Constructive Panpsychism Discussion
I was actually having relatively good conversation in the panspychism one. I'd like @Pneumenon @tim wood and @bert1 to join if possible.
Pneumonon, I said this earlier to your response:
If you want to be a panpsychist, the best way to do so is to attack emergentism as hard as you can. If you can say that emergentism isn't true, and that consciousness is real, then you can say that consciousness is fundamental.
— Pneumenon
Me: This does make sense. Emergence is its own inexplicable alchemy. The reason is the next level is assumed in the previous one.
tim wood I was going to ask you the relevance of the Greek idea of Nous to this discussion of emergence, SEP article, and what I said earlier regarding properties. Are properties something inhering in matter or is it presumed to have something that gives the measurements property? I mentioned the possibly arbitrary divide in Locke between primary and secondary qualities, for example. But what are properties really without experiential knowledge? Properties seem to be something that are observed, not necessarily an actual "real" thing out there.
Pneumonon, I said this earlier to your response:
If you want to be a panpsychist, the best way to do so is to attack emergentism as hard as you can. If you can say that emergentism isn't true, and that consciousness is real, then you can say that consciousness is fundamental.
— Pneumenon
Me: This does make sense. Emergence is its own inexplicable alchemy. The reason is the next level is assumed in the previous one.
tim wood I was going to ask you the relevance of the Greek idea of Nous to this discussion of emergence, SEP article, and what I said earlier regarding properties. Are properties something inhering in matter or is it presumed to have something that gives the measurements property? I mentioned the possibly arbitrary divide in Locke between primary and secondary qualities, for example. But what are properties really without experiential knowledge? Properties seem to be something that are observed, not necessarily an actual "real" thing out there.
Comments (171)
Gotcha, I actually recommend starting with that SEP article on it that Banno provided. That gives a good background. Basically, most of the arguments are something to the effect that if we want to NOT posit a dualism (mind and physical let's say), then you have to bite the bullet somewhere, because even if "mind" "emerges" from the physical, the emerging from one type of realm (the physical), into a completely different kind (the subjective, internal, "feels like", qualia, mental) state needs to then be explained in non-dualist terms.
To be clear, most scientific views would not posit a dualism in the world. Everything is physically manifested in some way whether matter/energy and time/space. Thus positing a mind that is emergent from matter, though seemingly appropriate (as emergence is assumed in the physical sphere), would inappropriate as it posits a dualism at some point.
So a sophisticated panpsychist might point out that if a cognitive scientists were to say "At X time, in this part of the brain, there is an "integration" that is happening which causes the emergence of consciosness".. the part about "causing emergence" becomes its own explanatory gap that needs to be explain. What is this emergence of consciousness itself besides that of being correlated with the integration of brain states?
And what would such an 'explanation' look like? How would you recognise that some proposition constituted an 'explanation'? I ask because such avoidance seems to dog these kinds of discussions. Some physical relationship is proposed by the (non-panpsychic) physicalist, and the 'hard problem' crowd will inevitably respond with "but that's just a description of how, not an explanation accounting for it". What I've yet to hear is a reasonable definition of what such an explanation should be like.
We can do how - neurons firing seem to cause what we experience as thoughts.
We can do why - having the experience of thoughts seems to help integrate information better than letting individual circuits act independently.
What's missing?
I don't think that's a how. I think it's an observation of a correlation. The explanation of this correlation is still wide open.
As I asked @schopenhauer1, what would an 'explanation look like? What properties of an explanation are missing from "neurons firing seem to cause what we experience as thoughts"?
I think it's right to place emergentism as the antithesis of panpsychism. I also think it is right that difficulties with emergentism are the main philosophical reasons for embracing panpsychism. Parsimony is another philosophical reason. There are perhaps other non-philosophical reasons, for example, some personal mystical experiences might suggest panpsychism for some, others feel they perceive agency in the actions of other things, but these are of less interest to philosophers (except those philosophers who prefer to criticise panpsychism on the basis of its perceived non-philosophical motivations).
@Pfhorrest said that the three basic options are:
1) Nothing is conscious (eliminativism)
2) Some things are conscious (emergentism)
3) Everything is conscious (panpsychism)
I agree. All these positions have problems. For me, eliminativism is clearly false (by introspection). Emergentism is fatally problematic. Panpsychism has difficulties, but they seem to me to be much more easily solvable. As I have said many times, following Churchill, "Panpsychism is the worst theory of consciousness apart from all the others."
Lets take a less problematic example and compare it. "Neurons firing in such and such a way seem to cause walking." In this example, we can detect the firing of neurons. We can detect the walking just by looking at the behaviour of the body. We can do this because walking is defined as nothing other than a certain behaviour of the body. The firing of neurons and the walking of the body is the same kind of thing. It's physical stuff doing something we can observe. We can see both ends of the correlation and how they are related.
Compare this with "Neuron's firing in such and such a way cause experiences, thoughts, feelings, and so on." We can detect the neuron's firing. We can detect certain behaviours, such as screaming, crying, speaking words that explain a complex thought, and so on. But these behaviours are not the definition (unless you are a behaviourist) of thoughts and experiences. The definition of thoughts and experiences involves something other than a behaviour. So we have a difficulty, the two ends of the correlation are not each behaviours, and the relationship between them is not transparent in the way that the relationship between neurons and walking is (at least to someone who understands muscles and nerves and what have you).
Right. So why not adopt a behaviourist position as the simplest model?
Quoting bert1
This seems to be the problem. You define thoughts as something ineffable and then act surprised that there's no physical explanation for them. It's the inevitable consequence of such a definition. If thoughts just are neurons firing, the problem is dissolved.
But, notwithstanding the above, the thing I really want to focus on here is how you would know that you have your sought after 'explanation'. What would it do that 'neurons firing' doesn't?
I think the difficult thing is intention and anticipation of the future, doing something for a purpose. How does "neuron-firing" account for the capacity to predict and manipulate the future? The neuron-firing would have to have the capacity to direct itself toward desired ends, which is the same problem which all materialism and physicalism encounters.
It's not just me though, it's every dictionary.
I don't think an explanation is possible in this case, where we think of 'explanation' as explaining one thing in terms of another (walking in terms of neurons firing and muscles contracting etc). It would place consciousness at a point in nature that doesn't generate the problems associated with emergence. For me, the only sensible point is somewhere that doesn't require explanation in terms of something else. That is to say, at a fundamental level of brute fact where explanations (in the above sense) are not required.
Because consciousness, as a matter of definition, is not behaviour.
OK, so what is the definition of 'conciousness' then, if not behaviour?
Sentience, awareness, the capacity to feel, the capacity to experience.
I have to say, @bert1 is doing a good job laying out the problems and basically point to his arguments. The problems I see is the physicalists (presumably elimitavists/functionalists) are often switching the causes of mental states with the explanations of metaphysical equivalence of how physical states are indeed mental states. A cause implies emergence, but emergence means what exactly in this case? Everything is physical in the universe and then when we get to a certain arrangement, we have mental states? That to me seems like dualism.
It is also tricky due to what I said earlier with Pneumonon:
Quoting schopenhauer1
So properties themselves are an odd thing. As I stated:
Quoting schopenhauer1
So if you are a skeptic regarding how properties inhere in physical states, this is definitely problematic. Liquidity without an observer is just and odd thing to say. Physical states of water (e.g. arrangements of molecules qua molecules) does not seem odd to say in a non-observer world. What is this state of experience, which itself gives properties to other things?
But even if you are not a properties skeptic, however, it is odd that this type of "property" (experience), is so oddly different than all other properties. It is the one that gives states of internal feeling, experience, sense, and internal states of feeling in general.
That doesn't help, I'm afraid. It's not more clearly identifiable than 'conciousness'. You said it's not a behaviour, so it needs to be identifiable something else. Giving alternative words for it which are equally nebulous isn't going to get us there. If we're going on a hunt for the cause of something we're going to need to know what the something looks like, otherwise anything and nothing might be causes.
If I said "the activity of neurons is Sentience" you'd want to deny that, right? So on what grounds, that's what I'm trying to get at.
Quoting bert1
As in 'appears to respond to stimuli'? Still sounds behavioural to me.
Quoting bert1
Feel what?
Quoting bert1
And 'experience' here means? Is it the same as awareness? Does a rock 'experience' being dropped from a cliff? I'd say it doesn't because it is not aware of the event, but you offered this in addition to awareness, so I'm guessing you mean something more?
I am a panpsychist, as I believe all matter is aware on this subtle level...that all matter distinguishes itself from all other matter. I believe this creates an awareness.
What I'm struggling to understand is the distinction you're both drawing between A causes B and 'a description of of how A causes B'. What does 'a description of of how A causes B' contain that is not just more A causes B type explanations?
If I asked what causes a car to go, someone might say "give it some gas and release the clutch". If I asked how that caused the car to go, they'd say "the gas enters the chamber, explodes, causes the crankshaft to turn, which connects to the gears, which drive the axle which turns the wheels". It would still be a series of A causes B type propositions.
I could say "but how does the turning of the axle turn the wheels?". I might get something in terms of friction causing neighbouring molecules to transfer momentum.
"But how does friction cause neighbouring molecules to transfer momentum?". I might get something I probably wouldn't understand about the inter molecular forces, but nonetheless...
"But how does the-thing-I-don't-understand-about-molecular-forces cause neighbouring molecules to transfer momentum under friction?"
... And so on.
How is the issue of conciousness any different from any other investigation. Why the need for 'the hard problem' epiphet, dualism, panpsychism, all these ideas which require us to add totally new, otherwise unjustified, concepts to our world-views.
If, not understanding how clouds cause rain, I postulated an entire realm of existence, or suggested we rethink what it means to 'rain' to include all effects clouds have, I think most people would accuse me of over-reacting.
Indeed, all I can offer in terms of ideas and words are synonyms. 'Consciousness' is impossible to define except by appeal to consciousness, unfortunately. Synonyms like 'sentience and 'awareness' might help some. For a kind of ostensive definition, an act of introspection is required. I'll try to offer instructions for this. Attend to an object. Then attend to your awareness of the object. Then notice that there is a capacity in you to so attend and be aware, regardless of what the object of that attention is. That capacity is consciousness. Not sure if that helps at all.
Quoting Isaac
Yes, I'd want to deny that on the grounds that their definitions are different. The activity of neurons is the activity of neurons. Sentience is sentience. If you want to say that, despite definitions, these two things are, in actual fact, the same thing, you need a theory that connects them. Because the definitions, as they stand, don't connect them. The onus, it seems to me, is on the person who asserts that two things which have different names and definitions, are in fact that same thing.
Clearly distinguishing theory from definition is important, in so far as that is possible. We need definition to agree what it is we are talking about. Then we theorise about the details of what that phenomenon is, what causes it, whether it is caused at all, its structure, its function, and so on. Once the theory is settled, then the definition might change to include the theory. This is a bit like the definition of water changing after we discovered it was H2O, or the definition of 'life' changing once biologists settled on a bunch of observable criteria.
Quoting Isaac
No, 'sentience' as in 'consciousness'. Sorry for the appalling circularity, but I think it goes with the territory. All I have are synonyms and reflexive introspection.
Quoting Isaac
Anything, or nothing. To get the idea of consciousness, we have to abstract it from awareness of some particular thing. Otherwise we might be conscious when we are tasting an orange, but not when tasting an apple, which would be absurd. [funtionalist hat] If I were a functionalist (I'm not) I could express this abstraction by saying that there are general characteristics of brain function when someone is experiencing that remain the same no matter what someone is experiencing, be it an apple or orange or whatever. It is those general features that constitute consciousness. Any any system that is instantiating those functions is conscious. [/functionalist hat]
Quoting Isaac
It means 'awareness', 'subjectivity' (to add another one) and the other things I said. These are all more or less synonyms, perhaps with slight differences of emphasis, but I think they are all pretty much the same concept.
