What problem does panpsychism aim to address?
There was a pretty interesting thread about panpsychism earlier. I've never really thought much about panpsychism before as I imagined it was something along the lines that the world we are part of is actually a sort of conscious experience itself, maybe something such as the mind of God. But it seems it is something else.
As I understand it, panpsychism is the claim that mentality (consciousness, experience?) is a basic constituent of the universe. I gather from some of the articles I have read this means that any material object has a mind, of sorts at least.
I'm not sure I follow that. From what I can gather, there are four main claims for panpsychism.
First, the argument goes that all objects, presumably down to very small scales (atoms?) must have some kind of mind.
Second, minds are expressed to varying degrees of sophistication according to the sophistication of the system (object), perhaps to the greatest sophistication in humans (in our experience, at least).
Third, mind is not an actual physical substance (I use the term loosely and am aware it probably means something in philosophy different from my usage). That is, it isn't like say gravity or the electromagnetic force which can be measured and which have a direct causal relationship to the world.
Fourth, matter isn't a manifestation of mind but rather mind is a manifestation of matter. Minds emerge from, are caused by, or are separate from, matter, nonetheless minds are directly attributable to material events.
Now, all of this seems quite odd. What problem is it that panpsychism attempts to answer? Clearly to posit an unidentifiable, unmeasurable and causally inert substance as a true, fundamental feature of the universe must mean there is a truly insoluble problem before us. In effect, it is saying here is a problem so hard to solve that the only answer can be a non-answer (I apologise in advance if I've completely missed the point of panpsychism).
From the various references I have read (and I accept mine is a very cursory introduction to the subject), it does rather seem to me that the problem is just the good old hard problem. It is just the problem of qualia. If minds were the function of systems to undertake say logical operations on information, ie to undertake computations, we'd have to conclude that computers do this. And that seems relatively explicable. We could expect that human brains are doing similar computational processes, also explicable. We could conclude that information is ubiquitous, that computations are possible, and that the universe has the property that systems can undertake computations. But isn't that already known, accepted and explained? So panpsychism can't be making that claim.
Is panpsychism only trying to explain the hard problem of qualia? If that were so, does it follow that if the problem of qualia were to be resolved in like manner to other physical matters (ie qualia are a describable and measurable physical event), would that undercut the rationale for positing panpsychism?
As I understand it, panpsychism is the claim that mentality (consciousness, experience?) is a basic constituent of the universe. I gather from some of the articles I have read this means that any material object has a mind, of sorts at least.
I'm not sure I follow that. From what I can gather, there are four main claims for panpsychism.
First, the argument goes that all objects, presumably down to very small scales (atoms?) must have some kind of mind.
Second, minds are expressed to varying degrees of sophistication according to the sophistication of the system (object), perhaps to the greatest sophistication in humans (in our experience, at least).
Third, mind is not an actual physical substance (I use the term loosely and am aware it probably means something in philosophy different from my usage). That is, it isn't like say gravity or the electromagnetic force which can be measured and which have a direct causal relationship to the world.
Fourth, matter isn't a manifestation of mind but rather mind is a manifestation of matter. Minds emerge from, are caused by, or are separate from, matter, nonetheless minds are directly attributable to material events.
Now, all of this seems quite odd. What problem is it that panpsychism attempts to answer? Clearly to posit an unidentifiable, unmeasurable and causally inert substance as a true, fundamental feature of the universe must mean there is a truly insoluble problem before us. In effect, it is saying here is a problem so hard to solve that the only answer can be a non-answer (I apologise in advance if I've completely missed the point of panpsychism).
From the various references I have read (and I accept mine is a very cursory introduction to the subject), it does rather seem to me that the problem is just the good old hard problem. It is just the problem of qualia. If minds were the function of systems to undertake say logical operations on information, ie to undertake computations, we'd have to conclude that computers do this. And that seems relatively explicable. We could expect that human brains are doing similar computational processes, also explicable. We could conclude that information is ubiquitous, that computations are possible, and that the universe has the property that systems can undertake computations. But isn't that already known, accepted and explained? So panpsychism can't be making that claim.
Is panpsychism only trying to explain the hard problem of qualia? If that were so, does it follow that if the problem of qualia were to be resolved in like manner to other physical matters (ie qualia are a describable and measurable physical event), would that undercut the rationale for positing panpsychism?
Comments (91)
It wouldn't be describable or measurable. It would only be inferred, like with other people's minds. The hard problem is one of subjectivity, which can' be scientifically measured or described. Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging.
Quoting Graeme M
Right, that's just functionalism. You still need the qualia. An alternative to panpsychism would be to suppose some kinds of information are conscious. That's what Chalmers has suggested. And it's not explained by the functions or kind of information. It's just an additional fact. That's property dualism.
How can you claim this to be true?
Quoting Marchesk
So yes, panpsychism aims to explain qualia?
This my not be what @Graeme M is getting at, if so I don't want to derail his thread with this, but - how exactly is spreading it out through everything a solution to the problem of it mysteriously emerging?
We certainly haven't reduced the mysteriousness - we've just re-invented the nature of the entire universe with a stuff that previously didn't exist and can't be measured.
We haven't reduced the 'how' questions - we still have the question of how this stuff interacts with matter only now it's interacting with all matter.
I'm not seeing what's improved.
There are plenty of arguments for the hard problem. Basically, no amount of objective explanation gets you to subjectivity. They're incompatible.
Sure, but it just becomes another brute fact of existence, along with the existence of QM, Relativity and fundamental properties and fields.
Quoting Isaac
Well the matter interacts but it's also conscious. Combine the matter together and you have more consciousness. I'm not a panpsychist, so you'd have to see how they go about explaining combinations.
Why couldn't unexplained emergence be a brute fact? Are there some limits/preferences about what can and cannot be a brute fact?
