Category: consciousness

Another panpsychist flogs a dead theory

January 10, 2020 • 9:30 am

Sorry, I’m not yet done with panpsychism. The more I read about this theory, the more I’m puzzled that seemingly rational people accept such a grossly benighted view of consciousness. Seriously! Especially atheists, for panpsychism resembles theology in several ways:

  • There is not a shred of evidence supporting its tenets.
  • It was invented to plug a supposed gap in our empirical knowledge that, it’s said, can never be filled by science or empirical study alone. Theologians still try to promulgate God of the Gaps arguments, while panpsychists tout The Conscious Particles of the Gaps.
  • Panpsychists will accept no criticism of their theory—even the true one that there is no evidence for it. They are enthusiasts, like evangelical Christians, and simply don’t listen.
  • Like theologians, they constantly refer you to other discussions of their theory if you find fault with some of them. It’s always: “Wait! You haven’t read these other five books and papers on our theory. All your objections are answered there.” (They aren’t, of course.) It’s an endless chase down a rabbit hole, like dealing with Edward Feser or Alvin Plantinga.

There are other parallels, but I digress. The last point, involving my post on the hourlong BBC show in which three philosophers (Philip Goff, Hedda Hassel Morch, and Eccy de Jonge) defended panpsychism, is instantiated by a comment made by Morch on this site. Her comment appeared after my BBC post, and here’s what she said (with the link):

“A BBC show on panpsychism once again shows that there’s no ‘there’ there”

A comment by Hedda Hassel Mørch:

Thanks for sharing your criticisms! I understand the view might not sound plausible to everyone from the short presentation we gave. I wrote about the case for panpsychism in more detail here, which addresses some of your points:
http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/is-matter-conscious

We also didn’t get the chance to talk about the combination problem (the hard problem of panpsychism as you call it). I agree this is a very serious problem for the view, probably the most serious one. However there are arguments to support that it’s not as hard as the original hard problem for physicalism (Philip, I and many others have given such arguments and suggested possible solutions) so I don’t think it’s a knock-down of the view.

So, dutifully, I read Morch’s piece in Nautilus magazine (the site is funded by Templeton, of course, who must eat up panpsychism because of its numinous and woo-ey tinge). And, sadly but predictably, Morch didn’t really answer any of my objections, much less that of the “combination problem”: how particles with no subjective consciousness but with properties defined as consciousness—like electron charge—somehow create a humanlike subjective consciousness when you put enough of them together.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Read the article and then I’ll give my take. In my view, the Nautilus piece simply repeats what we’ve already dealt with in analyzing Philip Goff’s views; there’s nothing new here except, perhaps, her assertion that maybe there is a rudimentary type of subjective experience in particles:

 

Once again we deal with the same erroneous or untestable contentions. Morch’s views (and quotes from others) are indented. Morch’s main contentions are in bold:

Consciousness is a unique problem that can’t be solved with empirical research. I’m referring here to the “Hard Problem” of consciousness: “How do the workings of a material brain produce the subjective feelings, the ‘qualia’, that are an important part of consciousness. The panpsychist view is that, from the outset, the Hard Problem is not only hard and unsolved, but cannot be solved—except, perhaps, by philosophy alone. (It defies me how an empirical problem can be solved by mere rumination alone, with no predictions, test, or evidence.)

Here’s how Morch frames the supposedly empirically insoluble nature of consciousness:

This problem is distinctively hard because its solution cannot be determined by means of experiment and observation alone. Through increasingly sophisticated experiments and advanced neuroimaging technology, neuroscience is giving us better and better maps of what kinds of conscious experiences depend on what kinds of physical brain states. Neuroscience might also eventually be able to tell us what all of our conscious brain states have in common. . . But in all these theories, the hard problem remains. How and why does a system that integrates information, broadcasts a message, or oscillates at 40 hertz feel pain or delight? The appearance of consciousness from mere physical complexity seems equally mysterious no matter what precise form the complexity takes.

Nor would it seem to help to discover the concrete biochemical, and ultimately physical, details that underlie this complexity. No matter how precisely we could specify the mechanisms underlying, for example, the perception and recognition of tomatoes, we could still ask: Why is this process accompanied by the subjective experience of red, or any experience at all? Why couldn’t we have just the physical process, but no consciousness?

Other natural phenomena, from dark matter to life, as puzzling as they may be, don’t seem nearly as intractable. In principle, we can see that understanding them is fundamentally a matter of gathering more physical detail: building better telescopes and other instruments, designing better experiments, or noticing new laws and patterns in the data we already have. If we were somehow granted knowledge of every physical detail and pattern in the universe, we would not expect these problems to persist. They would dissolve in the same way the problem of heritability dissolved upon the discovery of the physical details of DNA. But the hard problem of consciousness would seem to persist even given knowledge of every imaginable kind of physical detail.

Yesterday I highlighted a paper by neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland showing that intractability does not mean we need a radical new theory. Just because we can’t even conceive of what a solution would look like now doesn’t mean that we should defer to the radical and untestable hypothesis of panpsychism. It could mean only that the problem is hard. (Churchland gave examples of scientific problems that once seemed intractable because we didn’t even know how to approach them. And then the tools arrived!) The supposedly “intractable” problem outlined by Morch, Goff, and others, is taken apart in this 2005 paper by Churchland, which you can get for free by clicking on the screenshot:

Here’s how Churchland disposes of the idea that consciousness will forever be refractory to empirical study simply because it involves subjectivity (we’ll have more on this within a few days):

. . . Pursuing this point further, the philosopher may go on to conclude that no science can ever really explain qualia because it cannot demonstrate what it is like to see blue if you have never seen blue; consciousness is forever beyond the reach of scientific understanding.

