'Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true'
This is the title of a recently-published essay in Aeon. It is admirably brief, and clear. But it is also, I believe, mistaken. However I want to show that it is mistaken in a way that its author cannot anticipate.
First of all, 'panpsychism' is the belief that 'everything has mind' in some fundamental sense - electrons , other particles, material objects, and so on, have mind, or are in some sense capable of intentional action. This is proposed to solve, or dissolve, the fundamental dichotomy between 'mind and matter' by saying that mind is 'everywhere' (one meaning of 'pan'). All we're seeing with conscious beings is a highly differentiated form of matter, but matter itself is intrinsically conscious.
The main objection that the author gives is that:
He then points out that many successful theories, such as the Theory of Relativity, are also profoundly counter-intuitive, but we now know they're correct.
Then he says, physics tells us how matter behaves, but it doesn't really tell us what matter is, in its essential nature. And, he says:
Now this is where I think the author is mistaken, but not for the reason that he has anticipated.
I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences.
Now, in one sense we can be very clear about our own experiences - we certainly know what an unpleasant or pleasant experience is, and we know that some experiences have specific attributes, across a vast range of experiences. But in all cases, we know those things experientially - we know about those attributes, because they are the constituents of our experience, in a way very different from how we know and predict the behaviour of objects according to physical laws.
We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us.
So, I think the idea of trying to identify what experience, mind, or consciousness is, on the basis of the observed behaviour of objects, or by inferring that it is some property of matter, is profoundly mistaken. It is an attempt to naturalise what is in an epistemic sense prior to any idea of nature.
I think this is similar to Husserl's criticism of naturalism:
Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p 144.
So 'panpsychism' has forgotten this fact and then is seeking for what it has forgotten in the inner workings of electrons. 'Look', it's saying, 'there I am!'
First of all, 'panpsychism' is the belief that 'everything has mind' in some fundamental sense - electrons , other particles, material objects, and so on, have mind, or are in some sense capable of intentional action. This is proposed to solve, or dissolve, the fundamental dichotomy between 'mind and matter' by saying that mind is 'everywhere' (one meaning of 'pan'). All we're seeing with conscious beings is a highly differentiated form of matter, but matter itself is intrinsically conscious.
The main objection that the author gives is that:
[Panpsychism] is ‘crazy’ and ‘just obviously wrong’. It is thought to be highly counterintuitive to suppose that an electron has some kind of inner life, no matter how basic, and this is taken to be a very strong reason to doubt the truth of panpsychism.
He then points out that many successful theories, such as the Theory of Relativity, are also profoundly counter-intuitive, but we now know they're correct.
Then he says, physics tells us how matter behaves, but it doesn't really tell us what matter is, in its essential nature. And, he says:
In fact, the only thing we know about the intrinsic nature of matter is that some of it – the stuff in brains – involves experience.
Now this is where I think the author is mistaken, but not for the reason that he has anticipated.
I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences.
Now, in one sense we can be very clear about our own experiences - we certainly know what an unpleasant or pleasant experience is, and we know that some experiences have specific attributes, across a vast range of experiences. But in all cases, we know those things experientially - we know about those attributes, because they are the constituents of our experience, in a way very different from how we know and predict the behaviour of objects according to physical laws.
We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us.
So, I think the idea of trying to identify what experience, mind, or consciousness is, on the basis of the observed behaviour of objects, or by inferring that it is some property of matter, is profoundly mistaken. It is an attempt to naturalise what is in an epistemic sense prior to any idea of nature.
I think this is similar to Husserl's criticism of naturalism:
In contrast to the outlook of naturalism, Husserl believed all knowledge, all science, all rationality depended on conscious acts, acts which cannot be properly understood from within the natural outlook at all. Consciousness should not be viewed naturalistically as part of the world at all, since consciousness is precisely the reason why there was a world there for us in the first place. For Husserl it is not that consciousness creates the world in any ontological sense—this would be a subjective idealism, itself a consequence of a certain naturalising tendency whereby consciousness is cause and the world its effect—but rather that the world is opened up, made meaningful, or disclosed through consciousness.
Routledge Intro to Phenomenology, p 144.
So 'panpsychism' has forgotten this fact and then is seeking for what it has forgotten in the inner workings of electrons. 'Look', it's saying, 'there I am!'
Comments (159)
In an effort to make "mind" the ubiquitous complement to body, it turns the mind material and gives it to every individuated state. For the panpsychist, minds are individual states of the world, not bodies (as many reductionist claim), which manifest out of all specific states of body in the world.
The only difference between the emergent materialism and panpsychism is that latter expects experience emerges form all bodies, rather than just a select group (e.g. humans, animals, etc.,etc.). It objectifies not the "nature" of experiences, but experiences themselves, such they are independent states of the world, destroying the separation between the mind and body-- minds are another "material" state.
What is so great about experience anyway? It's all pervading - even animals have it - and we do objectify in these cases. Why is our experience so different that it requires special treatment?
Perhaps because we are able to articulate it, but surely it is not that easy. All things have consciousness or a mental element present and – like the study of quantum mechanics or say multiverse theory – consciousness is immeasurable neither within ourselves or other objects and the notion that there is something in all matter that enables or emerges this consciousness (thus consciousness itself is this unified element that permeates through everything) is quite attractive because of its almost anti-Kantian conclusiveness that closes further enquiry.
Nevertheless, panpsychism lacks appeal on some fronts only because it is dangerously close to justifying bizarre possibilities – again, like quantum mechanics – but when you think of what the condition is for being ‘cognitive’ it is questionable that the mind is merely a network of neural processes and that mental constructs is more than the ‘brain’ where input of information viz., biological constraints fails to embody the features of first person experience. Attempting to solve this problem through physical explanations alone simply does not work and a non-reductive approach becomes inevitable.
I am interested in phenomenal externalism and the subjective qualities of experience that makes us distinct [individually] from others, which renders thought on Buddhism and qualia; is anyone alive or does anyone die? I think that – just like the coupling of space and time – it is important to appreciate both models of embodied cognition, material and panpsychic.
Good observation!
Quoting TheMadFool
Please point out where in the OP I said 'we can't know anything', or anything I said that could be taken to imply that claim.
Quoting TimeLine
That is what is at issue, though. So to assert that it is the case, is to beg the question.
It is why embodied cognition is an interesting model, where the mind is no longer this abstract processor with no connection to the external world and that cognition emerges from the mind-body relationship and our interaction with our environment.
is false.
That our brain is involved in experience -- and not identical to or even specified in what kind of relation it might stand towards experience -- can be inferred by the fact that ingesting chemicals, like coffee for instance or even large quantities of food, has an a/effect on experience. What we call matter interacts with the brain through the blood stream, and experience changes. So it's a fair inference from the first-person side of things, at least.
And at the very least his intended audience -- people who would believe that panpsychism is "just crazy" -- are likely to share this belief with him, even if they do not know it to be the case (I would disagree with the strength of his assertion, but that seems tangential)
From there the rest of his argument follows just leveraging the desire for consistency which panpsychism offers. Since they believe brains are involved in experience, rather than ask how it is experience arises from what has no experience (as per the belief of the audience), just conceding that everything has some kind of experience (though not necessarily mind, intent, or other features which are very much a part of our experiences) gets rid of the question all together.
This is just to say that it's not from the behavior of electrons which the panpsychist infers that electrons have experience, but rather from the desire for an explanation of how it is we experience when we previously presumed matter did not experience. "How do the electrons in a rock suddenly become a mind in a different configuration?" being the target question which panpsychism deflates.
Right. So basically, it is a kind of naturalism - that 'experience' must be a feature of the natural world, we just haven't discovered 'experiencum' inside atoms yet. But - it must be there somewhere!
Quoting Moliere
That's exactly it! Thank you.
I don't think you'd find this satisfactory, of course. Obviously it would depend on what is meant by 'naturalism', and you mean 'naturalism' differently than these self-described naturalists. But I'm noting it because it seems noteworthy to me that self-described naturalists would object to panpsychism -- there is a relevant difference for them, even if it isn't one which is strong enough for yourself.
My reading was: he admits it's game over for old-school materialism, because there really is no way to get from the equations of physics, to the experience of being - in other words, he acknowledges the reality of 'the hard problem'. But he goes on to say 'as a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental/experiential is physical'. Why? Because he is acknowledging that there's no way to dispose of the 'hard problem'. So instead of disposing of it, he displaces it, by making consciousness an 'attribute of matter'. So everything is 'still physical' - but physical things themselves have an experiential attribute - which is 'experiencum', a term I just coined for this purpose.
And my argument is - no such thing!
But the article seems silly. We know the "intrinsic nature" of one very specialized, hyper-complex entity which might be both unique and uniquely complex over the whole universe, so lets just generalize that to everything, including elementary particles, it's probably true.
It also presupposes that it makes sense to speak of an "intrinsic nature" of elementary particles or tire irons. This is a massive philosophical leap.
Indeed you can. I said:
Quoting Wayfarer
But, I also said that experiences are 'undergone by a subject', so that they're not objects in the same way that the objects of physics are. A cannonball will follow a trajectory that is determined by the forces acting on it, and which can be calculated according to Newtonian physics. So it is possible to be objective about such entities, in a way that is not possible about the elements of experience. Experience is always first-person, in other words, it implies a subject. But that subject is also not something that can be known objectively (which is a central point of Kantian philosophy and its successors; this raises many difficult points about the nature of subjectivity and objective knowledge.)
Quoting hypericin
Which would be?
The Subject of Experience
by Galen Strawson
Link: http://a.co/e1NlB23
I have just been made aware, via my extensive philosophical network, that critics of Philip Goff might like to sharpen their arguments between now and tomorrow. There is a high probability that this thread might encounter celebrity intervention.