No, but I think complex novel things emerging is considered spooky in a way that brute fundamental things are not. The presumption being that emergence is produced by the fundamental building blocks, so how could you get something entirely novel out of that?
Something has to be fundamental because stuff exists. We just don't have an explanation for existence.
Well, at the moment perhaps. Isn't it feasible that an explanation may be forthcoming? In any case, if no objective explanation can bridge the gap, how does another non-objective explanation help?
I'm not trying to dismiss panpsychism, I just don't get how it even flies as a serious contender.
Possibly, but the thing emerging is not complex and novel. The thing emerging is conciousness. The whole point of the hard problem is that conciousness itself is taken to be a familiar, obvious fact (otherwise we'd just be rid of the whole thing). It's the mechanism that's mysterious, and we're quite used to mysterious mechanisms. The whole history of science has been the gradual revelation of previously mysterious mechanisms.
Only if the arguments for the hard problem are flawed. Which perhaps they are in some subtle way, or are relying on faulty intuition. I guess we'll know if/when an explanation does emerge.
Quoting Graeme M
Well, if the world contains both physical stuff and consciousness, but there doesn't seem to be a way for the physical stuff to produce consciousness, then an alternative would be that all physical stuff is conscious.
This depends on the presumption that consciousness is a genuine constituent of the world. Is there the slightest evidence to support the contention that it is?
That you have conscious experiences.
For a genuine p-zombie, it would seem that way.
You previously said that the thing that emerged was "complex and novel", now you're claiming it's so fundamental and obvious it can't be ignored. Which is it?
It's complex and novel when saying it emerges form the physical. It's fundamental and obvious as someone who is conscious.
:up: :clap:
Also: same response to basically everything else you’ve said in this thread, which were mostly exactly the things I was going to say.
I wrote a couple things in the other thread that might help explain the problem better:
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?
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:.
Basically what this is amounts to is that science must posit some kind of monistic physicalism (there should not be any "spooky" things "emerging" that is not physical itself). However, experience itself, though completely correlated with physical processes, itself cannot be explained as to how it is one and the same as the physical, other than being correlated with it. It becomes an epiphenomena of magical dualistic "foam" that is called an "illusion" that appears on the scene (which itself cannot be accounted for). This explanatory gap that is committed to "illusion" status or have its premises assumed in the consequent and becomes something of a thorny issue. The only thing the scientist can do, is keep solving the easy problems.
Much of the problem again, comes from the Cartesian Theater problem. At some point, the homunculus comes in the picture.. Some sort of "integration" event where enough physical events bring about mental events. But this is the exact question that is being asked, and thus it becomes begging the question to simply posit "integration" happens and thus consciousness.
From this perspective, pan-psychism is in a logical sense very close to if not indistinguishable from eliminative-materialism, the difference being that panpsychism doesn't consider subjects who claim to possess consciousness as being factually false, but as being necessarily and vacuously true in virtue of consciousness being a universal and hence tautological property. From this perpsective, the main difference between panspsychism and eliminative materialism is optimism.
It helps if you can learn to adjust your concept of mind. Systems Philosophy takes the phenomena of complex adaptive systems as fundamental. So what we think of as mental processes in this light are seen in more general terms as features of complex systems, feedback, control, increasing complexity and self-organization, etc. When you familiarize yourself with the theory and the vocabulary, then you can begin to see how material things can participate in what we call consciousness, to the extent that they likewise instantiate these properties or tendencies.
I recommend Laszlo's Introduction to Systems Philosophy, which touches on the issue. Von Bertalanffy also.
Quoting Pantagruel
:100: :up: :clap:
Ordinary functionalism explains what is different between human brains and your socks. All that’s left after that “easy problem” is some mysterious metaphysical having of a first person perspective at all, beyond just the third person behavioral differences. Panpsychism simply says that that is not a special thing that mysteriously arises only in human brains somehow; instead it’s a trivial thing that’s everywhere always, and only those functional differences actually make any difference.
Quoting Pantagruel
OK, but isn't that just saying what we already know and why there is a problem? Brains are material things that engage in complex processes, so this statement boils down to saying that consciousness is the same as complex system properties. Is anyone convinced by that? Isn't this just claiming that Chalmers' easy problems explain the hard problem?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I think there is something different between the claims of panpsychism and functionalism, though? OK, so "consciousness" is a common feature of the universe which attends appropriate systems/objects and that could be so (functionalism), but that's different from saying that all systems/objects can be conscious (panpsychism). Consider computations. These are genuine processes that have some kind of causal efficacy, Chalmers would say that a system undertakes a computation when the causal structure of the system mirrors the formal structure of the computation. Whether this is strictly true or not, it does note that a computation has to map to certain physical attributes that are not present in all systems or objects. So computations are a feature of the universe that are always available but only some systems/objects can perform them. We aren't then tempted to say that all objects, eg socks, can undertake computations.
It still seems to me that panpsychism aims to eliminate the hard problem by substituting for that state of affairs which gave rise to that problem a state of affairs an order of magnitude more resistant to explanation. I think maybe sime puts it best:
Quoting sime
Try imagining something. Remember an event that happened. Feel sad. Feel joy. These are things that are mental states. P-Zombies presumably don't do that but somehow act as they do.
Functionalism only addresses the easy problem of access consciousness. Critics then ask “but what about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness?” Panpsychists reply “that’s a trivial general feature of everything, nothing special in need of explanation.” Critics then ask “So my sock is conscious just like I am?” And we reply “no, not just like, but your sock is functionally different from you too. That difference is an easy problem, already answered by functionalism.”
No, it is quite another thing. As said, you would need to be sufficiently versed in the vocabulary and concepts of Systems Philosophy to be able to grasp what is being presented. Laszlo very specifically addresses it, in the introduction I think. It is a compelling description.
No, I think it has already also required,
Quoting Pfhorrest
but doesn't seem keen to admit it.
I wouldn't say incompatible, at least not in the sense of contradictory.
