, I’m a physicalist.
“Personally, I would rather preserve our common sense notion of the physical as being ‘tangible, given, concrete’,”
The problem, as Chalmers points out, is that view is fragile and so vulnerable to Cartesian skepticism. It’s why I favor more a functionalist view, where solidity isn’t anything fundamental, but a mechanism that resists penetration or molding. Thinking of it that way is more resilient, allowing us to be open to the possibly of a radically different underlying reality without dismissing what the common everyday version means for us.
But for an idealist, I can see that vulnerability being a feature rather than something to be avoided.
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Ah, I see what you mean by “private” now, you mean “undetectable by science”. That makes more sense. I would say qualities don’t have to be private in the sense of “not discoverable by others”, but not discoverable by science (or considered real by science) is true enough. Science methodically excludes qualities from its account, so of course it can’t discover them.
On the other hand, “private” might be another way of saying panpsychism seems like a metaphysical free-for-all. I get that. Particularly those that posit some mysterious property that unites physical and phenomenal properties. That’s why I’m not as keen on contemporary panpsychism compared to idealism (not to mention the versions that adhere to determinism). There are versions of panpsychism I’m amenable to, but ultimately I want a description of reality that answers to experience. I’m an empiricist, but a radical one, not a traditional one. Ideas count too.
As for Strawson, I have only read that one paper and a few articles here and there. Mostly I get what he’s saying, but his calling himself a physicalist threw me off for a while. Maybe you’ll find this video is a bit clearer (and it’s short):
I remember that post you wrote about the physical and I thought it was perceptive, even though I think I ended up making joke and derailing my part of the conversation before it even got off the ground. I don’t think most (non professional) physicalists see the problem you pointed out in that post. I keep seeing the same confusion over terms stemming from physicalists who don’t realize they’re allowing their common sense notions of what counts as physical (involving qualities) to creep in when it’s handy, even though the more sophisticated understanding they purport to believe in won’t allow it.
You’re right about idealism. We’ve always got an answer, don’t we? ;P
Idealism can allow for a more commonsensical understanding of the physical—it’s those things that are “given” or “manifest” in experience that I didn’t imagine or dream up, which means they are objects that belong to the world—the meaning of “objective”—and so others may experience them too. Physical things tend to be tangible, but air isn’t tangible, so the physical isn’t necessarily tangible. There might be other ways people might wish to categorize types of physical objects, like some might want to include math (I would probably not, at least not in most contexts), but there’s no need to separate ideas from matter or to try to figure out what reality “in itself” is like.
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My understanding of fundamental privacy is not being discoverable or observable for anyone except the subject. I don’t see the distinction between “not discoverable by others” and “not discoverable by science”. Science requires replicable or otherwise verifiable observation, so it seems ruled out by definition. Unless there’s a distinction here I’m missing?
Of course, science posits unobservable entities all the time, such as electrons. But they’re entities required for theories that explain and predict the observations we can make. However phenomenal properties are also thought to be intrinsic, having no relations with anything else (other than the subject’s special direct access). But as we’ve discussed before, now we’re talking epiphenomenalism, causal impotence. I don’t know if that counts for the metaphysical free-for-all, but it certainly puts it outside of anything science can adjudicate.
I’ll note here that science can come up with theories for manifest consciousness. It’s just that the most straightforward seemng theory, fundamental consciousness, doesn’t fit with what we know about the brain and body. But there are alternate theories of manifest consciousness that do.
Thanks for the video. Strawson’s view seems like a common panpsychist one. He’s just not willing to surrender the “physicalist” label. But it’s a physicalism that includes intrinsic properties, the quiddities or “things in themselves” aspect (which fits with my previous paragraph). So he’s still expanding the ontology, just preferring to call the additions “physical”. It’s a verbal difference from most panpsychists (at least the ones I’ve read). Others, like Goff, prefer to emphasize the distinction between their view and conventional physicalism.
But I think it’s important to distinguish Strawson’s view from Rouleau and Levin’s, who, as far as I understand, aren’t arguing for an expanded ontology, just the lack of any sharp distinction between the simpler systems and the more complex ones we typically label “conscious”.
I might have to dig up that old post on physicalism and see if it still matches my views. It’s been a while.
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Quiddities are intrinsic, but that just means they’re non-relational essences. That’s different from qualia, which are experienced properties. So yes, you’d call both are intrinsic, but I think that word means something different for properties that aren’t experienced. Imagine if I said mass is private (intrinsic). You’d go, “Private? What?” It’s like saying, “This place sounds purple.”
“My understanding of fundamental privacy is not being discoverable or observable for anyone except the subject.”
So again, quiddities aren’t subjects. I’m not sure I’d characterize them as causally impotent for the same reasons above. They’re about describing the nature of entities where science only describes relationships:
“The second core Russellian monist thesis, realism about quiddities, states that there are (instantiated) properties of precisely the sort about which, according to structuralism about physics, physical theory is silent: properties that underlie the spatiotemporal structure physical theory describes. Those properties categorically ground the most basic physical dispositions that physics describes, in the way a ball’s spherical shape categorically grounds its disposition to roll when pushed. These underlying properties are often called quiddities (Lewis 2009; Chalmers 2012). They are also called inscrutables (Montero 2010). The latter designation is meant to indicate something on which many proponents of realism about quiddities agree: we know little about quiddities beyond the theoretical roles they are supposed to play.”—SEP https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/russellian-monism/
Maybe the word you’re looking for is “hidden”? Because if anything, you could criticize some panpsychist theories for postulating entities that can’t be observed or detected by science. (Not all, though! Mostyn Jones, as you know, has a theory that details exactly how to scientifically falsify his theory and it unfortunately involves cutting open a mouse.)
“I don’t see the distinction between “not discoverable by others” and “not discoverable by science”.”
I do. I think there are many public things science can’t detect, especially beauty and moral good, among others, and I don’t think these are private. They may not be universal, that’s another discussion, but calling these private would be going way too far.