As a warm-up here's a very interesting discussion:
And a video of Daniel Dennett listening to Philip Goff
The principal difference between panpsychism and substance dualism is how they each attribute the source of activity of living creatures. Biology understands living beings as active. Physics understands matter as passive, inert. So philosophical speculations may tend toward contriving ways in which matter could be active, living. The dualist way is to posit a soul, which is a separate, active, immaterial substance, that has the capacity to affect matter at its most fundamental level, causing matter to move in ways unknown to physics. The panpsychic way is to posit the source of such activity as inhering within matter itself.
Just to add another option to the table, Peirce's version of objective idealism understands mind as living and active, and matter as "effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws," such that it is not entirely dead - only "mostly dead" (for fans of The Princess Bride). There is still an element of spontaneity in the universe that is evident in very slight deviations from the laws of nature. Hence "matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hidebound with habits"; and "dead matter would be merely the final result of the complete induration of habit reducing the free play of feeling and the brute irrationality of effort to complete death."
Thanks for the thread, though :) I like Galen Strawson as a provocateur, for he puts his finger on a sore spot even if he has no healing balm.
"We can see others having experiences, and infer what they're experiencing, but again, we only know experience by experiencing. Experience is never a 'that' to us."
If we can only know experiences through having them, then we can't attribute them to others. But clearly we can attribute experiences to others, so why not to electrons?
I wonder whether there's a conflation here of different senses of 'subjective'. Experiences are 'subjective' in the sense that they're attributes of a subject. But facts about experiences are still perfectly objective facts about reality.
Thanks! Didn't anticipate a response from the author, but honoured to have received one.
I think in this case 'others' are 'other beings'. Leaving aside the problem of solipsism - that my mind is the only real mind - I think it is inferentially sound to believe that other human beings experience themselves in a way similar to the way I experience myself. When I see someone else react after having hit themselves on the thumb with a hammer, even though I can't literally feel their pain, I think it is more than reasonable to believe that they experience the same pain I would in the circumstance, so I am inclined to sympathy - 'poor fellow!' Whereas if I saw a robot malfunction and hit itself, I see no reason the believe that it would feel pain, nor would I feel any sympathy with it - 'take it down to the workshop and get it fixed'.
And the same would go for any inanimate object. (Actually, reflecting on that, Aristotle's treatise on 'The Nature of the Soul' was called 'De Anima'. I suppose the same etymology is also reflected in 'animal'.) So all that points to what I believe is a basic ontological distinction between 'beings' and 'objects', which I suspect pan-psychism is wanting to blur or eliminate. Because, from the viewpoint of physicalism, it's an inadmissible distinction, because physicalism must be monistic - there is only one fundamental substance, to which panpsychism adds, that substance must be in some sense conscious.
Also, what I said is that it is a mistake to think that experiences can be known in the third person. That is basically the same criticism as the 'hard problem', which says that all experience has an irreducibly first-person aspect which can't be described in purely third-person terms.
Now, a lot can be described in purely third-person terms - which is essentially the 'domain of the natural sciences' - but 'the nature of the experiencing subject' is not among them, which is why I referenced Husserl in the OP. His 'critique of naturalism' says more or less the same.
Quoting Philip Goff
Nothing whatever is 'perfectly objective'. That is the major point of Kant, is it not? That said, I'm not a complete relativist, because I believe there is a 'domain of objective fact' - but that is a pragmatic matter, not an ideal realm.
Of course, all of this points to some large and weighty philosophical and also historical issues, but that is the general thrust of my criticism of panpsychism.
You actually make the mistake of being sceptical of experience here. All our experiences are "first person." One only knows "red" thorough living their experience. In this respect, it is no different to knowing of experience-- in fact, it's a subset of it. If I know red, a computer or a mountian, it's something of my experience I know.
All instances of knowledge are "first person", a person's lived experience. Red is no less irreducible than experience. Both can only be accessed with "first person" experience.
We don't know this at all.
Regardless, let's say panpsychism is the case, there's still the problem of how the individual (?) inner lives of electrons, etc, give rise to singular cohesive first person experiences. How does my experience of being a human, in a world, emerge from individual particles (that have experience as part of their nature). Is my conscious experience physically located throughout the particles within my brain, only some of them, or is it an emergent entity and exists somewhere else entirely?
Well, we do know that, as far as we know, having experience always involves having a brain, don't we?
What we don't know is precisely what it is that has experiences. I can say that I have experiences, but I don't know, precisely, what I am.
Now, if experience also involves self-awareness, then the jury is out. What we can say is that humans have self-awareness as a general rule, some more than others. Beyond that it is simply a guess probably based upon some brain bias of some sort.
As for me, the brain doed not equate to consciousnesses or experiences. Consciousness equates to consciousness and the brain seems to be doing all kinds of stuff as is most of the body, as it reacts to experiences of consciousness. My view is that the whole body is conscious - what is normally called body or muscle memory.
If having experience is defined as having volition, then I would say that is confined, as far as we know, to creatures with brains.
Volition is self-determination; animals of all kinds are usually supposed to possess volition, do you believe plants do?
If you define it more broadly, as in "the rock outcrop experienced erosion due to run-off", then that is a different matter.
Of course none of our categories are absolutely unambiguous; if our knowledge is to be disqualified because it is not absolutely unequivocal, then we could not rightly be thought to have any knowledge.
Whether or not a virus is living is an ongoing debate, as far as I'm aware, and it is controversial to give that as an example of a life form.
Yes, I would say that there must be some awareness, which means some sensory structure, in order to qualify as having volition, and hence experience. But the cut-off point, when it comes to organisms, is not at all clear. Whatever the case might be with organisms, however, I would say we have no reason to impute awareness, volition or experience to fundamental particles or non-organic entities in general.
But the quality of the evidence is what matters more than the existence of the evidence. I doubt its quality. And there's a semantic element to this too, namely what is meant by "experience". Is this watered down thing you call "experience" [i]really[/I] experience? Or is it missing one or more essential aspects?
True since we understand living entities to be interacting with non-living environments and to be continuously absorbing, and actually "composed" of, non-living "stuff".
Hi Phillip, welcome, I hope you stick around!
My question is this: if experience is the intrinsic nature of brains, then wouldn't it be just as simple, and certainly more parsimonious, to say that elementary particles have no intrinsic nature?
Quoting Philip Goff
This would seem to be a false dichotomy; "nothing" is neither experience nor entirely unknown.
And also, why isn't my foot conscious? Or is it, and my brain just isn't aware? But then why I am I located with my brain and not my foot?
I don't know if 'foot' would be a possible body-part to genuinely feel you are identified with, but I don't see a reason to exclude it either if, in fact, body-part identification is something you learn from the culture you're born into.
On the first question -- I think, insofar that we believe such-and-such to be an entity at least, that panpsychism would call it conscious. But I'm not sure that the parts of entities would be conscious.
So, an electron can be identified with 4 numbers -- principal number, orbital angular momentum, magnetic number, and spin. But the orbital angular moment of an electron is not posited to have consciousness, whereas the electron is.
So I think it would depend on what we admit as an entity. If we believe there is no self, for instance, then perhaps your conscious life just happens to include the conscious life of your foot too. Or, if we believe there is an ontological self, then that would be the reason your foot is not conscious -- it's just a part of you (your second question).
Instead of applying the knowledge argument to Mary, let's apply it to a robot. The robot has been programmed with all knowledge of light, but is unable to detect red due to a loose connection. During routine maintenance, the loose connection is spotted, and the robot can now detect red. The "red" signals are now fed via various circuits to the CPU where they are processed and the robot acts accordingly.
We know that the robot, as a robot, does not possess subjectivity because we programmed it that way. Perhaps more importantly, because it is a robot, we have a lesser tendency to anthropomorphise it and impute properties that are absent. We now decide to program the robot with "what it is like to see red" knowledge. How do we do that? The electrons the robot is made from may have subjectivity, but that doesn't help us. We can't even express "what it is like" for ourselves, and certainly can't predict it for a robot.
The only way to get the robot to discover "what it is like to see red" is for us to program it to create that knowledge for itself. This seems to be true, whether panpsychism is true or not. So we must program the robot with a general ability to create a particular type of knowledge.
While it might be possible to program a robot in such a way that it becomes capable of knowing what it is like to see a colour, the idea that knowledge creation can be restricted, even in this scenario, seems at odds with the very notion of knowledge creation. Since we cannot predict the knowledge, how could we predict where to place the restriction?
It seems that in order to endow the robot with the ability to create knowledge of "what it is like to see red", we must endow it with a general ability to create knowledge of any kind. In doing so, what have we altered? The robot is physically the same apart from certain bits scattered about its memory and registers being at a different voltage, and some electrical currents being different. I don't see that panpsychism offers anything to help us understand this situation or help us reach this goal.
The hard problem may indeed be hard, but I think the problem of how to create knowledge - of any kind - is the fundamental problem.
Reason we learn to identify consciousness with our heads is because all the evidence correlates with the brain and not the foot. But if panpsychism is true, then neurons (and only neurons in certain regions) in the skull shouldn't be special when it comes to consciousness.
Strictly speaking, they are just as special. Experience emerges from feet just as it does the brain-- and the same is true each atom, protons and electron, neutron, etc., In this context, there isn't just one "mind" to a body, but billions upon billions, where everything from a single electron to the whole body syestem has a mind of its own. In one person, there are more experiencing individuals than humans on Earth.
Why is my subjectivity unaffected when I have a hair cut?
Let's back up a bit here. In this particular discussion the distinction between consciousness and where I am located at within my body is important, since the original article is talking about the hard problem of consciousness and pan-psychism, which is not the same as the self.
The part of our body which we identify with as the seat of our "true being", or the location of the mind, or the self, or some such, does not have evidence in favor of it. It's an act of identification in the sense of "to identify (with)". Even if the self exists, it doesn't make much sense to say that there is evidence in favor of the self -- it's not the same sort of thing as, say, dinosaurs, for which we have evidence for.
