Well, Scientific American has published an article that, while on a subject of questionable interest, is at least neither woke nor wrong. The topic is panpsychism, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this way:
Panpsychism is the view that mentality is fundamental and ubiquitous in the natural world. The view has a long and venerable history in philosophical traditions of both East and West, and has recently enjoyed a revival in analytic philosophy.
The old and new forms of panpsychism were advanced because of our present failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from. Thus panpsychism offers an easy way out: we’re conscious because everything is conscious. That, of course, doesn’t solve the “hard problem” of how a brain-carrying organism can be conscious. Our failure to completely understand where consciousness comes from, say the panpsychics, is because we’re working on the wrong level: we just need to show that all bits of the universe are inherently conscious. Problem solved!
No, not solved!
First, a failure to understand something doesn’t mean that we’re taking the wrong approach; it could just mean that the problem is a difficult one. We don’t know where and how the first self-replicating organism evolved, but we don’t say that every bit of the universe has a form of replication, and thus the problem is solved.
In the “revival” forms of panpsychism (about which I’ve written many posts), promulgated most vociferously by Philip Goff, the claim is that every bit of the universe has some form of consciousness, however rudimentary. This includes particles like electrons. (They never specify the form of consciousness enjoyed by, say, electrons.) When the particles, though evolution, are assembled into a creature like a human, this assembly somehow makes the entire creature “conscious” in the way we think of (go here for a discussion of what consciousness is; I’m just referring to the common construal: self-awareness and the ability to perceive sensations).
But there has been no progress in understanding whether panpsychism could be true since it was proposed a long time ago, and that’s for several reasons:
- We know no way of demonstrating that inanimate objects, like rocks and neutrons, have some form of consciousness.
- We know no way of showing that the combination of rudimentary consciousnesses, as in the constituent particle of our brain, will somehow, when assembled in an organism, make it conscious. This is called the “combination problem.”
- As far as we know, consciousness requires a complex nervous system in a living organism, which isn’t present in inanimate constituents of the universe or in dead individuals.
- We are making progress in the conventional view of consciousness, e.g, it’s either a byproduct of having a sufficiently complex nervous system or an evolved condition in which the brain was selected to create the phenomenon. (In both cases it’s a material phenomenon connected with how neurons are arranged.) We can change consciousness with brain stimulation, use psychological tricks to fool people into thinking they’re doing something consciously when they’re not, or vice versa, and we can take away or restore consciousness with drugs (e.g., anesthesia).
It’s because of these issues that panpsychism has made no scientific progress while the “materialistic” view of consciousness, the one that doesn’t assume that particles themselves are conscious, has made progress. Panpsychism, in my view, is promulgated by philosophical grifters, who crave the attention they get from propounding novel and counterintuitive theories. And surely on some level they must realize that there’s no way to go any further with their scientific program. They keep singing the same old tune without adding any words, i.e., evidence.
At any rate, the Sci Am piece below, by science journalist Dan Falk, gives an account of the arguments in favor of and against panpsychism made at a recent meeting at Marist College, a college founded as a Catholic school (but now denying any religious affiliation) in Poughkeepsie, New York. The meeting was organized by panpsychist proselytizer Philip Goff, who found it all too easy to get funding from the John Templeton Foundation, which loves stuff like panpsychism because it’s anti-materialistic and conjures up the numinous (“an electron is conscious?. Weird!”)
Goff, of the University of Durham in England, organized the recent event along with Marist philosopher Andrei Buckareff, [JAC: he seems to be a philosopher of religion as well as religious] and it was funded through a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. In a small lecture hall with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Hudson River, roughly two dozen scholars probed the possibility that perhaps it’s consciousness all the way down.
You can read the article for free, though if you know about panpsychism, you don’t need to. But if you don’t know about it, it gives a good summary of the arguments against it (there are no arguments for it except its claim that everything is conscious). As usual, physicist Sean Carroll injects some sense into the discussion; he also had a big debate with Goff, as he has several times before (see below):
The crazy part of this all is that a lot of philosophers accept panpsychism, despite its numerous problems and scientific intractability. From the article (my emphasis):
Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.