What is the merit in this objection? It is lacking merit, for if you look closely, you will find that it rests on a misunderstanding. The argument presumes that if a conscious phenomenon, say smelling mint, were genuinely explained by a scientific theory, then a person who understood that theory should be caused to have that experience; e.g., should be caused to smell mint. Surely, however, the expectation is unwarranted. Why should anyone expect that understanding the theory must result in the production of the phenomenon the theory addresses? Consider an analogy. If a student really understands the nature of pregnancy by learning all there is to know about the causal nature of pregnancy, no one would expect the student to become pregnant thereby. If a student learns and really understands Newton’s laws, we should not expect the student, like Newton’s fabled apple, to thereby fall down.  To smell mint, a certain range of neuronal activities have to obtain, particularly, let us assume, in olfactory cortex. Understanding that the olfactory cortex must be activated in manner will not itself activate the olfactory cortex in manner. We are asking too much of a neuroscientific theory if we ask it not only to explain and predict, but also to cause its target phenomenon, namely the smell of mint, simply by virtue of understanding the theory.

Churchland continues with the argument, so read the rest, but this seems to me to pinpoint the error of the Panpsychic Program. If we can reproduce the phenomenon of an odor, or of conscious awareness, with a theory that is testable, and we understand which neurons are involved, how they fire, and why, then we have understood consciousness. Its subjectivity is not necessarily a problem (Pigliucci calls it an advantage), because we can still report and thus study consciousness. We may not be able to know what it’s like to be another person, but we can study what phenomena are required for consciousness in both us and others who have the ability to report consciousness in some way.

Beyond that problem, there’s another problem that’s scientifically intractable: the intrinsic nature of matter.  

Morch:

One might wonder how physical particles are, independently of what they do or how they relate to other things. What are physical things like in themselves, or intrinsically? Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but intuition rebels at this claim.

. . .Roughly speaking, Newtonian physics says that matter consists of solid particles that interact either by bumping into each other or by gravitationally attracting each other. But what is the intrinsic nature of the stuff that behaves in this simple and intuitive way? What is the hardware that implements the software of Newton’s equations? One might think the answer is simple: It is implemented by solid particles. But solidity is just the behavior of resisting intrusion and spatial overlap by other particles—that is, another mere relation to other particles and space. The hard problem of matter arises for any structural description of reality no matter how clear and intuitive at the structural level.

Like the hard problem of consciousness, the hard problem of matter cannot be solved by experiment and observation or by gathering more physical detail. This will only reveal more structure, at least as long as physics remains a discipline dedicated to capturing reality in mathematical terms.

This seems to me to be a manufactured problem, and in fact a meaningless problem. What, exactly, does Morch mean by “what physical particles are“? Once you’ve described everything about them that you can, and how they interact with other particles, what remains to be asked? What is the elusive essence of physical particles, the elusive “Ding an sich” that they’re supposed to have?

Well, of course they say the answer is “consciousness”, but that’s not an answer because it explains nothing. They like that answer, though, because if you say that every bit of matter in the universe has consciousness, then you don’t have to posit a scientific explanation for “higher” consciousness beyond what I call The Lego Argument: if you put together a lot of conscious particles, you get even more consciousness. But that problem—the issue of “combination” that I singled out yesterday—isn’t solved, either, for there’s supposedly a qualitative difference between the consciousness of an electron and that of a human being.

But is there?

Goff says “yes”: that the consciousness of electrons is not like human self-awareness with qualia. Rather, it consists of their unique properties: their spin, their charge, their mass, and so on. But here he’s just renaming observable properties as aspects of “consciousness,” which not only kicks the entire problem of panpsychism out the window, but also trashes the problem of finding an “intrinsic nature” of particles that eludes science. If “spin” and “charge” are part of that intrinsic nature, then it’s not only not eluded science, but we already understand the particles!

And here is one aspect in which Morch diverges from Goff:

Particles do have a rudimentary consciousness that’s not encapsulated in their observable characteristics. That is, they are wee “thinkers.”

It’s hard to tell what these people believe, for their arguments are slippery, but Morch says this:

 Some simple, elementary forms of experiences implement the relations that make up fundamental particles. Take an electron, for example. What an electron does is to attract, repel, and otherwise relate to other entities in accordance with fundamental physical equations. What performs this behavior, we might think, is simply a stream of tiny electron experiences. Electrons and other particles can be thought of as mental beings with physical powers; as streams of experience in physical relations to other streams of experience.

But in what sense can electrons be thought of as “mental beings”? Morch doesn’t tell us. Nor do we learn what kinds of “experience” they have, for it must be a kind of experience that stays with an electron over time, just like consciousness stays with us over time. But that’s not how electrons are!

Ergo, neither Goff nor Morch have solved the two problems they’ve set for themselves.