So it is hazardous to begin describing consciousness based upon our conception of the self because, 1, that's not what consciousness is in the first place, and 2, while there is something that it's like to be our self (and are thereby there is consciousness of the self, ala the hard problem), there is plenty of things which we are conscious of (hard problem definition) which our self is not aware of, such as PTSD. You still feel the affects of PTSD even when your self does not identify with said condition.
Now, neurons are a common cause posited for consciousness. But that has little to do with the seat of the self, considering that our neurons do, in fact, run to our foot, yet we do not identify our self with the foot.
Not when it comes to consciousness, no. Though when it comes to human experience pan-psychism wouldn't exclude the importance of neurons.
It's not... you lose hair, feel the person cutting, etc.
If you mean why is it that you don't feel terrible fear or pain when your experiencing hairs are lost, that question has a number of different answers.
Firstly, your mind is not that of the individual hair. Each hair has its own subjectivity.
Secondly, assuming each hair has its own subjectivity, we don't know what that entails. It might be hairs don't feel pain or are rendered unconcious by the approach of cutting tools. It might well be hairs are, in terms of a manifestation in their own experience, unaffected by being cut.
Here, you are advocating panpsychism.
Quoting Rich
I am tending to think of evolutionary processes in terms of the appearance of subjective states. I don't know if any other schools of philosophy see it like that, perhaps it is something like what Henri Bergson thought, but I must confess never to having studied him.
However I did notice in an obituary of Timothy Sprigge, an idealist philosopher who was a leading advocate of panpsychism, that:
That actually corresponds with something C S Lewis said, which is that 'the soul is anything capable of calling itself 'I''.
But I still don't think that this means sub-atomic particles are conscious, as I see them as devoid of subject-hood. (However Sprigge might have disagreed - see this passage.)
Quoting Rich
I tend to see the emergence of rational self-awarness - the ability to reflect on the question of the nature of experience - as being a hallmark of the emergence of human intelligence, as distinct from other forms of intelligence. I think that is at least part of the symbolism of the 'myth of the fall', in which Adam eats the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil'. It is the 'knowledge of good and evil', which brings about the sense of self-consciousness, leading to shame (and the sense of being a separate person, which is lacking in animal consciousness).
Quoting tom
I think there's a 'principle of holism' at work. I mean, an individual is a unitary being (under the heading of 'subjective unity of the self'.) The individual can loose many things - like limbs and organs - and still adapt; Jim is still Jim even after a limb has been removed. But that only works to a point; some injuries or illnesses might be so severe that 'the person we knew as Jim no longer exists'.
However, it's amazing how adaptive the being is in keeping itself whole. I suppose the famous example is Phineas Gage, who had a crowbar blown through his skull and survived, albeit with many permanent changes. But he was still recognizably 'Phineas Gage'. There was another story from recent history, a film producer who suffered absolutely catastrophic brain damage after his car was T-boned in Los Angeles, but nevertheless became rehabililtated to the point of being able to live a reasonably normal life (story here). Such cases are scientifically baffling and I don't think too much ought to be read into them, but I think they suggest the sense in which the body-mind is able to restore itself to 'wholeness' even after catastrophic injury.
I we want to give a robot subjectivity - i.e. "what it is like" knowledge, we have to program it that way. Swapping out a hard-drive, or adding more memory is not going to affect the running of the program that achieves this. What particular hardware constitutes the robot is irrelevant, but panpsychics clain it is relevant!
[quote=Chalmers"]...roughly, the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems...'[/quote]
I think this is a more attractive view, in that it allows for an evolutionary 'moment', as it were, when hominids 'became' conscious, without landing every fragment of fallen hair with a complex intrinsic nature.
Here's the paper by Chalmers.
Doesn't seem to get round the "robot problem" - i.e. to grant a robot qualia requires a change in its programming, not its matter.
I guess if you are a monist then "everything has mind [even though I am not quite sure what "mind" means] seems appropriate, I am not sure this entails that everything is "in some sense capable of intentional action." I think anything that can be defined as living can in some sense demonstrate intentionaly (even if minimally), but I do not think any inert matter can or has demonstrated similar intentionality. If so then for the monist's inert matter's is unintentional, and the question is again what does "mind" mean if this is the case.
All things, living and inert have a history, even if on the micro level it can be very short. If all matter can (in some combination) accommodate life, then mind in some sense must be a potential state of matter, part of matters natural progression or history.
I think you have to kind of commit all the way. There is a first-person side for every existing entity. Adding "proto-properties" adds nothing to this explanation, at least in a scientific sense.
Hi Wayfarer. I’ve seen you write paragraphs like the above several times and am always struck by the ironic nature of the fact that in order for what you claim to have any force it must be possible to do the very thing you claim to be impossible – namely, objectify experience. If experience can’t be the object of knowledge, then you can’t make any claims about it. Full stop. There’s no middle ground here that I can see, but perhaps you could take a stab at explaining how your claims about experience are possible if experience literally can’t be known.
I should have made it clearer that although I think panprotopsychism is 'more attractive' than panpsychism, I don't endorse it at all. I agree with your fundamental point about phenomonology not being assimilable to the Chalmers view. By 'more attractive' I only meant that the proto business is curious about an interesting place - what a Darwinian analysis might make of the notion of an evolution into something like consciousness from something like pre-consciousness. I'm hoping some future or even near-future may conjure up a better vocabulary than we have so far, which will enable us to focus on what this so-called problem actually consists of.
I agree. I went to an interesting talk the other week about morality and ai. One sideline area that interests me is how we read other minds. At the outer limit, we - people mostly - tend to assign something like qualia to the behavior of machines, as if they had some mind-quality. The indifference of the robot is, to the human being, an indifferent stance - and we take indifference in our fellow-creatures to be a sort of emotive position. 'How dare you be so indifferent?' But I'm drifting off the point.
Your missing the point. Under panpsychism, it's not only the entire system from which conciousness emerges. It does so from every state. Each hard drive and memory stick, for example, has their own subjectivity.
Regardless of whether replacing a hard drive or memory affects the experience of the entire system (would depend on whether either caused different experiences to emerge from the robot system), all its particular parts have their own subjectivity as well.
In the given robot, there is not one instance of an experiencing subjectivity, but billions (the entire system, each hard drive, each memory stick, each atom that makes up every part, every electron, etc.).
But the essay says
So I'm guessing, you don't agree with it.
Quoting Aaron R
What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person'. That is not the same as saying that it can't be known tout courte.
When I first studied philosophy formally, I was struck by the profoundity of Socrates' encounter with the Oracle of Delphi, on the entry to which the aphorism was inscribed Man, Know Thyself. Not that much was said in the courses I was studied about this topic, but I formed the view that self-knowledge is quite a hard thing to come by, and that many don't have it, even including some very famous and accomplished people.
And indeed one can have all kinds of technical expertise and prowess, and yet be 'a stranger unto oneself'. I happen to think a paradigmatic example of that is Hugh Everett. (If you do take the time to read this article, the last sentence is the kicker.)
I know, my point was about it's position. Personally, I don't agree that everything has subjectivity. Though, I do like the panpsychist argument for demonstrating how deeply prejudiced towards anyone but ourselves.
Quite a few struggle with panpsychism not because of the wild speculation everything has subjectivity, but rather because it knocks our sense of superiority as the "only" conscious entities. Since everything has subjectivity, particular bodies and behaviours begin to struggle as a justification of levels of experience belonging to other lifeforms. If apparently inert rocks have subjectivity, how can we be sure higher level thinking is limited to life that behaves like humans or has some similar bodies?
[/quote]
It's not that I don't agree with it...it is that I am not sure what "mind" means given this interpenetration. If "mind" is some sort of potential latency in matter, I think how that could be is worth exploring, but I don't understand what the inner life of an electron could possibly mean without anthropomorphization. It may well be that all matter entails the possibility of "mind", I don't disagree with that possibility, but I think intentionality remains only a possibility, and not actual, in inert substances.
Isn't it possible to make subjective claims about experience? So I wouldn't go so far as to say "you can't make any claims about it". That conclusion is uncalled for. Would you agree that we can have subjective knowledge concerning experience?
Agree! That is what is troubling me too.
Quoting Wosret
But the question of whether time and space really are objective realities is a deep philosophical problem in it's own right. Recall that Kant saw both as part of the 'conditions for experience' rather than 'objects of experience'.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Subjective, yes.
Not really. See Kant is an empirical realist, and transcendental idealist, which can be seen as drawing an epistemological, and ontological cut through the noumena. His transcendental idealism is affirming the ontological reality of the categories, but denying that they can be known through experience, since they are the conditions for experience themselves. Which is the distinction between "the nouemna", and "the thing in itself". The noumenon is the idea, the ideal, the category, and the "thing in itself" is actually the feature of reality.
So, the "thing in itself" exists independently of the categories and the mind.
Really? We have one problem - how to explain consciousness - which panpsychism actually doesn't help us with, plus it causes a whole host of other problems:
How do all the fundamental particle consciousnesses combine to create a unified consciousness, and why does that require a brain? i.e. how does a single unified consciousness emerge? This is the same question we have without panpsychism!
Are atoms more conscious than fundamental particles? How about mobile phones?
Why are there no semi-conscious things. Or rather, there must be semi-conscious things, how do we identify them?
Why do I lose consciousness when I'm asleep, given that I am physically the same? Do my fundamental particles also sleep?
Panpsychism simply is not weird enough. Emergent consciousness from underlying physics is much weirder, simpler, and it has a large active research program!
I think it is you that is missing the point. It is a well known problem for panpsychism - the combination problem.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Even if you insist that each electron, atom, transistor is conscious, the robot is not.
The basic problems of consciousness are just things like the nature of it, how it interacts with the physical, or emerges from the physical structurally, whether it's contingent or necessary. PP answers a lot of those questions.
The problems you suggest are problems for, and introduced by PP...
That's like responding to "this bullet will solve all of my life problems" with, "How can that be? What about the mess afterwards?".
Can it answer a question like, "Why is this robot not conscious?"