How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation), or apprehend the value of evidence in supporting or weakening a theory. Here’s more (my bolding):
Many philosophers at the meeting appeared to share Goff’s concern that physicalism falters when it comes to consciousness. “If you know every last detail about my brain processes, you still wouldn’t know what it’s like to be me,” says Hedda Hassel Mørch, a philosopher at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences. “There is a clear explanatory gap between the physical and the mental.” Consider, for example, the difficulty of trying to describe color to someone who has only seen the world in black and white. Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”
First of all, those philosophers seem to be ignorant about how real scientists (as opposed to philosophers) are attacking the problem of consciousness and understanding its physical basis. More important, I think Goff would (and believe has) said that panpsychism is a physicalist theory. We just don’t know, physically, how the consciousness of electrons works. If it’s not physicalist, then it’s supernatural. But if you claim it’s an inherent property of matter, that’s a physicalist assertion, for one then needs to show how it’s an inherent property of matter. If you can’t, find another line of work.
Here’s some critique of the theory from the article (there’s no evidence offered in support of the theory except that it sounds good):
But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”
Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”
. . . During a well-attended public debate between Goff and Carroll, the divergence of their worldviews quickly became apparent. Goff said that physicalism has led “precisely nowhere,” and suggested that the very idea of trying to explain consciousness in physical terms was incoherent. Carroll argued that physicalism is actually doing quite well and that although consciousness is one of many phenomena that can’t be inferred from the goings-on at the microscopic level, it is nonetheless a real, emergent feature of the macroscopic world. He offered the physics of gases as a parallel example. At the micro level, one talks of atoms, molecules and forces; at the macro level, one speaks of pressure, volume and temperature. These are two kinds of explanations, depending on the “level” being studied—but present no great mystery and are not a failure on the part of physics.
Bringing up the gas laws was a smart thing to do, showing emergent physical properties that do not demonstrate a failure of physicalism. The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics. One more critique:
Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”
It’s clear that I think panpsychism is a big philosophical grift, and although I could be more charitable, I get angry when a philosophical equivalent of creationism, which is what panpsychism is, gets popular. Perhaps Goff and his colleagues really believe it, but unless they’re thick-headed they surely realize that there is no evidence in its favor and they haven’t offered a solution to the most crucial part of their theory: the combination problem. I predict with some confidence that panpsychism will go nowhere. As the Encyclopedia notes, the theory has a “long and venerable history”. I’d disagree with the “venerable” part, but the fact that its history is long, but yet no progress has been made in documenting or understanding it, shows that it’s an intellectual dead end.
Here’s a three-year old video, which I believe I put up before, giving an audio debate between Carroll and Goff. There’s no doubt that the physicist is the winner; Goff comes out licking his wounds.
For another video dismantling of panpsychism by Carroll, go here, and you can also see a paper by Carroll on the phenomenon here.
When I first read the Sci Am piece, I had the following email conversation with Matthew, also a critic of panpsychism:
Me: Why not a symposium on flat-earthism?
Matthew: I bet Templeton funded it. Good guess. I mean, it’s right up their street. Imagine the real good they could do with all their dosh if they funded sensible things!
I hadn’t read the article when I had this exchange, but, sure enough, Matthew was right: the sticky fingers of Templeton are all over this symposium. To wit:
But I’ve had some second thoughts about Sci Am publishing this article, and don’t oppose it now. Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”, but only because a lot of people still believe in panpsychism, and if you pay attention to intellectual currents you’ll have heard about it. In my view, though panpsychism is nearly as scientifically worthless as flat earth theory or the “Loch Ness Monster” hypothesis, the public needs a place to understand what panpsychism is. Author Falk fills that bill, also showing (necessarily) panpsychism’s profound weaknesses. In that sense, Falk has done a good job, and I can’t fault Scientific American for publishing his piece.
Panpsychism is an idea that is literally vacuous, in the strong sense that it makes no meaningful and explanatory statement about anything at all. E.g. asserting that an electron is conscious is not even meaningful.
Absolutely, because the question is not “why do we label humans as conscious” but “why do humans behave in this extremely weird way that we label conscious?”