What remains is the “combination problem”—the one that, in her comment above, Morch characterizes as tractable and one to which she and Goff give solutions. How, exactly, do electrons without a real consciousness get together to produce brains with full consciousness? That problem is not automatically solved by the central tenet of panpsychism. And, at least in this piece, Morch doesn’t give an answer, either. Here’s all that she says:

A second important objection is the so-called combination problem. How and why does the complex, unified consciousness of our brains result from putting together particles with simple consciousness? This question looks suspiciously similar to the original hard problem. I and other defenders of panpsychism have argued that the combination problem is nevertheless not as hard as the original hard problem. In some ways, it is easier to see how to get one form of conscious matter (such as a conscious brain) from another form of conscious matter (such as a set of conscious particles) than how to get conscious matter from non-conscious matter. But many find this unconvincing. Perhaps it is just a matter of time, though. The original hard problem, in one form or another, has been pondered by philosophers for centuries. The combination problem has received much less attention, which gives more hope for a yet undiscovered solution.

If you can find a solution to the “combination problem” in there, you’re a better person than I. All she says is that it’s easier to get a conscious brain from conscious particles (but how?) than from non-conscious particles. In the meantime, I’ll continue my search for the solution, which means that you will be afflicted as well.

And then the final sell job:

The possibility that consciousness is the real concrete stuff of reality, the fundamental hardware that implements the software of our physical theories, is a radical idea. It completely inverts our ordinary picture of reality in a way that can be difficult to fully grasp. But it may solve two of the hardest problems in science and philosophy at once.

I’m not buying. If panpsychism were an Amazon product, I’d give it just a single star.

 

Pigliucci on panpsychism and Churchland on “intractable problems”

January 9, 2020 • 12:00 pm

I’ve had several public disagreements with Massimo Pigliucci (I believe he considers me a philosopher manqué), but I’m not so set in my ways that I can’t give him kudos when he writes a good paper or has some good ideas. And his new piece on Medium, which is largely a critique of panpsychism, is good. Pigliucci is almost uniquely qualified to critique panpsychism—at least in terms of his street cred—since he’s a working philosopher who used to be a working biologist. He also sees through bullshit easily but calls it out politely, though in the present article he can’t quite contain his distaste at the end!

I guess the new piece on panpsychism stems from his continuing published dialogue with Philip Goff, whom Pigliucci calls “one of the leading supporters of the idea.” (That’s true.) I haven’t yet read the dialogue, but I give a link below. In the meantime, below is an essay in which Massimo incisively critiques panpsychism. Some of his points we’ve dealt with before, but it’s good to see them in one place, and he makes some new points, as well as situating panpsychism within the history of philosophy.

Massimo’s critique makes two main points. The first is that the “hard problem of consciousness” (how it mechanistically arises from our brain) only looks hard because it’s early days and we aren’t yet close to a solution. His response, which is echoed by Patricia Churchland in the older article below, is that the “hard problem” is composed of several “easier problems” that we’re solving right now, and when those are done we will either understand the origin of consciousness or have a better idea of how to attain that understanding. He, like Churchland (and like me) sees nothing uniquely intractable about “the Hard Problem”. To wit:

First, Massimo quotes philosopher David Chalmers, and then rebuts him (Chalmers’s words in italics):

 “. . . . .It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.”

No, it doesn’t seem “objectively” unreasonable at all. It depends on one’s own metaphysical assumptions (more on this later). Now, if there is a hard problem of consciousness, surely there are “easy” problems. Sure enough, Chalmers gives us a list:

The ability to discriminate, categorize, and react to environmental stimuli;
The integration of information by a cognitive system;
The reportability of mental states;
The ability of a (brain) system to access its own internal states;
The focus of attention;
The deliberate control of behavior;
The difference between wakefulness and sleep.

I have suggested elsewhere that the problem Chalmers is so concerned with is based on a category mistake, and that it dissolves into a number of sub-problems, all of which he refers to as “easy.” Once (if, really, since there is no guarantee in science!) neuroscience and evolutionary biology will have answered the easy problems of consciousness, there won’t be a hard problem left, above and beyond the easy ones.

Pigliucci then deals with the “Mary’s room” argument for the irreducibility of consciousness (you can read that for yourself), and then dismantles Goff’s view that the very properties of inanimate matter like particles comprise their “consciousness”.  He argues further against the irreducibility of the Hard Problem and supports the view that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, and considers panpsychism a form of “property dualism” in which matter arranged in a certain way aquires brand-new properties (“higher” consciousness):

All sorts of new physical properties “emerge” when matter is organized one way or another. For instance, the wetness of water does not exist at the level of individual molecules of H2O. It emerges only when there is a large number of such molecules, and when they interact with each other within certain ranges of pressure and temperature.

What makes property dualism a kind of dualism is the further stipulation that consciousness is ontologically irreducible to neurobiology and physics. But why? If we simply stipulate this, we are engaging in a massive instance of begging the question. If, instead, we are invoking irreducibility just on the ground that science hasn’t arrived at it yet, then we are making an argument from ignorance. Either way, things don’t look good for dualism.