As for Strawson, I don’t think he’s expanding the physicalist label so much as pointing out that the physicalist label is overly broad. But yes, he’s different from Goff, who doesn’t try to make two points at once! BTW, I haven’t read Rouleau and Levin so I didn’t mean to compare their view with Strawson’s. I was just trying to explain Strawson since I think I may have finally grasped what he’s getting at. As someone who’s largely sympathetic to his views, it says something that even I found him difficult to understand at first. That physicalist label threw me off big time.
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My understanding of the relationship between quiddities and consciousness comes from a little further down in that SEP article. Note the final sentence. It seems to be the final lynchpin that makes Russelian monism a form of panpsychism.
I take this to mean that the inaccessibility of quiddities is the same as the privacy of qualia, or maybe it’s more precise to say it’s what makes qualia private, or related in some other manner. It’s just that the subject, when there is a subject, is supposed to have some form of special privileged access. Or something like that. This isn’t my view, just my attempt to understand it. But Chalmers, Goff, and Strawson all talk about the distinction between what matter does, which science can access, and the things in themselves, which it can’t, and where they situate consciousness or proto-consciousness, which it seems like is just their way of discussing this quiddities / qualia relationship.
It’s the idea of these quiddities making up consciousness, essentially saying that “things in themselves” is mental, or experential, or proto-experential, that makes Russellian monism start to feel bit like some forms of idealism to me. Of course, that isn’t how Russell saw it. He saw his view as very distinct, which he called it “neutral monism”.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you were equating Strawson’s views with Rouleau and Levin’s. I just mentioned it to make clear the views are very different.
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Sorry it has taken me so long to reply. I read your comment on my phone then, not wanting to type on my phone, I put off replying, then forgot to reply. It’s something of a bad habit for me.
What philosophers say about phenomenal properties is mind-bogglingly varied. When it comes to quiddities, there are many ways of conceiving of them that concern how and whether they are constituted in consciousness. I’m not familiar with Bertrand Russell (haven’t read him) so I don’t want to say much more about quiddities. Apparently there’s even a physicalist Russellian monism. Yikes.
As for phenomenal properties, I wouldn’t necessarily link them to private qualia or private qualia to qualities existing in the world. I’d just leave that to be clarified by the particular philosopher.
I say this because I think there are two kinds of privacy that you could get into trouble for conflating here. One isn’t really privacy, it’s simply that science doesn’t describe the nature of things: it doesn’t say what something is, only what it does. There’s no reason to think what that something is, its intrinsic nature, cannot be known by us. In fact, I think it would be really bizarre to postulate that qualities (conceived as entities in the world) can’t be known since that would seem to destroy the link between the phenomenal realm of consciousness and the external reality that panpsychists are trying to bridge. It would simply make for another kind of dualism, one that’s incredibly ugly and convoluted. I say this because if we’re talking about qualities as “things in themselves” in a Kantian sense, then they can’t be known by anyone, not just science. They would be these mysterious theoretical qualitative entities that no one can know and no one can experience. But if that’s what qualitative properties are, how can we know they constitute qualia (or any other phenomenal property for that matter)? I mean, what would be the point in that? I think that’s just terrible.
I’m not saying that this incredibly ugly and convoluted dualism isn’t out there…I think it is out there…but I wouldn’t assume it covers a vast swath of panpsychist theories.
So whether qualities exist in the world as Kantian “things in themselves” (unknowable) might have to be left up in the air; it depends on the philosopher’s views, in other words.
It’s difficult to characterize panpsychism these days. It has become such a popular term that everyone wants a piece of it, but I’d be wary of that. The term is getting close to losing meaning.
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No worries on reply delays. I do the same thing. My system is to mark any notice email that I can’t respond to right away as unread. It serves as a to-do list. At least when I remember to do it. (Unfortunately notifications in most social media apps can’t be marked unread once you’ve seen them, which is a drag.)
I definitely agree that philosophers are all over the place with phenomenal properties. It’s why I’m mostly a qualia quietest, because the definitional morass makes it difficult to know what’s intended when the term is used. For instance, my long term impression is that “phenomenal properties” is a synonym for “qualia” and “mental qualities”, but not qualities out in the world.
On the knowability of intrinsic properties of matter, how could they ever be known? My understanding is that by definition that are non-relational and non-interacting. What experiment or observation could we make to learn about them? That’s my main issue with the concept. If they exist, they seem utterly unknowable and there seems to be nothing we can say about them. (Despite panpsychists going on to speculate about them anyway.) It’s why I’m an ontic structural realist rather than an epistemic one.
I can’t claim to be fully immersed in panpsychist literature. It’s not really an area of interest for me. But my impression is the Russelian monist link between the intrinsic properties of matter and qualia is pretty common among panpsychists. Consider this from the SEP article on panpsychism.
I do agree that this link is dubious. But then I think this whole conception of both matter and consciousness is poorly motivated to begin with, metaphysical speculation beyond any ability to ever test, even in principle.
“The term is getting close to losing meaning.”
I agree, although I think that’s also true of “consciousness”, “qualia”, “phenomenal”, “what it’s like” and many other phrases in this area.
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I’m not sure I know what you mean by “non relational and non interacting”. Can you give an example?
“What experiment or observation could we make to learn about them? That’s my main issue with the concept. If they exist, they seem utterly unknowable and there seems to be nothing we can say about them.”
There’s Mostyn Jones’ experiment in his paper on panpsychism. He gives a fairly detailed account of what experiment can be done. I personally don’t care about the experimental part of his paper as I prefer a priori arguments in metaphysics (rather than metaphysics based on the contingent findings of physics). But anyway, there it is.
Aside from that, I don’t think many panpsychists would want to say (macro) qualitative properties can’t be known in principle. That would be very strange. There are some who posit third entities to unite qualitative and quantitative properties, but I think overall the impetus behind panpsychism is to unite qualitative experience with the external world. So if there are unknowable qualitative properties, I would think these could come together to form qualitative properties we can know. (This is all very convoluted. I’m not keen on this invisible third property stuff. I think most of this ugly theorizing comes about as an attempt to reconcile to a physicalist’s deterministic universe. I’d just assume do away with the latter.)