For the record I do think that the rock feels something, is aware of something, is a subject, has an experience, when dropped off a cliff. What it feels I don't think is important or interesting in the same way that what a person feels when dropped off a cliff is important and interesting. Although I know there are Rights for Rocks groups that would find this offensive.
Because the hard problem only applies to emergentism. I agree the hard problem is horrible. But the only way to make it go away is to ditch emergentism. This is intellectually rather unsatisfactory, as it's saying "Stop trying to figure this out. Lets give up and just add another property to the list of fundamental properties." It seems lazy and unprofessional. However I think there are enough reasons now to do that with some confidence. Not that I want to put people off trying to find a coherent emergentist account of the causation of consciousness - if they think they can do it, by all means have a go.
A panpsychist (at least not my kind of panpsychist) would never say 'such and such causes consciousness'. It's important to distinguish consciousness (as the capacity to experience) and a particular experience itself. To have an actual experience, you need consciousness PLUS something happening to that conscious something. While consciousness itself is not caused by anything, the exact nature of the experienced is very much caused by what is going on. So in humans, WHAT we experience is totally dependent on what are bodies are doing in the world. It makes total sense to speak of causes when one is speaking of the contents of experience, but not experience itself, which is just a property of all matter like charge and spin and mass and so on.
Nonetheless, I appreciate the effort.
Quoting bert1
Here I get stuck. How do I know I've successfully attended to this 'awareness of the object' if I don't know what it is I'm looking for? I could be attending to absolutely anything, how do I know it's an 'awareness of the object'? I can convert the properties of the object into words, recall images of similar objects, I get a desire to act sometimes (if the object is desirable or offensive), sometimes I perceive changes in my physiology in response to it. Pretty much all of these things can also be observed (in a rudimentary way) in the brain. I'm not getting anything particularly difficult to explain yet. Is any of that what you're calling 'awareness'?
Quoting bert1
When we interfere in any way with one we get a corresponding effect in the other. It's not conclusive but I think it's pretty sound theory as to why we might consider the two are the same. It's either that they're the same, or that they're linked intricately. The former theory can exist within the rest of science, the latter requires a whole universe of forms, concepts and features which would otherwise not be required. What would possibly stop us from presuming the simpler explanation for now?
Panpsychism simply assumes that Mind is more fundamental to the real world than Matter. Since my own worldview is similar to ancient notions of Panpsychism, I could go into great detail to explain to you why it is a necessary assumption to make sense of the mental phenomena (e.g. Consciousness) of the world. But as an introduction, I'll just link to an article by philosopher Phillip Goff. :nerd:
Panpsychism is crazy, but it's also most probably true : "But many widely accepted scientific theories are also crazily counter to common sense"
https://aeon.co/ideas/panpsychism-is-crazy-but-its-also-most-probably-true
I think this is a misreading of the problem I am suggesting with physicalist answers of causes. So physical events presumably have physical answers, and thus all the answers about gas causing the car to go are legitimate as they are all in the same realm (physical). But here is something different.
You see, it is also how radically different you consider mental states. There is a radical break between matter in various processes and arrangements and observers/internal states/feeling/awareness. To say that one just "pops out" or "emerges" of the former would be to claim to be a dualism whereby a very different realm is occurring- that of experiencing (but only under certain circumstances). So what can you do with this? Well, what happens is you keep pushing the Cartesian Theater back until you realize it was homunculus all the way down.
Simple behaviors of neurono-chemical interactions and physical properties creating states of awareness just seems to beg the question. We already know experience exists. We already know it is associated with neural/biological systems. We don't know how neuro-biological systems themselves are the same as experience.There is a gap there. No gap is present for why gas causes the car to go. More explanations can add detail, but if you were to say gas pouring into a chamber and exploding, etc. IS some sort of feely, awareness thing really.. well that indeed would be an explanatory gap. Now a physical thing is causing this internal state of awareness- a radical different state altogether. T
That is the equivalent of what is being claimed of neuro-biological processes. You see.. physical, chemical, physical chemical physical chemical, more physical chemical physical chemical. WHAM!!! EXPERIENCE!!! Something is not right there.
And then HERE is where someone chimes in and say NO it's the INFORMATION that is experiential :roll:.
Oh oh. What about the virtual particles within the rock? How can they be aware if they are merely ripples in a field? Or worse, only mathematical entities without any sort of corporal existence?
Philosophy is truly a difficult discipline. :worry:
So you declare dualism in your definition and then claim that physicalists have failed to answer the question you set within your non-physicalist framework?
I'm assuming there's no radical break between matter in various processes and arrangements and observers/internal states/feeling/awareness. So, just for now, don't assume there is, I'm asking how you've arrived at the conclusion that there is. If it's just axiomatic for you that there is such a break, then there's no argument to be made. It's not surprising physicalists (eliminativists) reach a different conclusion to you, they have a different axiom.
What I'm trying to get from you and @bert1 is how you got to that point (assuming it isn't just axiomatic).
How do you know that what you're calling an 'experience' is, in fact, anything at all.
This isn’t exactly Descartes’ argument of “I think, therefore I am”, but in seeking to provide an answer to the question: The only reason one would know one thinks is due to one’s experience of engaging in thoughts – i.e., due to one’s conscious awareness of the thoughts one thinks. A resulting Cartesian-like proportion of “I am when I am aware of anything” to me seems to be of a very strong certainty – notably, far stronger than the certainty with which physicalism, dualism, or panpsychism can be either affirmed or denied.
Any ontology which needs or seeks to eliminate the occurrence of experiences in order to be cogent will first need to evidence to me, either logically or experientially, that me being while I am aware is in fact a falsity – including the falsity of me being while aware of the evidence that is so presented. But then, if I am aware of this evidence and thereby experience it, then I am that which experiences the presentation of this evidence – which in turn nullifies the evidence against my so being. This, thereby, makes any such ontology false due to its logically contradicting the reality of experience / awareness / subjectivity / consciousness / sentience. And while this argument can only work in first-person, it seems to me to hold equal validity to all other beings were they to apply it in their own first-person manner. If you think I'm wrong, please explain why.
This just stipulated argument doesn’t imply that experiences are things, nor that that which experiences is/are thing(s); it simply offers a superlatively strong, if at all fallible, certainty that experiences occur for as long as aware beings are.
The aforementioned is how I know that experiences occur.
A question in turn: Is not all evidence something which one or more people either directly or indirectly experience and are thereby aware of? And don’t we know about neural firings and related phenomena due to such evidence?
I'm not sure how. Thoughts are a publicly defined concept. A child has no idea what 'thoughts' are until they are introduced to the term, so you'd need at least two reasons; 1) having an experience of thoughts, and 2) being embedded in a culture which talks about such things.
Quoting javra
But what does being 'aware' of something entail? That's part of what I don't seem to be able to get out of anyone. Is it just a fundamental belief for you, that there's this indescribable thing called 'being aware'? For me, I can break down my experience of, say, drinking a cup of tea, into sensations, the presumed cause, memories, desires, converting a lot of this mentally into words and 3D models. Maybe I even experience experiencing those things. But that can just be broken down into more sensations, memories, desires, words, models... I never seem to run out and end up with something fundamental, indivisible.
Quoting javra
This all hinges on the idea that awareness is a simple, an indivisible event or property. I don't think it is. I think what we call 'awareness' is a collective term for the mental processes which go on in response to some stimuli. That's how it feels to me anyway.
Quoting javra
Yes, I think it must be. I'm not sure how that prevents us from postulating a model for how it works based on the presumption that those experiences have real-world correlates.
So the very thing youre using to write this and refute experience yourself and do all you do in your waking life doesnt exist :roll: ? Join @bongo furys party. You both can talk about the absurd fantasy how you dont really experience anything while you are in fact experiencing. No one is writing these words either. But that last sentence is self refuting just like that argument.
Those things you describe all encompass experiential phenomena. It doesnt have to be one kind of thing. You are on the mind aspect of the the divide when referring to those things.
Well each of those things are completely non-mysterious activities of the brain. The whole 'what it's like' awareness mystery dissolves if you break down what constitutes an experience into its component parts. Light hits my eyes, the message is relayed to my occipital cortex, several layers of inference calculation take place, a message gets sent to other parts of the brain dealing with modelling, sensation, interoception etc. Each infers a likely cause of the input by way of selecting an output to send on. Eventually some behaviour results, alters the environment and the process starts again. Where's the mystery there?
Quoting Isaac
Sure, (1) is not a sufficient reason but it is a necessary reason.
Quoting Isaac
All that the statement entails at this juncture is that the proposition “awareness is real (for as long as aware beings are)” can be made with a greater certainty than all propositions accounting for how or why this is so, as well as all propositions contradicting it being so. Hence, for me, it’s not a fundamental axiomatic belief, but a fundamental known regarding what is. The "how is it so" is tangential to its so being.
Quoting Isaac
I’m having difficulty understanding this. If you mean in the sense of “a first-person point-of-view cannot hold differing first-person points-of-view at the same time and in the same respect (e.g., cannot both look right and look left at the same time and in the same way)”, then yes, I deem awareness to be a unitary and thereby indivisible event. I may be simultaneously aware of different givens but my awareness of these remains unified.
Explanations of how awareness comes about, regardless of what they may be, cannot then nullify the just mentioned reality. They can only either be in accordance to it or in contradiction to it.
Yes, there are different modalities of awareness. Awareness of a seen tree is not the same as awareness of the generalized idea of (the concept of) tree. But in all cases known to us a first person point of view cognizes, i.e., takes notice of, that which it is aware of.
If you’re experiences are different, how are they so?
Quoting Isaac
What I’ve expressed in no way prevents us from so postulating. It does, however, entail that everything we postulate and all evidence with which it is postulated will itself be necessarily experienced by one or more aware beings. Again, this entails that the reality of experience is a fundamental known: succinctly expressed, a reality of greater certainty than our postulations regarding how it comes to be.
Hidden Cartesian Theater..look it up..but ill explain later..
Also to add, on my own account of panpsychism, mentality or experience isn’t properly speaking a property of things; rather, it’s a different perspective on the same ordinary physical things, a perspective that can be taken with regards to anything, not just humans, though there’s often little point to taking it for many things.
It’s sort of a combination of two kinds of bundle theory. Objects are bundles of properties. All those properties are empirical. To be empirical means they can be experienced. Phenomenal consciousness is just a bundle of experiences. For a thing to be red is just for it to be disposed to do something (emit photons) to us that provokes the experience of red in us, and both its being objectively red and our subjective experience of its redness are the same event, the interaction between us and the thing. The phenomenal experience is just the subjective perspective on that event, while the physical behavior (of doing the thing that constitutes looking red) is the objective perspective on that event.
To say that all things have phenomenal experiences is thus similar (if not identical) to saying all things are quantum mechanical “observers”: it just means they are subject to interactions with other things, receiving information from those things (which is the same thing as interacting with them). But neither quantum mechanical “observation” nor phenomenal “consciousness” really mean the substantive ordinary things we mean by those words day-to-day. Those ordinary meanings are all about what you DO with the information / in response to the interaction, and there are important functional differences between humans and e.g. rocks in that respect, which differences constitute ACCESS conscious, which is really the more important subject.
There are a couple things off here:
1) The homunculus problem (a type of circular reasoning in philosophy of mind).