It's just that neither seems to derive the other, hence why Levine called the conundrum an explanatory gap.
What’s so ‘mysterious’ about emergent properties? This is where most of the panpsychism ideas look juvenile at worst and idiotic at best. Emergence is a CONSCIOUSLY observable (and scientifically measurable) property.
To repeat what I mentioned in the other thread. Heat is an emergent property, but a molecule has no ‘heat’. Such emergent properties cannot be physically measured at certain levels because they make no sense, yet somehow people believe this is a good argument for panpsychism. Why? I’d like to see an argument presenting how ‘heat’ is an innate property of all matter (including molecules). Of course the argument would require talk of a ‘different kind of “heat”’ in order to remain workable.
The main problem standing in the way of our understanding of consciousness is this silly clinging to some holistic ‘panpsychism’ idea that barely makes any sense, lacks rigour, and conveniently plays with words instead of engaging with critical thought and actual idea that possess a common and workable vocabulary.
Chalmers’ zombies aren’t much of an argument either as far as I can see. Meaning that because some artificial being could be created to act ‘as if conscious’ is equivalent to an actual conscious being. If such a ‘zombie’ was, in effect, said to be identical to a human (neurons and all) yet not consciously aware, then I believe this would be breaking the laws of nature - we cannot ‘logical imagine’ what we don’t understand with any degree of accuracy.
I’m more than ready to be combative against a lot of the ideas orbiting panpsychism as a reasonable premise - not ALL but most I tend to see far too often.
Phenomenal consciousness is supposed to be the kind of thing where, even if you modeled the physical aspects of a human being in their entirety, you still wouldn't necessarily have modeled that. It's not supposed to be some kind of aggregate of physical behaviors, but something entirely besides the physical behaviors.
There are only three options with regards to that kind of thing:
#1: Nothing has it. Not even us. We are all philosophical zombies. Nobody actually has any first-person experiences. Third-person observable behavior is all there is to a human being. (This is eliminativism.)
#2: Only some things have it. Even though it's not an aggregate of physical behaviors, it spontaneously starts happening out of nowhere wherever certain patterns of physical behaviors happen. Because reasons. (This is emergentism).
#3: Everything has it, just having it at all is trivial and fundamental, and it's only when aggregates of equally trivial fundamental physical behaviors build up into complex behaviors that aggregates of this trivial first-person experience simultaneously build up into complex experiences. (This is panpsychism).
The point was that it makes absolutely no sense to talk about the ‘heat’ of a molecule. I am saying it makes just as much sense to talk about ‘consciousness’ at a molecular level - which some people do. I’m certainly open to the ‘consciousness’ equivalent of ‘motion’ ... which our current guesses lie in combinations of neurons and/or cellular combinations. Anything else looks like vainly trying to the the temperature of an electron.
Do you have any suggestions for the ‘conscious equivalent’ of ‘motion’? I’ve not looked at the microtubules idea for a while, but it looked sketchy at best. I think its biochemical - more than fancy enough (needless to say an atom doesn’t have biochemistry, but then some may insist they do due to up/down quarks and such ... which is the core of my dislike of what I tend to see flaunted on forums).
Ditto. Ditto. :up:
Eliminativism & emergentism are non-exclusionary just as e.g. legs & walking (or atoms & strawberry jam) are non-exclusionary.
Nobody has any problem with the behavior of human brains (weakly) emerging from the behavior of their constituents in the way that heat (weakly) emerges from the motion of particles.
What panpsychism is about is when people ask "Okay that accounts for the behavior of people and their brains but where in any of this emergence of complex behaviors did phenomenal experience start happening and why?"
Then you can either give some answer to where that completely different metaphysical thing started happening (and how do you do that exactly?), or else you say "it didn't start happening, because nothing else besides the behavior happens", or else you say "it didn't start happening, because it was always happening to a trivial degree at the fundamental level, and all that emerged was a more complex aggregate of that trivial fundamental thing."
I posed my position in terms of the many iterations of poorly articulated positions that claim to be reasonable ones in terms of ‘panpsychism’.
I have no qualms with the idea of some physical property of matter that, at some level, manifests as consciousness. In this sense the ‘mysteriousness’ of emergence is no more (in some cases less so) ‘mysterious’ than some property X that exists in all matter. Consciousness itself - us here now discussing it - is inextricable from the perceived problem as it is part of it.
We may as well argue about the universe ‘starting’ to happen or stars. It makes no difference to the logical position of the situation other than we’re more focus in here on the subjective sense - ie. conscious experience.
If thee was some physical property it would still lead to some kind of gradual progression - on SOME level. Even if it’s an all or nothing situation - much like the firing of neurons - that doesn’t take away from there being level of complexity below that are far from a simple all or nothing mechanism.
I find it to be a reasonable idea to ponder, but not one to adhere to with any degree of serious conviction (until evidence is found in support of it).
To repeat. My MAIN qualm is with people naively suggesting atoms are ‘conscious’ with the poor defense of ‘just a different kind of conscious’ - which is nonsensical. Admittedly those who have put more thought into this don’t say such things without a well articulated reason for doing so. On forums most of what I have tended to see is a wishy-washy form of mysticism that use concepts that are clearly misunderstood and/or poorly cobbled together.
In terms of a defense of panpsychism I’d look to entropy as the ultimate underlying field upon which consciousness exists. From more ‘spiritual’ perspective I also find it reasonable to view humans as that old adage of ‘the universe trying to understand itself’ - fine, no problem there either.
If however we’re talking about atoms having a property of consciousness and then when these atoms accumulate in certain constitutions what we know as ‘consciousness’ emerges ... well, then it’s emergence we’re talking about just in the same sense that every other phenomenal experience of humans is held as a nascent item - framed for the sake of differentiation/orientation as x or y.
Of course they are exclusionary, by definition. Functionalism, for example, excludes eliminativism. Functionalism says that consciousness exists and is a function. Eliminativism says that consciousness does not exist.