Some panpsychists might say these qualitative properties can’t be known by science. From that link you sent me:
“Derk Pereboom (2011) has suggested that future thinkers may through imagination theorise their way to a positive hypothesis concerning the intrinsic nature of matter, and such a proposal may turn out to have empirical support, or theoretical support of some other kind. However, at least as they are currently conceived of, the physical sciences have no use for speculation concerning matter’s intrinsic nature. It is arguable that our choice is between the panpsychist proposal and the view that the intrinsic nature of matter is “we know not what”.”
We might not know intrinsic properties scientifically (though I would be reluctant to say this is a settled issue), but they can be known by virtue of our own consciousness or phenomenal experiences. What is “in here” must be the same qualitative ‘stuff’ as what’s “out there”…at least that’s how I understand it. So if it’s all the same, there is no “in here” vs. “out there”.
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“I’m not sure I know what you mean by “non relational and non interacting”. Can you give an example?”
The only example I’ve seen provided are the phenomenal properties (or proto-phenomenal properties) panpsychists commonly says is in all matter, but which we have special (non-physical) access to. Any other example someone might provide raises the question of whether we’re still talking about something non-relational and non-interacting, since for us to know about it implies a relation and past interaction. It’s why I think any any talk about them is unproductive.
Quickly skimming Mostyn Jones’ paper, it looks like he’s talking about “qualia proteins”. Whatever version of qualia he’s discussing, it doesn’t seem like fundamental qualia, the version discussed by people like early Frank Jackson, Joseph Levine, and heavily implied by Chalmers and Goff. But I find people like Goff are so evasive about exactly that they do mean that it’s hard to say. As I noted above, terms like “qualia” and “phenomenal properties” have been stretched and contorted so much, it’s difficult to know what someone means when they use these terms. Many shift between the manifest and fundamental versions depending on the argument they’re trying to make.
“We might not know intrinsic properties scientifically (though I would be reluctant to say this is a settled issue), but they can be known by virtue of our own consciousness or phenomenal experiences.”
Right. This gets us back to the special (non-physical, non-causal) access we’re supposed to have to our intrinsic qualia. This is fundamental consciousness, which I think is a theory that raises more questions than it answers (like the hard problem). For me, things seem a lot easier if we just accept that experience is relational and causal, but that’s the functionalist take.
“What is “in here” must be the same qualitative ‘stuff’ as what’s “out there”…at least that’s how I understand it. So if it’s all the same, there is no “in here” vs. “out there”.”
I agree. But I think both are structural and relational, with no need to posit anything else.
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I think non relational means “not defined by relations” in the way entities in physics are, where everything turns out to be both more than its relation to something else. Non interacting, that’s very strange. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about that. If qualities (however construed) can’t interact, then the matter they’re the qualitative aspect of can’t interact. And if we can experience them, they interact with us.
The qualities Mostyn talks about in that paper are colors. He keeps using that example but I think he means to include other qualities. But he is different from some of those names you mentioned because he’s not an epiphenomenalist. (I’m not sure where Goff stands on that. I’d have to scrutinize his book to figure it out, but meh…)
“Right. This gets us back to the special (non-physical, non-causal) access we’re supposed to have to our intrinsic qualia”
The way I see it, the characterization of qualitative experience as non causal is not an essential part of panpsychism. If anything it’s a very limited kind, a pseudo panpsychism. The causal problems philosophers like Jackson and Strawson face stem from their adopting a deterministic view of nature (which isn’t a feature of panpsychism per se) rather than the nature of qualities in the world.
“But I think both are structural and relational, with no need to posit anything else.”
Are you saying your experience is merely structures and relations?
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“I think non relational means “not defined by relations” in the way entities in physics are, where everything turns out to be both more than its relation to something else. Non interacting, that’s very strange.”
Consider this. What is an interaction other than a relation across time and space? If so, when something interacts, it has relations, and if it has relations, then it seems to fall within the preview of the physical. (Or we can talk about interactionist dualism, but that’s a turn most panpsychists seem to rule out.)
Goff and most of the others try to resist epiphenomenalism. But they also avail themselves of things like philosophical zombies, which to me scream epiphenomenalism. How else can a zombie be behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious entity?
Ironically, they often involve Russellian intrinsic properties as a way around epiphenomenalism. The idea, I think, is that they’re part of all the causal interactions, just not the part that physics can measure. Chalmers admits that this idea “smacks of the grandest metaphysics”.
https://web.archive.org/web/20241209094731/https://consc.net/papers/moving.html#3.4
(Sorry for using the archive link. Chalmers’ web site appears to be down right now.)
My issue is that these intrinsic properties add nothing to the explanations. To me they seem like a metaphysical glaze added to make us feel better. But again, functionalist.
“Are you saying your experience is merely structures and relations?”
Yes. Keep in mind my point above about interaction. My experience is a set of structural relations in time and space, a very complex one. What else would you expect from an ontic structural realist? 🙂
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“What is an interaction other than a relation across time and space?”
I’m not sure this captures what is meant by “interaction”; it seems too broad. Maybe that’s what you meant, though. If interaction is nothing more than a relation across space and time, everything interacts with everything else simply by existing because everything is related to everything else across space and time, including qualia. You’d have to stipulate some entity that exists outside of space and time to make it possible for something to have no interaction.
I’m reading that Chalmers paper you sent me and now I’m gonna rant a bit if you don’t mind, then get back to your questions. He says, “Even on an interactionist picture, there will be some broader causally closed story that explains behavior, and such a story can always be told in a way that neither includes nor implies experience.”
Huh, yeah, sure you can conveniently ignore the question of who is telling the story and who is listening to the story and pretend no one ever experiences anything, and you can tell a story about things moving about in space with no purpose, but in doing so you’re forgetting the storytelling and its purpose rests on experience. To get to an account devoid of experiences, you have to know what to subtract from your account and presuppose that account is being heard by someone who can experience it.
“While we certainly have strong intuitions that consciousness plays a causal role, our evidence for these intuitions lies largely in the fact that certain conscious events tend to be systematically followed by certain physical events. As always, when faced with such a constant conjunction, we infer a causal connection.”