For some reason, no one takes the claim of PanVitalism seriously: that fundamental particles have "life" as a fundamental property. When fundamental particles combine in just the right way, their life-forces combine to give rise to a single living entity.
I ain't battin' for PP in any case. I said not only that it's wrong, but clearly, obviously, manifestly wrong.
Granted that all the fundamental particles are conscious, then PP can't answer why the robot, qua robot, is not conscious. The panpsychic might protest that I've you to switch it on, but can't answer why that makes a difference, or that I've not loaded the consciousness program, but can't answer why that's necessary.
How does the panpsychist explain why the robot isn't conscious? Almost certainly by denying that premise in some way tout court if they wish to maintain their position.
You might as well be asking them "well, if you're right, then how do you explain why you're wrong"?
Quoting tom
Quoting tom
Quoting tom
I'm kind of grouping these since they are related.
I think, broadly speaking at least, whether a robot can identify a red card from all other colors is not the same sort of thing which the hard problem of consciousness is talking about. We can imagine a philosophical zombie, for instance, being able to identify red cards from all other colors. And the philosophical zombie is already more sophisticated than a robot in that it has all of our functional capacities -- which is (again, broadly speaking) how Chalmer's characterizes naturalism -- it just lacks consciousness, the "feel"-iness of first person experience.
We do not program the robot to have knowledge of qualia. We program it to identify cards which reflect light at such and such wave-length, then to send some kind of indicator that it has done so to us.
Also, I would say that 'qualia', while certainly related, are different from pan-psychism in that we could defend pan-psychism without, in turn, defending the more particular notion that qualia exist. (at least as entities -- of course we can use the word 'qualia' to simply refer, in general, to particular instances of subjective experience without committing ourselves to separately existing causal entities called qualia)
Quoting tom
I think this is a problem of psychological identity, which is something one can ask regardless of their stance on pan-psychism.
Even if there is no subjective experience we have people who profess to have a unified consciousness, and in general we observe that people who make such reports tend to have brains, so we can ask how this phenomena occurs.
So, I'd just say that what pan-psychism sets out to answer isn't this question.
Are humans 'more' conscious than dogs?
Honestly, one reason to adopt pan-psychism is it gets rid of this question. With emergence we might ask, at what point does a system gain consciousness? Does it come in degrees?
But I think a consistent pan-psychism would simply say that 'more' or 'less' aren't quite applicable here. It's a 'yes/no' question, and the answer is always 'yes', insofar that what we are naming is an entity (since clearly we can also speak of things which do not exist, and would thereby not be conscious)
It's just that the subjective experience of an electron differs from that of an atom differs from that of a cell-phone differs from that of a robot differs from that of a human.
Because everything is conscious :D -- so there is nothing to identify.
I'd have to be a fundamental particle to say whether or not I sleep. By all observations, at least, I'd infer 'no' -- but there's no reason to rule it out, I suppose.
Also, this question hinges on two different meanings to the word 'consciousness' -- one such meaning is 'awareness', as in "I am conscious of Matt's feelings for me" meaning the same thing as "I am aware of Matt's feelings for me". When you lose consciousness in your sleep you lose awareness. But you do not lose out on what it is like to sleep. We feel dreams, after all, at least the one's which we happen to remember after waking up. I don't see why we wouldn't feel the one's we don't remember just because we don't remember them or why sleep, itself, doesn't have a subjective side just because we don't quite remember what it is like afterwords.
It seems to me that given enough understanding of memory and sleep that we could actually engineer ourselves to retain such memories.
But that can't be right, can it? After all, the claim that experience can't be known in the third person is itself a third person claim about experience. Maybe you think that's a cheap parlor trick, so consider the fact that you can convey truths to me about your experience, and I can convey those truths to others. We can come to know many things about your experiences without actually having had those experiences ourselves. How is that possible if experience cannot be known in the third person?
Furthermore, we can also have third-person knowledge of the structure of experience in general. That's what Kant (who you seem fond of) was really after, wasn't it? He attempted to infer the structure of subjectivity via the transcendental method. By it's own lights, Kant's philosophy counts as knowledge only insofar as the structure of subjective experience can be objectified - that is, insofar as it can become the object of theoretical knowledge.
And that brings me to my point. Objectification is not naturalization. By conflating the two you are running aground the rocky shores of mysticism. Those shores are extremely hard to navigate and, honestly, I'm not convinced it can be done. But the very fact that you and I are having this conversation seems to entail that experience can be objectified - it really can become the object of third-person knowledge. Yet this doesn't entail that it is also "natural", whatever you happen to think "natural" means.
What I said was:
What is it to 'know something in the third person?' Well, consider the trajectory of a projectile. A great deal of physics is occupied with such questions, in fact, as you know, it was towards the end of calculating such things that calculus was devised. Then there's the entire field of mathematical physics, astronomy, cosmology - too vast to summarize. And all of that, you or I or the next person can go and learn about and study, and we will all see the same facts. What scientiific methology does in respect of such matters is to isolate those aspects of experience which are (1) quantifiable, and (2) common to all observers, and set aside or bracket out the subjective elements, so as to arrive at the putative 'view from nowhere' (Nagel).
Whereas, the only reason you and I believe that each other has the same kind of experiences is presumptively. I presume that other persons have similar kinds of experiences to myself, but I can't ever know what it is like to be another person. There may, furthermore, be kinds of experiences that others have, that I have never had, and that is not something that can be written down and conveyed through mathematical formulae, in the way that facts about objects can be.
I can send you a projectile, but I can't send you an experience; experiences all come with subjects attached.
This is why eliminative materialists are able to deny that experience is real at all. Of course, Galen Strawson, who is an advocate for panpyschism, says this is self-evidently false - but it can't be proven. Dennett, and Rosenberg, and various others of that ilk, all argue that first-person experience is unreal, and there's no objective way of proving them wrong, because the reality or otherwise of first-person experience is not an objective fact. In fact, that is why such people are obliged to deny the primacy of the subjective; if it's true, their argument is false (as indeed I believe it to be.)
So when I try and convey an experience to you, I can only do so because I believe you will know what I mean, that the person I am conversing with is a person like myself. I think it's a perfectly reasonable belief, but a belief is what it is.
Quoting Aaron R
Indeed, but he also was aware of the 'reflexive problem of knowledge', which is that the 'transcendental subject' in whom all of the intuitions reside, is not itself amongst the objects of knowledge. The subject is in that sense an aspect of the noumenal, rather than the phenomenal, domain. Furthermore, the whole arduous labour of the Critiques had to be undertaken specifically because the knowledge of the structure of experience was hitherto unknown.
Quoting Aaron R
I am sure that naturalism relies on, or presumes, objectification. The natural scientist is herself an intelligent subject in a domain of objects, other beings, and forces. The pursuit of objective knowledge rests on analysis of those and the identification of the causal relations and regularities by which their behaviour can be predicted.
If we could not have ":third person" knowledge of "first person" experience. we would not have any knowledge of our own experience. First person experience is the having of experience, not the discursive knowing of the experience that has been had; that comes only after the fact and it is a third person knowing, just as knowing of any phenomenon is.
So, I would say Aaron's objection is correct, if you could have no third person knowledge of your own experience then you could not say anything meaningful about it.
I don't think we have knowledge of experience. I think knowledge is a facet of our experience.
Quoting John
It is often commented, that 'the taste of an orange' can't be conveyed to one who hasn't eaten an orange.
I can send you an orange, and then you can taste it, but I can't send you 'the taste of an orange'.
How can you say knowledge is a facet of our experience if you have no knowledge of experience?
Quoting Wayfarer
I can't see the relevance of this truistic example. If you know you have tasted oranges then you know something about your experience.
To be conscious is to be subject to experience. So any kind of knowledge-claim whatever presumes that there is a subject of experience. Knowing how to speak, how to compare, I can comment and reflect on the nature of experience - as I have acknoweldged. But the subject of experience is not an object of experience; I can't stand outside experience, or reason, or knowledge, and comment on it 'from the outside'.
Quoting John
I didn't say otherwise, but it's still a subjective experience, not an objective fact.
But that's exactly what you are purporting to do. You are making comments, which you do not take to be purely subjective, because you obviously think they are correct and not mere opinions. about the nature of experience. So you are indeed, purporting to"stand outside experience, or reason, or knowledge, and comment on it 'from the outside".
Quoting Wayfarer
So, there is no objective fact about whether you have experienced the taste of oranges or not?
To you, another human being, with whom I share experience. My comments are not purely subjective, but they don't concern any object. You cannot send me an experience, or even show me an experience. You might induce one in me, by giving me an hallucinogenic drug, or putting me in a rocket, but that relies on there being a subject of experience.
This is all discussed in Facing Up to the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
That is simply not true, your experience insofar as you know it, is the object you are speaking about: otherwise anything you say about your experience is simply senseless.
The fact that I can't experience your experience is no more significant than the fact that one rock cannot be in the same place at the same time as another, and it is also, by the way, another purported fact about the thing you say no objective statements can be made.
Experience is not an object, except for in a metaphorical sense. An experience doesn't exist, absent an experiencer. Whereas, a bowling ball, a pen, a computer - the list goes on - are all objects.
So, they are objects because they exist absent experiencers? Does the erosion experienced by a hillside exist absent the hillside?
It sort of does. The thing about the experiencer is they don't appear in experiences of the world. Our experiences are of specific state (bowling ball, computer, rock, an instance of happiness, my understanding of a post, a thought that we are an experiencer, etc.). In these terms, the experiencer is always beyond any particular experience-- a sort of infinite which is never captured by giving an account of one particular moment of the world.
Insofar as our experience of states of the world goes, there is no experiencer. It cannot appear in experience's accounts of the world because it is an infinite. To grasp the experiencer, one's understanding has to move beyond a state of the world (e.g. the existence of a rock, bowling ball or a thought), to the expression of logic that is the being of an experiencer.
The "hard problem" is a red-herring generated by confusing particular experiences (i.e. state of experiences-- an existing thought, a feeling, a sensation, etc., ) with experiencer. It's not true. The experiencer is more than any of their experiences, more than the sum of their experiences.