Indeed, if a panspychist said that I too would disagree with them. Who says this though?
I'd love to hear an actual answer to this.
These are all still qualia. If humans were really P-Zombies and did not entertain qualia (but nonetheless acted just as though they did), would there be any need for panpsychism as an explanation? I'm puzzled by the general line here - if a person can do all the things I do but without qualia, then it seems we could explain these behaviours without recourse to any additional property beyond those uncovered by science so far. Where would panpsychism be required?
Quoting Pfhorrest
I assume you are defending panpsychism. If an object has no functional role of its own, how is it proposed that it could be attended by mental states (even if limited). A sock has no inherent functionality, its function is derived. The thing with mentality is that we associate it with causal relationships.
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting Pfhorrest
And this perspective was already on the physicist's menu, or not?
Qualia is brute sensation (e.g. seeing green, hearing noise, etc.). Although imagination, and memories probably rely on qualia, etc. they are not the same as qualia. My point was there are other internal states besides just qualia that one can have. And I don't understand why you would be deflating the issue. The very question regarding the Hard Question is to understand how/why internal states are equivalent to brain processes. Anything else is not the world we live in, but P-Zombie world. That is not ours though, so it is a big deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle
Everything has a function, in the sense meant by functionalism, which is different from the sense you seem to mean. A function in the sense that it responds to inputs with some output: if you do something to it, it does something in response. The function of a sock or a rock is very trivial, but it still has one. Imagine for clarity that you were programming a simulation and you had to code what such a virtual object does in response to other events in the virtual world: you have to code in that the rock moves in response to being pushed, for example. That’s a kind of functionality.
It depends on the physicist’s philosophical views. If he’s an eliminativist then no, he denies that there is such a thing. If he’s an emergentist then yes, but now he’s got a tricky question to answer as to how the other third-person physical behaviors of things that he normally studies spontaneously generate a first-person phenomenal experience in special circumstances. If he’s a panpsychist, then yes, and there’s nothing special to explain because things having a first-person phenomenal experience is a normal thing not in need of any special explanation.
Not really. I merely want to establish whether the panpsychist does need after all to take ownership of
Quoting Pfhorrest
as I alleged, and not pretend that they are tidying up after other people's metaphysical confusions.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Good... if he's prepared to stick to the physicist's menu, yes? Go on...
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ok, so "first person perspective" wasn't some innocuous physical concept to do with frames of reference. I wanted to check.
So ownership is needed.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Possibly. But what about the "weaker" of this species, who is either functionalist or has some other (e.g. @Pantagruel's "systems" or my "symbolic competence") explanation for the emergence, which doesn't at all require that what emerges is anything but an aspect of material behaviour?
These kinds of emergentist won't be taking ownership of,
Quoting Pfhorrest
Nor of,
Quoting Pfhorrest
... and the like.
I, as a panpsychism, think it is.
It’s only emergentism that makes it out to be anything metaphysically weird. The panpsycist, in taking “phenomenal consciousness” to just be the boring ordinary having of a first-person experience, is free to also be a physicalist, because they’re not invoking anything in addition to physical stuff, just a different perspective on that physical stuff.
Physicalism is not identical to eliminativism.
Quoting bongo fury
That person is not providing any answer at all to the question of phenomenal consciousness. We don’t know if they think there is no such thing, if it somehow emerges from nothing when behavior does the right thing, or if it was always there and just gets refined along with behavior.
Your position is about studiously having it both ways, so that's hardly surprising.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, you admitted that an eliminativist (usually a physicalist) would rule it out.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Yes, an extra, 'meta' perspective.
Quoting Pfhorrest
No, but it is usually implied by it.
Quoting Pfhorrest
For someone who has defined that question in metaphysical terms, perhaps not.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Ditto.
Quoting Pfhorrest
Remember, it doesn't have to be a substance: a physical goo or a metaphysical woo.
Physicalism regarding consciousness is the view that consciousness is real, and it is physical. Eliminativism is the view that consciousness is not real (at least not in one of the main commonly meant senses).
And usually reached on physicalist grounds. As I said, the one implies the other, so the comment about non-identity was rather pointless.
You confuse me here. Perhaps my confusion confirms my ignorance about the topic? My understanding of the hard problem is that there is "something that it is like" to entertain mental states. This state of affairs, this quality if you like, is what we refer to more generally as the experience of qualia. The feeling of warmth, the colour blue, the memory of a red car, the sight of my child, and so on. When we entertain mental states they are something we can introspect upon - they have some kind of presence. If they did not, we should in a literal sense be in the dark. Our brains can and do compute a vast amount of information for which we have no felt analog. That is also what we assume computers do - undertake complex computations for which there is no felt analog, no inner experience. No qualia. Qualia are all there is, as far as the hard problem goes.
Stanford says:
"The phenomenal character of an experience is what it is like subjectively to undergo the experience. If you are told to focus your attention upon the phenomenal character of your experience, you will find that in doing so you are aware of certain qualities. These qualities — ones that are accessible to you when you introspect and that together make up the phenomenal character of the experience are sometimes called ‘qualia’. C.S. Peirce seems to have had something like this in mind when he introduced the term ‘quale’ into philosophy in 1866."
My proposition is that, on this kind of definition, were mental states not experienced (were they not attended by qualia) they should not require an explanation. There'd be no hard problem and as a consequence no claims for panpsychism.
Quoting Pfhorrest
I shall have to leave that as I am not familiar with the concepts. Function for me denotes an active sense of the term - that is, the term "function" in this context describes the state of affairs in which an object or system undertakes an operation where an operation is a causal physical process. A rock being moved by my foot is not a function of the rock, though it might be a function of my foot. A sock sitting on a bed is an object, not a function. It has a function, but derivatively. It can be a member OF a function, but is not A function. So I guess there is a lot more to this question of what constitutes a function.