The same is true for presupposing a causally closed universe, though. Why doesn’t he see that? He’s supposed to be a Kantian. He’s supposed to know that. He’s supposed to be saying causality is meaningful only when we acknowledge it as an a priori category that makes experience possible, if he’s going to be a Kantian. That would mean causality never comes from our seeing it out there in the world. The evidence for our own agency is at least equal to the evidence for a causally closed universe. I would think our agency is more readily known. After all, we can’t witness everything in the universe. The next line:
“But the epiphenomenalist can account for this evidence in a different way, by pointing to psychophysical laws, so our intuitions may not carry too much weight here.”
So he wants to have a law that merely seems as if it builds a bridge from the psychic to the physical, but doesn’t really? Yeah, Chalmers is a tough nut to crack at times. Anyway, back to our conversation.
Epiphenomenalism as I understand it simply denies our causal agency. When I lift my finger, it is not a decision that I can own, even if it seems that I am the one making the decision, because every decision I think I’m making is really nothing more than the mechanistic forces in the universe of which I am a part. I have no ability to change anything or affect anything, despite all appearances to the contrary. I don’t see how this view can come from anything other than an assumption of a causally closed universe. I don’t see this view as necessary to panpsychism or other theories of mind. It’s a separate belief that need not have bearing on qualia or experience or the nature of the world even, because we can simply say the world may not be causally closed, that we have no evidence that it is (there can be no evidence). This is an assumption, and perhaps not one worth holding on to.
“How else can a zombie be behaviorally indistinguishable from a conscious entity?”
I don’t think you need to have an epiphenomenalist view to say zombies are possible (but quite frankly, ridiculously implausible). I have agency. I can trick you into thinking I’m sad or mad or whatever, even though I’m not feeling that way. I can lie to you and if I’m really good at it, there is no way you can tell I’m lying. There can be a disconnect between what I’m thinking or feeling and my behavior. Can this sort of lying go on forever? Is it even remotely plausible? Not with us, no. It’s not in our nature. But generally speaking it would be absurd to assume behavior has nothing to do with experience and our causal agency.
“Yes. Keep in mind my point above about interaction. My experience is a set of structural relations in time and space, a very complex one. What else would you expect from an ontic structural realist?”
It’s just that I thought you and Jim were talking about fields and how they are difficult to conceive of as lacking substance. But the very notion of substance would contradict everything being relations. Maybe I misunderstood your point there.
Anyway, aside from substance, what about qualities? Are you saying you don’t experience them or are you saying these are all relational?
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To say all interactions are relations is not to say that all relations are interactions. I think interactions involve an adjacent relation in space and time, while the relation between us and, say, the Andromeda Galaxy right now, doesn’t.
On the other hand, consider that our knowledge of any relation involves interactions, although often through intermediaries. A quasar ten billion light years away generates photons which travel across those ten billion years of spacetime to interact with a radio telescope, which then has a series of interactions eventually resulting in a particular state in an astronomer’s brain. We haven’t interacted directly with the quasar, but we only know about it through a series of interactions beginning with it and eventually ending with an interaction with our sense organs and brain, at least under metaphysical realism.
Sorry, didn’t mean to get you worked up with the Chalmers citation.
On causal closure, the issue for me isn’t a doctrine about the physical being causally closed. But if something participates in the causal chain, even if we don’t label it “physical” for whatever reason, I think its participation in that chain puts it within the purview of science. (Remember, science can work with unobservable entities if they are necessary to explain observable ones.) I think that’s what Chalmers and people who think like this are struggling with.
“Epiphenomenalism as I understand it simply denies our causal agency.”
My understanding is that it denies that conscious experience has any effects in the world. It doesn’t prevent unconscious agency. You may say that’s not agency, but if the unconscious entity is acting in the world in a goal directed manner, it seems hard to avoid the word “agency”.
On zombies and epiphenomenalism, the issue is that classic zombies aren’t compatible with just lying or hiding current feelings.
There is a weaker version called a behavioral zombie, which is only behaviorally identical to a conscious entity, that might be closer to what you’re discussing. But that version has no metaphysical implications. An AI chatbot could be considered a behavioral zombie, albeit one that can’t currently keep the facade up for long.
“It's just that I thought you and Jim were talking about fields and how they are difficult to conceive of as lacking substance.”
Actually my take was that they can be looked at both as a process or as a substance. I also pointed out that every substance above them reduces to processes. And I’m non-committal about whether fields are the bedrock reality, or if they’ll eventually reduce to something even more fundamental.
“Anyway, aside from substance, what about qualities? Are you saying you don't experience them or are you saying these are all relational?”
I think they’re relational, that what we call a “quality” is something whose structure and relations we either don’t currently understand, or that we’re just bracketing for current purposes. If we account for all the upstream causes of a quality and all the downstream effects, I think we will have accounted for the quality. The only way I can see that not being true is with some degree of epiphenomenalism.
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“To say all interactions are relations is not to say that all relations are interactions.”
Okay, gotcha.
“But if something participates in the causal chain, even if we don’t label it “physical” for whatever reason, I think its participation in that chain puts it within the purview of science. (Remember, science can work with unobservable entities if they are necessary to explain observable ones.) I think that’s what Chalmers and people who think like this are struggling with.”
This does change things, as I was under the impression that the non-physical wasn’t allowed in the causal chain. And I think science does work with an implicit understanding of conscious experience (since how could it not? Scientists are people too.) What I reject is the notion that they don’t have any need for that implicit understanding and that they can still arrive at their scientific explanations without it. That seems like nonsense. Like the rainbow example. There would be no knowledge of anything like physical rainbow correlates (assuming there is such a thing) if no one ever experienced rainbows as colorful arcs. In fact, I welcome the idea that phenomenal experience might one day get taken seriously by science, though not in our current manner of merely eliminating it from the picture, despite relying on it implicitly or by “reporting”—which is not great.
“My understanding is that it denies that conscious experience has any effects in the world. It doesn’t prevent unconscious agency. You may say that’s not agency, but if the unconscious entity is acting in the world in a goal directed manner, it seems hard to avoid the word “agency”.”