Instead of recognising the experiencer as an infinite, and so outside any experience of a state of the world, the substance dualist and hard problem reduce the experiencer to particular states of experience in the world.
I never said experience doesn't require a subject. In the case of erosion that is experienced by the hillside, the hillside is the subject, I am saying that logically this is no different than saying that in order for you to experience, you must exist.
In regards to Kant, his philosophy implies only that the transcendental subject can't be an object of empirical cognition, not that it can't be an object of cognition tout court. Insofar as transcendental philosophy is itself the product of reason operating on judgment, it requires that the transcendental subject must be capable of becoming an object of cognition. Otherwise transcendental philosophy itself would not be possible.
Furthermore, it is striking the extent to which Kant's account of subjectivity is functional in nature. That is, it ultimately specifies what something must do in order to count as a subject of experience. To the extent that it does this, Kant's theory (and variations thereof) can be interpreted as providing a functional model of subjectivity, thus unwittingly legitimizing the notion that the problem of subjectivity is best approached as an engineering problem (per Dennett, et al). There's a very real sense in which Dennett and his ilk can be seen as legitimate heirs to the Kantian tradition. To be clear, I'm not saying that Kant would have condoned Dennett's philosophy, but it's pretty hard to deny that he planted the seeds of modern functionalism right below the surface.
I thought you meant that I can't have your experience. I hit my thumb with a hammer and I feel pain, but you can't feel my pain. I hit your thumb with a hammer but I feel no pain. We don't share the same experience, we experience what we experience, each in our own way.
I did not say anything about it being impossible. What I said was
So, I didn't say that 'third person knowledge of experience is impossible. I said that experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or object is, and that consequently, it always has an inescapably first-person attribute, which is exactly what is not present in judgements about physical objects of cognition.
(Which is why I added that I can send you a projectile, but I can't send you an experience, because there's always a subject attached.)
Quoting Aaron R
Blackwell entry on Transcendental Ego; emphasis added.
Quoting Aaron R
I don't agree with that assessement. I think he is concerned with the limits of knowledge. Recall his saying 'I had to declare a limit to knowledge, to make room for faith'.
Quoting Aaron R
Based on what I know of Dennett, I can't see how he can be said to have understood Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy' or indeed much of Kant at all.
Quoting Cavacava
My point exactly.
Fallacy of equivocation. 'The hillside' might be the subject of analysis, but it's not a subject of experience - unless, of course, panpsychism is right, and mountains are conscious!
You're assuming your conclusion, and arguing in a circle.
That is all perfectly true, but it is also not hard to see how this perfectly complemented Cartesian dualism. It mapped perfectly well against this model, and indeed formed the worldview of early modern science, which is still vastly influential to this day.
As Thomas Nagel wrote:
(Mind and Cosmos, pp. 35-36).
Now is seems to me as though panpsychism acknowledges that this is a problem, but then goes about trying to mend the split as follows.
In his very lnfluential essay Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism’, Galen Strawson proposes to rectify it by acknowledging the apodictic nature of conscious experience - i.e. it is implausible to doubt that there is one who doubts - but also by declaring that whatever is real is physical. Ergo, what is physical must have an experiential aspect - 'experiencum', as I called it above - which is not detected by physics itself, because physics is only concerned with 'the motions of bodies'. This he calls 'real physicalism', as distinct from physicSalism, which is basically old-school materialism (i.e. that everything is reducible to physics). He says, because at least in some form, namely, the form of brains and nervous systems, matter is capable of consciousness, then it must latently have possessed this attribute all along; when it assumes the forms of brains, it is, as it were, actualised. (I am reminded of my Indian Philosopher lecturer saying in his lectures on Vedanta, 'what is latent becomes patent'.)
But all of this seems to be to be trying to go back and find something that has been forgotten - namely the primacy of consciousness - while still preserving the main axiom of physicalism, that what is real, is physical.
Never having been a materialist or physicalist, I have no requirement to presume 'the primacy of the physical'; personally, I think physicalism has been seriously challenged by physics itself. But I think that regardless, the materialist paradigm is now so thoroughly embedded in the secular culture of the West, that to advocate anything radically different is a practical impossibility (after all, it was for just such a proposal that Thomas Nagel was declared a heretic for publishing the book above.)
So panpsychism is trying to mend this split, by declaring matter itself conscious. This enables one to stay within the physicalist fold, but to try and address the glaring insufficiencies that have since appeared in it. That's my reading of it.
I say that you are assuming that to be a conscious subject such as a human being with conscious experience is a situation that entails an entirely different logic vis a vis experience than it does to be an unconscious subject such as a hillside.
To clarify what I mean; you argue that I do not experience your experience, and I respond that the logic is the same in the case of the experience hillsides enjoy, in that one hillside does not, could never, experience the same erosion that occurs on the other hillside. The logic appears to be the same.
And yet you seem to be unable to demonstrate that this assumption that there must be a different logic is correct. I say this is the conclusion you seem to be groundlessly assuming and asserting, which also underpins your argument.
What conclusion to do you think I am assuming?
Quoting Wayfarer
Seemed pretty clear, but maybe I misunderstood.
In regards the difference between experience and projectiles - sure it's true that you can throw me a ball but you can't throw me an experience. You also can't throw me the ideal gas law, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing folks that the ideal gas law can't be an object of cognition.
As for the Blackwell entry, this comes down to an exegetical dispute. I would argue that to identify the thinking self with the noumenal self renders Kant's philosophy blatantly self-contradictory. As such, I think such an identification should be avoided on the basis of the principle of charity. There's multiple places where Kant explicitly claims that that his transcendental psychology counts as knowledge and that transcendental arguments count as cognitions. Insofar as transcendental psychology gives a positive account of the faculties of the knowing subject, and insofar as we want to maintain that the knowing subject just is the transcendental subject, then the transcendental subject simply cannot be identified with the noumenal subject of metaphysical speculation, on pain of contradiction
As for the tie in with functionalism: you said that you disagree with that assessment because Kant was concerned with establishing the limits of knowledge, but these aren't mutually exclusive so there's no problem here. If you want to argue that Kant's account is not functional then you'll need to try to show that the various faculties and operations that he posits don't amount to functional transformations. That's going to be pretty hard considering that pretty much every operation that Kant describes takes the form of a function (i.e. they operate on well-defined inputs in order to produce well-defined outputs). Philosophers have been noting the functional nature of Kant's transcendental psychology for decades and to my knowledge, it's not really a controversial claim at this point. Consider this quote from the SEP article Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of the Self:
[quote=SEP]
Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.
1. The mind is complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
3. These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.
These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science.[/quote]
But I don't think you really want to try to understand any of this, because it doesn't square with your notion that Kant's philosophy is a decisive ally in your holy war against naturalism. So I’ll leave it here.
The problem is that argument is it doesn't, itself, respect the primacy of consciousness. Instead of treating each conscious subject as its own experiencer, it speaks if being an experiencer is a generality, passed down generations, such that I am of the same "mind" as my parents, and their parents, and so on and so-- as if my mind belong to others and theirs mine!
Concerned about justifying "mind," it misses actually the distinction of the experiencing subject. It fails to recognise each experiencer is primary themselves. My consciousness is not given by matter. Nor is it given by any other preceding mind. It is only itself-- Willow the experiencer-- and that's all that can define it.
I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person' but I didn't say that this means 'knowledge of experience is impossible' which is what you seem to think I am saying. I'm saying that knowledge of experience is not objective in the way that knowledge of objects is objective (physics being the paradigmatic 'science of objects'), because it has an ineluctably first-person aspect. (It seems obvious to me that this is exactly the same argument as the 'hard problem of consciousness' argument.)
Remember, the essay I quoted states:
So even if that were true, how would you know that? Is that 'inner life of an electron' going to an object of perception to you? Will it leave a bubble trail?
Quoting Aaron R
What is the 'ontological status of natural law'? That's a whole other topic.
Quoting Aaron R
An example often given from experience is that the eye can see another, but not itself, a knife can cut another, but not itself. The nature of the transcendental ego is exactly to that - it is the 'unseen seer, the unthought thinker'.
Quoting Aaron R
I don't think for one minute that Kant was on a jihad against naturalism. After all he was also a scientist and his theory of nebular formation still stands, and I have no objection to any of the quoted points above. But his critique of reason is relevant, as it is about limits of knowledge, in the sense of the issues fundamental to the nature of knowledge which determine the kinds of things that it can validly judge, or not.
I'm arguing that panpsychism is an attempt to extend naturalism past the point where it can properly proceed, but that's not an argument against naturalism, generally. What you're reacting against, I think, is the suggestion that there are perspectives other than the naturalist, from which this criticism can be made.
Isn't it simpler to suppose that these are properties are all actual or potential properties of matter. Perhaps 'human exceptionalism' is not nature's radical departure, but rather part of nature's natural progression.
Not sure I agree with electron's inner life, but an electron as well as all other matter must have a history, and perhaps history is all that matter as such can relate to us.
This is a subject of knowledge, not an object of cognition. We need to be careful to keep this distinction. There are pure ideals, such as mathematical principles, which if we follow Platonic realism would be known as objects, intelligible objects. But the intelligible object is purely ideal, and a law is an application of the ideal toward the physical world. From the application of ideals we derive subjects of knowledge, but we must maintain a separation between the law, as a subject of knowledge, and the aspect of the physical world, (the object) which the law represents.
Quoting Cavacava
To assume that these are actual properties of matter, and to assume that they are potential properties of matter, is two distinct things. This is the difference between panpsychism and substance dualism, which I referred to earlier. Panpsychism would assume that they are actual properties of all matter. Substance dualism apprehends a necessity for a separate actuality, the soul, which is required to actualize these potential properties of matter. With substance dualism, there is a separate immaterial substance, soul.