[quote=Homunculus Argument article from Wikipedia]The homunculus argument is a fallacy whereby a concept is explained in terms of the concept itself, recursively, without first defining or explaining the original concept. This fallacy arises most commonly in the theory of vision. One may explain human vision by noting that light from the outside world forms an image on the retinas in the eyes and something (or someone) in the brain looks at these images as if they are images on a movie screen (this theory of vision is sometimes termed the theory of the Cartesian theater: it is most associated, nowadays, with the psychologist David Marr). The question arises as to the nature of this internal viewer. The assumption here is that there is a "little man" or "homunculus" inside the brain "looking at" the movie.
The reason why this is a fallacy may be understood by asking how the homunculus "sees" the internal movie. The obvious answer is that there is another homunculus inside the first homunculus's "head" or "brain" looking at this "movie". But that raises the question of how this homunculus sees the "outside world". To answer that seems to require positing another homunculus inside this second homunculus's head, and so forth. In other words, a situation of infinite regress is created. The problem with the homunculus argument is that it tries to account for a phenomenon in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.[1][/quote]
In other word, there is "somewhere" this comes together. You can push it back, but at some point it is there and at some point it isn't. When this point happens, what is this?
At some point there is experiential processes. Why should physical processes be this? That is the question. You keep going back to physical things without getting at it.
Also, you may be making several category errors when you say "inference calculation", and "modelling".
Overall, the problem with your argument seems to be assuming the mental processes and states somewhere in there.
Perhaps you can help me on this? On the one hand, I feel your answer is intuitively correct, and it surprises me so many people continue to state that behavioralism actually defines experience. Even psychologists state behavioralism is a black-box model.
On the other hand, when I start thinking something intuitively right, after so many decades of learning how wrong intuitions can be, I get suspicious Im missing something and I dont know what.
What comes together?
Quoting schopenhauer1
Repeating it doesn't make it so. I've just explained how what you're calling 'experiential processes' can easily be thought of as a series of mental activities each of which is not only explicable in terms of neural activity, but is watchable and even in rare cases transferable directly to another mind or cluster of neural cells. You still haven't explained what it is about this 'step' that different from any other step in the explanatory process. All explanations are of the form A causes B and within that one can ask "but how does A cause B?" and expect a more detailed explanation, in the form A causes Bi, then Bii...and so on.
This is no different. Neural activity causes the sensation of awareness. The more detailed explanation is that inputs from sensory and interioception nerve endings, trigger both positive and repressive feedback loops within neural circuits to build various models whose output either forms the input of some higher level model, or some behaviour. The behaviour and it's effect them become the input and the cycle starts again - part of the this modelling is what we call things like logging data to memory, forming sentences, initiating physiological changes and initiating action.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well if I 'may be' then you should be able to expand on that, yes?
I have..you are constantly discussing physical behaviors hoping this is eqivalent to "green" but you havent actually told me how this is green rather than just you know optical nerve sending signals to coritical nerves, etc.
Sorry, I made a mistake here which is worth correcting as it is confusing otherwise. A good behaviourist would NOT define consciousness as behaviour, as that would be begging the question. The behaviourist would accept the agreed definition (whatever that is) and say that the best theory of this phenomenon is to equate it to behaviour, or tendencies to behave. In this case, the behaviourist theory of consciousness, subjectivity, awareness etc (if they accepted that concept with it synonyms), would be just that being aware is nothing other than a tendency to behave in such-and-such way. (Sorry if that's not very good, I'm not a behaviourist.)
So, if a good behaviourist doesn't beg the question by messing with the definition, shouldn't substance dualists, panpsychists and anyone else with a theory of consciousness also not build their theory into their definition? Absolutely not, on pain of being horrible hypocrites.
The trouble is, if we start with a particular definition, it may very well make one theory much more tenable than another. And I think that's the case with the concept of consciousness. (I think a concept and the meaning of a word are more or less the same thing in this context). And a definition that appeals to one's own subjectivity that does not refer to any observable function or behaviour at all, does indeed prejudice the theory in favour of some kind of non-reductivist or non-emergentist position. All I can say is that's not my fault! Definitions are what they are. I didn't invent the concept of subjectivity just so I could be a panpsychist. One way theorists resist intuitive dualisms, panpsychisms and other non-reductive theories is to attack the definition. Perhaps saying we have got the definition wrong, or we shouldn't use words in ways that suggest unacceptable conclusions: words like 'consciousness' and 'awareness' denote folk-concepts which should be abandoned, much like how 'life' referring to 'elan vital' (or some kind of inner soul or spirit) is outdated, and now 'life' should be thought of as nothing other than a set of observable behaviours and functions. That's been partially successful with the word 'life', it largely does now mean that set of behaviours, depending on who you talk to. I wonder if 'consciousness' will go the same way.
In that light, I see phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness not as two different ways of thinking about the same thing, but two separate things. Access consciousness is trivially accounted for by functionalism, and is weakly emergent from simpler mechanical functions. Phenomenal consciousness is not a different take on that same thing, but a different thing entirely, and it is with regards to that only that I am a panpsychist.
Everything has phenomenal consciousness, it doesn’t emerge from anything that doesn’t have it, and it doesn’t just not exist, though it’s pretty trivial and unimportant.
Only some things have access consciousness, which emerges from simpler functions that are not access conscious in a philosophically trivial way, although the end product of that holds all the interesting important details about consciousness as we usually mean it.
Right.. I was pointing out to @Isaac the circular reasoning explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument
Also this is a short definition here:
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Homunculus-Fallacy
I'll try. Clearly many intuitions, often derived from introspection, do turn out to be wrong. For example:
I'm really angry with my wife because she didn't fill the car up with petrol because she is inconsiderate and didn't care that I needed to do a long drive in a hurry.
This contains a lot of content. It could pretty much all be wrong. His wife may have been in a hurry herself and was trying to get the car back in time. It might be that she did fill the car up with petrol but the fuel gauge is faulty. It might be that he isn't really angry with anything, he is hungry, and this is making him cranky. Or he is angry about something else and blaming his wife. Etc etc. In general, the more content an intuition has, the more susceptible it is to mistakes. So lets remove some of the content, or make the content more general and less specific:
I'm really angry about the car not having a full tank.
It could still be wrong, but there's less things to be wrong about, and therefore it's more reliable as a piece of introspection. Lets go further:
I'm not feeling right about something.
This is really general, and highly unlikely to be a mistake. If you feel unsettled in some way, well, you feel unsettled in some way.
Remove as much content as possible, and we end up with maximally reliable introspections, things like:
I feel something
or
Sometimes something happens in my mind
or
I sense something
or
I am having an experience
or
There is something it is like to be me
This is pretty much the introspection I was trying to get at when offering a definition in terms of attending to one's own subjectivity. It seems to me that this is essentially infallible. You can't be mistaken about these things, as they are devoid of anything to be wrong. So while some intuitions are most certainly fallible, this particular one we appeal to to define 'consciousness' is not one of them.
EDIT: an NDE would have been a better example to use.
I heartily agree. Sometimes it's really hard to get people to accept that there are different definitions, and even if you do, to get them to talk about the one you want them to talk about.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, I think I agree with you. I think functionalism may well be a good way to account for the content of consciousness, and what our identity is. When people talk about 'losing consciousness' due to head malfunction what has disappeared is not actually consciousness, but content and identity.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I know what you mean, but in a way it is supremely important. If there were no consciousness, it might be the case that nothing at all would ever happen, and there could be no function. I do what I do because of how I feel. If that is extrapolated all the way down, as some panpsychists will want to do, that means substance does what it does because of how it feels. And we can be thankful that consciousness is present at that fundamental level in order that we have the world that we have (if indeed we want it). Without consciousness, nothing could matter. Nothing would be important.
That's interesting, I hadn't thought of the homunculus fallacy as being identical to begging the question, but maybe it is.
Thank you!
Quoting schopenhauer1
Thank you!
It has been so long since I have felt this appreciated. My father used to politely look at my childhood paintings and compliment them. Unfortunately he fell through the ice over the river Cam while jumping up and down and showing off. I watched his body slowly shut down as he slid under the ice. He was still grinning like a buffoon even as he clutched vainly at the slippery edges, trying to pretend it was all part of the act. Hmm. I can't really respond appropriately to people being nice to me. I have to make it all weird.
EDIT: For the avoidance of doubt and any embarrassment (apart from my own), that story about my dad is totally untrue. My social skills are desperately bad.
EDIT 2: I've just realised I might be likening my fans to buffoons in the above story. That was not my intention in the slightest. This is getting worse.
I don't think so. This is a huge difficulty that impedes conversations about consciousness - agreeing what the subject of enquiry is. My reply to @ernestm might help, not sure.
The tight correlations would indeed be neatly explained by their being identical. This is what Block and Pfhorrest are calling 'access consciousness' though, rather than 'phenomenal consciousness' which is what I'm trying to talk about, and what panpsychism is a theory of.
Because it's not a theory of phenomenal consciousness. I should probably expand on that, but I'm too tired tonight. Briefly, the difficulty is caused by two things (in my view - and I don't know if I'm correctly guessing your view or not, sorry if I've got it wrong): (1) the idea of 'consciousness' as a collective noun to cover lots of different examples, tasting an apple, making an inference, feeling sad, and so on, and (2) that brain function is both necessary and sufficient for any one of these, so for example, whenever a certain brain function happens, we taste apple, and whenever we taste apple, that brain function is happening. Therefore, tasting an apple just is that brain function, that's the obvious straightforward conclusion to draw. And that's the same with any example under the collective noun 'consciousness'. Therefore, it's reasonable to generalise and say that consciousness is just the name we give to these kinds of brain function. All straightforward and extremely persuasive. What's wrong with it is that 'consciousness', in the phenomenal sense, is not a collective noun in this way. And that also undermines the validity of the generalisation. I'll try and explain it better another day.
That's a whole lot of inferring going on, which you claim is required for, and as such, is necessarily prior to conscious experience. But only conscious minds infer. So how is this possible? How can you describe simple sensation as a process involving multiple instances of inferring, when inferring is a process of reasoning carried out by a mind?
I'm taking a little break from the forum for a while, but I would certainly read (if not respond to) such an explanation when you have the time. Just to clarify though as there seems to be some confusion from other respondents - I'm not looking for a critique of my position. I'm quite happy with it, I'm well aware that there are alternative positions and I'm also well aware that there are arguments against them, this has all been played out by our epistemic peers (if not epistemic superiors) in the papers and books on the philosophy of mind. As yet it remains unsettled, so I doubt reference to a Wikipedia article or a three paragraph post by any internet forum member is going to resolve it to the extent that I'm compelled to change my mind.
What I'm really interested in is how you personally have arrived at your belief. As @javra answered earlier "for me, it’s not a fundamental axiomatic belief, but a fundamental known regarding what is. The "how is it so" is tangential to its so being.". That's the sort of thing I'm looking for. Is it axiomatic for you or is it derived from some other belief? How certain are you of it? etc. I may have poked about a bit to get at the meat of your beliefs, but it's those I'm interested in, not the persuasion either way. If that's OK with you.
This distinction @Pfhorrest made of 'phenomenal consciousness' seems very useful to this end. It's exactly that that I want to understand your beliefs about. It's not a distinction which makes any sense to me, not something distinct which requires a name, so I'd like to know how it seems that way to you. As I said, I shan't reply, but I will read with interest at some point.
For my part, I think in a completely sane world we wouldn't need a name for it, because phenomenal consciousness is a trivial thing about which there isn't really much to say. The only reason to name it at all is because, in the existing historical arguments about philosophy of mind, it's become clear that people are conflating two different things, and that conflation is the source of much confusion. Separate the two things, and it becomes clear that one is a trivial philosophical non-problem (yeah, there's a first person perspective of anything, so what?), and the other becomes an interesting non-philosophical problem (for psychologists, neuroscientists, AI engineers, etc, to work on).