I think effects in the world and unconscious agency are inextricable. I certainly wouldn’t deny unconscious agency, if by that you mean acting in a goal directed manner without necessarily being aware of making a decision. That’s the vast majority of experience after all. I was thinking of agency as intentionality (I didn’t say that, though, so my bad.) That goal directed manner need not involve being aware of making some decision. Driving down the road while thinking about what I want to make for dinner, that’s all included.
“On zombies and epiphenomenalism, the issue is that classic zombies aren’t compatible with just lying or hiding current feelings.”
I just meant there’s a separation between ‘what it’s like’ on the ‘inside’ vs. what can be known from the outside that is made apparent by the fact that we can lie. So behavior can’t always tell us what’s going on on the inside. That disjunct between behavior and experience allows for the logical possibility that, theoretically, zombies could be feeling nothing at all on the inside and still behave as if they do. But Chalmers gets into metaphysical possibility and everything goes downhill. Zombies were never necessary. And yes, zombies can’t have agency because, well, they’re zombies! That metaphysical “in some other world it might be possible” stuff just takes the discussion down a stupid rabbit hole. All that one has to do is to point out that sometimes people lie, and in those instances, behavior can’t tell you what that person is experiencing. In order for lies to be possible, there must be something more to experience than behavior. There’s no epiphenomenalism entailed by this lying because the person lying is directing their own behavior to do the opposite of what they’re feeling. There’s still agency. If we want to include, for example, the neural correlates of consciousness (assuming they exist) as ‘behavior’, then that’s problematic too because the experience of the ‘subject’ must be presupposed to establish those correlates in the first place.
“Actually my take was that they can be looked at both as a process or as a substance.”
Gotcha.
On qualities, if they’re bracketed out, how can there be upstream causes of them with downstream effects?
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“In fact, I welcome the idea that phenomenal experience might one day get taken seriously by science, though not in our current manner of merely eliminating it from the picture, despite relying on it implicitly or by “reporting”—which is not great.”
I’m wondering what you think science should do differently on this. If report or behavior isn’t a useful guide, then how should it study conscious experience?
“On qualities, if they’re bracketed out, how can there be upstream causes of them with downstream effects?”
I don’t think they’re bracketed if the causes and effects are being studied. The act of doing that study is an attempt to unbracket whatever is being studied, to pierce the veil and get at the actual mechanics. But it has to start with being willing to do it. For example, if we take the attitude that the experience of red is fundamental, then all inquiry stops.
But if we look at the causes of that experience (light of a particular wavelength hitting the retina, electrochemical signals to the brain, and its effects (strong distinction between red and green, even though they’re close on the electromagnetic spectrum, and a higher tendency to focus attention on that part of the visual field) along with all the associations triggered (roses, ripe strawberries, blood, etc), I think we’re getting at what the red experience actually is.
Of course, there remains a strong intuition that there must be an intrinsic redness between those causes and effects. But, assuming we’ve identified all the causes and effects, for that intrinsic thing to exist, it must not then have any effects (epiphenomenalism). If we reject epiphenomenalism (natural selection can’t work with acausal essences) then once we understand the causal relations, we understand the experience.
Unless of course I’m overlooking something.
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“I’m wondering what you think science should do differently on this. If report or behavior isn’t a useful guide, then how should it study conscious experience?”
Oops, something get deleted there. I’m not sure what I originally typed exactly, but maybe it was “no-subject reporting” or something along those lines.
Thanks for the explanation. It sounds like you’re wanting to take experiences of red (along the lines of reporting experiences at least) as a genuine part of the overall causal chain, but this isn’t the usual reductive mechanistic story. Reductive mechanism assumes qualitative experiences don’t cause anything, so as far as causality goes, it’s on a par with epiphenomenalism. But it sounds like what you’re describing is different from that?
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My take is functionalist, specifically analytic functionalism of the type developed by David Lewis and David Armstrong. Lewis’ paper makes for interesting reading. He takes himself to be arguing for a particular type of identity theory, but with his focus on causal roles, it was subsequently recognized as a new type of functionalism. https://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Identity_Theory.pdf
“Reductive mechanism assumes qualitative experiences don’t cause anything, so as far as causality goes, it’s on a par with epiphenomenalism.”
What are some examples of this? I don’t think I’m familiar with any reductionists taking this approach. It doesn’t seem like reductionism as I understand it. (But it’s the end of an extremely long day, so I might just be having a brain fart.)
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—What are some examples of this? I don’t think I’m familiar with any reductionists taking this approach. It doesn’t seem like reductionism as I understand it. (But it’s the end of an extremely long day, so I might just be having a brain fart.)
No worries on brain farts, I get them myself all the time. 🙂 From your linked paper:
“T HE (Psychophysical) Identity Theory is the hypothesis that -not is necessarily but as a matter of fact-every experience identical with some physical state. Specifically, with some neurochemical state.”
If experience is identical with neurochemical states, it’s not qualitative. This is essentially saying no experience as such is recognized. This is what I mean by reductive.
A bit further down in the paper: “The definitive characteristic of any (sort of) experience as such is its causal role, its syndrome of most typical causes and effects…” and later “The identity theory says that experience-ascriptions have the same reference as certain neural-state-ascriptions: both alike refer to the neural states which are experiences.”
But if you take ‘experience’ to be identical some ‘neurochemical state’, then every time the word ‘experience’ pops up in such a theory it’s really not saying anything but ‘neurochemical state’. So intentional agency is out of the picture since all experiences are nothing but neurochemical states, according to this theory. Neurochemical states aren’t agents with free will, purpose, or directedness in the world.
Plus, there can’t be a correlation between experience and neural states because you can’t correlate something to itself.
Yet, he talks about experiences as if they are something different from neural states later in the paper:
“We are far from establishing positively that neural states occupy the definitive causal roles of experiences”
What is he talking about? I thought he wanted to say neural states ARE experiences?
He recognizes that behaviorism denies causally effective agents:
“Behaviorism as a thoroughgoing dispositional analysis of all mental states, in- eluding experiences, is likewise ruled out as denying the reality in and a fortiori the efficacy of experiences.”
But what he proposes is behaviorism, only moved to the level of brain states, and with a few caveats in support of this kind of behaviorism to account for occasional lying and other anomalous cases. But of course, any sophisticated behaviorism would do that. His identity theory redefines experience to be nothing more than brain states, which is still leaving off the causal efficacy of the agent. There can’t be a ‘me’ deciding to move a finger. There is only a brain state sending signals to move my finger.