After dealing with these higher-level issues of whether or not a problem is tractable, Massimo gets back to panpsychism. And he makes his second point—that the idea is incoherent—using Goff’s own characterization of what “consciousness” means when it’s applied to particles. Here’s an excerpt, with Goff’s statements again italicized, while Massimo’s response is in plain text (emphases mine):

“I think Hossenfelder misunderstands the view she’s attacking. When one first hears about panpsychism, one thinks it’s the view that in addition to its physical properties — mass, charge, spin — a particle also has non-physical consciousness properties. That kind of panpsychism would lead to the kind of problems Hossenfelder points to, because we’d want to know what the consciousness properties of particles are doing over and above their physical properties. But Russellian panpsychism is very different: the view is that mass, charge and spin are forms of consciousness. If that makes sense (which we’re currently assuming), i.e. if micro-level forms of consciousness are identical with the properties invoked in the standard model, then clearly it’s mistaken to wonder what these forms of consciousness do over and above the properties of the standard model (because this implies that they’re distinct, when ex hypothesi they are identical).”

Goff is seriously mistaken here. First off, Hossenfelder is most definitely not assuming that consciousness is a non-physical property. If it were, she wouldn’t expect it to show up in physical experiments.

Second, I simply don’t know what it means to say that “mass, charge and spin are forms of consciousness.” Notice that Goff says that this is assumed ex hypothesi, that is, a priori. Problem is: this assumption is precisely what is under scrutiny, so one cannot take it as foundational. Are there any empirical reasons to think it holds? No, by definition. Are there any philosophical arguments to support it? Well, Philip continues:

“But how on earth could mass, charge and spin be identical with forms of consciousness? … You seem to suggest that the postulation of intrinsic natures is incoherent if particles are elementary. I’m happy to accept that quarks and electrons are fundamental, but we still need to ask about the nature of their properties. In my view, physics tells us what mass, charge and spin do (or more precisely the behavioral dispositions they endow to their bearers) but does not tell us what they are. Hence, it is coherent for the panpsychist to suppose that they are forms of consciousness.”

No, it isn’t. For a number of reasons. First, the panpsychist has to come up with a good argument for why there should be anything to say about electrons, quarks, etc. above and beyond their physical properties. The search for essences — which is what Goff is talking about — should have ended sometime during the Middle Ages, with the demise of the Scholastics. Second, even if we entertain the possibility that particles have essences, then we need to be told what such essences would look like, and how we could discover them. Last, but not least, the panpsychist would still have to come up with a positive reason for why the essence of particles is consciousness. Oh, and after all of that, we still wouldn’t know why human beings have first person experiences and rocks don’t. Or do they?

Like Massimo, I’m perplexed, because when you ask Goff to tell us in what sense electrons are “conscious”, he just redefines their properties—spin, mass, charge, and so on—as consciousness. But if you pull that trick, then explaining human consciousness just becomes a purely physical problem, given Goff’s addendum that when you bundle enough conscious atoms and molecules and neurons together, you get a human brain. In other words, why isn’t consciousness then an epiphenomenon of the collection of molecules that make up the brain?

Further, Goff seems to think there is some “intrinsic nature” of matter that isn’t given by its behavior and observable properties. But to a physicist, the described properties of an electron completely characterize an electron for any purpose that we want. And if you call those properties “consciousness” and say that when there are enough conscious particles in a lump you get “higher” humanlike consciousness, then you’re saying nothing beyond describing what neuroscientists are already trying to do. There are no essences beyond what we can observe. Or, if there are, Goff can’t tell us what they are, though he strains mightily to do so.

In the end, Massimo accuses Goff of practicing a form of metaphysics, or “first philosophy” of the brand emitted by Decartes. Finally, patience exhausted, Massimo sticks in the knife. But he’s right to perform that act of intellectual evisceration, because he’s already refuted panpsychism but the proponents persist:

The problem is that Goff not only is going back to first philosophy, he actually thinks that it can provide the underpinnings of a whole new science! His book is tellingly entitled Galileo’s Error. Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. But Galileo did not make the error Philip is charging him with. And there is no such thing as a science based on statements that are entirely empirically untestable. The error isn’t Galileo’s, is that of some modern philosophers who insist in creating problems that don’t exist, and then spend a lot of time “solving” them in a way that rolls human understanding back four centuries.

Perhaps another piece of advice from Wittgenstein comes handy here: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” (Tractatus, 7)

***************

Patricia Churchland is a prominant “neurophilosopher” who wrote a paper in 1996 about whether the Hard Problem was in principle permanently intractable to normal scientific investigation. Back then she didn’t deal with panpsychism, though she does now—and finds it pretty ludicrous. And she’s been slugging it out with Goff on Twitter (go see for yourself). To wit:

Anyway, Churchland’s 1996 paper on hornswaggling is largely about her view that the Hard Problem, while hard, isn’t in principle intractable, and doesn’t call for new methods of inquiry. Like Massimo, she writes about Mary’s room problem,  and the breaking down of the higher problem into more tractable sub-problems which, when solved, might give us the key to the mechanism of consciousness. You can get the paper for free by clicking on the title below:

I’ll give just one quote from Churchland:

The point is this: if you want to contrast being able to imagine brain mechanisms for attention, short term memory, planning etc., with being unable to imagine mechanisms for consciousness, you have to do more that say you can imagine neurons doing one but cannot imagine neurons doing the other. Otherwise one simply begs the question.

To fill out the point, consider several telling examples from the history of science. . .

. . . Consider now a biological example. Before 1953, many people believed, on rather good grounds actually, that in order to address the copying problem (transmission of traits from parents to offspring), you would first have to solve the problem of how proteins fold. The former was deemed a much harder problem than the latter, and many scientists believed it was foolhardy to attack the copying problem directly. As we all know now, the basic answer to the copying problem lay in the base-pairing of DNA, and it was solved first. Humbling it is to realize that the problem of protein folding (secondary and tertiary) is still not solved. That, given the lot we now know, does seem to be a hard problem.