FWIW I think that most if not all philosophical progress is made in this way. Sort out the different questions that are all mistakenly conflated as one question, figure out what you want an answer to each of them for, what would count as an answer, how to go about figuring one out, etc, and you end up with several different questions that are either trivial or no longer philosophical. The philosophical work was all in getting to that point where everything that isn't a non-philosophical question is rendered trivial, and special sciences can take over.
(For instance, I think similarly about free will. Incompatibilists and compatibilists are talking about two different things. The kind of thing incompatibilists are on about is trivial; electrons "have free will" of the kind they're on about, and that doesn't really mean anything as significant as it sounds. But the kind compatibilists are talking about, while much less philosophically "deep" in a way, is much more interesting, in that special sciences can then go on to do interesting empirical investigations about it. Philosophy's place is in elucidating that difference.)
Entities with perceptual apparatus such as eyes and ears seem more plausible candidates for being conscious. Some things only exist in consciousness such as pain because it doesn't make sense to say pain is existent with no one conscious of it.
At this stage I don't think we know anything about consciousness and are groping in the dark.
What is to stop considering any thing as the subject?
That’s basically the thesis of panpsychism: all objects are also subjects.
Objects from rocks to humans vary wildly in their behaviors, though, so of course subjects from rocks to humans vary wildly in their experiences, and the experience of a rock is no more interesting than its behavior.
How would you define a thing in this case? Is every atom in my body having seperate experiences to me?
Experiences are usually linked to a perceptual mechanism like eyes and ears and the nerves on the skin for touch so it is not clear how a rock could have an experience.
On a dualist perspective souls or minds interact with the brain to receive sensory data. It is not clear where experience could be had without nervous systems.
I don't think that interactions between inanimate objects need to or do invoke subjectivity.
The rest of what you’re talking about are behavioral details, which then correspond to experiential details. The experience of something without a nervous system is not much to speak of. Consciousness proper — ACCESS consciousness— is a reflexive (self-oriented) behavior and correspondingly, self-experience, self-awareness.
Here's a scale for assessing consciousness...
Where do atoms rate?
Are you going to classify their participation in, say, oxidation, as proof of their responsiveness to stimuli?
You sure 'bout that?
Or is this thread a neat example of philosophy as language on holiday?
I believe in freewill and so when I decide to move my arm the atoms have to move. Otherwise who decides what an entity does?
Also if I am moulding clay to make a jar I think my will is what causes the clay to take a particular shape.
This makes me think will is another aspect of consciousness where even if you are paralysed you can express a desire or preference for a certain course of action.
Human civilisation and innovation to me is testament to the power of human desire and will.
I think for panpsychists, experience is different than consciousness. My question to you is how you get passed the homunuculus argument in regards to physicalist explanations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument
You discussed Australian philosophers.. David Chalmers essentially coined the term "hard question of consciousness". You know the key points I think. I don't see how a misuse of language is necessarily the case. How is physical phenomena equivalent to "feeling" or an "inner aspect" without creating a dualism at some point? This is the problem with emergentism (an "emeregence" of a mind realm from a physical). The problem with most physicalist arguments is they are dualists and they don't even know it :lol:! So how do you address this?
I think using Wittgenstein to try to "dissolve" this is actually a misuse of philosophical methods. Rather, the question is posed to you regarding the hard problem. Can you answer it without hiding behind the idea that everything is just language games?
Many philosophers frequently use “consciousness” to refer to something entirely besides the kind of functional states you’re quoting above. The whole debate about “where consciousness comes from”, whether philosophical zombies are possible, etc, hinges on that use of the word.
I don’t think that that is a very useful use of the word. That’s not a thing of any practical importance to talk about. The important thing is the kind of thing you’re talking about. But people are nevertheless asking about the other thing, asking where does it come from, in between rocks they presume don’t have it and humans who they each know first hand do have it, and could something otherwise just like a human somehow not have it.
The panpsychist waves away that problem by saying that that thing they’re asking about is just a trivial thing that everything has. We know first hand that we have it, we grant that things similar to us have similar versions of it, so why not just grant that very different and simpler things just have very different and simpler versions of it.
What matters then is just those differences, which brings us back around to the important thing, the one you’re talking about.
Quoting Andrew4Handel
Where does that “free will” come from? If it’s some function of your brain, then since your brain is made of atoms it’s the behaviors of those atoms that add up to your behaviorally free will. If it’s just indeterminism, the atomic scale is less deterministic than the macroscopic scale, and it is still the indeterminism of your atoms that adds up to the indeterminism of your actions.
(There are, again, multiple things to talk about here, all being referred to by the same name.)
When all else fails, change topics.
Meh. It's the root cause of metaphysics, hence...
Quoting Pfhorrest
...and the aim of philosophical analysis is to show them the error of their ways.
The alternative is the argument that @schopenhauer1 presents, which seems to be that since we can't solve the hard problem it must be turtles all the way down.
Don't pass it to me.
But this is naive metaphysical babble on my part, and I apologize.
It's stuff we want to say, up until we say it and it is revealed to be nonsense.
Or gets posted here.
Exactly.. notice the wrong word there didn't change the semantics of what I'm trying to say :p.
Quoting Banno
Well, again, how do you get past the homunculus argument against emergentism? Also, how do you NOT fall into dualism unintentionally (actually related to the homonuclus argument too).
Can you set out why you think I am committed to emergentism?
I suspect it would be revealing.
I can't really say whether you are committed to emergentism, but it does seem like the logical foil to pansychism, which is as you say "turtles all the way down". With emergentism it's duck, duck, duck, TURTLE!!. So just giving the theory most directly opposite. Emergentism is often implied by most physicalist theories. Example:
[quote=https://psychology.wikia.org/wiki/Emergentism] C. Lloyd Morgan and Samuel Alexander
Samuel Alexander's views on emergentism, argued in Space, Time, and Deity, were inspired in part by the ideas in psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan's Emergent Evolution. Alexander believed that emergence was fundamentally inexplicable, and that emergentism was simply a "brute empirical fact":
"The higher quality emerges from the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent with its special laws of behaviour. The existence of emergent qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or, as I should prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted with the “natural piety” of the investigator. It admits no explanation." (Space, Time, and Deity)
Despite the causal and explanatory gap between the phenomena on different levels, Alexander held that emergent qualities were not epiphenomenal. His view can perhaps best be described as a form of non-reductive physicalism (NRP) or supervenience theory.[/quote]
I also brought up the idea that maybe properties are not "real" as in, inhering in the matter arrangements or matter itself, but observer-dependent. I've also mentioned this theory goes back to Locke and earlier, but Locke arbitrarily split primary and secondary properties. Of course, Kant has a full blown theory of it, but his "categories" are a bit too much of speculative idealism.
Then the point is moot.
So back, if we can, to my objection to panpsychism. We have a clear idea of what it is to be conscious, as opposed to being unconscious; but that's not the sort of consciousness a panpsychist might attribute to a rock.
So, what is this different sort of consciousness?
The panpsychists says everything has that experience just like everything has behavior, and it's the differences in quality of both of those things between different things that matters.
(And therefore philosophical zombies are impossible).
That aspect, property, function (or whatever) whereby its possessor is the subject of experiences.
That sense is listed in most dictionaries in some form or another.
This is just trolling. Obviously medical usage is not the only usage.
I've always been fine with the distinction between 'phenomenal consciousness' and other concepts of consciousness. The term has a very clear and straightforward meaning for me. The concept of consciousness in this sense is a given for me, at least I have no reason to question it. It has been pointed out many times that this idea of consciousness might just be illusory, i.e. it seems that we have consciousness in this sense, but in fact, we don't. However any 'seeming' at all about anything is sufficient for consciousness, as that is its very definition: that 'something seems to be the case', something appears in consciousness, there is a phenomenon I am aware of. The existence of an illusion of any kind is proof of the reality of phenomenal consciousness. So I am sure about what the word means, and the concept is simple and clear, at least to me.
The philosophy of phenomenal consciousness is in part about the problem of other minds. I know I have experiences, but I can't be sure if other things do, because I am not them. The possibilities are:
1) that nothing else has it (I am in a lonely world of Australian zombies)
or
2) that some things have it and others don't (lets say things with some kind of nervous system have it, but not, say, single-celled organisms. This is some kind of emergentism.)
or
3) that everything has it in some sense (panpsychism).
There are several routes to panpsychism, but the one I think is the most persuasive is probably the argument from non-vagueness. If you are unfamiliar with the topic of vagueness in logic, look up stuff on the Sorites Paradox, the Paradox of the Heap and you should find plenty of stuff. It's easy enough. Anyway, it has struck me, and also a number of other philosophers (Goff and Antony, for example) that phenomenal consciousness is one of the very few concepts that is is NOT vague. It does not admit of degree. There is no 'grey area' between consciousness and non-consciousness. And indeed this is a good way of determining if you share the same concept with someone, as others will often say "Yes, but there are degrees of consciousness, like when you are waking up. You start off asleep, then you have vague fuzzy impressions, and eventually you have clear thoughts and perceptions when you are fully awake." This is a clear indication that people are talking about the content of consciousness, rather than phenomenal consciousness itself. The idea of phenomenal consciousness is that no matter how vague and insubstantial your content of consciousness is, you are still conscious, because you are aware of something, whatever it is. And that is all that is needed to fulfil the definition, so you are fully conscious in the phenomenal sense. (NOT in the medical sense like Banno keeps returning to - that sense indeed admits of any number of degrees.) So the idea is that anything is either phenomenally conscious or not, there is no middle ground, there is no partial consciousness, there are no borderline cases, there exist no states, functions, configurations or whatever in which it is indeterminate as to whether a thing is conscious or not.
So, if we accept that this concept is non-vague, what implications does this have for a theory of phenomenal consciousness? If we think some things are conscious and others not (either in the case of my solipsism, or in the case that I think some other things are conscious as well as me) then I need to find a plausible break in nature which I can point to and say "Consciousness is on one side of that break, but not the other." It's got to be an absolutely sharp break, because consciousness cannot emerge gradually as physical systems change. It has to emerge suddenly, if it is to emerge at all. But here is the punchline: there are no sharp breaks in nature at which consciousness can plausibly emerge. In the development of an embryo, there are a million million tiny changes. The development of any macro characteristics, like a nervous system or a brain or the creation of a protein or whatever, at any relevant scale, is vague. There are borderline cases of each of these structures and any function that depends on them. Arguably, the only sharp break in nature is a jump in energy levels in an atom. Picking ONE single one of those in an evolving organism to place the emergence of consciousness would be absurdly arbitrary, and a million miles from something any emergentist is likely to want to claim. Given the absence of sharp distinctions in nature, if consciousness is somewhere, it has to be everywhere, because consciousness is not a vague concept.
I don't think so. Emergentism I see in various forms that are not panpsychism.. Really it's one or the other. It's more binary than what you are implying actually. I don't even see a third, fourth, fifth, sixth way.. those ways are not recognizing the hard problem for what it is and mistaking it for easier problems. That happens a lot in these discussions.
I am reading Terrence Deacon's Incomplete Nature who commits to this kind of theory now, actually. I am not very far in it though. However, as I said above- the hard problem is often mistaken for easier problems. It all ends up being in the emergentist camp in one way or the other. You can re-arrange the furniture to whatever starting place you want, it doesn't change that. But if you would like to tell me how embodied cognition theories are not emergentist, and how they are not committing to a hidden dualism (by having X mind "arise" or "emerge" at some point), I'm all ears.