Honestly, I’m surprised by this outright admission of brain-mind identity. Science allows for a much more dynamic relationship between real lived experience and brains, but it does so by taking experience to be something other than (not identical to) brain states. X can’t cause changes in Y if X and Y are identical. Unless I’m missing something here?
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“If experience is identical with neurochemical states, it’s not qualitative. This is essentially saying no experience as such is recognized. This is what I mean by reductive.”
What I’d ask you to consider here is that when you say “no experience as such is recognized”, what you mean is that your preferred theory of experience isn’t being recognized. And I would point out that you’re not recognizing his theory of experience.
“So intentional agency is out of the picture since all experiences are nothing but neurochemical states, according to this theory.”
I think here you’re judging his theory by the standards of yours. But within the framework of his theory, why would intentional agency be ruled out?
“But what he proposes is behaviorism, only moved to the level of brain states,”
I think this is an overbroad interpretation of behaviorism. If any physical processes, including ones inside the body and brain, count as “behavior” then we need to come up with a new term to refer to the behaviorism of the early and mid 1900s, which, at its most severe, denied that brain states were meaningful concepts except as behavioral dispositions.
The difference between functionalism and behaviorism is that functionalism recognizes that internal body and brain states are meaningful and worthy of study in themselves, that relegating them to only behavioral dispositions gives up too much.
“His identity theory redefines experience to be nothing more than brain states, which is still leaving off the causal efficacy of the agent. ”
But a major part of the discussion in this paper is on causal roles, which seems to speak directly to the causal efficacy of the agent. The brain states are just what fulfills those causal roles in us. In my mind, denying this causal role identity is what calls into question agent efficacy. Here I don’t think we can have our cake and eat it too. Either experience is about causal roles, or it’s causally impotent. I suppose someone could argue that it’s both, but then the key portions, the ones they want to separate from causal mechanisms, are the ones that would be epiphenomenal.
“Honestly, I’m surprised by this outright admission of brain-mind identity.”
I noted above that when he wrote this in 1966, he took himself to be defending mind-brain identity theory, but his emphasis on causal roles is what led to this paper being retroactively considered a founding paper on analytic functionalism, more a mind-functionality identity theory. So his main contention is that experiences are causal roles, which in us are fulfilled by brain / neurochemical states.
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“What I’d ask you to consider here is that when you say “no experience as such is recognized”, what you mean is that your preferred theory of experience isn’t being recognized. And I would point out that you’re not recognizing his theory of experience.”
What most people mean by “experience” is “phenomenal experience”—colors seen, sounds heard, not “brain states”. But I tried to recognize that he means to use the word in a different way from the way it is commonly used. He uses it to mean “brain states” because he thinks experience is reducible to brain states even if experiences don’t refer to brain states. I don’t think I’m imposing my theory so far. I was trying to explain this part of our conversation:
I said: “Reductive mechanism assumes qualitative experiences don’t cause anything, so as far as causality goes, it’s on a par with epiphenomenalism.”
You said: What are some examples of this? I don’t think I’m familiar with any reductionists taking this approach. It doesn’t seem like reductionism as I understand it. (But it’s the end of an extremely long day, so I might just be having a brain fart.)
The ways we normally use the word ‘experience’ are being excluded in the first paragraph of his paper. He thinks seeing a rainbow or deciding to move a finger may involve a constellation of different meanings that don’t necessarily refer to brain states, but they are nonetheless nothing more than brain states. What makes them nothing more than brain states is the reductive mechanistic assumption of physicalism and a physical causally closed universe. Experiences—even by his account—cannot exhibit causal power over and above brain states. They may only be defined by reference to other experiences, but that doesn’t mean they are anything or that they cause anything. They are merely brain states because brain states are physical and therefore have causal power:
“We are far from establishing positively that neural states occupy the definitive causal roles of experiences, but we have no notion of any other physical phenomena that could possibly occupy them, consistent with what we do know.”
In other words, he refuses to recognize experience (as the word is normally used) as having causal power. Instead he redefines the word. But this runs into the danger of equivocation:
“First, it allows experiences to be something real and so to be the effects of their occasions and the causes of their manifestations, as common opinion supposes them to be.”
But common opinion does not consider experiences to be mere ‘manifestations’ with no causal power in the physical world. (Remember, he’s saying experiences can only be illusory ’causes’ of other experiences.) Nor does common opinion reduce experiences to brain states, as he himself seems to be saying here:
“The dualism of the common man holds that experiences are nonphysical phenomena which are the causes of a familiar syndrome of physical as well as nonphysical effects. This dualism is a worthy opponent, daring to face empirical refutation, and in due time it will be rendered incredible by the continuing advance of physicalistic explanation. I have been concerned to prevent dualism from finding a safe fall-back position in the doc- trine that experiences are nonphysical and physically inefficacious. It is true that such phenomena can never be refuted by any amount of scientific theory and evidence. The trouble with them is rather that they cannot be what we call experiences. They can only be the non-physical epiphenomena or correlates of physical state which are experiences.”
In other words, phenomenal experience, experience in the usual sense—the usual sense according to him even!—is causally impotent:
“All manner of nonphysical phenomena may coexist with them, even to the extent of sharing the same space-time, provided only that the nonphysical phenomena are entirely inefficacious with respect to the physical phenomena….But none of these permissible nonphysical phenomena can be experiences. For they must be entirely inefficacious with respect to all physical phenomena.”
You say: “The brain states are just what fulfills those causal roles in us. In my mind, denying this causal role identity is what calls into question agent efficacy.”
But most people mean something different by agency. When people discuss agency and free will, they mean the ability to affect change in the world. They don’t take that to mean “my brain states have causally efficacy”. This is what has been frustrating about his paper and many such papers. The tendency here to change the meanings of words feels like equivocation or a slight of hand. I don’t think I’m being unfair in appealing to the common, ordinary meanings of words. I’m not trying to insert idealism into this. I’m just pointing to something fishy going on having to do with the way he redefines words, an equivocation that either he’s making or he’s relying on readers to make—the latter would be more effective against the criticism of his peers.
