A hybrid philosophy of mind

Phenomenal consciousness is perhaps best defined in distinction from what it is not. It is not anything to do with any behavioral properties of a thing.

The most influential formulation of the combination problem was given by William James in The Principles of Psychology (1895). In criticizing “mind-dust theory”, on which mental states are held to be compounds of elemental mental states, James made the following observations:

"Where the elemental units are supposed to be feelings, the case is in no wise altered. Take a hundred of them, shuffle them and pack them as close together as you can (whatever that may mean); still each remains the same feeling it always was, shut in its own skin, windowless, ignorant of what the other feelings are and mean. There would be a hundred-and-first feeling there, if, when a group or series of such feelings were set up, a consciousness belonging to the group as such should emerge. And this 101st feeling would be a totally new fact; the 100 original feelings might, by a curious physical law, be a signal for its creation, when they came together; but they would have no substantial identity with it, nor it with them, and one could never deduce the one from the others, or (in any intelligible sense) say that they evolved it. 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. We talk of the ‘spirit of the age,’ and the ‘sentiment of the people,’ and in various ways we hypostatize ‘public opinion.’ But we know this to be symbolic speech, and never dream that the spirit, opinion, sentiment, etc., constitute a consciousness other than, and additional to, that of the several individuals whom the words ‘age,’ ‘people,’ or ‘public’ denote. The private minds do not agglomerate into a higher compound mind."

James is here arguing that experiences (feelings) do not aggregate into further experiences, and that minds do not aggregate into further minds. If this is right, any version of panpsychism that holds that microexperiences (experiences of microphysical entities) combine to yield macroexperiences (experiences of macroscopic entities such as humans) is in trouble.

But in ordinary usage, something being a mind means more than just being some kind of prototypical subject of phenomenal experience, or instantiating any old function or another. It means instantiating some specific kinds of functions that we recognize as mental.

But I think that consciousness as we ordinarily speak of it is access consciousness, to be addressed later, and that access consciousness is a purely functional, basically mechanistic property that is built up out of, or weakly emerges from, the ordinary physical properties of the physical things that compose an access-conscious being.

An example of this is temperature, which is a (weakly) emergent property of the motion of molecules in a substance: if you modeled the motion of all the molecules in a substance, you would end up modeling something that exhibited temperature for free, and if that was the scale you were interested in, you could usefully model just that aggregate property of temperature instead and ignore the details of the motion of individual molecules. I have no objection to such "weak" emergentism.

There's stuff in between this and strong emergence. Thermodynamic properties of gases in a box are just statistical, large-scale descriptions of fundamental particulate behaviour. However, there is such a thing as collective behaviour. A phonon is an example of this. While phononic behaviour is just motion, you need at least two interacting bodies for these particular modes of motion to emerge. Likewise, while chemical bonds are just modes of electrostatic attraction, they are only possible when you have two or more atoms. There's important stuff between statistics and magic (strong emergentism). So the difference between the thermodynamics of gases, liquids, and solids is derivable but not comprehensible in terms of the dynamics of individual atoms: you have to consider at least two (often more) of something before some behaviours are possible.

A problem completely avoided by not using terminology regarding psychological phenomena to describe non-psychological phenomena. Put it this way: a horse is just a bunch of physical stuff reacting to and acting on a bunch of other physical stuff, and everything is like this. So everything is a horse? No. Psychological phenomena regard brains. It doesn't matter if there's no fundamental difference between a brain and a bowl of soup: it's a classification for specific kinds of things (or behaviours: to be is to do).

Being itself is purely functional though, isn't it? You went to pains in previous threads to establish that there is no real distinction between to be (i.e. to have a bundle of properties) and to do (i.e. to have the potential to behave a certain way). Seems odd now to insist on a distinction between emergent properties and emergent function.

There's stuff in between this and strong emergence. Thermodynamic properties of gases in a box are just statistical, large-scale descriptions of fundamental particulate behaviour. However, there is such a thing as collective behaviour. A phonon is an example of this. While phononic behaviour is just motion, you need at least two interacting bodies for these particular modes of motion to emerge. Likewise, while chemical bonds are just modes of electrostatic attraction, they are only possible when you have two or more atoms. There's important stuff between statistics and magic (strong emergentism). So the difference between the thermodynamics of gases, liquids, and solids is derivable but not comprehensible in terms of the dynamics of individual atoms: you have to consider at least two (often more) of something before some behaviours are possible.