Since we are composed of electrons loosely speaking and all with a supposed conscious how does that translate into an organisms functionality. Where does our sense of conscious override or compete with or compensate for all the little ones consciouses?
No sense = nonsense.
I had forgotten about panpsychism.
Thinking about it again in light of my latest readings in gnosticism and gnosis suggest to me a modern scientific gnosticism.
But not hermeticism.
Consider also reading the Kybalion – maybe early 20th c.- it’s a freebie – one of the tenets is “MENTALISM” (all caps I think is important).
So the idea occurring to me is panpsychism is a gnostic take to appeal to scientists or intellectuals (vs. emotional – a cult recruitment strategy – see Steven Hassan’s book) using mentalism from the Kybalion – in a general category of secret mystical religions of the West.
Thank god they don’t try to actually DO anything with their gnosis.
Hooray – edit is back :
Link about Hassan : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Hassan
He escaped The Moonies.
Ok, check this out from The Kybalion (1908):
[quote]
I. THE PRINCIPLE OF MENTALISM.
“THE ALL is MIND; The Universe is Mental.” — The Kybalion.
This Principle embodies the truth that “All is Mind.” It explains that THE ALL (which is the Substantial Reality underlying all the outward manifestations and appearances which we know under the terms of “The Material Universe”; the “Phenomena of Life”; “Matter”; “Energy”; and, in short, all that is apparent to our material senses) is SPIRIT, which in itself is UNKNOWABLE and UNDEFINABLE, but which may be considered and thought of as AN UNIVERSAL, INFINITE, LIVING MIND.
[end quote]
http://www.kybalion.org/kybalion.php?chapter=II
Despite panpsychism being presented as “cutting-edge science” by its advocates, I think it’s just another variation of two very old and very intuitive habits of thought: mind/body dualism and top-down explanations.
To an untutored mind, it seems obvious that a thought is a completely different thing than a brain. They require their own separate categories — and if the binary is to be broken, then the superior (the mental) must be the foundation for the inferior (the physical.) This is one definition of supernatural.
It also stands to reason that a social species which evolved to look for top-down explanations involving people’s motives vs their brain states would find top-down explanations much more satisfying, easy, and “complete” than bottom-up explanations. Thus the popularity of spirituality, religion, and God. God’s Will, Agency, and Ethical Being didn’t evolve from elements that included none of those. God simply is — the inexplicable explanation for Itself and everything else.
Panpsychism then is just another, simpler version of God. “Mind comes from God/a Mind Source/a Fundamental Mind” is not much different that “Consciousness comes from Fundamental Consciousnesses.” They just are.
As PCC notes, it’s similar to Creationism, or, more specifically, Intelligent Design. Consciousness That Can’t Be Specified, like the Creator Who Cannot Be Named, is slipped into science on the assumption that our old instincts on what seems right must have left traces in reality by being required.
So, I go to a nearby park and sit on a bench. The bench has approximately as many atoms as are in my body. If all the atoms of the bench are made up of tiny conscious particles am I hurting the bench’s feelings by sitting on it?
Thus I refute panpsychism – by sitting on a bench.
Or thus you introduce a new possibility: the next article on Panpsychism won’t contain any refutations by critics because doing this harms the smallest, most marginalized, most vulnerable consciousnesses of all. Their very existence is being denied. Pure Fascism.
🙂
If those tiny particles are conscious I hope you don’t have any intestinal problems.
Did the bench consent?
My comment disappeared?
Panpsychism is a scientific Gnosticism – a secret mystical religion designed to appeal to the scientifically literate or intellectual – vs. emotional.
Check The Kybalion – “MENTALISM”, Steven Hassan.
Your comment didn’t disappear; it was automatically held up because it had more than one link. I’ve restored it.
Oh, I appreciate that – thank you.
I understand the functional variability , I was just a tad hasty.
Jerry, you write “The gas laws may not be predictable from the laws of physics, but are consistent with the laws of physics.” — but this isn’t true!