It's more that intentionality and thought are impossible to accomodate within standard scientific materialism, which after all wants to eliminate just those things from its accounts. For a long time, they were simply dismissed on those grounds (and still are, by the likes of Daniel Dennett.) The panpsychist approach seems to be that they're ubiquitous, they're attributes of all matter, but only manifest through the processes that give rise to intelligent life.
Nagel's approach in Mind and Cosmos is different again - although not that different. He proposes that
From here.
However,
here.
That chimes with me. I have long been drawn to the mystical dictum (and not only mystical, it has been expressed by at least some evolutionary biologists) that we are 'life made conscious', that the human form is in some way the Universe discovering itself. (Neils Bohr said, only half-jokingly, 'A physicist is just an atom's way of looking at itself'.)
But what is potentially fruitful about that approach is that the idea found in esoteric philosophies of 'realising a higher self' maps against this kind of understanding. There is, for example, a principle in Hermetic (and Stoic) philosophy, 'as above, so below', according to which man is a kind of replica or epitome of the Cosmos.
Panpsychics have no clue how the subjectivity imputed to individual fundamental particles might combine to form the unified subjectivity of a person. I'm also slightly concerned that they might be forced to declare SuperStrings are conscious in the near future.
So, to demand something from say physicalists, that you don't demand from panpsychics, seems a bit unfair. Panpsychics have no more idea how an individual person's consciousness "floats into the world" than anyone else.
Quoting Cavacava
It's certainly simpler minded, and similar moves have been tried before e.g Vitalism. What could be easier - simply declare that matter has just the right hidden, untestable property that accounts for a feature of the human brain you can't explain. We'll be attributing a range of emotions to photons next. Maybe the blue ones really are a bit sad?
Quoting Cavacava
Here's the thing, fundamental particles don't have a history. Electrons are not even distinguishable in principle.
It's certainly a good question. I do think there are possible answers though. I do not agree with the IIT theory of consciousness, but it might be a very good theory of what determines the complexity of a conscious individual, and also determines what separates one individual from another. A theory of mental identity, I guess. So the answer would be that there is only one consciousness, as there is only one substance (and one version of panpsychism is that substance is conscious) but mental individuals are distinguished by what they are aware of, and this is determined by the local differences in how much information is integrated in different parts of the universe. I probably haven't explained that very well, I'm in a hurry.
I think the intentionality that all life and some animals demonstrate was not around 5 billion years ago. So how could it have arisen? My guess is that matter is capable of sustaining life and is capable of evolving into what we current experience. I don't believe in creation ex nihilo.
If that is the case, then unless you think god came down and did his thing, the properties of intentionality and thought evolved out of matter, so matter has the potential to evolve in this manner. That's just the way it is, I think. I think this approach might be better than dualism, and there are several philosophers (Brassier, Grant, Harmon, Meillassoux, et al) working along these lines.
It's hard to believe that any matter can stand outside of time, but I don't know much about these particles, I do know there are a lot of scientists working on it. I always thought those graphic images we see generated by machines such as particle accelerators, track particles such as electrons, protons and so on, each particle leaving kind of a quick history.
Hey Bert....yea, I didn't get it...maybe you can explain it some more. Like "one substance", what is meant by that.
I went to a philosophical talk about historiography yesterday which brought me back to this topic. In writing history, people of many different backgrounds - conservative, feminist, monarchist, Marxist, believer-in-objective-history, whoever - can agree on good historical practice, which will include a pool of what some people might call 'objective facts about reality'. Facts of some kind, anyway.
Nevertheless any historical narrative is irredeemably the writer's own perspective, their standpoint. Their sense of self, their I-ness is bound up with their own sense of their own history. And some of their material is going to be testimony: individuals' accounts of their experiences put in language as best they can, testimony that only has itself for justification. So there can't be scientific writing of history, but there can be good and bad practice in writing history.
I think the same about 'consciousness', or whatever better word there might yet be found for the unifying sense that the experiencing self has. There's a limit to what third-person scientific talk, evidence and reasoning can tell us about consciousness. Some of the material involved is first-person testimony, or it won't be true to what it's trying to explain. And any account is by a conscious person, whose own consciousness is entangled in how they tell the story they're telling.
The (Greek) naturalist impulse is always to ask 'what is it made of? How does it work?' Which obviously has been a very fruitful impulse in respect of the objective sciences. But the question at issue in this topic, is of a different order. That is where alternative philosophical perspectives, including non-dualist perspectives, are invaluable.
I see an influence of that perspective here:
Quoting bert1
In the form of panpsychism where each state has it own subjectivity, they don't. The subjectivity of a person is another unique subject. A state which exists in terms of itself, rather than being formed by the consciousness of fundamental particles. The "combination problem" misses the entire point of what constitutes a conscious subject-- it's just a repetition of the "hard problem," the outright rejection that consciousness itself emerges from states which are not consciousness.
This panpsychist position is actually more or less identical to the non-reducative emergence of consciousness, only instead of only particular systems generating consciousness (e.g. human bodies, animal bodies, etc.,etc. ) every state does so-- in this respect, they aren't forced to declare SuperStrings conscious, it an outright defining claim they make. As with any state, a conscious states emerge form SuperStrings, making them a conscious subject.
Those who say there is a reason to believe it, will argue that materialism can't or won't acknowledge the fundamental issue at stake, which is the explanatory gap.
A similar argument underpins the definition of life. A cell is living since it has the behaviors associated with living things, whereas amino acids and proteins do not. The seven commonly agreed upon criteria for life are:
It should maintain some balanced conditions in its inner structure. This is called Homeostasis
Its structure is highly organized.
It should be able to break down or build up nutrients to release or store energy based on need. This is called Metabolism
It should grow, which means its structure changes as time goes by in an advantageous manner.
It should show adaptation to the environment.
It should be able to respond to environmental stimuli on demand (as opposed to adaptation, which occurs over time).
It should be able to reproduce itself.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cell_Biology/Introduction/What_is_living
Now, life doesn't always have these 7 criteria at all times. For example, a life form at the end of its life cycle does not change in an advantageous manner, rather it begins to break down. Similarly, a life form may never reproduce itself, yet we would consider an infertile human to be just as alive as the parent of seven children. In short, the behaviors considered necessary for biological life are not always present in life forms, but this does not mean that since one behavior is missing, the life form does not live. There is a difference between biological life and life itself.
To return to panpsychism - to have consciousness is to be conscious of something, aware of something. To have self-awareness is to be aware of oneself, and humans view this as the gold standard of consciousness. But if consciousness only requires awareness of something, then cells are aware of their environment, and plants are aware of the location of the sun, and so forth. Their behaviors are quite predictable, even if there is some difficulty in predicting their actions. However, the only reason that life forms are aware of their environment is because of the interactions of atoms and molecules between the environment and the life form. The behavior of the life form is probabilistic based on quantum mechanics. At the smallest scales, the behavior of subatomic particles is also probabilistic, albeit on a different level than the life form. But it is a question only of scale, not of kind. The probabilities of the subatomic particles inform the probability of a behavior arising from a complex life form, and it is known that this life form's consciousness is the result of behaviors between the particles of the environment and the particles of the life form.
So just as life may exist without some of the key criteria of biological life, consciousness may exist without some of its emergent behaviors. At some level, there is no difference in kind between a life form colliding with an object and changing course with an atom colliding with another atom and changing course. Both behaviors are probabilistic, even if one is more predictable than the other. One may make the argument that the life form has far greater mind than the atom, but it is incorrect to say that the atom has no mind at all, unless mind is defined to have specific characteristics such as the criteria for biological life. There is a difference between a biological mind (brain) and mind itself. Those that say 'obviously an atom cannot think' are missing the point. The atom obviously has no biological brain, but it still has behavior and awareness, and as such has some aspect of mind.
Quoting Nerevar
I don't think anyone here disputes that. The point about panpsychism is that it says electrons have some form of consciousness.
Quoting Nerevar
I agree the single-celled organisms demonstrate some traits of awareness but I don't know if it is generally agreed that members of the plant kingdom exhibits awareness. Besides 'stimulus and response' might not equate to 'awareness' although it's probably a tricky distinction.
Quoting Nerevar
There's an awful lot hanging on 'some' here. That line of reasoning could just as easily be used to justify old-school materialism. And as for 'behaviour', I don't know if there is an equivalence between 'the behaviour of mass' and 'the behaviour of organisms', as the latter does reflect at least some, and usually all, of the seven points given above. In fact, I think a number of the conclusions in the last paragraph don't really follow from what precedes them. But, food for thought.
Is this really the case though? Is the outcome of an atom colliding with another atom really probabilistic, or is it deterministic? And are the actions of living matter simply probabilistic, or are they intentional? It appears to me, like your whole claim, that there is no "difference in kind" between the actions of inanimate matter, and living beings, is based in the assumption that physicists and biologists have not been able to determine that difference. On both sides though, there is an inability to understand actions at the fundamental level, so you describe both of these types of activities as "probabilistic". That is the basis of your claim of similarity. But the human being's inability to determine the exact nature of a specific difference, is not proper proof that the difference is not there.
There is no evidence, nor reason to suppose animals have consciousness.
If animals could create "what-it-is-like-to-see-red" knowledge, then what is to stop them creating knowledge of any kind? They don't create knowledge of any kind.
Quoting Wayfarer
Single celled organisms? Awareness?
And since humans know about the big bang and quantum mechanics, it's certain that fish know that the earth orbits the sun. Pretty sure that's how evolution works!
I usually attribute some kind of feeling akin to excitement or pleasure to a dog when it wags its tail and jumps around in circles. Do you think that is unreasonable?
Quoting tom
What is your explanation of the behaviour of, say, an amoeba?
Sure, and right now the flowers are full of the joys of spring.
Whatever state a dog happens to be in, it cannot know it is in that state. If it could know it is in a particular state, then what stops it knowing anything? A conscious being - i.e. a person - knows what state it is in.
A dog is an expression of its genetic code.
I don't know. It's not necessary to know one is having an experience in order to have an experience is it?