I would imagine that just as the consciousness of a fruit fly is different than a human, perhaps the experience of a cell is different than that of a fruit fly. It just doesn't have a clear distinction between arrangements of matter that are animals and not animals. Unless you are some sort of "vitalist" or something like that. It's more just process of elimination. I'm not even saying I am committing to panspychism, but I think it's better than other, supposedly more sophisticated theories that don't get at the hard problem at all.
So let's look at some ideas contra panspychism:
1) There is something special about biological organisms- specifically ones with neuronal activity. Great, what about neuron architecture makes it equivalent to mind?
2) There is something about interactions of body, brain, and environment (your embodied cognition). Great, how does this clear the assumption of mind either not already being in the equation somewhere when these things interact (hidden dualism), or at some point X "arising" (magic emergentism, which amounts to dualism anyways).
Why?
Is that the sort of argument that leads you to think that consciousness goes all the way down? Similar to .
Perhaps it's more like the emergence of snow flakes from a cloud; as a certain point the random movement of water molecules become ordered. Too much moisture and all you will get is hail. Too much heat and it will rain.
It does not have to be snow flakes all the way down.
It depends on how radically different experiential states are to physical states. You are still in the realm of physical arrangements of matter, not experience and internal feeling when discussing crystalline lattice structures or whatnot. Also, you have to remember, properties are wrapped in this whole conundrum of mind/body. See again here:
Quoting schopenhauer1
With that being said, it would be odd to talk about properties like liquidity, independent of mind if they are truly not something that inheres in anything but a mind. In fact, if that is the case, the only true property would be a mind, the rest stems from that (pace Locke and Kant). Talk about misuse of language.. Liquidity independent of observation might fall in your Wittgenstein misuse :).
I believe I have.. Lightwaves hit rods and cones.. goes through optical nerves to cortical nerves.. these nerves go through various networks and feedback loops...
Nothing seems experiential there because you simply assume it to be there when this type of activity happens. That would be a dualism of sorts. A property dualism in this case. That's odd though, as most scientific theories strive for a monism whereby what is assumed is physicalism. So, the Cartesian theater gets shoe-horned in somewhere.
Another interesting thing is these neural networks and inputs/outputs can be likened to a computer. Yet a computer is only ever interpreted by an observer. Someone has to see the outputs happen. The observe has to be in the equation. This is unlike the very basis of experience itself, which is not in the equation already before its supposed "emergence". Thus, it is not analogous to something like a computer.
Seems Banno is inclined to ignore that critical word "Constructive", in the title of the thread.
Because phenomenal consciousness does not admit of degree.
"Here is how Block introduces the notion of phenomenal consciousness:
P-consciousness [phenomenal consciousness] is experience. P-conscious properties are experiential properties. P-conscious states are experiential, that is, a state is P-conscious if it has experiential properties. The totality of the experiential properties of a state are “what it is like” to have it. Moving from synonyms to examples, we have P-conscious states when we see, hear, smell, taste and have pains. (Block 1995: 230)" A. Byrne
There are many degrees of seeing, hearing, smelling and tasting.
I can't think of any examples of borderline cases of consciousness. If one thinks that consciousness emerges, say in the development of an embryo, then there is a change from the embryo not experiencing anything at all (not conscious), to the embryo experiencing something (conscious). But the distinction between nothing and something in this context must be sharp, no? What could a middle ground between something and nothing possibly be? If you can think of an example, please let me know.
I heartily agree, and you are right to point out this contradiction between me and Block (at least in this bit you quoted, I can't find the original article off hand). I apologise, it is a long time since I read Block and I did not realise he had defined consciousness in this way. Block does indeed explicitly identify consciousness with experience, and I think this is a mistake. For me, the accurate way to think about this is to say that experience is an amalgam of consciousness plus content. Block defines consciousness here by listing examples of experiences, rather than identifying consciousness with what all the experiences have in common, by virtue of which they are experiences. I should perhaps not use the term 'phenomenal consciousness' after all as it is likely to cause this confusion.
So, to clarify, there are infinite degrees of what we experience (content), but no degrees between not being able to experience at all (i.e. the condition most people think rocks are in) and being able to experience something.
Consciousness is frequently conflated with awareness. I recall psychological experiments that illustrate someone being conscious of an impending threat, but unaware of it. One's body reacts an instant before one is actually aware of the threat. However, usually the two are perceived to be the same. One could stretch the definition of consciousness to the ability to use information to one's advantage, like a flower turning toward the sun. But is the flower aware?
OK, so in your terms, I am talking about awareness in this thread. I mean by 'consciousness' what you mean by 'awareness'. I'm a panpsychist in the sense that I think everything is aware, including flowers and rocks.
EDIT: I said the opposite of what I meant to say. Fixed.
I doubt flowers are blessed with this experience. How would you describe the awareness of a rock?
I don't know what a rock might feel. Nothing very interesting I suspect.
I don't think so, but jgill might.
Not judged, merely separated. But this is only one point of view. Most would have consciousness=awareness. It becomes a word game.
Quoting neonspectraltoast ??
That we aren't aware of, maybe? :chin:
@-Bert1
If phenomenal consciousness is only 'awareness of something' then it is possible to be aware of very little content and / or modes of content. So, say one can only hear or not hear. There is no degree in volume or tambre, etc. But what then is awareness? What is the "what it's like to be" of this sound, however rudimentary? It sems to me (in my ignorance) that both emergence and panpsychism offer little to this question. No philosophical position tackles this well, even if we claim seperate realms between the physical and mental.
There are still questions about what this 'awareness is, where it comes from, and how it comes to be (if it comes to be at all). My intuition says - oddly enough- that there is something about our intuitions on this subject which force us into the wrong direction. Can philosophy avoid enough intuition (is logic an intuition?) to tackle consciousness? Some here have mentioned Wiggenstein's view that it's all word games. Will tackling the questions of consciousness force philosophy to reexamine itself and the way it operates? It seems there is a strange loop that endevour.
Can we state that awareness is not self-awareness if we do not yet understand what awareness is? I feel there is a bit of the multiple drafts theory by Dennett in self-awareness and awareness 'proper'.
I am not a fan of Block's distinction or definition of P-consciousness. I think you and I may be closely aligned with Drestke's interpretation consciousness.
I agree with you I think. Confusion with this goes back again to awareness and access to content and modes of awareness (consciousness?). We get caught up in the massive amounts of content and modes that consciousness can play with, and we misunderstand those as gradients.
So let's say the consciousness of an embryo starts off as an awareness of an on and off, two options. As it develops into a more integrated and complex (information) 'system' it somehow develops a larger repertoire of options to be aware of. It can now see and separate (or the world enables it to see and separate if you are an externalist) what it sees into objects. Eventually, with language, it can experience concepts. But all of those still follow a nothing to something jump. A good example of the confusion might be the following. Dichromatic vision to Trichromatic vision is not a step up in the gradient of chromatics. It is dichromatic or not dichromatic, or trichromatic and not trichromatic.
Let me know if this offers anything to the discussion or if there is something I've left out, etc.
From this basic linguistic assumption panpsychism is a no goer.
The confusion in this general area appears to be an array of what are intrinsically opposing ideas about what ‘panpsychism’ is.
I imagine we all appreciate what temperature is? If so do we all accept that temperature is merely our appreciation of interacting molecules but NOT a property of a single molecule - because temperature is emergent.
I think it makes sense to view consciousness in this way rather than trying to slap some non-applicable ‘temperature’ on a molecule.
We are conscious. A rock isn’t. Just like we have a temperature, but a molecule doesn’t.
I don't understand this at all. Can you elaborate?
Basically if what we ‘experience’ - our ‘experiencing’ - is what we call consciousness, how is this any different from our ‘experiencing’ of temperature?
Keep in mind that a molecule has no temperature, our ‘experience’ is expressed in the phenomenon of temperature (feeling hot and cold). In this sense ‘consciousness’ is just a name we give to experiencing something and there is nothing to suggest that ‘heat’ or ‘consciousness’ exists in a molecule - the terms literally have no meaning at that level.
From that principle ‘panpsychism’ is a no goer. Any rational approach would be more willing to accept that the interactions of certain cells leads to ‘consciousness’ at some point. I’m willing to be open to the suggestion of some proto/pre-conscious states leading to the emergence of what we term as ‘consciousness’.
Some people push it too far imo. To me some things I hear online in this area equate to someone saying a Table is the same thing as a Banana, when they say electrons are conscious, by covering up this with claims that it’s just a different kind of conscious. That is what I find to be nonsense in the sense that a Table is just a different kind of Banana ... No! It just isn’t.
I promote a variety of panpsychism although I prefer the term panexperientialism for the form of panpsychism which fits into my larger worldview. I think language is important and I try to avoid using terms like “consciousness” in ways that violate the common uses and understandings of the term. Language is imprecise and it is important to try to agree on definitions lest discussions become more disputes about usage of words than about ideas.
I come to panpsychism via a more fundamental philosophy which is basically Whiteheads process philosophy. In that philosophy the most fundamental units of reality are “events” (occasions or droplets of experience) what Whitehead calls “actual occasions”. Thus one talks about “quantum events” not “quantum particles”. About the world as a continuous creative becoming not a “being”, about properties as relationships between events not as inherent aspects of inert entities. The distinction between primary and secondary properties is thought of as a fundamental mistake in philosophy, an artificial bifurcation of nature.
Coming from this type of process ontology as a fundamental worldview a form of panpsychism is almost an inevitable conclusion. Having given this brief introduction and cursory overview of my fundamental worldview, I will comment on some of the posts from the thread just to try to give a different perspective, use of language and point of view. I am not here to convince anyone of anything. I do not think the purpose of philosophy is to win arguments only to familiarize yourself with different possibilities or explanations for “reality”.
If you want to be a panpsychist, the best way to do so is to attack emergentism as hard as you can. If you can say that emergentism isn't true, and that consciousness is real, then you can say that consciousness is fundamental.
— Pneumenon
I regard consciousness to be a relatively rare form of unified integrated (self aware and self reflective experience). I think humans and other higher animals can be regarded as “conscious” in the way we usually use the term. I think all of nature is “experiential” and thus experience is fundamental and consciousness or mind differ not in kind from experience but in degree. Different physical arrangement give different physical properties and the same can be said for arrangements of experiential units. Thus human consciousness requires an intact functioning human brain. I am a neutral monist of sorts the fundamental units of nature “occasions of experience” are unified integrated physical-protoexperiential units. To say they are conscious is to twist the usual interpretation of the world “conscious”.
So a sophisticated panpsychist might point out that if a cognitive scientists were to say "At X time, in this part of the brain, there is an "integration" that is happening which causes the emergence of consciosness".. the part about "causing emergence" becomes its own explanatory gap that needs to be explain. What is this emergence of consciousness itself besides that of being correlated with the integration of brain states? Schopenhauer1
This is the “combination problem” of panpsychism. How do the individual units of experience or mind combine to form a higher level of awareness or mind. I do not see it as fundamentally different from the way in which different physical combinations (like molecules, have different properties than their individual constituent “atoms”). Consciousness is a form of unified integrated experience and requires a complex integrated structure, system or process to support it.
@Pfhorrest said that the three basic options are:
1) Nothing is conscious (eliminativism)
2) Some things are conscious (emergentism)
3) Everything is conscious (panpsychism)
I do not think experience, mind and consciousness arise from fundamental constituents which are inert entirely physical and devoid of any psychic subjective or affective aspect themselves. So I fund panpsychism to be more plausible (in some form) than the alternatives.
That is the equivalent of what is being claimed of neuro-biological processes. You see.. physical, chemical, physical chemical physical chemical, more physical chemical physical chemical. WHAM!!! EXPERIENCE!!! Something is not right there.-Schopenhauer1
Which is why I think experience (non-conscious experience) is an aspect of the most fundamental units of nature “events” or “actual occasions” in Whiteheads terms.