One can apply Newton’s equations of motion to describe the movement of a system of N particles. As N gets large, the complexity of the system increases rapidly — making it difficult to predict, say, the future positions of the particles given their current positions. However, in this same limit the statistical properties of the system converge to simple relations — for instance, the ideal gas law that relates the average momentum flux of the particles (corresponding to the pressure) to their average kinetic energy (the temperature). This is the kinetic theory of gasses.
Certainly, the motion of an individual particle in a large-N system is not predictable; but the gas laws themselves are.
I stand corrected. But I would maintain that there are “emergent” properties of matter (“wetness of water”?) that are consistent with lower-level physics but not predictable from them. Wouldn’t you agree?
Actually I think that may be a bad example. Water’s wetness is probably explainable by hydrogen bonds or something like that.
I have always assumed that “wetness” was a function of hydrogen bonds. However… As a kid I played some with liquid nitrogen. To my considerable surprise, rags soaked it up (just like water). Of course, LN2 had no hydrogen bonds. Some what is wetness? I guess I don’t know.
Well for chrissake, instead of dissing my examples, propose some good ones. And you should find out about water’s wetness before dismissing it! I am SURE there are higher level phenomenona not predicted by the laws of physics, but consistent with them. I will propose the emotion of love. Try to take THAT ONE down!
High-level phenomena where the pattern of low-level stuff is all-important are good examples. Thus a “rabbit” cannot be predicted by low-level physics, even though the rabbit is fully consistent with the laws of physics.
It’s not clear what you mean by “wetness”. Are some liquids wet and some aren’t? Is oil wet?
Is “wetness” the same as viscosity – the forces between molecules of a liquid that give it “thickness”?
Chemistry has emergent phenomena in great abundance. I read recently that the “protein folding problem” – predicting how a protein will fold from the amino acid sequence – has sort of been solved, by a AI program called AlphaFold.
But AlphaFold doesn’t do this by solving the Schrödinger equation for the protein molecule!
http://websites.umich.edu/~chem461/QMChap8.pdf
And things get more complicated very fast when considering systems more complicated than He, and one is reduced to observing what the system does, rather than calculating it.
I would agree that the wetness of water can’t be predicted from lower-level physics. Wetness is only meaningful when the interaction of the water with something else, (that which it is trying to “wet”) is considered. It is indeed therefore an emergent property. Water won’t wet the hydrophobic plastic supermarket containers we use for leftovers. It just beads up. (They’ll wet with detergent in the wash cycle, but not with the rinse.) But water will wet ceramic plates and steel utensils (and your skin, but soap is better if it’s oily.) A trick in baking is to put the oil in your measuring cup first, then add the molasses or honey. The aqueous liquid sugar will slide right out when you pour it instead of hydrophilicly wetting the glass and sticking to it.
Now, if you know the degree to which the surface is hydrophobic or hydrophilic, then you can predict if water will wet it. Much protein chemistry and pharmaceutical drug development works off this principle. The teaching is that this is related to the ability of the substance or certain amino acid residues making up the substance to form hydrogen bonds with water molecules. This varies with tonicity, ionic strength, and particularly pH. So it’s not so much a property of water as it is the substance of interest and whatever else is dissolved in the water. Emergent, yes.
Being “emergent” doesn’t mean that it can’t be predicted from lower-level physics. If one made a full-scale simulation of the lower-level physics, and if the emergent property is then manifest in that simulation, then it can be predicted from lower-level physics.
It’s common for people to have that perception that everything is conscious.
And that’s probably the actual evidence for panpsychism.
But they should have had people at that conference discussing psychological explanations for that perception, like our human tendency to anthropomorphize and maybe the diffuse perception of a person, smeared out over reality, that a baby might have. Those look a lot better once Occam’s Razor has done its slashing.
The consciousness of subatomic particles has long been the subject of one-liners in the internet, and before that in junior high school, such as: “An Electron walks into a bar and order a drink for the proton. He found her very attractive”.