Do dogs experience hunger do you think?
I am inclined to regard corvids' memory of where they have stashed their food - the most able can remember up to 500 locations - as 'knowledge'. Just as a for instance. Wouldn't you call that knowledge?
That was my second sentence: "Making shit up to solve something that's seen as a theoretical problem isn't a good reason to believe anything. "
Quoting tom
Bacteria can exhibit learning behaviour.
Quoting tom
There's an observable difference between an animal that is ocnscious, and one that is not. It is reasonable to infer that this difference has a cause.
I think you're mixing up conscious with self-conscious.
Crows are among the handful of animals whose behaviours seem to refute the idea that animals are not conscious beings - i.e. they lack subjectivity. Not only can some species of crow remember 500 locations where they have stashed food, but they exhibit remarkable tool use and problem solving abilities. My claim that animals can't create knowledge is clearly refuted by the fact that corvids can remember where they stashed food.
I'm going to take this refutation a little further and remind myself that the corvid genome has encoded, via billions of years of evolution, the knowledge of how to replicate itself in its niche.
Partly through laziness, and partly in an attempt to provoke, I admit to being imprecise in my use of the word "knowledge", particularly when I claim that animals (and genes) can't create it, when they obviously can.
The type of knowledge that only humans can create, which includes "what-it-is-like" knowledge, is "explanatory knowledge".
You may have experienced the situation where you become aware that you are in a particular state, when you were previously unaware. This can happen to people under extreme stress. For example, a person might become aware that they are in a state of panic, or even become aware that they are running.
Perhaps even the famous Libet experiment might indicate the same phenomenon. The action potential to make a decision exists significantly before the subjects become consciously aware they are making a decision.
I really cannot see any way of separating experience from awareness, or what-it-is-like knowledge. Robots, animals, and humans under stress may be in a particular state, but none is having a subjective experience.
Dogs can be in a state of hunger, just like a robot can be in a state of requiring its batteries charged, but neither experiences hunger.
I don't understand why animal-lovers don't see this as a blessing.
Strictly it's subjectivity, which they (and fundamental particles) lack.
It's worth noting that there is zero evidence for a number of beliefs, some of which include beliefs about what counts as evidence for which we surely do not have evidence for.
In addition, successful scientific arguments have been theoretical before. When there's some issue with a theory people 'make shit up' all the time to try and resolve said issue and create arguments, some of which are philosophical, about which is a better solution. So at least with how scientists have gone about their business before and now it just doesn't make sense to reject creative theorizing.
I'd say that if someone were to say "There is no good reason to believe it", then I'd at first ask about their stance on consciousness, in the sense of the hard problem of consciousness. From there, if they agree that said problem is a problem, then it would seem they'd have to offer a solution themselves, or simply claim ignorance at least. Even if there is no good solution, the arguments are more abductive than anything, so there could still be a best solution (after all -- good solutions usually only come after having developed an already accepted theory). So if one were to claim ignorance then it would just be a statement of where they are in the debate, rather than something which we should adopt ourselves. Then we'd come to the various proposed solutions to the hard problem of consciousness, of which pan-psychism is at least a contender worth considering. If you believe otherwise, then my suspicion, initially at least, is that you are just incredulous at what sounds like a ridiculous idea on its face -- but that is no argument against adopting a belief.
So it seems to me that the only path to -- rationally at least -- shrugging off pan-psychism is through rejection of the hard problem of consciousness in the first place (insofar that said rejection is based on reason, too, rather than simple frustration with what sounds like some ridiculous ideas).
Tom is trying to backtrack, and tone down that rhetoric, now saying that animals lack a certain "type" of knowledge. But that's a rather meaningless statement. The type of knowledge which dogs have is different from the type which cats have, and this is different from the type that beavers have, which is different from the type that crows have, and so forth. In fact, that's pretty much what distinguishes one species from another, that each one has a different kind of knowledge.
What Tom appears to be saying, is that since human beings have language, and the ability to communicate, this gives them the capacity to say "what is", and this is a special sort of knowledge. So perhaps we could put all the other "types" of knowledge into one category, and keep this type of knowledge as separate, as special. But I don't think that's justified, because this type of knowledge, the capacity to say "what is", is just one of the many types, and nothing has been demonstrated to give it particular distinction, such that the others might be classed together, and this one separated out to have its own class.
There is another option: it is not the brain that is conscious, but the abstraction instantiated on the brain. i.e. consciousness is a software feature rather than a hardware epiphenomenon.
Actually, I mentioned earlier in the thread that I considered panpsychism "not crazy enough" and even "boring". The idea that abstractions can be conscious seems to be the crazy idea that solves all the problems and is fully compatible with other knowledge i.e science, while avoiding dualism.
Panpsychism is refuted by the knowledge argument.
You still have an argument, unlike the statement "there is no good reason to believe it" -- that is all I'm arguing against.
There is no such thing as a good reason. Belief is counterproductive.
I have outlined arguments that panpsychism is wrong. These arguments highlight a problem, that I argue, is deeper than the Hard Problem.
The Fundamental Problem is the problem of the creation of (explanatory) knowledge.
Sure. But what does that have to do with anything anyone has said?
I'm not arguing that making shit up simply to plug something thought of as a theoretical problem isn't common. In fact, I'm saying something rather iconoclastic because it's so common. You seem, on the other hand, to be suggesting that the fact that it's common justifies it. I don't agree with that.
Re consciousness, I don't agree that there is a "hard problem." The only hard problem is folks' inability to reconcile their not very well grounded, often religious-based views with reality.
Your definition of "knowledge" is tailored for the purpose, so this argument is only begging the question.
Quoting tom
Explanatory knowledge, (knowing-that), is just another form of knowing-how, involving knowing how to communicate. When you recognize this, you'll realize that all living things know how to do various different things. The fundamental problem therefore, is not the creation of explanatory knowledge, which is just an extension of know-how, it is the creation of knowledge in general, in the sense of knowing how to do anything at all.
The reason why panpsychism is a valid ontological position is that we notice in our studies of the physical universe, that matter "knows how" to follow the laws of nature. There are two ways that we can account for the fact that matter follows laws. We can assume a transcendent God type of thing, which created matter intentionally, to follow laws, or we can assume that the tendency to follow laws is some sort of habituation within the matter itself. The latter involves panpsychism. We cannot assume that the capacity to follow laws is just some random occurrence, because following laws is directly opposite to random occurrence.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Balls don't know how to roll downhill. If there's a hill, balls will roll down it. It's not as if they can do anything else. Your comment more or less reinforces the notion that panpsychism is anthropomorphic, or attributes intention to inanimate objects. One can well explain the motions of objects without any reference to intention; the problem that panpsychism is trying to solve, is how some 'configurations of matter', like the brain, 'produces' consciousness.
I wonder if Panpsychism, in board terms, doesn't entail teleology as an inherent characteristic in nature. The dilemma between nature's steady progression towards (?*) versus the theory of emergent phenomena. All of nature chugging along, with thought as just it latest manifestation, versus life and the mental or thought as abrupt emergence out of raw nature (but isn't this spookier than a natural progression.) Mustn't reality be a-conceptual in some regard (as pre subject/object, pre correlationism), as it must have been prior to man.
If it's natural progression, then some sort of panpsychism should apply, if pure emergence is possible, then no panpsychism, rather a kind of divine command theory (IMHO).
* if mind/life is a possible end for matter and life and mind seem to have taken a tenacious hold on matter, then perhaps nature aims at an ultimate mix of matter/life/mind
Since all of our ordinary-language criteria for attributing mental states to other people are behavioural criteria, it surely follows that Panpsychism is redundant if framed as a substantial metaphysical thesis. None of us use a non-behavioural theory of mind to understand other people (how on earth would that even work???), so why do we need a non-behavioural theory of mind to account for everything else?
On the other hand, if panspsychism is merely the rejection of the anthropocentric metaphysics of mind that is implicit throughout human culture, then pansychism wouldn't be to propose anything additional to the current physical picture. But in this case panpsychism is at best "Pan-behaviourism".
Pan-behaviourism however, is surely ethically dubious and linguistically nonsensical. For we can only consistently attribute purposeful behaviours to other people because as a species our natural and conditioned responses to stimuli are similar - the condition that allows us to form a community of speakers that share a common language in which we can inter-relate via sharing our agreed-upon definitions for our shared behaviours. I therefore don't therefore see any merit even to a belief in "Panbehaviourism" -for it overlooks the necessity of community customs when attributing purposeful behaviour to an agent of that community.
Describing the motions of things, and explaining the motions of things, are two distinct things. So, you can describe the situation, the ball is set on the hill, and it rolls, just like you can describe the water placed in the sun evaporates, and these are descriptions of those activities. However, the descriptions don't ever completely answer the question of "why?", so they never provide a complete explanation.
That is why I think we need to maintain the distinction between a description and an explanation. We can produce a description, "the ball rolls down the hill", and ask "why?". Then we create an explanation, gravity. But if the explanation is itself just a description "gravity acted on the ball", we will never have a complete explanation because there will always be a further "how" or "why" question. The description represents what is the case, and does not provide us with an explanation for this.
When these why questions are all answered without reference to intention, then we have a complete explanation without reference to intention. But until we can answer all the why questions without referring to intention, then it is false to say that we can explain motion without referring to intention. All you can really do is describe motion, and this is not the same as explaining motion. I believe that some forms of panpsychism may be offering us a potential explanation without referring to intention. Then again, the relationship between consciousness and intention is what is really at stake here.
Not that it is common, period, but rather that is a necessary part of the scientific project. Insofar that one accepts the findings of science then one must also accept some amount of creative theorizing and beliefs or thoughts 'on the limb of reason', and ask why it is they are either right or wrong.
Well, perhaps that's why science is not omniscient! But I think you've made a valid point, and one often forgotten. Maybe that is why Aristotelean physics, though obviously incorrect in fundamental ways, wished to arrive at a more holistic understanding which includes the reason that things happen - in a teleological sense, rather than just because of a chain of efficient causation. In leaving that out, perhaps much else is left out besides. (Check out this book.)