So whilst the panpsychist holds that mentality is distributed throughout the natural world—in the sense that all material objects have parts with mental properties—she needn’t hold that literally everything has a mind, e.g., she needn’t hold that a rock has mental properties (just that the rock’s fundamental parts do)." Italics added.- Tim Wood
Rocks are simple aggregates that lack the integrated or complex structure which would give rise to any form of unified or integrated, or conscious experience. Hardly any serious presentation of panpsychism would hold that “rocks are conscious” and as an argument against panpsychism it represents a failure to grasp the fundamentals of the philosophical presentation.
If one assumes there are degrees of consciousness, from zero to partial to full, then one may conclude a rock has zero degree and a bright, functioning human has over ninety degrees when fully awake. If one assumes partial consciousness does not exist, then when we awaken there is no continuity and its like a light being switched on instantly. Is that possible? More likely, consciousness underlies everything, always there, and we become aware of it. Jgill
I think most experience is non- conscious experience, there are long presentations about “Whiteheads Unconscious Ontology” and “Non Conscious Experience in Whitehead” that I will not bore you with. Experience comes in forms and degrees but not differences in kind and experience is fundamental to a process view of nature. Most human experience I would argue is non-conscious experience. Our conscious experience is only the tip of the iceberg (the flashlight) of our mental processing and perception. Most of our mental processing is non-conscious and not under conscious control and outside the realm of conscious awareness.
I also brought up the idea that maybe properties are not "real" as in, inhering in the matter arrangements or matter itself, but observer-dependent. I've also mentioned this theory goes back to Locke and earlier, but Locke arbitrarily split primary and secondary properties. Of course, Kant has a full blown theory of it, but his "categories" are a bit too much of speculative idealism. Schopenhauer1
The division of properties into primary and secondary is one of the fundamental mistakes in the interpretation of nature an “artificial bifurcation of nature” as Whitehead would phrase it. The red and warmth of the sun are as “real” as much a part of reality as wavelengths and photons (perhaps more), you cannot pick and choose. There is always more to “reality” than what can be objectively measured and quantified.
From that principle ‘panpsychism’ is a no goer. Any rational approach would be more willing to accept that the interactions of certain cells leads to ‘consciousness’ at some point. I’m willing to be open to the suggestion of some proto/pre-conscious states leading to the emergence of what we term as ‘consciousness’. I like sushi
Precisely there are different degrees and forms of experience just as there are different measured physical properties depending on the structure of the system under observation.. Using the term “consciousness” causes an unnecessary resistance to the concept of panpsychism because the way we usually use consciousness is to describe our own self aware, self reflective, language oriented awareness and we do not attribute that degree or form of experience to all of nature.
In short, NO.
I'll defend my own ideas, but not those of a philosopher perfectly capable of defending himself. :smile:
Panpsychism :
In popular usage, this term is taken to mean that even stones and atoms are conscious in the same sense that humans are. But that’s nonsense. In my theory it only means that the potential for emergent consciousness is included in the energy / information that constitutes those elementary Objects. The elementary mind-stuff eventually emerges as self-consciousness in holistic Selves.
https://qz.com/1184574/the-idea-that-everything-from-spoons-to-stones-are-conscious-is-gaining-academic-credibility/
OK. A rock has zero experience. Oh oh, there it goes, rolling down a hill! Guess it has >0 experience.
:gasp:
You will have to expound on your point as I am not entirely sure what you intend to convey.
I'm not sure I understand why we even use expressions like "consciousness" or "experience" when speaking of non-living entities. Do the planets have the "experiences" of revolving about the sun? Does a virtual particle - which may only be a mathematical device - have "consciousness" or "experience"? Do quarks have free will? Why is it important for some people to apply these and similar words removed from a context of living beings? :chin:
E.g. if free will is just the absence of determination then every electron has free will. That makes it clear that that is a pretty useless sense of “free will”, but it’s nevertheless a sense to that lots of people use, and it’s true that in that sense of the phrase, electrons “have free will”, not that that really means much.
I think one's metaphysical view of the nature of "reality" (worldview) is important. It profoundly affects the way that individual makes decisions and approaches problems.
For example if one attributes feelings, experience and awareness to other creatures one is likely to behave differently towards them than if one regards them as robotic automatons (pure stimulus response systems).
If one regards the world as a creative becoming (a process) with interdependence and interrelationships your approach is different than if one regards the world as inert independent objects with fixed inherent properties ("vacuous actualities" devoid of "any inner experience") (eliminative materialism)) or (mechanistic determinism).
I am not sure adding "free will" (itself a highly controversial term and subject) will be productive, although rejecting the doctrine of mechanistic determinism with respect to nature is important to considering the various forms of panpsychism.
Actually drawing a bright line between the living and the non living and the experiential and the non experiential is not such an easy task as you imply. It is precisely in attempting to draw such a line that one begins to consider, becoming over being, and process and relationship over being and properties. The task is also what leads some to consider panpsychism over mechanistic and deterministic approaches to nature and reality.
Really thoughtful responses. I have sympathies with Whiteheadian process philosophy as it starts from experiential and/or occasional processes and goes from there.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I think of the "living" having the ability to reproduce. My pet rock can't seem to do the job unless I hit it with a hammer. And then it has a shattering experience.
But I see your point. :cool:
Some humans can’t reproduce either. Are they not alive?
I haven't read this thread in detail - to be honest, most of it goes over my head - but I found it a pretty unsatisfying thread on the whole. Not because those contributing have done so poorly, quite to the contrary, but because I haven't been able to get a clear picture of what anyone is really talking about. This could be my problem of course, but still...
The difficulty I have is that a persistent theme seems to be that consciousness is referred to as some actual "thing", even by those who may be questioning its presence. What is consciousness, the writer asks, and the answer is "experience", or "awareness", or "feeling". When I think about consciousness, which I do on occasion because it is pretty interesting, I can't actually see it anywhere.
When I try to pull it apart, I can't find anything really. I don't mean that I am not aware of things because we all agree that we are aware of things, I just mean I can't actually put my finger on some thing called awareness or experience. I agree that there is something that it is like to be me, so clearly something is going on. But I have to confess it really seems like no more than a particular informational state - that is, consciousness is a concept that stands in for how we use information to model states of affairs. If we start thinking that we are viewing actual objects or having experiences of things, I kinda think we've fallen into the trap of the Cartesian Theatre.
That is why panpsychism seems so untenable - it's explaining some claimed quality of the world that doesn't seem to be there. I can't for the life of me see why anyone would want to say that a rock has some kind of awareness, at least not in the sense we typically mean. Sure, it's aware if we observe there are real physical relationships between a rock and the rest of the world and the rock can be seen to be causally related to the rest of the world, but I am pretty sure that we aren't talking about that. We are really talking about a system abstracting information from the world to model functional processes peculiar to itself. I suppose that is some form of computationalism, though I confess I haven't the background to make that claim.
Perhaps in some sense panpsychism IS true, in that any computational system that models informational entities and relationships will be "conscious", but I feel that is also a bit misleading because we immediately start to think Cartesian actors by saying so...
/https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/
Also the existence of mind or "consciousness" in nature would seem to be the one thing we can hardly doubt because of our immediate "awareness" and self reflection. It is what allows us to question and think in the first place. With that as a given one can begin to inquire what and who else has some form of awareness, experience, mind or consciousness. I think these terms actually have different meanings but get conflated in discussions such as this. The mental like the physical comes in various forms and degrees but not a difference in metaphysical kind.
What is the difference between protoconsciousness and consciousness?
I think "consciousness" as commonly used and understood by a wider audience refers to the kind of self reflective, self aware, unified, integrated, intense experience or mind of which we humans are "aware" when we are awake (not asleep, not in a coma, not "knocked out", etc.). I think most people object to the notion the "experience" or "mind" of anything other than the highest and most complex animals is "conscious" in the sense in which we usually use and perceive the meaning of the term.
There are lots of other terms to use: mind, experience, awareness, prehension, etc. Perhaps fundamental to the way I present my view of "panpsychism" are terms like "mind in nature" or "panexperientialism", "non conscious experience" , "mentality", "psychialism". I think saying things like "electrons are conscious" loses a great number of any audience that might be listening.
We can probably agree there is some fundamental aspect of nature which is "subjective or internal, what it is like" that is not measured by physical science and which is present in various forms and degree throughout nature but which is the same metaphysical kind or category, or not?
What I am suggesting is that we are mistaken when we claim that consciousness exists because we are aware of it. You say that consciousness is what allows us to think and question, but it would seem theoretically possible for us to design a machine that can do relatively the same things. After all, it really is our brain thinking and questioning. Any system that can compute information from its own data store and produce responses that indicate it has just done so would seem to be conscious on that view. I would agree. So too does Graziano. But that doesn't mean that consciousness is some quality of the world.
If consciousness is the feeling of the world, what exactly does that mean? It seems to me that when we think we are experiencing things (or seeing an object or hearing a sound), I suggest we have have just fallen into the Cartesian Theatre. We can never explain that so long as we believe "we" are participating in an experience.
One can simulate intelligent behavior with AI but I doubt there is the kind of "subjective or interior experience" there that we usually attribute to ourselves.
One can doubt many things but the "reality" of our own inner feelings, awareness and thoughts (I think therefore I am) would not seem to be a productive start. Descartes started right but went wildly wrong when he came to dualism as a conclusion.
We try to eliminate the "subjective" from our scientific "objective" study of the world, but the separation is hardly entirely complete or successful and something seems missing from entirely objective descriptions of human experience (love, sadness, joy). Who is doing the investigation and making the observations anyway.
We try to communicate our inner experience with language but verbal descriptions are never complete descriptions of the "actual event or occasion".
We attribute "inner experience or subjective experience" to other humans on the basis of observation, behavior, similarity and verbal and other types of communication but we are never actually privy to the entire content of anyone else's "mind". There seems little point to seriously doubt it.
That there is mind in the world seems to be a first principle. What other entities have some form of "mind" would seem to be the reasonable question and area of philosophical speculation.
I think the trouble with consciousness is probably language - by creating terms to describe our internal experience we have given concrete existence to something that isn't really there. We report that we "see" things, that "we" feel emotions, that the subjective perspective of our corporeal selves is somehow a separate entity.
Now, I am no scientist nor philosopher, so I guess I don't know the detail enough. But I disagree with your suggestion that it is unlikely that an AI can have a "subjective or interior" experience. As I read that, I get the feeling you are saying that inside us, there is some thing. An entity, perhaps, or some qualitative essence. And taken as such we are in trouble because how could we ever measure such an unphysical phenomenon? And how could a mere machine of all things also have this inner essence?
The answer is, I suggest, that it cannot. Nor can we.
Taken in that wise, panpsychism cannot be a real description of anything. Information on the other hand is a real description of a real, physical quality of the universe. And it is always available to the right kinds of agents to exploit. Whether it is you, me, a crocodile or an AI. But not rocks, I am willing to wager.
Well language is always a problem being imprecise and subject to interpretation, but I think the difference is more than that.
You seem to imply the psychic, mental or experiential is not "real" "existent" somewhat like eliminative materialism might imply.
One response is that (in my case anyway) there is no separate or free floating consciousness. Human experience requires a functioning intact human brain. It is that "reality" is more than what can be objectively observed, measured or quantified. There is a physical correlate to any experience but merely looking at the material or physical fails to captures the totality of the "event". Merely describing the region of the brain which is active, the neurotransmitters, the neuronal network, etc does not give a complete, adequate or entirely satisfactory description of the event (love, hate, sadness, joy) . Much like talking about your trip is no substitute for actually having made the trip and describing the infrared in scientific terms fails to create warmth.