This is the difference between cognition and behavior. It is doubtful most computers are cognizant, but certainly they perform behaviors which might be called "processing". These presumably come with no internal states, however. The exact problem here is how processing is internal states.
Quoting Graeme M
Again, imagination, introspection of any sort on any feelings, awareness of something, remembrance, future projections, etc. These are all introspective inner qualities that are more than just qualia. Imagine a friend right now. That is more than just qualia. You are actually reconstructing a whole set of things beyond simply colors, sound, feel, etc. Qualia are simply sensations. Unless you think all introspection is just sensations, then this is wrong. As I stated before, sensations may be a necessary part of the all introspection, but not sufficient to account for all of it.
Quoting Graeme M
Even if you reduced the idea of inner experience to the term "qualia", then qualia would simply encompass all the phenomena I mentioned, and yes, this still would have to be accounted for. It is not like this minimizes the problem, it just encompasses everything under one term.
Yes, but in ruling it out, they’re not proposing that the weird thing happens. (But they’re also denying the most ordinary familiar thing, by conflating it with something metaphysicall weird).
Panpsychists say something happens (that familiar having of first-person experience), but that it’s perfectly ordinary and nothing weird.
Only emergentists (about phenomenal consciousness, because that’s the context here) say that a weird thing that calls for philosophical some explanation happens.
Quoting bongo fury
There’s nothing meta about it. Reflexive SELF-awareness, which is what I think ordinary people usually mean by “consciousness”, is meta. But simple first-person perspective is no more meta than third-person is.
Quoting bongo fury
Which direction do you mean that implication to go? Eliminativists are usually physicalists, sure, but it’s quite a stretch to say physicalists are usually eliminativists. More often they seem to be emergentists, because nobody wants to deny the reality of their own first-person phenomenal experience unless they’ve got a serious philosophical axe to grind.
Quoting bongo fury
You’re not clear here, but I think you’re missing something definitional. Phenomenal consciousness is defined as the having of first-person experiences. It’s what people are asking about when you suppose someone has made something that acts exactly like a human being and they ask “But does it have the same experience as a human being or does it just act like it does?” You can say “no”, because nothing has such experience, or say either “no” or “yes” and explain what is happening that does or does not give rise to that in this particular thing but not always in all things (some explanation not about the behavior of it, because that’s already explained and not what they’re asking about), or you can say “yes” because everything has one, so everything that’s like a human has one like a human.Quoting bongo fury
What? You’re not making any sense.
Quoting bongo fury
I never implied it was. This is a non-sequitur.
Quoting Graeme MYes there are many different forms and kinds of mind but they are all of the same ontologic nature. There are many different forms of physicality but they are all the same ontologic nature. In fact the physical and the mental are dual aspects of the same fundamental unit of nature (neutral monism). I won’t defend any form of panpsychism other than a monistic variety. The kind of unified, integrated experience that we call “human consciousness” can only be present in a unified integrated structure like the brain. Physically damage the brain and you damage or lose “consciousness”. I won’t defend the statement “rocks are conscious”. I won’t defend the statement “electrons are conscious”. Consciousness in my mind is a relatively rare form of mind or experience
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Quoting Graeme MOur “experience”, our “mind”, our “consciousness” cannot be adequately or satisfactorily explained in purely physical terms. No description of neural pathways, metabolic activity, neurotransmitters or brain waves entails the actual “experience” of the subject. This is sort of Mary’s and red, the scientific description versus the first person experience. One should also asks who or what is conducting science, asking the questions, doing the experiments, interpreting the results, you can not take the observer out of the science completely.
Quoting Graeme MMind (experience) and Matter (the physical) are inseparable aspects of the same fundamental basic neutral monistic ontology (events, occasions). Reality is a process not a “thing”, a becoming not a “being”. When we talk about particles with properties we are really talking about events with relations (to other events, to the past and to the future).
Ok, well I did my best to get you to notice where I think your argument tricks you into thinking it is deflationary while it is anything but. Something which is hard to notice, and needs focus... which we've lost.
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting Pfhorrest
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Good question! It's the same old problem that philosophers and scientists have been wrestling with for millennia. David Chalmers gave the Mind/Body problem its modern name : The Hard Problem.
Problem? What Problem? : The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind. . . . We need to understand both what consciousness is and how it relates to other, nonconscious, aspects of reality. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Quoting Graeme M
The notion that the physical world is an idea (or dream) in the mind of god, is an ancient explanation for the existence of reality. Dreaming was believed to be magical, in the sense that things that don't exist in reality can be conjured up in dreams. That made sense to primitive people, but in our scientific age, we want more details about the hows & whys. In any case, a Creative Mind of some kind has always been the ultimate answer to those basic questions. The only alternative answer atheists have to offer is the shoulder shrug of Multiverse theory : "it is what it is --- don't ask why".
Quoting Graeme M
Psyche (soul) was indeed their best explanation for the emergence of Life & Mind from ordinary matter. And Psyche was most closely identified with human consciousness and reasoning ability. But the weakness of Panpsychism is the implication that stones and atoms are conscious of the outside world, including their fellow stones and particles. Yet, again modern thinkers find it hard to believe that dumb rocks have a "life of the mind" . That's why I prefer to use a term that has less religious and philosophical baggage : Information. It's similar to Spinoza's Single Substance of the Universe. And is now thought to be the "basic constituent" of the universe, by some scientists.
Is Information Fundamental? : https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/is-information-fundamental/
Spinoza's Universal Substance : The most distinctive aspect of Spinoza's system is his substance monism; that is, his claim that one infinite substance—God or Nature—is the only substance that exists. https://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoz-m/
Quoting Graeme M
"Sophistication" may be a better word for the evolution of Mind, than the more common term "Complexity". Information is not just numerically complex, it is integrated and irreducibly structured. The Santa Fe Institute has been studying Complexity for thirty years, and that includes Information Theory. But, as scientists, they were mostly looking into meaningless syntax-only Shannon Information, defined as structure-destroying Entropy. They are now studying meaningful semantic structure-creating Bayesian Information, in pursuit of Big Questions and Hard Problems.