That's reasoning is catergoy error. It treats a holistic approach as if it were a singular part of the world. It always fails because no account of a part gives the whole. No matter how many parts are known, there is always another one, another moment which has yet to happen or has not been grasped.
Under arguments like final cause, people make the mistake of thinking of the whole as a part. They try to understand it as a distinct state that can be named, that sets efficient causation in motion. People don't take the time to realise the whole must be more than this, something which cannot be grasped in terms of a part at all, extending beyond any point (including "final" ) of causation or state.
When we concentrate on descriptions of what is, we tend to take for granted the "what is" part, and proceed in an attempt to describe it. But as Aristotle explained, the fundamental ontological question is why is there what there is rather than something else. So if we look around us at plants and animals, rocks and hills, the earth and the sun, we can wonder, why do these things exist as the things which they are, and not as some other things.
The chain of efficient causation doesn't answer this question because it just gives an infinite regress, so that no matter how far back we go in the chain, we will always wonder why was there that instead of something else, ad infinitum. So the chain of efficient causation, being infinite according to its own requirements, cannot provide us with a complete explanation for any existence. That's why the Neo-Platonists turned to Forms, and the Christians turned to the will of God, as final cause, because this adds the necessary element to "complete" the explanation.
The book looks interesting, I like the topic of how science separated off from the Church. I kind of look at modern science as the child of the catholic church. It's pretty well grown up now and gone in its separate way, but it still learned a lot from the parents.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I don't think you understand final cause too well Willow. Final causation is the only thing which could cause the existence of a whole. When a whole is defined as all the parts existing in particular relationships, such that each has a particular function, or purpose with respect to the whole, then it is self-evident that final cause is the only thing which could cause such an existence.
Modern process philosophers will sometimes deny the real existence of wholes, negating the need for final cause in the classical sense. But they still apprehend the need to account for the observed relationships between particles, and this pushes many of them toward panpsychism.
To my mind, there are two open questions here (that are probably related to each other): one is whether there is anything to explain (i.e. whether "the hard problem" is really a problem), and the other whether panpsychism constitutes an explanation (not just good or best explanation, but any explanation at all) - might it not be a kind of dormitive virtue.
in other words as I understand it,
panpsychism conceptualises meaningful behaviour as the symptom of a separate internal mental state according to either a dualism of metaphysically independent physical and mental properties, or according to a generalised form of brain-world duality.
Logical behaviourism directly identifies third-person mental predicates as third-person behavioural predicates, whose assertability criteria I would suggest are generally holistic and involve brain-body-world interactions.
I stress the third-person here, because although I believe logical behaviourism dissolves the hard problem in the third-person (how can it not???) I don't see how logical behaviourism alone can be used to dissolve the hard-problem of the first-person. After all, first-person predicates and third-person predicates are generally non-interchangeable and have entirely separate uses.
It doesn't dissolve it so much as ignore it or bypass it.
I can't resist re-telling the old joke about two behaviourists after making love: 'That was wonderful for you, dear. How was it for me?'
But the point is, and one that was matter of intense debate earlier in this thread, is that 'all experience implies a subject of experience'; and my contention is that 'the subject of experience is never the object of cognition'. The claim that there is no subject and therefore no problem, is exactly what is proposed by Daniel Dennett, and why his philosophy is basically untenable in the opinion of his many critics (hence his book 'Consciousness Explained' being dubbed 'Consciousness Ignored' by them 1).
"All experience implies a subject of experience" sounds a bit like
"I am able to see objects, therefore I must have eyeballs"
Suppose Robinson Crusoe lived from birth on an unpopulated island and failed to notice his blinking and reflection. How could he deduce purely from observing the objects around him, that his ability to see was dependent on a sensing capacity of some sort?
And if he later lost his sight, touch and hearing, what difference would it make for him to believe he had lost sensing capacity versus believing that the world itself disappeared?
Rather than a deductive conclusion, Peirce's take was that the initial recognition of one's own existence as a subject of experience is a retroductive conjecture prompted primarily by the unpleasant surprise of being (repeatedly) mistaken:
Right. I assume here that in kantian terminology pierce is referring to the empirical ego of reflective consciousness, i.e how each of us privately understands our own empirical lives by thinking of ourselves in terms of a hypothetical third-person whose qualities are inductively inferred.
Any ideas on what Pierce thought concerning the idea of the Transcendental Ego?
I must confess that I am not very familiar with Kant or that particular terminological distinction. Peirce, on the other hand, was very familiar with Kant; but he does not appear to have written anything about that particular terminological distinction. However, this comes from earlier in the same article:
He seems to be saying that "self-consciousness" pertains to the transcendental ego as "knowledge of ourselves" or knowing that I exist, rather than the empirical ego as "consciousness of the object as represented" or knowing that the I exists.
As far as I know, there is no third option for Kant, and I cannot understand why Peirce seems to think that "recognition of my private self" is any different than recognition of the empirical self through inner sense.
None of what you say refutes or comes to terms with the issue of 'the subject of experience'. A deaf, dumb and blind subject remains a subject. And Robinson might be a singlularly un-self-aware subject, but he remains a subject nonetheless.
Quoting aletheist
What Peirce says is true enough but again I don't think it does justice to the question at hand. (Although I do recognize the distinction he makes in the second quote, between self-consciousness and pure perception. What I think he's reflecting on is the distinction of 'me thinking about myself', and the pure act of consciousness, which is not self-conscious but simply and choicelessly aware.)
As far as Kant is concerned, I think the key passage is that dealing with 'transcendental apperception'.
1. All experience is the succession of a variety of contents (pace Hume).
2. To be experienced at all, the successive data must be combined or held together in a unity for consciousness.
3. Unity of experience therefore implies a unity of self.
4. The unity of self is as much an object of experience as anything is.
5. Therefore, experience both of the self and its objects rests on acts of synthesis that, because they are the conditions of any experience, are not themselves experienced.
6. These prior syntheses are made possible by the categories. Categories allow us to synthesize the self and the objects.
5 is the key point - the 'conditions of experience' are themselves not objects of experience. This is in keeping with Kant's (and Husserl's) general notion of the transcendental as 'that which constitutes experience but is not given in experience'.
In practical terms, consider the question of self-knowledge, which is said to be at once of prime importance, but the absence of which is observable in oneself and in others. How could it be that we don't know ourselves? I think it's because underneath (or prior to) the level of discursive awareness, there are subconscious and unconscious factors that condition experience. Of course in Kant's day the Freudian terminology hadn't yet been devised but Kantian philosophy clearly anticipates it:
WWR (World as Will and Representation) II(1844).
To relate this to the OP - the problem I see with panpsychism is the attempt to 'objectify' consciousness or to locate it as an attribute of external objects without fully grasping its elusive nature even within our own experience.
Certainly it is true that from my perspective, my concept of a third person is of a subject of experience, or perhaps I might say, a potential subject of sensory stimulus. Likewise it is true that I see my empirical ego as a subject of experience, because of my tendency to think of myself as someone else situated in front of me.
But for me, here things must abruptly end. For this thought of the empirical ego as "someone else situated in front of me" is plain nonsense if it is intended to imply the existence of a literal hidden onlooker of my empirical ego.
Ordinarily, is it not the case that the notion of an onlooker or of an experiential subject is necessarily tied to thinking of a third party, whose status as a subject is in terms of behavioural stimulus-response criteria?
If so, then I cannot apply this concept to the personal pronoun in so far as it is used to mean something other than the empirical ego.
the "third-person" and "subject of experience" surely have identical uses, do they not?
That is referred to as the 'homunculus fallacy'.
Quoting sime
Clearly not. If I burn my hand, I don't say 'that hurt him'. I say 'that hurt me'. And that pain is a first-person experience, even though it can be described to some extent in third-person terms.
If you only have access to your own personal experiences then that is solipsism.
Also you could not make the claim "Subjective experience has no objective existence" as you would lack sufficient access to any objective state to assert such a claim.
You might say "I believe there is no objective existence of experience" but by definition, there is no way to logically validate your belief as you have no access to the objective.
So the problem I see with your stance is that you try to state your claim as though it carries some weight of objective import.
It does not.
First, it's not a matter of access. One doesn't open a door into personal experience or find it within some container. First-person experience is prior to any form of knowledge or inference (in this respect, Descartes' cogito argument is apodictic, i.e. cannot be reasonably doubted.)
What is it about experience that makes it 'personal'? What is 'mine alone'? In order for solipsism to be advocated, one has to take the additional step of appropriating the apodictic reality of first-person experience as 'mine'.
As regards knowledge of objects of experience, nowhere I have said that we don't have 'access' to knowledge of objects. What I've said is that knowledge of objects and the knowledge of the nature of experience are basically different, in that 'knowledge of experience' is first-person, that is, experiences are undergone by subjects, they are not objects in the way that bullets or billiard balls are. One can satisfactorily describe the nature of objects, in a scientific sense, without any reference to a first person, in fact, a large part of scientific method concentrates on doing exactly that. However one cannot describe the nature of experience in that way, because experience is not an object in that sense.
It is a modest claim.
it sounds as though we're pretty much agreed then :) the transcendental ego, in so far as it designates anything at all, cannot be an onlooking homonulcus. i would simply like to further suggest that the meaning of all linguistic concepts concerns first-person understanding of third person behaviour. I might often use language to point at my private intuitions as it were, but none of this implies additional metaphysical substances to what is empirically experienced.
As for Kant's argument for the transcendental ego from the unity of apperception, he already appears to presuppose a subject that is distinct from its representations, the very thing he sets out to prove.
I suspect his belief in a transcendental ego is a consequence of his metaphysical understanding of time in terms of an atomic substance, albeit a mentalistic one. A deleuzean or whiteheadean process philosopher presumably has no need of a transcendental 'glue' to bind "temporally distinct" representations.