At first thought, one is surprised that there are solemn conferences about anti-naturalistic twaddle of this or any other sort. But today, even without the help of Templeton, a new
anti-naturalism has become fashionable in academia: the postmodernist trope that science is just another story, equivalent to assorted indigenous folktales, critical this or that studies, gender theory, post-colonial word salad, and also (why not?) the fancy that electrons have personalities. Any day now, we can expect objections to standard science courses on the ground that they make some student feel unsafe.
Why is it that only the matter that comes together in the form of a brain shows any indication of consciousness?
Why is a dead brain no longer conscious?
No more neuronal twinkling.
(Tribute to my late med school biochemistry Prof Harry Schachter: “Man cannot live on acetate alone. Glucose is necessary for neuronal twinkling”.)
“Panpsychism is not precisely equivalent to “flat earthism”…” – J. Coyne
Right, panpsychists aren’t as “intellectually perverse” as flat-earthists.
“It is an established fact, a piece of information, that the continents are in motion. We call the latter fact “established” because anyone who does not agree that the continents are in motion either does not fully appreciate the data and arguments a geologist could put forward in support of that thesis or is intellectually perverse. (There exists an organization called the Flat Earth Society, which is, as one might have guessed, devoted to defending the thesis that the earth is flat. At least some of the members of this society are very clever and are fully aware of the data and arguments—including photographs of the earth taken from space—that establish that the earth is spherical. These people take great delight in constructing elaborate “refutations” of the thesis that the earth is spherical. Apparently this is not a joke; they seem to be quite sincere. What can we say about them except that they are intellectually perverse?)”
(Van Inwagen, Peter. /Metaphysics/. 4th ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015. p. 21n4)
“Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.”
I’d like to know that that “principle” is.
“How can philosophers fall for a panpsychic grift? I suppose it’s because they don’t really understand science, want to do down science (yes, some philosophers have that motivation)…” – J. Coyne
There are also scientists with panpsychistic leanings, such as the below-quoted biologists:
“The doctrine of emergence, which is widely held today, is that aggregates may have qualities, such as life or consciousness, which are quite foreign to their parts. This doctrine may conceivably be true, but it is radically opposed to the spirit of science, which has always attempted to explain the complex in terms of the simple, and has on the whole succeeded. We do not find obvious evidence of life or mind in so-called inert matter, and we naturally study them most easily where they are most completely manifested; but if the scientific point of view is correct, we shall ultimately find them, at least in rudimentary form, all through the universe.”
(Haldane, J. B. S. /The Inequality of Man, and Other Essays/. 1932. Reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. p. 114)
“[I]f the world-stuff is both matter and mind in one; if there is no break in continuity between the thinking, feeling adult human being and the inert ovum from which he developed; no break in continuity between man and his remote pre-amoebic ancestor; no break in continuity between life and not-life—why, then, mind or something of the same nature as mind must exist throughout the entire universe. This is, I believe, the truth. We may never be able to prove it, but it is the most economical hypothesis: it fits the facts much more simply than does any dualistic theory, whether a universal dualism or one that assumes that mind is suddenly introduced into existing matter at a certain stage, and very much more simply than one-sided idealism (in the metaphysical sense) or one-sided materialism. ”
(Huxley, Julian. “The Biologist Looks at Man.” 1942. Reprinted as “Philosophy in a World at War” in: Julian Huxley, /On Living in a Revolution/, 55-74. New York/London: Harper & Brothers, 1944. pp. 62-3)
“[T]he gap between living and nonliving systems is bridged to some extent by micrococci and rickettsia types, small and largeviruses, and phages, forming a sort of model gradation leading down to the nonliving world, though they cannot be considered as the phylogenetic persistence of the evolutionary fines of descent. Here again it is difficult to assume a sudden origin of first psychic elements somewhere in this gradual ascent from nonliving to living systems. It would not be impossible to ascribe ‘psychic’ components to the realm of inorganic systems also, i.e. to credit nonliving matter with some basic and isolated kind of ‘parallel’ processes.
Such a ‘hylopsychic’ view will most probably not be accepted by very many biologists. However, quite a number of facts in addition to our findings in comparative animal psychology support this view. These facts belong to the field of cognition theory and even of microphysics.
…
[W]e may state that a hylopsychic concept is well in accord with many findings and facts of the natural sciences, and that it is possibly the most suitable basis for a universal philosophy.”