So I am not implying that the "mental" as it were is not real - there must be some actual thing happening - but that the qualities of the mental are not genuine physical qualities. Instead, they are descriptions of process. Red for example isn't a real property of the world. It's a description of how a physical quality of the world affects my body. Perhaps it might make more sense to say that the objects of mind are logical/informational objects - they represent relationships between cellular responses.
I suggest that if we move from thinking that our experience is a representation of the world and view it as the state of internal information manipulation, we no longer need to explain "consciousness". If this were so, then qualia for example aren't really actual entities that somehow emerge from neuronal interactions, rather they are distinctions, differences, equalities that are grounded in genuine physical states (you will see from this that red doesn't have to be an experiential quality that can be defined on those terms - so long as any population is reliably agreed about when something is red, then "red" as a descriptor is reliably observed). In the end, the world we inhabit (as opposed to the world without) is an abstracted model, perhaps something like Graziano's attension schema. WE are a model, if you like.
So, while information is ubiquitous in the universe, I think computing agents (information processors) are not. That's why I think panpsychism fails. It's trying to describe a process as a thing.
Wiki: Mentality may refer to:
1. Mindset, a way of thinking
2.The property of having intelligence
3. Mental capacity, a measure of one's intelligence, the sum of one's intellectual capabilities
Present your definition of mentality, please. The Stanford article on panpsychism refers frequently to mentality, but I couldn't find a clear definition of the word in that context. Being a math person I prefer an intelligible presentation of basic definitions.
Is this what you mean: "self organizing and self sustaining systems in physics, chemistry and biology." ?
No, I don't think we can. But we (or at least I) do understand what awareness is.
That's interesting. Let's say that's true, that phenomenologically, there is a sharp distinction between dichromatic and trichromatic experience. And let's also assume that these phenomenologies are closely correlated with biological systems. I don't really know the biology of sight at all, but can we find a similarly sharp distinction in the biology with which to correlate the phenomenology? Or can we find borderline cases of the physical biology?
That's not what I would call consciousness. I'd call what we experience the content of consciousness, i.e. what we are conscious of.
I agree. However, I think philosophers of mind, including me, do use the word 'consciousness' in a perfectly normal sense. Indeed, it is the sense often first listed in a dictionary.
There are different versions of panpsychism. You're a micropsychist (only constituents of rocks are conscious), I'm something else (not sure what to call it). I think any object at all, however defined, has a unitary experience. My view is much weirder than yours.
Because they think it is true, presumably. Things that seem strange sometimes turn out to be true. Then after a while it doesn't seem strange any more.
Yes, but there is little value in saying things that people can interpret to fit their own view if what you intend to do is disagree with them. But maybe you are a more agreeable person that I am, and maybe you will keep people interested long enough to have a conversation with them that I will miss out on.
They'd want to say it because they think it's true, presumably what you mean is that you can't think why anyone would think it was true that a rock was aware.
Yes, human experience requires a functioning human, just as canine experience requires a functioning dog, snail experience requires a functioning snail, and rock experience requires a functioning rock.
What does the word 'aware' in this sentence mean? It can't mean 'conscious' because you're implying that awareness exists but saying that consciousness does not exist.
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When you say “red isn’t a property of the real world” you engage in what Whitehead would call an “artificial bifurcation of nature”. We are part of nature, our perceptions are part of nature. The division of the world into primary and secondary qualities per Locke is an artificial one that leads us into many of our philosophical difficulties. I don’t want to get sidetracked into a discussion about the nature of perception or sensation (how well our perceptions represent “the real world”. We are part of nature, we arise from nature and thus our perceptions are as “real” as any other part of nature.
Quoting Graeme M Again this takes us into the philosophy of perception and will sidetrack the notion of “panpsychism”. Just for reference I like Whitehead on this subject as well, with his theory of perception “causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference”. A good introduction by Steven Shaviro http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=1274 who I find in general to be a good interpreter of modern philosophy (some writers speak to me, others do not ).
Quoting Graeme M I think our perceptions represent the world to us well enough for us to function. Granted our perceptions are limited and may mislead us regarding the nature of reality and science has shown many of our perceptions or common sense notions to be incorrect. For me this includes the notions of the larger world being inert, mechanical and deterministic and devoid of any form of “will, psychical, mental or experiential qualities”.
Do you wish to say all these forms of "Consciousness" (experience, psych, mentality) are to the same form, degree and intensity? or just that they are all of the same metaphysical (ontological) kind?
I am wondering if you see a "combination problem" or not?
I am also wondering if you see some form of "universal consciousness" or "consciousness" separated from physical structure?
But my goal is not to "disagree" with them but to "engage" in a discussion of ideas, an exchange of thoughts. One discussion rarely changes anyone's basic world view but hopefully it stimulates one to explore other ideas. I know the main value of engaging here is the reading I do elsewhere in an attempt to understand the discussions and clarify and defend my views.
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-evolution-of-color-vision-in-insects.-Briscoe-Chittka/195de55dbf4fa744998682d1542a386f34430ac8
Well I freely admit language is a problem and language is imprecise. Defining terms like mind, mentality, experience, consciousness are a major problem in philosophy of mind. I don’t claim to have a definition that would satisfy a mathematician or materialist. This is part of the so called “hard problem of consciousness”. We experience directly (all of our thoughts, inquiries and answers start there in the mental)and yet we can’t measure or quantify it and we only infer its presence in other entities.
I am at heart a process philosopher and the world is a becoming, a constant perishing of the past and rebirth of the present and anticipation of the future. For me the world is composed of fleeting space time events, the most basic form of mentality is this incorporation of the events (data) of the past and of the possibilities of the future into the “present”. Whitehead called this aspect of reality “prehension”. In this view a primitive form of non sense, non conscious, experience or anticipation of the future and knowledge (memory) of the past, is built into the universe which is not physical and thus cannot be directly quantified or measured by our senses or our instruments.
Quoting jgill That was in reference to sharply demarcating life from non life. A distinction I think is arbitrary. The “strange attractor” quality of such systems is worthy of philosophy thought and speculation. If you expect the precision of applied and theoretical math in philosophy you are likely to be disappointed. Metaphysics and ontology in particular are speculative.
I think that is well-stated. The problem is with being itself rather than objectified thing. That is an odd notion for even the most speculative I would imagine. We cannot help but put things in measurable, quantified, or tangible objects-forms.
Another avenue to look at it is that things don't have to be straight ontological fixed things. Rather, we know that there is at least one thing in nature whose process can experience. But experience coming from non-experience is tricky. There must be sub-experiential things going on, that works in degrees rather than a sudden burst (which invokes dualism unnecessarily and mystically unbeknownst and chagrin of the emergentists). Thus in some way processes themselves might be self-informing.
I have that view that all of nature is a process, a becoming (continuous perishing and rebirth) not an enduring being. This speaks of quantum events with duration in spacetime and relationships to other events and to the future and the past; instead of enduring quantum particles with fixed properties interacting in a purely mechanistic and deterministic manner (vacuous actualities).
This ability to incorporate (prehend) elements (data, information) of the past and to incorporate (prehend) possiblities from the future into the present event is a form of "experience" which purely quantitative, empirical, materialist, objective observation cannot measure. It is also the basis for all more integrated unified greater intensity forms of experience (mind, psyche, consciousness).
Shaviro ," perception and feeling are among the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than life being a necessary condition of possibility for sentience."
The discussion is as comprehensible and consequential as highly abstract and modern areas of mathematics appear to be to me, and I was a professional.
Great question. I would say that even if we find intermediates of di and tri they will be separate and distinct phenomenal experiences. Eg. Blurry vision is not clear vision. This idea feels very Hume like. I can't put my finger on why though. But I believe it has something to do with the illusion of continuity?
Yes, there is a sharp division in the biology, to do with how many kinds of cones and how many channels there are in the optic nerve.
Do you have a reference?
Cause I suspect all photoreceptors are the result of mutations in a common ancestor, and that the different spectral sensitivities are the result of such mutations?
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They would not result in blurry vision only the ability to detect different wavelenghts?
I think I am not clear on some kind of definitional matter. The argument for panpsychism is that mentality is a fundamental part of the universe and as such accompanies any material object. So in that respect, even a rock is "conscious".
This is a strange claim, to me at least. Mind you, I am assuming that when people talk of consciousness, they are primarily concerned with what we'd loosely call "experience" - that is, that everyday behaviour is accompanied by what seems to be an internal movie. It seems like "we" are immersed in this experience - we see red, feel warmth, hear middle C. But I am not convinced we have movies in our heads, at least not of the sort that a rock might also experience.
Quoting bert1
I am suggesting that people think of consciousness as an inner movie and that "they" experience this movie - they are aware of the movie. And this leads them to believe that there actually IS a movie running in their heads. My claim here, along with others, is that people are mistaken to think this. In the matter of panpsychism, if there isn't a movie playing that we can experience, then what would a rock be experiencing? I guess we'd need to better distinguish what our experience is (if it isn't a movie) before we could say whether a rock might have it.
Quoting prothero
I don't think I am positing some kind of division, I am saying that red doesn't exist. It is not a property of the world. At least, not in the everyday sense we think of red, which is to say that we think of it as a property of objects that we perceive. I think that people believe that red is a genuine "thing" that can be described. I am saying it isn't, rather it is information. Perhaps more like a description.
I realise I don't understand the philosophical implications of say computationalism and embodied cognition, for example, but it seems to me that consciousness (for brevity, let's call consciousness qualia so we aren't being confused about physical states of awareness etc) describes physical brain states. I think we can be reasonably confident this is the case because a great many learnings about the brain come from observing how people describe experiences in the presence of various brain dysfunctions.
Consider that when we say something is red, aren't we really describing a physical function of the brain, that being to distinguish between objects on the basis of the wavelengths of light reflected from them? We know that light stimulates the retina, the retina signals the visual processing system, this system makes discriminations on the basis of wavelength and eventually assigns the perceptual experience of what we call colour to consciousness. Damage to parts of this system can render patients still able to discriminate on the basis of wavelength but unable to experience colours, for example.
The critical thing here, as is typically the case with other sensory modes, is that the discrimination is described consciously by reference to a quale, in this case "colour". Behaviourally, patients can in many cases respond to sensory input without a conscious experience of that perception. That suggests, to me at least, that qualia describe computational outcomes within the processing system.
We do not have red experiences when we flutter our eyelids, wave our arms or comb our hair, rather, we have red experiences when the visual processing system computes the wavelengths of light from objects in our field of view.
If qualia are descriptions of brain processes that we use to undertake certain functions/behaviours, they would not seem to me to be actual objects or real entities. The brain makes discriminations about the world based on how it processes the information encoded in spike trains and in turn the outputs from those computations are used to produce useful, functional descriptions about those discriminations. My take on this is that qualia, as we call them, aren't real things, they are descriptions of the internal brain states.
If we do not have the required computational processes happening, it seems hard to imagine a description might be produced. Descriptions are not ubiquitous in the universe and are almost certainly agent specific, but the critical point would be that without the agent and its computations, a description does not occur. Descriptions are information, information is ubiquitous, describing agents are not. Rocks do not undertake those kinds of computations, at least not so far as I know.
So my objection to panpsychism is that I think people are mistaking the descriptive capacity of appropriate systems for actual physical entities. If red were a genuine physical property of the universe, then it seems possible other material objects could also experience red. If on the other hand red is a description that is a consequence of a particular physical state in an agent, then it is agent specific and has no broader availability. Or existence. It might be true that red objects reflect light at particular wavelengths, but it is hard to state that for certain. The only thing we can state for certain would seem to be the resulting brain state in an agent. Providing that our agent reliably discriminates between red and green, for example, we can be confident that the agent's description is functionally identical to our own. We could, I suppose, agree to call that red. But red itself isn't in there.