What is the point of these stories? They reinforce the message of the argument from ignorance: from the vantage point of ignorance, it is often very difficult to tell which problem is harder, which will fall first, what problem will turn out to be more tractable than some other. Consequently our judgments about relative difficulty or ultimate tractability should be appropriately qualified and tentative. Guesswork has a useful place, of course, but let’s distinguish between blind guesswork and educated guesswork, and between guesswork and confirmed fact. The philosophical lesson I learned from my biology teacher is this: when not much is known about a topic, doní’t take terribly seriously someone else’s heartfelt conviction about what problems are scientifically tractable. Learn the science, do the science, and see what happens.

Finally, I’ve put a link below (click on screenshot) to the exchange between Goff and Pigliucci. I’ll read it ASAP, but give it here for your delectation.

I realize I’m posting more about panpsychism than I intended, but it’s because I keep looking for a more tangible explanation of how the properties of inanimate matter are supposed to comprise “consciousness” in a way different from how physicists have described those properties via materialism. And I keep looking for a mechanism whereby molecules that have only rudimentary components of consciousness, like spin and charge, are supposed to get together and produce human consciousness in a way that differs from my own view that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of neuronal organization that has reached a certain level of complexity.

I have found no answers, and am concluding that, with panpsychism, there is no “there” there. It seems to be a hornswoggle—an intellectual equivalent of the shell-and-pea game. (“Nope. Consciousness is over there—under that shell!”) And yet serious people take the view seriously. It’s baffling. Are they falling for a “panpsychism of the gaps” argument?

A BBC show on panpsychism once again shows that there’s no “there” there

January 8, 2020 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: In the first comment on my thread below, reader Coel calls our attention to a year-old critique of panpsychism by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, “Electrons don’t think.” It makes some physics-related criticisms of panpsychism that I could not have made, but also adds a nice comment, a response to the claim (made by Goff among others) that the spin, charge velocity, and other properties of particles are part of their “consciousness”.

Part of a reader’s comment:

artuncut8:15 AM, January 02, 2019

Your response reveals that you haven’t understood the view you’re attacking, at least if you’re aiming to target the form of panpsychism that is currently taken seriously in academic philosophy (what article was this in response to?). The claim is (A) that physics doesn’t tell us what physical properties are; it merely provides mathematical models that predict their behaviour, and (B) those very properties that physics characterises behaviouristically are, in their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness.

Part of her response:

Sabine Hossenfelder8:28 AM, January 02, 2019

artuncut,

You are evading to address my point. If you rename “spin” into “consciousness” you still have the standard model of particle physics and no panpsychism.

“those very properties that physics characterises behaviouristically are, in their intrinsic nature, forms of consciousness”

I like the way Sabine gets in there and battles with the more nescient readers. There are 715 comments!

__________

If you’re sick of panpsychism by now, you can skip this post and the podcast below. But it’s not going away soon, I think, given the vociferous nature and arrant careerism of its proponents. And so it’s incumbent upon us to understand this idea. I’ve listened to the podcast to once again try to understand what it means to say that components of the Universe, like atoms or rocks, are “conscious”.

So here’s a new 48-minute (ends at 44:37) broadcast show that just appeared on BBC Radio 3 (click on screenshot below to hear it). It features three guests (all philosophers) publicizing the resurgent but deeply misguided views of panpsychism: that everything in the Universe has some form of consciousness or some essential component of consciousness, and thus humans are conscious because our brains are cobbled together from semi-conscious atoms and molecules. But there’s also one detractor/skeptic, who happens to be a neuroscientist. Moderator Matthew Sweet, I must say, does a terrific job, asking all the right questions.

I’ll soon stop posting about this, but I wanted readers to see how deeply wrong an idea can be (maybe “woo-ish and untestable” is a better characterization than “wrong”) and still be popular. I am still baffled by its popularity, though nobody I respect has adhered to this idea.

Here is the Beeb’s description of the show; I’ve provided links to the participants.

Panpsychism is the view that all matter is conscious. It’s a view that’s gaining ground in contemporary philosophy, with proponents arguing that it can solve age-old problems about the relationship between mind and body, and also fill in gaps in other areas of our understanding of nature. But is it true? And if it is, how could it change our understanding of ourselves?

Matthew Sweet is joined by panpsychists Philip Goff and Hedda Hassel Morch, the neuroscientist Daniel Glaser, who is sceptical of panpsychism, and Eccy de Jonge, artist, philosopher and deep ecologist, who has written about the 17th-century philosopher and possible precursor of panpsychism, Spinoza.

The gist of the theory is really found in the first 30 minutes, when Goff tries to explain how stuff like atoms and rocks are “conscious”. It turns out that he doesn’t think they’re conscious in the same way that we are, but that atoms and rocks do have a rudimentary form of consciousness that pervades the whole Universe:

Goff: “The fundamental constituents of physical reality, perhaps electrons and quarks, have almost unimaginably simple forms of experience, and the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the very simple experience of their most basic parts.”

Well, this fails on two counts. First, he doesn’t say what it actually means for an electron to have “experience”. Sure, they have spin and move around, but in what sense is that “experience” if they don’t “experience” it? What he’s saying is more or less what he told Sean Carroll on the podcast I posted yesterday: all matter has “properties,” like mass and spin and velocity, and if you call those properties “consciousness,” then yes, everything is conscious. But then he’s made no advance beyond pure physics.