(Rensch, Bernhard. /Evolution above the Species Level/. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959. pp. 352+355)
“Are we not forced to conclude that even in the simplest inanimate things there is something which belongs to the same realm of being as self-awareness? It need not, of course, resemble our self-awareness any more closely than say, the passage of an electric current down a wire resembles the operation of a complex calculating machine, or the operations of the nerve cells in our brain. But, just as both a simple electric current and the operations of a computer can be described in terms of electrical circuits, so, according to this line of thought, something must go on in the simplest inanimate things which can be described in the same language as would be used to describe our self-awareness.”
(Waddington, C. H. /The Nature of Life/. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1961. p. 121)
I suspect that there is still an echo of ‘vitalism’ and ‘essences’ in this thinking. This, however well disguised, is a belief in magic. There is no magic.
Those are thought-provoking quotes, especially from evolutionary biologists. Why would they not view consciousness as an evolutionary outcome of selection and adaptation? The focus on emergent properties or a “sudden origin” (Rensch) seems misplaced. To paraphrase Waddington, the fact that some theropods evolved feathers and an ability to glide doesn’t mean that “even in the simplest [reptiles] there is something which belongs to the same realm of being as [flight].”
Or maybe I’ve misunderstood the panpsychist argument in those quotations? Panpsychism seems so obviously wrong to me that I have a hard time seeing it from the protagonist’s pov.
Interesting. Shooting from the hip, my response would be that ironically, these evolutionary biologists did not take evolution serious enough. Specifically, two aspects: features of living organisms should be considered in the light of the function they serve for the organism (what good would it do a rock to be conscious?); and very complex features can evolve seamlessly out of rudimentary origins that are so much less impressive that they don’t even seem to fall into the same category (the canonical example: an eagle’s eye evolving out of a lump of light-sensitive cells).
I suspect that much of this debate is partly owed to Descartes’ lack of imagination and introspection – his notion that human consciousness is a fundamental, indivisible thing rather than a complex combination of functions, some of which can be impaired without affecting the others, makes it much harder to think about gradual origins of consciousness.
It seems to me that panpsychism is stealth pantheism, hence the sponsorship of the symposium by Templeton.
Anil Seth is one of the best neuropsychologists to answer the panpsychists. Kudos to the Sci. Am. reporter for interviewing Seth for the article.
Why should Sean Carrol give credibility to the other side by engaging in such a debate? I’m reminded of the critique people had made in Bill Nye debating creationism with Ken Hamm. The best argument I’ve heard in that case is that Bill was directing his statements to the kids in the audience, asking that they question what they’ve heard. I don’t see a similar argument playing out in this case. So, in lending credibility to the other side, what is really gained here?
Why didn’t they invite Deepak Chopra? Was he busy?
I’m just reading “Conversations on Consciousness” by Susan Blackmore in which she interviews such luminaries as Dan Dennett, Francis Crick, David Chalmers, Roger Penrose, and Ned Block. What has struck me, about a third of the way in, is how incoherent they all seem to sound! I guess that’s why it’s “the hard problem”.
If anybody has a good recommendation for a science based book on the emergence of consciousness I’d be very interested.
I think Jeff Hawkins has come closest to something reasonably scientific in his book “A Thousand Brains”. He comes from more of an engineering education and then entrepreneur, but seems to be almost a self taught neuroscientist with his own lab! So plenty of flags that you should be on “crazy nut alert”, but this book was pretty good and came very close to giving me a, “that’s it” moment with regards consciousness. I have his first book, “On Intelligence”, but not read it yet.
I’ve read Goff’s book. It’s quite nicely written, with a few interesting points, and does a reasonable job of providing an overview of the other philosophical points of view of the problem of consciousness. It’s unconvincing regards his main point though, and ends with trees talking to each other.
Chalmers’ “Reality +” is good, arguing for a simulated universe (which of course only moves the problem of “real” consciousness back a step or more), but another nice summary of the main philosophical concerns inc. his zombie problem. It’s an entertaining read.