Tell me if I’m wrong, but I’m assuming he thinks:
As for behaviorism, I didn’t mean to say he was going back to old-school behaviorism. I just meant that he’s changing behaviorism to make it behavior of the brain. I was just going by what he says about it. Here he seems to be aligning himself to the parts of behaviorism he approves of rather than a simplistic version:
“Many of these statements have been collected by behaviorists; I inherit these although I explain their status somewhat differently. Behaviorism is widely accepted. I am content to rest my case on the argument that my principle can accommodate what is true in behaviorism and can escape attendant difficulties.”
You said: “Here I don’t think we can have our cake and eat it too. Either experience is about causal roles, or it’s causally impotent.”
Or it’s causally efficacious, but not about “causal roles”. You’re assuming functionalism here. 🙂
“I suppose someone could argue that it’s both, but then the key portions, the ones they want to separate from causal mechanisms, are the ones that would be epiphenomenal.”
But that’s assuming physicalism (as causal closure and reductive mechanism) is true. You’re limiting causality to exclude anything that doesn’t fit this reductive picture, and excluding agency in the usual sense of the word.
Another issue I have, which is somewhat tangential, is I’m not sure functionalism and mind-brain identity theory play together well for the reasons Jim gave before in a previous discussion. You seemed to concede his point then, but I don’t know what the difference is between this paper and your views.
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It seems clear we’re interpreting Lewis in different ways. I’m giving him more interpretational charity, probably too much in your view. For example, I don’t think his use of “experience” excludes seeing colors or hearing sounds. It’s just that he thinks seeing and hearing are nervous system processes. And I don’t take his argument, that the common understanding of experience being non-physical implies epiphenomenalism, as an argument for that view, but as a serious strike against it. I take his view as causal all the way through.
You’re probably out of patience with me throwing papers at you, so no worries if you pass. But if you’re interested, this short paper on whether materialists should believe in qualia might get at his views more directly about folk psychology. (Although given the variance in our interpretation of him, for all I know it could alienate you further from his views.) https://www.andrewmbailey.com/dkl/Materialist_Qualia.pdf
On the distinction between causal efficacy and ability to affect change in the world, I guess I see the latter as inseparable from the former. If we look at the change an agent makes, we then can then look at the steps leading to that change. And tracing those steps backward eventually leads us into the agent and the steps that take place within it. I don’t see this as assuming physicalism unless by “physicalism” we mean causality. But I’ll grant it does assume reducibility.
I’m hazy on the details of that conversation with Jim. I think my concession was along the lines that the identity relationship between functions and brain states is very complex, and noted his concerns were similar to well known criticisms of type identity theory. Overall I still think experiences can be identified with functionality, and functionality with brain processes. The functional layer provides an important explanatory translation between mind and brain. But the multiple realizability aspect of functionality ensures that this is never going to be a clean 1:1 relationship, except maybe in specific “token” instances.
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Sorry it took me so long to reply…I accidentally deleted your email. I think it came in while I was in the midst of deleting a bunch of emails. Anyway, I’ll have a look at that paper. Thanks!
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This is something I’ve been recently entertaining while also being quite far from the realm of consciousness debate. However, as I continue reading about learning and behavior theory, and in particular behavior systems theory, I can’t help but feel that maybe phenomenal consciousness is not necessarily fundamental, but plays a particular function in behavior for animals with high behavioral plasticity (like monkeys or human beings). Contrary to other species, humans and chimpanzees (just picking two examples) have a high behavioral plasticity. Their behaviors are not highly fixed and structured as in the case of other animals, whose action patterns are neatly organized under coordinating systems as responses to particular endogenous and exogenous stimulation.
When we have broad-niche animals like us, with so many options to engage with the environment that are required for our survival, we have to stop relying on particular discrete or contextual cues to activate fixed action patterns. Instead, we need a system of valence for particular biological functions that can help us determine when a particular behavior has been successful in meeting a given biological function, thus adding it to one of our many behavior systems (some for feeding, some for socializing, some for reproduction…). Thus, the role of consciousness is to provide a valence system that allows animals with high behavioral plasticity to determine when a given biological function has been met and these valences guide behavior and learning.
This would give us a criterion to predict when an animal may exhibit consciousness: if it has high behavioral plasticity. It would also give consciousness a function: to guide behavior and learning towards the accomplishment of particular biological functions, as a substitute to fixed behavior systems with unchanging action patterns.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m utterly wrong with this. It’s been a long while since I read anything about either functional or phenomenal consciousness, but I wanted to know what you may think about it.
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I think you’re on the right track. I’ve definitely been there. But the questions to ask are: what are valences exactly? And what exactly is consciousness from a functional standpoint, that is, what is its adaptive value and how did it evolve?
The way I’ve come to think of it is that at base are what Joseph LeDoux calls “survival circuits”. These circuits are ancient, going back to unicellular organisms, or (if Rouleau and Levin are right, pre-cellular processes). But as multicellular life evolved and increased in sophistication, the number of automatic actions likely became very large and overlapping. It was probably exacerbated by the evolution of reactions that were even anticipatory, essentially a non-model based prediction.
The problem is that this would lead to conflicting reactions. An organism needed a way to break the ties. The ability to predict outcomes probably could have started at a very incipient level, but enough to weight which impulses to inhibit and which to indulge. Attention would have been an integral part of this. (William James considered attention to be equivalent to volition.)
As it became more sophisticated, the automatic reactions became affects, valenced automatic reactions that motivated the prediction engine, the planner.
That’s why the functional hierarchies I talk about usually start with the automatic reactions at the lowest rung, but become predictive to an ever widening scope, until the predictions become about the self.
That’s where the path you’re on led me, and it’s been my view for some years now. It’ll be interesting to see if we converge.
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It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with only primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
What I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461, and here is a video of Jeff Krichmar talking about some of the Darwin automata, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7Uh9phc1Ow
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It may well be that one day these questions will be definitively answered to our satisfaction. Until such time, one’s point of view is little more than “belief” dress it up however one may wish.