And this doesn’t solve the second problem: how do the rudimentary consciousnesses of the molecular bits of our brain somehow come together to produce full consciousness in the whole organ: consciousness in which we have qualia—feelings, perceptions, and sensations? This remains a mystery that neither Goff nor Morch appear to solve.

Morch agrees with Goff, saying that tables and chairs aren’t conscious but have conscious constituents, but human brains have conscious constituents that can combine to give us consciousness. This is pure sleight of hand, because this doesn’t answer the Hard Problem of Panpsychism: How do the semisconscious bits of brain stuff combine to make a brain conscious, but the semiconscious bits of tables and rocks don’t? These philosophers don’t tell us, and so there’s a gaping hole in their “theory”—if you want to call an untestable and largely semantic issue a “theory”.

Goff, who dominates the conversation, says that electrons and quarks have experience, and that is their consciousness. He asserts again, along with Morch, that scientific materialism is powerless to solve the problem of consciousness because science is quantitative and consciousness is a qualitative experience that can’t be put in an equation. Science, he avers, can only give us correlations between brain activity and the experience of consciousness, but that approach doesn’t tell us how brains produce consciousness. (I think he’s wrong here: enough correlations produce that understanding.)

And Goff bangs on, as he did in Sean Carroll’s podcast, that physics cannot tell us what matter really is—all it does is tell us how matter behaves. That, say Goff and Morch, doesn’t tell us what we want to know. As Goff says, “Physics leaves us in the dark about the intrinsic nature of matter–what matter is, in and of itself. . . Panpsychism puts consciousness in that hole.”  This is Panpsychism of the Gaps!

And it sounds to me like more bullshit. Does saying that matter has “experience” now finally tell us about the intrinsic nature of matter? (Never mind that there’s no evidence for the “experiential” part of matter save that it behaves—which is what physics already tells us.) Goff finally pronounces that panpsychism has given us an attractive answer to the “hard problem” of consciousness: how does the brain’s workings produce sensations?

Goff: “The idea is that there’s just matter, nothing spiritual or supernatural, but matter can be described from two perspectives: physical science describes it, as it were, from the outside, in terms of its behavior; but matter from the inside, in terms of its intrinsic nature, is constituted of forms of consciousness. It’s a beautiful way to bring together these two stories.”

No, it’s a beautiful way to describe what comes out of the south end of a cow facing north. Panpsychism does not in any way solve the physical basis of conscious experience. It just punts it down to a lower level, and then adds the claim that when enough semi-conscious atoms come together in a brain, voilà, you have full consciousness! It’s magic!

Neuroscientist Glaser, the only voice of reason beside moderator Sweet, pipes in and says that neuroscience doesn’t need saving by panpsychism—not just yet. It’s early days in trying to understand consciousness, he says, and we don’t even have a clue how the brain produces and comprehends language or stores memories. When we figure out those things, he claims, then we can tackle consciousness, and if we fail at that then we can start thinking about stuff like panpsychism (16:46).

Things begin to get boring at this point (Matthew gave up 30 minutes in), but I listened to the bitter end. de Jonge comes in as a “deep ecologist” (a new term to me), saying that panpsychism is congenial to deep ecologists, who believe that humans are nothing special in natural ecosystems (duhh. . .), and this jibes nicely with panpsychism’s claim that our consciousness is nothing qualitatively different from the consciousness of a rock. We’re all part of the whole! In other words, de Jonge likes panpsychism not because there’s any evidence for it, or because it makes sense, but because it makes humans seem part of a greater whole, just like Deep Ecology.

Finally, Goff claims again (34:08) that materialism bequeaths a bleak and depressing worldview, while panpsychism give us a picture of the world that makes us “more comfortable in our own skin”. He admits that it doesn’t make it true, but I, at least, am not much comforted by thinking that my electrons have experiences. In fact, it freaks me out. Fortunately, it isn’t true.

I’m becoming aware that people like Goff and Morch like panpsychism because, they say, it gives philosophers alone the ability to do what scientists can’t: explaining not only the “intrinsic nature of matter” but also the hard problem of consciousness. In other words, these philosophers are claiming the Big Territory in a turf war between neuroscience and philosophy.

I would argue that although philosophers have a valuable role in helping empirical workers figure out how to properly frame a research program for understanding how consciousness arises, philosophers cannot solve the problem by themselves. And Goff and Morch’s philosophy doesn’t even seem to be real philosophy. As one genuine philosopher told me: “it is just a gimmick on the part of those philosophers who are stunningly ignorant of science, especially the biological sciences.”

I will continue to listen and read, though I’ll try to inflict as little of this as I can on readers. But nothing I’ve heard has convinced me that there’s anything to panpsychism but a lot of puffery and empty assertions about the “experience” of rocks and electrons. It fails to define what that “experience” consists of beyond the physical properties and behavior of matter, and it fails big time in explaining how the “experience” of the organic molecules in our brain can come together to produce human consciousness, when it can’t do that for rocks or viruses. Panpsychism is neither a theory nor a philosophy, but a semantic trick performed by piling a few bogus claims atop each other. Why is it popular? You tell me!

Here’s the show (the answer to the title question, of course, is “NO!”).