Santa Fe Institute : https://www.santafe.edu/engage/learn/courses/introduction-information-theory
Beyond Center : https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Life-Information-Causality/dp/1107150531
Can Integrated Information Theory Explain Consciousness? : https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/can-integrated-information-theory-explain-consciousness/
Enformy : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page8.html
Quoting Graeme M
True. Mind is not a physical thing, but a process of enforming (making sense of) experience. But in it's generic form as Information, it's an ontological meta-physical "substance" : the essence of Being, not the atoms of Objects.
Substance : The philosophical term ‘substance’ corresponds to the Greek ousia, which means ‘being’, transmitted via the Latin substantia, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/
Quoting Graeme M
Yes. Mind is a function of the material brain. It's what living brains do. It converts physical sensations into metaphysical concepts. But, according to the Enformationism Thesis, Mind-stuff and Body-stuff are merely different forms of Generic Information (causal, creative, power to enform, energy).
Quoting Graeme M
Your hypothetical question answers its own query : Qualia are not "describable and measurable" Quanta. Hence the necessity for a different way to measure and describe Qualia and there role in physical Reality. We need to understand mental Qualia, because they are what gives meaning to life in a material world. :smile:
Qualia : http://blog-glossary.enformationism.info/page17.html
Quoting Marchesk Yes, “mary’s room” no familiarity with the scientific description of “red” (wavelengths, optics, neural paths, etc.) is a substitute for the actual experience “seeing red”. Scientific descriptions (verbal descriptions) are always incomplete in some sense and unsatisfactory substitutes for “the experience itself”. We can describe what happens in the “quantum world” we can even “predict in a stochastic probabilistic way” what is possible but we can’t explain it in any way that fits our “commonsense” notions of the world and reality.
Quoting IsaacAllright, let’s approach the problem from the other end. We have “consciousness” this integrated, unified, self-aware, self-reflective form of “experience” or “mind”. We could not do science or philosophy otherwise. At what point in the chain of being “existence” or “life” do you think this ability disappears working your way down. Do higher animals have experience? Ants? Bees? Flowers? And how would you or do you know? What physical test or quantitative measure do you have?
Quoting Marchesk or the basic “stuff” or units of nature are both physical and experiential (neutral monism).
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Quoting schopenhauer1 This is the problem with “functionalism”. We can design computer programs (counselors, psychiatrists, etc.) that cannot be distinguished from conversing with a human under controlled conditions but do we think these systems are “conscious, intelligent, experiential”? We can only infer the consciousness of “others” based on similarity, observation and projection. We can reasonably infer some kind of “mind” or “experience” in at least some other creatures as well but why stop there?
Quoting schopenhauer1There is a one to one correspondence between certain “brain states” and certain “experiences”. There is IMHO no free floating “consciousness”, experience or mind, they are all bound to the physical even while being more than just physical or completely or satisfactorily described by their physical manifestations or counterparts. Human experience, human “consciousness” requires a human brain. It is the complex unified integrated structure of the brain which correlates with the unified integrated complex nature of human mind. Human experience is just one form of mind in nature perhaps the most self-reflective and self-aware but nature is never entirely reducible to its scientific description at any level.
Can you describe an act of introspection that is not accompanied by "sensations"?
True, but for all intents and purposes, science assumes certain premises such that matter/energy and space/time is what is being measured. Thus, the hard problem might be one that is one step out of the grasp being that it might be a more metaphysical problem as you are saying. It is likely that a non-physicalist scientific explanation would be almost a contradiction in how it is based. The closest we can get is maybe ideas of observer-based worlds which posits an observer in the equation as a must?
Quantum mechanics is already like that.
The catch is, anything counts as an “observer”.
In other words, something like panpsychism.
You are misrepresenting my view. I said it may be necessary but not sufficient. In other words, I don't just imagine "green". I imagine a green object. Something might invoke a feeling like joy, that is not a qualia but an emotion or affective response of some sort. It is the fact that there is an internal-ness in general, whether that be colors, sounds, smells, whole objects, feelings, or even events associated with these things. The experience of understanding new information. Of understanding a piece of art. Of remembering a grocery list. These are more than mere qualia as far as my definition of it goes. I define qualia as sensations, not every internal experience you can have. Some other people might define it in a broader sense. Even if that was the case, that is playing semantics not philosophy per se. In other words, qualia can mean a billion things and it wouldn't change the nature of the hard question, nor its importance in philosophy of mind.
Interesting. Any scientific theories of that sort posit panpsychism as related to observer-dependent quantum theory?
That is one interpretation that I think is proposed by Ned Block. However, it may be that A-consciousness is intertwined with P-consciousness. I think it might be more fruitful to make a distinction between pure behavior vs. cognition. Neural networks are behaving, minds are cognizing.
I don't think it helps to confuse panpsychism with qualia, perception, sensation or functionalism.
Consciousness is the unified integrated presentation of sense data. Perception is a process (causal efficacy, presentational immediacy and symbolic reference). Introspection (self knowledge) is more than sense data.
What do you mean by "what-it's-like" vs. "being-a-reflexive-thing"?
Got it. People just don't like the idea of "drops" or "occassions" of experience. To them, brains are either online or offline. No brain, no online. No certain parts of the brain, no online. This raises a whole bunch of other problems, but they rather those problems than experience being primal. The main interesting point of Whitehead was the idea of "corpuscular societies" vs. "compound individuals.
[quote=IEP, Process Philosophy]]In some instances, actual occasions will come together and give rise to a “regnant” or dominant society of occasions. The most obvious example of this is when the molecule-occasions and cell-occasions in a body produce, by means of a central nervous system, a mind or soul. This mind or soul prehends all the feeling and experience of the billions of other bodily occasions and coordinates and integrates them into higher and more complex forms of experience. The entire society that supports and includes a dominant member is, to use Hartshorne’s term, a compound individual.