My bet for answering many such questions is “superintelligence”, although of course many believe it will never arrive. Let alone “artificial” sentience.
And my views are not entirely based on ignorant hope or foolish fantasy. I have coded many machine learning algorithms, and reinforced learning, among other techniques, is a formidable tool.
Of course, my own views are mere “belief”, albeit a belief based upon rudimentary experience. Eventually I believe that consciousness and qualia will become what we make them. I believe that the advance of computer technology will eventually give the answers we seek. Wherever, “however” consciousness arises, our own pointers combined with advanced technology will answer most questions we could possible dream of answering.
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This may be a view which garners outrage, but I actually see the most crucial questions as answered. My certainty in those answers a few years ago weren’t as high as they are today, but each passing year where the alternatives are presented and debated, makes me less inclined to think they’re wrong. Of course, the difficulty is getting people to accept them.
I didn’t realize you were a coder, much less a machine learning one. My own coding days are increasingly in the past, but it left an indelible imprint on the way I think about this stuff. Of course, as I mentioned in the post on computationalism, that does require caution, since many computer science concepts aren’t as useful as we might think with the brain.
I tend to agree on technology, although I think a large part of that will help us in improving our questions. It seems like many of the ones we ask today aren’t productive. Questions that aren’t answerable, even in principle, usually are built on problematic concepts, a point this SMBC makes pretty well.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/questions
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Yes, I have coded for many years. Almost exclusively to analyse financial markets and trading/ investment algorithms. For my own proprietary trading. My most recent efforts have been in creating a high yield floating rate synthetic dollar bond using crypto derivatives. Very satisfactory indeed.
As regards asking the right question, many have been asking exactly the wrong one on markets: to ask a machine learning algo to predict tomorrow’s stock prices is absurd. It is an almost entirely unbounded problem and even if the universe is strictly deterministic in my view we are a long way off in terms of ascertaining all the variables which move markets.
In another case I asked Gemini who first used the phrase “doors of perception” and was told Aldous Huxley. I suppose instead I ought to have asked where Huxley got it from. Or there again, it was a reasonable enough factual question and Gemini should have got it right.
But I firmly believe AI will eventually ask its own questions and answer them.
As you know, I don’t consider questions relating to consciousness as being fully answered, but I know where you are coming from and I don’t suppose either of our positions are moveable. Yet!
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“high yield floating rate synthetic dollar bond using crypto derivatives”
Not sure what that is, but it sounds impressive.
I can see predicting tomorrow stock prices being absurd. But I wonder if longer term probabilistic predictions for a particular company or industry isn’t. I have a degree in accounting, although I haven’t used it in decades. But it seems like a company’s fundamentals and market opportunities should allow some form of prediction. Although it would obviously never be with 100% certainty.
I’m not surprised Gemini flubbed that answer. Just about everything I’ve asked it has resulted in a questionable answer. I don’t feel like I can trust it at all. It might be more useful if it provided citations so its assertions could be easily verified. I remain annoyed that Google shoves it in my face now.
I always try to keep my position movable. But I’ll admit my priors are now pretty strongly tilted toward my current position. It would take strong evidence or a very compelling argument, but I try to stay open to them.
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Good rundown. I have been trying to grasp what Levin is up to on consciousness. I have accepted how dynamic he claims some of the cellular and precellular processes are. But I don’t agree that there is something important about consciousness in there, except for how cellular components will play a role in nervous systems later, like Ledoux explains.
I like your take on a generalized, loose acceptance of physicalism. I’m pretty much at the point where I’m confident in the general ideas of physicalism and some kind of illusionism. The weeds get too weedy. We have good enough answers. For humans, we put too much emphasis on the feeling, which all animals have, and not enough on the representational and the content. Language exploded conceptualizing. That is what turned the greatest apes into truly reflective and causality-parsing apes.
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Thanks. Sounds like we’re on a similar page.
I do periodically wonder if the debate between illusionism and panpsychism actually amounts to anything. Both agree that there’s nothing categorically different between what’s happening in brains vs what happens everywhere else. Both see what science can study is the functionality, the causal roles, the structures and relations, one because that’s all there is, the other because the extra thing is fundamentally inaccessible.
The only reason I don’t lean into that view is that they lead people to think in different ways about scientific theories, and so which ones seem more plausible. For instance, a panpsychist is much more likely to find IIT plausible. (Although Koch in his 2019 book sought to distinguish IIT from panpsychism, but he had leaned into the association in his 2012 book.)
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I just read that paper—thankfully it was not too long! I still don’t see how he’s taking color experiences (or any other quality) to be veridical in any way.
Saying that qualia are real insofar as they belong to ‘folk psychology’ doesn’t help, because folk psychology is not veridical according to him. Qualities are reducible to physical brain states and are only identifiable as such under his view. So his agreeing that qualities are ‘real’ amount to “Yeah, sure, ordinary folk believe in illusions—we can agree that they do believe in illusions.” And his motivation for admitting even that much is what I suspected:
A materialist can and should accept these look-alike theses. That makes his position seem less radical; it softens the blow of rejecting the Identification Thesis in its full-strength, materialistically unacceptable form.
Or am I wrong to think that, to him, qualities just are the illusory experiences we have of what IS ultimately some physical structure which is hidden from experience?
All of this feels like a verbal game, to be honest.
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I think you’re right about the verbal dispute. Do you remember Chalmers’ discussion in Reality+ of various strategies for handling differences between the manifest vs scientific image. He listed four.
Illusionists favor 1 for qualia / phenomenal properties, but 4 for conscious experience in general. Type-b materialists usually favor something like 2. Strong phenomenal realists would, I think, argue for 3. Lewis is going more for 4 in this paper. I think he’s arguing for a reconstructed version of qualia.
As a functionalist, I’m generally a fan of 4 for this myself. But really the only differences between 1, 2, and 4 are in the communication strategy, that is, verbal.
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This list is very helpful, thanks. I had forgotten about this part of Chalmers’ book.
From the point of view of someone who takes the “manifest image” to be all there really is, i.e., experience, the other three don’t seem all that different. They all look like elimination with varying degrees of transparency about the elimination.
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