And a relevant cartoon by reader Pliny the in Between’s site, The Far Corner Cafe:

Sean Carroll vs. Philip Goff on panpsychism

January 7, 2020 • 10:30 am

Since we’ve been talking about panpsychism lately—that’s the theory that the entire Universe and its constituents are in some way conscious—I thought I’d post a podcast in which two opposing academics hash out the issues.

I’ll be posting a bit more about panpsychism in the weeks to come as I read and learn more about it, but the more I learn, the more I see it as a form of either woo or religion. Its advocates don’t seem to define what it means for matter (like an electron) to be “conscious”, and they admit that there’s no way to test their theory. But they see it as a superior alternative to dualism (i.e., the view that there is material “brain stuff” and nonmaterial “mind/consciousness stuff”) and also to materialism (consciousness is an epiphenomenon of a brain that reaches a certain level of complexity) as way of explaining human consciousness. If the constituents of the brain—and all matter—have some kind of consciousness or some component of consciousness, they argue, then consciousness is inherent in our brain, just as it is in a rock or, as Patricia Churchland put it, in a dust bunny. Ergo, problem solved—or so they think.

I see panpsychism as a cult or a religion: an untestable proposition that adds no explanatory value to neuroscience or non-wooey philosophical approaches to consciousness. And, like religion, its advocates won’t admit of any evidence against their theory (i.e., the many palpable connections between the brain and consciousness), but maintain their hypothesis with no supporting evidence. It’s just consciousness all the way down. And they can maintain it to those who don’t think too hard because there can be no evidence against it—not until they tell us what consciousness means for a rock or an atom.  As philosopher/panpsychism booster Philip Goff says:

I agree that panpsychism cannot be directly tested. But neither can materialism or dualism or any other theory of consciousness.

He’s wrong. We’re already making progress on understanding what neurology requires for consciousness, and how to alter its presence or nature.

Except for free will, I’ve never received as much pushback against what I see as a reasonable, science-based stand as I have for my opposition to panpsychism. I get emails, ticked-off posts by philosopher/panpsychism booster Philip Goff on his website, and even arguments by some readers who favor panpsychism.

Goff himself, in the podcast below, repeatedly states that he’s “heartened” by the increasing (but still minority) view among philosophers that panpsychism is the way to go in explaining consciousness. And others, like physicist Lee Smolin, authors Annaka Harris and Philip Pullman, and philosopher Stephen Law, have endorsed Goff’s new trade book, though this doesn’t mean they all endorse panpsychism. Goff’s claim, in the podcast below and elsewhere, that other philosophers agree with him doesn’t move me, for the number of people who adhere to a falsehood doesn’t increase its truth value.

But on to the podcast: Sean Carroll’s “Mindscape” that you can access by clicking on the screenshot below.  Sean, of course, is a physicist, cosmologist, and author, who knows a lot about philosophy. Debating him is Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University and perhaps the most vociferous advocate of panpsychism (he has a new book about it).  Sean states from the outset that he doesn’t accept panpsychism, and that materialism (his view of the world) is perfectly capable of explaining consciousness, though it’s a hard problem and will take a long time to understand.

The podcast is 94 minutes long, and I’ve listened to all of it. I won’t summarize it in detail, but if you want to listen to just the heart of the argument, start at about 1:11:00—71 minutes in.

A brief view of the controversy. Goff avers that materialism won’t help us understand consciousness because all it produces are correlations between brain activity and conscious experience. That, he says, is useless because it doesn’t enable us to get at the heart of consciousness: subjective experience or “qualia”. As he says, “How can you capture in an equation the spiciness of paprika?” (Understanding consciousness won’t necessarily require equations, though.)

In the other corner, on the side of materialism, Sean Carroll, is puzzled at what all the fuss is about. Once he understands how the laws of physics work, he says, we will understand how consciousness arises. (That’s not good enough for Goff, as he says that that “correlational” approach doesn’t tell us what consciousness is, just like Goff says that a definition of mass in physics doesn’t tell us what mass really is.).  Carroll finds this puzzling, since if he has a comprehensive system of understanding how something comes to be, including the real phenomenon of consciousness, then that’s all there is.

(I am summarizing based on one hearing here, and urge you to at least start listening for yourself, at least to the last half hour.)

Carroll’s general response to panpsychism begins about 37 minutes in. In response to Goff’s statement that we need to know what consciousness really is,  Carroll answers he doesn’t really care about the “intrinsic nature of subjective experience”. If you have consciousness and know how it’s produced from neurons and the brain, that’s all there is to know.

As I said, the heart of the disagreement starts about 71 minutes in, when Goff argues that yes, everything is conscious: even the mass, spin, and charge of physical particles like electrons are forms of consciousness: a “limited form of conscious experience.” But that’s about as far as he goes in defining consciousness of inanimate objects. When Carroll asks him if he means that everything is conscious, because everything has physical properties, and whether the the Universe’s wave function is also conscious (Sean talks about that wave function his latest book Something Deeply Hidden), Goff gives a reluctant “yes”. Goff also declares that panpsychism is completely congruent with what physics tell us about the Universe.  Carroll then asks him what panpsychism adds to our understanding of the Universe, and—at least to me—Goff doesn’t produce a coherent answer.