One thing I’d say re. panpsychism vs flat earth, is at least panpsychism isn’t provably nonsense. Just highly likely nonsense.
For a book on consciousness, “Kinds of minds” by Daniel Dennett looks good.
Thanks Laura! I have been meaning to read something by Dan Dennett, but he didn’t come across as very compelling in the Conversations book i mentioned above. But then none of them did! 🙂
The consciousness of nonhuman animals matters for our ethics about how to treat them. If an animal isn’t conscious of pain or emotional suffering, just doing things automatically, then its suffering doesn’t matter ethically.
But if it is conscious, then is it ethical to hunt it? Domesticate its species, do medical experiments on it, make its species go extinct?
Their awareness would be different from ours, so we can’t get a meaningful ethics by just anthropomorphizing animals (or the world, as in panpsychism).
I like what Colin McGinn says about panpsychism:
“Panpsychism is surely one of the loveliest and most tempting views of reality ever devised; and it is not without its respectable motivations either. There are good arguments for it, and it would be wonderful if it were true—theoretically, aesthetically, humanly. Any reflective person must feel the pull of panpsychism once in a while. It’s almost as good as pantheism! The trouble is that it’s a complete myth, a comforting piece of utter balderdash. Sorry Galen, I’m just not down with it (and isn’t there something vaguely hippyish, i.e. stoned, about the doctrine?).”
(McGinn, Colin. “Hard Questions: Comments on Galen Strawson.” /Journal of Consciousness Studies/ 13, no. 10/11 (2006): 90–99. p. 93)
Everything we believe about the universe is a result how we decode evidence with our sensory system. I trust scientific evidence because of my knowledge how science and society works and my knowledge of how flawed and biased humans (including myself) are at gathering reliable evidence.
Neuroscience doesn’t feel right because it contradicts how most of us experience ourselves and the universe. Science is becoming more complex everyday; the difficulty to understand scientific increases accordingly. This creates good opportunities for pseudo-science.
The only thing scientists and well meaning philosophers can do is provide evidence for how science works and clearly state which ideas are speculation and which are backed up by reliable evidence.
To believe in pan-psychism or flat-earth has probably less to do with intelligence as with developing a wrong (or rational) model of reality, correct decoding of sensory input becomes much more difficult.
Flat earther’s are wrong to think they have scientific arguments and pan-psychism-supporters think speculation has real meaning. Confirmation bias prevents them to see where they go wrong.
The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, by cosmologist Max Tegmark, is a kind of panpsychism.
It asserts that the world isn’t made of some “stuff” that obeys the laws of physics – the world IS a mathematical structure, which includes the laws of physics.
This mathematical structure is “real” because we’re part of it, and conscious of it. So hypothesizing some “stuff” to make it real is superfluous.
So it’s not so much that matter has mind, but that matter IS something abstract, something that a mind could think.
He wrote a popular book about this idea, “Our Mathematical Universe”. Also an article on arxiv, https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646
Panpsychism reminds me of many other untestable hypotheses and an important rule to remember – the number of people that believe a thing is true is independent of the probability that the thing is really true.
The debate between Carroll and Goff at the Marist College is available here: https://livestream.com/maristmedialive/consciousness/videos/237506306
All the details from the event are described at https://sites.google.com/view/panpsychismandpanentheism/project-events/marist-workshop
Surely, if panpsychism is true, black holes are the most conscious objects in the universe. Just imagine being one, you spend billions of years acquiring matter, becoming supremely conscious and wise, only to realise you can never tell anyone about it. To top it off you’d then spend trillions of years going senile through Hawking Radiation.
I don’t think Goff’s thought this through. He’s consigning black holes to a miserable existence!
I forgot this gem:
The Consciousness of the Atom
Alice A. Bailey
Lucius Press (originally Lucifer Press or Publishers)
1973
https://books.google.com/books?id=ALy7oJO5Y4oC&source=gbs_navlinks_s
… umm .. for a glimpse at looney-tunes looneyness, Alice A. Bailey and friends will not disappoint….
Relevant, from the table of contents :
“LECTURE I. THE FIELD OF EVOLUTION.”