Other times, however, a bodily society of occasions lacks a dominant member to organize and integrate the experiences of others. Rocks, trees, and other non-sentient objects are examples of these aggregate or corpuscular societies. In this case, the diverse experiences of the multitude of actual occasions conflict, compete, and are for the most part lost and cancel each other out. Whereas the society of occasions that comprises a compound individual is a monarchy, Whitehead describes corpuscular societies as “democracies.” This duality accounts for how, at the macroscopic phenomenal level, we experience a duality between the mental and physical despite the fundamentally and uniformly experiential nature of reality. Those things that seem to be purely physical are corpuscular societies of occasions, while those objects that seem to possess consciousness, intelligence, or subjectivity are compound individuals.[/quote]
Similarly, Tononi has very similar ideas in his integrated information theory:
[quote=https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2014.0167](f) Aggregates are not conscious
‘Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence’. This is how William James illustrated the combination problem of panpsychism [110]. Or take John Searle: ‘Consciousness cannot spread over the universe like a thin veneer of jam; there has to be a point where my consciousness ends and yours begins’ [117]. Indeed, if consciousness is everywhere, why should it not animate the United States of America? IIT deals squarely with this problem by stating that only maxima of integrated information exist. Consider two people talking: within each brain, there will be a major complex—a set of neurons that form a maximally irreducible cause–effect structure with definite borders and a high value of ?max. Now let the two speak together. They will now form a system that is also irreducible (? > zero) due to their interactions. However, it is not maximally irreducible, since its value of integrated information will be much less than that of each of the two major complexes it contains. According to IIT, there should indeed be two separate experiences, but no superordinate conscious entity that is the union of the two. In other words, there is nothing-it-is-like-to-be two people, let alone the 300 plus million citizens making up the USA.13 Again, this point can be exemplified schematically by the system of figure 5a, right panel. While the five small complexes do interact, forming a larger integrated system, the larger system is not a complex: by the exclusion postulate, only the five smaller complexes exist, since they are local maxima of integrated information (?max = 0.19), while the larger system is not a complex (? = 0.03). Worse, a dumb thing with hardly any intrinsically distinguishable states, say a grain of sand for the sake of the argument, has no experience whatsoever. And heaping a large number of such zero-? systems on top of each other would not increase their ? to a non-zero value: to be a sand dune does not feel like anything either—aggregates have no consciousness.[/quote]
When I refer to "consciousness" as unified integrated experience with self knowledge it is to this kind of "society" I refer. It takes a certain kind of organizational structure to have such forms of experience. There are many different ways to describe the concept in language, I just prefer Whitehead because of some passing familiarity with his terminology and that because he creates his own terms they do not carry all the alternative meanings of some other descriptive terms. We have trouble defining mind, psyche, experience, awareness, consciousness, etc. much less indicating how we feel they differ from each other.
In scientific terms I think "actual occasions" are best understood as space time events of duration or quantum events with relations as opposed to quantum particles with inherent properties. Traditionally in language we describe a world of independent objects with properties but that is actually not correct. We describe a wall as "solid" which it is to our bodies but to xrays, neutrons and many other entities the wall is mostly empty space, so "solid" is a relationship not a property. Those objects that appear stationary and inert are really activities (quantum events, whirling atoms, etc.)) so again those "properties" are relationships not inherent to the object alone. In fact there are no independent objects or inherent properties. All properties are relationships. All objects are becoming (repetitive events) dependent on the world in which they exist and to which they relate.
In a temporal world what is responsible for continuity?. Where does novelty and creativity and intensity of experience come from?. These are metaphysical not scientific questions. So the fundamental question is the role of mind in nature. For a panpsychist experience is ubiquitous in nature (not consciousness like we humans possess, a special kind of experience or mind) but relations to other events, to the future and novelty (creativity) and to continuity with the past.
Process theory essentially comes down to the idea that durational events themselves are experiential and this is odd to most people. However, it is only as odd, or maybe even less odd than dualistic Cartesian Theater "experience foam" that just "arises" from "integration" events as a latecomer on the scene. Pick your poison.
I think the panpsychists on this thread have gone out of their way to try to explain the nuances of their views often misrepresented by such statements as these. I'm honestly not quite getting what you're getting at with this post. It seems more than a bit odd. Perhaps @prothero wants to take a swing at the thumb comment? And what does "Be Him" mean? Are you agreeing in some way via Spinozan pantheism or Hegelian idealism that all things are experiential to some degree?
Somewhere below Primates, Cetaceans and possibly Elephants.
At the moment we know that people do not report self-awareness, nor do they have any memories which result from self awareness if their rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum is damaged together with the left ventral, anterior insula and the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex. Every single person so far who's had fMri scanning in vegetative states has has disruption in the network between these three areas.
The anterior cingulate cortex has a lot of specialized neurons called spindle cells, which are found only in primates, cetaceans, and elephants. Thus animals less evolved than these would seem to be lacking a structure in the brain which has been experimentally shown to be required for self-awareness. It seem reasonable to conclude, for now, that this would mean animals who don't have this functional area are not self-aware.
It's possible, of course that other animals simply use different cortices for the purpose, certainly the root of consciousness itself (as in awake, as opposed to knocked-out) is in the rostral dorsolateral pontine tegmentum which is a feature of the brainstem, something shared with all other animals with a brain of any description. This would still exclude insects, however.
Excellent question.
Quoting Isaac
My vote, FWIW... where human infants acquire competence in pointing symbols (including samples) at things, so that a red thing is perceived as an example of red things.
Really? So get a newborn, poke it with a sharp stick, does it feel anything?
Feel consciously, I'm prepared to doubt. Not firmly. Just casting a preliminary vote.