At the end, we see one of Goff’s beefs with materialism when he says that materialism produces a bleak view of life. Instead, says Goff, knowing that “we’re conscious creatures in a conscious Universe” can make us feel better about ourself. It also, he says, will enable us to treat the environment better, for when we realize that plants are conscious, too, we won’t destroy them. (But should we eat them?). But, say I, rocks are conscious as well: does that mean we shouldn’t dig up rocks or pulverize them? Should we split atoms if they are conscious? Is a plant more conscious than a rock?

I am completely with Sean here, as we are both materialists (or “naturalists”, if you will), and I see no explanatory value of panpsychism. But those of you who still adhere to panpsychism might be surprised, as I was, at how poorly the advocates of that theory defend it. It’s not even philosophy, as there doesn’t seem to be much rationality about it.

But click and listen. 

 

Oy! LiveScience touts panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness

November 12, 2019 • 11:30 am

Until I read this piece, I always thought that LiveScience was a rigorous science site. Indeed, most of it is, but here’s an exception: a paean to “panpsychism”, the view that everything in the Universe, from electrons to elephants—indeed, the Universe as a whole—has a form of consciousness. The author of the article is Philip Goff, a philosopher (now at Durham University) who makes a living touting panpsychism and whose views I’ve critiqued before. So I’ll try to be brief.

Goff’s thesis is that the reason we can’t solve the “hard problem” of consciousness—how neural impulses can be converted into subjective experience—is that we’ve been groping around in the wrong area: neuroscience.  The solution, he suggests, is to recognize the possibility of panpsychism.

Click on the screenshot to read the piece:

Now neuroscientists have pretty much accepted that consciousness is a product of the brain, for we can alter consciousness or eliminate it or even split it by various brain manipulations or psychological tricks. And we’re starting to understand the neural correlates of consciousness: the parts of the brain that give rise to subjective experience—”qualia”. But that is the “soft problem”, and doesn’t address how physiological and neurological processes produce the sensation of consciousness.  As Steve Pinker said in a superb popular article on consciousness in Time magazine:

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

I do think it’s a genuine scientific problem, and I can hazily glimpse how it might be solved in the future, but right now it’s a mystery. And it’s a mystery that has buttressed a lot of woo, ranging from religion (“See, science can’t tell us everything. Sometimes you must invoke God”) to Goff’s panpsychism.

Here’s how Goff sets up the problem:

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

Well, maybe science will never be able to answer the question, but that may mean that the problem is simply hard, or that its solution is so counterintuitive that, like quantum mechanics, our brains aren’t capable of grasping it. But it doesn’t mean that we need to invoke the numinous. Too many real empirical solutions have been overlooked in the past (lightning and disease, to name two) because a problem was hard, tempting people to punt to a woo-ish explanation.

Goff does the requisite invocation:

I believe there is a way forward, an approach that’s rooted in work from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington. Their starting point was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is.

This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterized in terms of behavior — attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call “the intrinsic nature of matter”, how matter is in and of itself.

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view — physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

I’m not sure, nor does Goff tell us, how panpsychism tells us what matter really is. All it seems to tell us is that all matter is conscious. He goes on:

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view — physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

The result is a type of “panpsychism” — an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the “new wave” of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter — nothing spiritual or supernatural — but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside”, in terms of its behavior, but matter “from the inside” is constituted of forms of consciousness.

This means that mind is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness. Before you write that off, consider this. Consciousness can vary in complexity. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of a human being, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there may be a point where consciousness suddenly switches off — but it’s also possible that it just fades but never disappears completely, meaning even an electron has a tiny element of consciousness.

This argument is bogus on its face. Make the same comparison with metabolism, coded replication (DNA), or any other behavior or characteristic of organisms. Those are not continuous with nonliving matter: a rock doesn’t replicate itself faithfully, or metabolize, or seek food. Surely a minimal requirement for consciousness is some kind of neuronal network. I may be wrong, but emergent properties can arise with a certain degree of complexity. Humans can use symbolic language, mice can’t.

I can’t be arsed to dig into all the links Goff cites, but saying that mind is matter doesn’t solve the problem of what matter is, for we still don’t know what “mind” is! And so Goff passes on to how every bit of matter is conscious.

What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking, it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits into our scientific story.

While our current scientific approach offers no theory at all — only correlations — the traditional alternative of claiming that consciousness is in the soul leads to a profligate picture of nature in which mind and body are distinct. Panpsychism avoids both of these extremes, and this is why some of our leading neuroscientists are now embracing it as the best framework for building a science of consciousness.

I am optimistic that we will one day have a science of consciousness, but it won’t be science as we know it today. Nothing less than a revolution is called for, and it’s already on its way.

Yes, his theory is untestable, but I’m not sure it’s even the simplest theory. After all, you could voice a simpler theory that “consciousness was bequeathed to us by God”. Further, the idea of a continuum of self-awareness from humans to photons is not only hard to accept, but is supported by no evidence at all. Yes, you could say that photons have a different kind of consciousness, or are only dimly aware of things, as is a bacterium, but, as Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

In the end, Goff fails in his task of explaining how panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness; he just avoids the problem by asserting that everything is conscious. Consciousness is simply an inherent quality of all matter. But the hard problem remains. From where does that consciousness arise? What properties of matter produce a sentient atom?

Goff’s unfounded speculations don’t belong in LiveScience because they’re not scientific speculations, but a form of unsubstantiated woo. When he tells us how he knows that matter is conscious, then I’ll pay attention.

h/t: Bill