Why are you assuming physicalism to be the case?

Okay, I have no objection to that. That is still weak emergence

I’m mostly using psychological terminology for phenomenal consciousness just because that’s the terminology already used for it, but I can see the historical reasons for its use

I’m not trying to do that, and I don’t see how you can read that in to the passage you responded to.

That is still weak emergence, in that if you modeled the underlying system that that behavior emerges from, you would automatically model the emergent behavior (as in see that behavior emerge in your model; not that you would have a higher-level model of it).

What's your objection to strong emergence?

it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, and thus violates my previously established position against fideism.

It just seems like a category error to call physics 'psychology'.

What is a 'purely functional' thing, then?

I guess my salient point is: are you assuming some non-conscious stuff exists? If so, do you believe consciousness comes from this stuff?

"If you mean access consciousness, then I think there are lots and lots of things (most things) that are not access conscious, and our access consciousness, "consciousness" in the sense that we ordinarily mean it, is built up out of that stuff."

You're back to the Hard Problem: how does "active consciousness" emerge from "non-active consciousness" stuff?

Agreed, and that's why I wouldn't do that.

My overall position is saying that whatever metaphysics is going on with human beings that may be required for our having of a subjective experience, that metaphysics is going on with everything and is not special to humans; the important difference between humans and e.g. rocks, that makes us conscious in the ordinary sense (access conscious), is only the difference in the function of a human vs a rock, not anything metaphysically different.

What's your objection to strong emergence?
— Olivier5

Basically, it's magic.

I think you're misreading "access" as "active" here.

In any case, access consciousness is the topic of the easy problem. There is no mystery there. Access consciousness is just a kind of functionality. How does the function of my computer emerge from the function of the atoms it's built out of? Very carefully, but not philosophically mysteriously. Likewise, the function of brains emerges from the function of atoms in a similar fashion.

Whatever there is besides that function, whatever metaphysically special thing there also needs to be, that is phenomenal consciousness, which is the subject of the hard problem, and my solution to that is that everything has it, so nothing (phenomenally-)conscious emerges from anything non-(phenomenally-)conscious, because there is nothing non-(phenomenally-)conscious.

You sound like a panpsychist idealist. That's a contradiction

By describing it as panpsychism (everything is conscious), you are doing that. Yes, you are demoting consciousness in this context to any physical response function, but that itself is a result of poor choice of terminology.

So either:
- we're zombies ourselves,
- magic happens, or
- everything "has a mind" in the sense that these people are talking about.

Weakly emergent phenomena build up out of more fundamental phenomena. The kinds of emergent phenomena that Kenosha lists are things that build up out of the phenomena exhibited by basic physical particles: if you model their motion, mass, charge, etc, and model an appropriate aggregate of them just in terms of their motion, mass, charge, etc, you get the emergent phenomena in the model for free.

Basically, it's magic.

it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full,

Have you ever heard of sexual reproduction? It is a universal property of living systems, and you can't find it anywhere in non living stuff. Stones and stars don't copulate. QED here is a strongly emerging phenomenon.

human beings are not produced by chemical synthesis. They are made by sexual reproduction

You and I are made of information, essentially.

Do you think sexual reproduction involves any processes that are not built up out of the processes of the cells that are built up out of molecules that are built up out of atoms that are built up out of quarks etc? Is there some magic that happens somewhere in there? If not, then that's not strong emergence.

, "strong" emergentism holds some wholes to be truly greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, wholly new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts.

If you had read the web of reality thread, you'd see I already agree that everything is made of information.

Atoms don't reproduce, and molecules don't reproduce. They don't have any 'elementary reproduction'

I don't see any reason to assume they have any 'elementary consciousness' as a way to explain our consciousness... Both are just behaviors that emerged through life.

Try and understand what I am saying about the Heraclitus river. What is a river? It is not actually defined by the specific molecules of water flowing through it. Otherwise you wouldn't see the same river twice. Likewise your body is not defined by the atoms flowing through it.

No, but sexual reproduction is not anything more than a complicated process of atoms interacting in the way that atoms do. Nowhere in that process is it required to suddenly invoke some elan vital or such to make the reproduced organism alive like its parents.

A river can’t do anything that a bunch of water molecules can’t do,

I never said it was magic, but it's an emerging phenomenon in the sense that it cannot happen outside of life. It has no meaning at the atomic level. No precursor, nothing that compares. It only means something at the cellular level. Below that level, it makes no sense at all.