If it might elicit a vote from you (because you weren't a panpsychist) I might ask you whether a snail poked with a sharp stick (and hardly lacking in responses quite rightly earning our sympathy) feels consciously.
I was going to add: ... or the kind of experience a sock can undergo?... but I gather that cuts no ice.
What Whitehead would call perception in the mode of symbolic reference which comes after causal efficacy and immediate presentation.
And this is why using "consciousness" (self knowledge, self reference, self awareness) as a synonym for "experience" creates a problem. You can read about unconscious ontology (whiteheads) or non conscious experience but no one is asserting that the experience of a flower, tree, snail is of the same degree or intensity or self knowledge as that of a human. Consciousness is a special kind of experience but without the lower orders of experience there would be no consciousness.
I’m a big Whitehead fan, and I like to take this individual-society metaphor in the other direction too. I analogize a society’s educational and governmental institutions to the mind and the will, a kind of societal self-awareness and self-control. And likewise I say that both epistemic and deontic authority are spread diffusely through society in a way that is negligible at the individual level, much like mind and will are diffused throughout the universe in a way that is negligible at the atomic scale. But in both cases, the right kind of functional structures built up out of those constituents can integrate that negligibly diffuse stuff together into something significant: consciousness and free will as we ordinary think of them in humans on the individual scale, and some semblance of academic and political authorities on the societal scale. At both scales, the important feature of this kind of view is that the “novel” thing that’s built up by the end is just a refined form of something normal that’s everywhere, and isn’t actually something wholly new that at some point suddenly starts happening in a way discontinuous with that what was already going on before.
This is one of the kinds of things that I think my Structure of Philosophy helps highlight or draw attention too:
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/8303/the-structure-of-philosophy
Sounds cool. Will drink.
Quoting prothero
My point exactly. Please read the context.
Quoting prothero
This is obvious, but is also what lulls people into the sleep from which this consideration,
Quoting Zelebg
... really ought to rudely awaken them.
The "Combination Problem" of Consciousness raises the question of how invisible metaphysical mind-stuff could add-up to visible physical matter-stuff. About 15 years ago, a simple observation by a quantum physicist suggested to me a solution to the Mind/Body paradox. He said, "a Virtual Particle is nothing but Information". He was merely noting that VPs have no measurable tangible material physical properties, they only have mental intangible mathematical metaphysical qualities : formalized as statistical probabilities. Mathematical definitions, such as the Wavefunction do not exist in actuality, but only in potentiality. Yet they are meaningful to rational receptive minds. (i.e. how would a dog conceive of a wavefunction?)
That's when it occurred to me that Matter & Information might be different forms of the same underlying essence : the power to be, and to cause. Einstein had long ago equated Energy with a strange malleable property of Matter that varies with speed relative to Light : Mass. But neither Energy nor Mass are material substances. They exist only as ideas in minds capable of perceiving relationship patterns in spatial or temporal arrays of objects.Those rational patterns may be called mathematical "Facts" by definition, but they are not material "Things". Instead, they are various forms of general Information about things, and how things are related to each other. So this hypothetical universal Mind-field (pan-informationism) is omni-potential. Whose Mind? Whose Potential? Those are not scientific questions, in that they imply super-human minds & powers. But philosophers over the ages have given tentative labels to that great unknown Rational Force : Logos, Demiurge, God, Anima Mundi, Great Spirit, etc. What would you call the ultimate source of all Causes and Effects in the world?
Chalmers : Nevertheless, panpsychism is subject to a major challenge: the combination problem. This is roughly the question: how do the experiences of fundamental physical entities such as quarks and photons combine to yield the familiar sort of human conscious experience that we know and love.
Information : [i]1. facts provided or learned about something or someone.
2. what is conveyed or represented by a particular arrangement or sequence of things.[/i]
[ Note : an "arrangement" is a pattern that is meaningful to a mind ]
The bottom line of this line of reasoning is that, --- just as Energy is measured as a ratio (or Proportion) between Hot & Cold, or High or Low, or to positive/negative poles of wavelength --- Mind is also measured in Reasons (Latin - rationes decidendi). Ratios and Proportions are not real physical things, but mental ideas about things. Hence, Energy is nothing but the Idea of Causation, which Hume noted is merely the attribution of creative power to a prior event. So Matter is a product of the "creative power" of the mental ratios that, in other contexts, we call Reason. Therefore, all things in the world are emergent forms of Generic Information : Panpsychism -- all Is Mind. Enformationism -- all is Information. This theory is a 21st century version of ancient Idealism, but it does not deny Realism.
Causation : discovery of relations between objects of comparison. ___Hume
Information : knowledge of relations between things
"knowledge is power"
Enformationism is based on the "dual aspect form" of Energy/Matter, or Body/Mind. Hence it's a type of "neutral monism". Reality is neither all mental (Spiritualism), nor all material (Materialism), but all Potential (Enformationism). Monistic Information is the power to Enform, to create both material objects and mental ideas.
Neutral Monism : What distinguishes neutral monism from its monistic rivals is the claim that the intrinsic nature of ultimate reality is neither mental nor physical. [ it is instead both physical and metaphysical[/i] ]
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neutral-monism/
Reason is mind stuff : Reckoning, account, reason, rationale, judgement, consideration, system, manner, method, intention
From this new perspective, "the emergence of experience from the pre-experiential" would be completely natural and evolutionary. Hence, Reality is all Information all the time. it seems to have begun as the creative Potential of the original Singularity, which manifested at first as a prototype of normal Energy & Matter (Quark Gluon Plasma). Unless you believe in magic, all things & events & experiences in the current world originated in that creative event, via emergent phenomena, and phase transitions. Sorry, all this is tricky techy, but I go into even more detail in my blogs. :nerd:
Big Bang's invisible plasma : https://www.space.com/31517-entire-universe-squeezed-one-image.html
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