Do rocks compute information about internal states and reliably respond to those computations? I didn't think so, but maybe they do? If all material objects undertake such computations and reliably act upon those, then perhaps consciousness is ubiquitous. My guess is that it isn't.
I can't speak for other panpsychists, but I don't think experiences, or qualia, are objects, so as far as that is concerned I agree with you. I think it makes much more sense to say that the content of experience is determined by processes and functions, possibly computations, I don't know. But I don't think any of these things can simply be identified with consciousness. For me, an experience happens when a conscious system undergoes a change.
Should qualia on that definition be regarded as consciousness? I'd have thought so (again, so long as we aren't just talking about the physical state of being responsive to stimuli). After all, isn't it the phenomenal character of consciousness with which we are concerned in panpsychism? Or have I misunderstood the claim?
I don't think so, no. Consciousness is an essential prerequisite for an experience. If I'm conscious, it means I'm capable of experience. Exactly what I experience is not yet determined merely by the fact of my being conscious. What I experience are the qualia, and these change. We can't identify consciousness and qualia because qualia change and consciousness doesn't. We are conscious of one thing, then another, then another. The content changes, the consciousness doesn't. This seems really obvious to me but it seems other people's intuitions on this are quite different to mine, so much so that it is hard to have a conversation and know we are talking about the same ideas. Consciousness is that property by virtue of which I am able to have experiences. Consciousness is that which all qualia and experiences have in common, by virtue of which they have a felt character.
I don't know if a dictionary will help, but it might. Lets take a look at the first two senses of 'consciousness' on dictionary.com:
When I'm talking about consciousness, I mean sense 1, and this is what I believe most panpsychists and people like Chalmers who go on about the hard problem mean. The focus of definition 1 is on the awareness, not what one is aware of. There is a list of categories of content, but only to indicate that is the kind of thing that one's awareness is often aware of.
It is possible to talk about consciousness in sense 2, we refer to someone's consciousness as the totality of the contents of their conscious mind. In this definition, the focus is on the content of awareness, not on the awareness of content.
There's other senses as well, like the awake/unconscious distinction. Some like Banno think that covers the concept adequately. I just don't think it is the sense that most philosophers of mind use. I think philosophers typically are using 'consciousness' in sense 1 or 2.
Does that help at all?
Apples are not “red” in the dark. Apples are not “red” when blue light shines on them, when they are not ripe, etc. Language is imprecise; it is predicated on our experience. Red is the result of a perceptual process. Wavelengths are the result of a different process. We are part of nature. Our perceptions are part of nature. Nature is a process. You are saying this kind of process (atomic emission for example) is real and exists and that kind of process (perception of red) is not real and “doesn’t exist”. This is why Whitehead calls this kind of distinction “an artificial bifurcation of nature”. It is why some philosophers argue against the notion of primary and secondary qualities or properties.
Quoting Graeme MBert1 (I think) would make a distinction between qualia (content) and consciousness (awareness of content) but I don’t make that distinction (he can elaborate). For me consciousness depends on experience not vice versa (deprived of input consciousness deteriorates). Consciousness (self-aware, self-reflective) is a high level of integrated unified form of experience which is in my view relatively rare in nature. You seem to wish to make the brain state and the experience (identical) thereby eliminating the need for any further discussion or explanation (eliminative materialism or physicalism). I do not claim that human experience can be had without a human brain (there is a one to one correspondence). I just claim that the scientific, material, physical, quantitative descriptions of brain states do not complete, adequately or satisfactorily describe the entire “process” of experience. Much like describing your travels (no matter how complete) to someone else is no substitute for them taking the trip. The experiential component of nature is more that can be described in purely mechanistic deterministic or materialist quantitative terms. The content of human experience and thought is more that can be described with language.
Quoting Graeme MMost mental processing, indeed a lot of creative output and problem solving, memory retrieval does not occur in our conscious awareness. (Examples are those solutions that appear in the morning, those answers that pop into our head after we stopped asking the question). “Consciousness” is just the tip of the iceberg of mental activity (purposeful, intelligent) that takes place in the human brain. Training is what we do to teach ourselves to accomplish tasks without conscious effort or reflection (sports, musicians, military).
Quoting Graeme MQualia are the result of perceptual process but all properties of nature are the result of process and relationship. So the distinction between qualia and properties is artificial (bifurcation of nature).
Quoting Graeme MI am not an advocate of “rocks are conscious”. Rocks are simple aggregates. Rocks lack the complex integrated structure that would give any kind of unified integrated experience. You will have to address Bert1 on that subject.
The ultimate constituents of “rocks” space-time quantum events are active agents (processes) which may possess a primitive non conscious form of experience regarding continuity, the past and the future, relations (inputs and outputs) to the larger nature from which they arise and depend upon. I do not believe in inert, independent entities or objects with inherent fixed properties, it is all process, events and relationships all the way down (it gets into various interpretations of quantum mechanics).
Quoting Graeme MOther materials have different interactions, relationships and processes related to that wavelength.
Quoting Graeme M No, not rocks as composites or aggregates.
Quoting Graeme MOnly certain forms and only when you have a certain definition of consciousness. There are many forms of panpsychism (I have one and Bert1 has another, but there are many other versions). The basic notion is that some form of mind, experience, mentality, psyche or “conscious quality” is ubiquitous in nature (to the core) and that physical monisms, and dualisms are mistaken ontologies that give rise to the “hard problem of consciousness”.
Quoting bert1 Quoting bert1
I think that experience, perception and feeling (prehension) precede (are a requirement for) life and the higher form of mentality that we call “consciousness”. Most of nature is “non or unconscious experience” but I concede you are not alone (or even a minority) in your view.
Shaviro ," perception and feeling are among the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than life being a necessary condition of possibility for sentience."
The very nature of reality as process (continuous creative becoming) past, present and future (durational events in space and time) requires a primitive form of perception (relations to the larger whole), feeling (habit or a lure for certain outcomes). This is working panpsychism from the foundations of reality up. The other approach is (I think therefore I am, consciousness exists) and working your way out (other humans) and down (other forms of life and existents). If one does not believe mind is ubiquitous in nature where does it stop, and where and how did it start?
I think I can see what you are getting at, though it seems a bit circular. Consciousness is the state of being aware, you seem to be saying, but do you also require that being "aware" means that your consciousness has a content in the qualia sense? If so then one isn't conscious until one experiences qualia (in the sense I defined qualia earlier, that is what you call "content"). I feel that there is evidence one can be aware without experience of that awareness, for example the case of colour discrimination in the absense of colour experience I described earlier. There are also other cases that show that people can attend to and even respond to stimuli at greater than chance without a shred of awareness of the stimuli.
Nonetheless, even granting that consciousness is an enabling state, how would we determine that other material objects have this enabling state? Isn't the hallmark of the consciousness we are seeking the existence of the content of consciousness for which so far we seem not to have a strong explanation? Help me here, I'm not quite grasping the application of the concept.
Panpsychism appears to be a sort of response to the hard problem - that is, that qualia exist without physical explanation. So long as an organism is functional and responding to stimuli, we would consider that creature to be conscious. We'd say it is in a conscious state, but we aren't bound to believe that it also has qualia. In the case of other material objects, we not only don't have evidence for qualia, we don't even have evidence for them being conscious.
I think language again obscures my meaning (perhaps I am not able to explain myself well enough). Yes, I agree that perceiving red is a natural process, so I am not denying the process of perception. What I am saying is that there is nothing "red" about red. As a description of a state of our perceptual system it exists but redness as a quality/property doesn't exist. If we could isolate some particular brain state that reliably conforms to claims of red experiences, I am saying that is all there is to be explained. THAT is red.
I am not really following your argument for bifurcation of nature. It isn't a bifurcation to say that brainstate A corresponds to claims of redness, is it? If I were to say that I assign the value A to claims of redness and B to claims of greenness for the sake of succinctness, do A and B now emerge as genuine properties of the world? They are in the sense that A and B are placeholders (rather like a variable in a program), but they might as well be C and D. A and B don't hold any strong claim to being genuine properties of the world, they are descriptions (placeholders for the states they describe). Consider that IF we were really able to inform each other what red looks like to us, we might even find that none of us have the exact same experience. This is, I propose, because the qualitative aspect of red isn't fixed - red is not the thing itself. The experience of red stands in for a physical state of the brain.
It doesn't matter at all what red looks like to you, as long as you reliably respond to an object's reflected wavelengths the same as I do. I'd stand on an even stronger formulation and say that red doesn't look like anything at all, but that's a bit harder to explain. A Martian who reliably reports some distinctive quality for the wavelengths I refer to as red is having a red experience, even if he calls it "Mnng", because all there can be is the appropriate discrimination. If he fails to discriminate red from a shade of grey, we could infer perhaps that he cannot have colour vision (physically, his perceptual system isn't able to make that discrimination).
Returning to panpsychism, I am still not able to discern what the claim is. I mean, I know panpsychists are saying that mentality is a fundamental property of the universe, but if we aren't talking qualia then what are we talking about?
Quoting prothero
As you noted, much of our mental processing goes on outside of conscious awareness. Something the same could be said for a computer. There is a pretty strong similarity between the operations of a digital computer and a human brain. If there is no consciousness of such events, then there is nothing especially noteworthy there. Computers manipulate data and produce consclusions. We know what physical properties are necessary for that, even single cells do this. These are clearly physical operations of a particular kind - anywhere we find systems doing this, we can say computations are occurring.
So that can't be what panpsychists are getting at. Is it? In a sense, if it IS that then I might kind of agree, because as I said earlier, information is ubiquitous. So if the capacity for agents to make use of information is panpsychism, then I'd be on board with that. In other words, information is a property of the universe that the right sorts of agents can utilise. But that is hardly a startling conclusion, so again, it doesn't seem to be what panpsychists are thinking. And it certainly isn't tackling the problem of dualism as far as I can see because it says nothing about qualia, only that the universe is such that computing systems can compute...
The problem is the "arising" of consciousness from non-consciousness. What is "this" that is "there" that was not there before? If you say "consciousness!", then how is this not a dualism of sorts?
I am going to refer you to two fairly famous papers on the issue which may help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
https://www.newdualism.org/papers/G.Strawson/strawson_on_panpsychism.pdf
The most elementary units of nature were originally conceived to be inert, passive, entities (objects with fixed properties) moved about by external,eternal, mechanistic and deterministic laws of nature.
Given this conception of the building blocks of the universe it was hard to see how "consciousness", awareness, perception, experience, mentality, psyche (use whatever word you want) could come about as the result of any combination of such objects.
The default positions were "consciousness" somehow mysteriously emerged and the non experiential become experiential (emergence) or that mind and matter were two separate but interacting substances (dualism).
Modern physics which thinks of the fundamental units of nature as quantum events (concentrations of energy) with duration occurring within the field of space-time (quantum field theory) gives us a much different picture of the fundamental units of nature (hence physicalism is the preferred term over materialism). Modern physics I would say thinks of the fundamental units of nature as active, energetic, units with properties which are determined by their relationship or interactions to the larger universe.
There is also a relationship to the events of the past (memory) and the possibilities of the future (lure or anticipation). These relationships are much more akin to experience and this is a form of panpsychism.
In modern physics at the quantum level we can predict the results of experiments (in a non deterministic, stochastic probability way) but we really can't explain them in any purely mechanistic deterministic way as the action of inert, independent, passive entities..
I am basically asserting that the relationship of the events of nature which have duration and their relationship to the past and the future is a form of experience (non conscious and non physical (unable to be eternally observed or empirically measured) is the basis of all higher forms of experience, mind and consciousness.