Strong emergence is definitionally "like magic"

Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic. How does an irreducible but supervenient downward causal power arise, since by definition it cannot be due to the aggregation of the micro-level potentialities? Such causal powers would be quite unlike anything within our scientific ken. This not only indicates how they will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism. Their mysteriousness will only heighten the traditional worry that emergence entails illegitimately getting something from nothing.

If I kick a rock..Will it experience anything? Will it think to itself "I have been kicked!" ?

there's reason to think that something prototypical of human experience still happens to a rock.

My take is that the distinction between weak and strong emergence is confusing a quantitative difference for a qualitative one.

The latter can either be because metaphysically boring material stuff, arranged the right way, magically gives rise to something metaphysically novel (strong emergence); or else that whatever it is that a real human is supposed to have that a philosophical zombie wouldn't -- which is not anything functional, because a zombie is functionally identical to a human -- is just something that everything has.

Why would you be surprised at the sudden emergence of something metaphysically interesting?

Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence.

Strong emergence describes the direct causal action of a high-level system upon its components; qualities produced this way are irreducible to the system's constituent parts.[11] The whole is other than the sum of its parts. An example from physics of such emergence is water, which appears unpredictable even after an exhaustive study of the properties of its constituent atoms of hydrogen and oxygen.

It’s not the interesting part, it’s the novel part.

Strong emergence definitionally differs from weak emergence. Things that meet the criteria for strong emergence are “like magic”; things that only meet the criteria for weak emergence are not. So things that are not “like magic” — not of the same character as the things compared to magic — are not meeting the criteria for strong emergence.

@Kenosha Kid, please back me up here.

The idea of the Scrabble tiles is that a new thing 'a word' has arisen randomly from the casting of the tiles, but this 'thing' is a human construct,

That would be dandy, except that "magic" is a very vague term, often applied to things we don't quite understand but seem nevertheless real. The magic of the gap. And this is the case here: Pfhorest's use of the word 'magic' only denotes that he doesn't understand something, and thus rejects it as impossible.

Where did the dictionary come from? That’s where the magic happens. It’s not just building up from things inherent in the tiles, bottom-up: something other than the behavior of the tiles is exteriorly imposed on them from the top down.

So the dictionary weakly emerges from the behavior of the scrabble tiles, which as I said is fine by me.

The whole point is that many 'weak emergences' add up to a 'strong emergence'.

A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is, on my account, the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject,

Supernatural beings and philosophical zombies are ontologically quite similar on my account, as for something to be supernatural would be for it to have no observable behavior, and for something to be a philosophical zombie would be for it to have no phenomenal experience. Both of those are just different perspectives on the thing in question being completely cut off from the web of interactions that is reality, and therefore unreal.

Specifically, as regards philosophy of mind, it holds that when physical objects are arranged into the right relations with each other, wholly new mental properties apply to the composite object they create, mental properties that cannot be decomposed into aggregates of the physical properties of the physical objects that went into making the composite object that has these new mental properties.

From that moment it can react to inputs and produce outputs (lights, for example), whereas previously it was as dormant as a rock.

True, because its configuration now enables all of those inanimate objects to interact in a certain way. But the kind of actions they do to each other are still actions that their constituent parts were capable of all along. Every copper atom is already capable of exchanging electrons with neighboring atoms; a closed circuit just gives a bunch of them motive and opportunity to pass electrons around with each other in a circle.

So when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, either it is wholly absent from the most fundamental building blocks of physical things and so is still absent from anything built out of them, including humans — which I've already rejected above — or else it is present at least in humans, as concluded above, and so at least some precursor of it must be present in the stuff out of which humans are built, and the stuff out of which that stuff is built, and so on so that at least something prototypical of phenomenal consciousness as humans experience it is already present in everything, to serve as the building blocks of more advanced kinds of phenomenal

I don't see that you've accounted for qualia. Consider Mary, who is the world's foremost expert on color, but has never experienced redness. She learns to associate her intellectual knowledge with the experience only after she actually has the experience.

Against Eliminativism

I am against eliminativism for the simple reason that I am directly aware of my own conscious experience, and whatever the nature of that may be, it seems that any philosophical argument that concludes that I am not actually having any conscious experience must have made some misstep somewhere and at best proven that something else mistakenly called "conscious experience" doesn't exist. But beyond my own personal experience, I find arguments put forth by other philosophers, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's room" thought experiment, to convincingly defeat eliminativism, though not to defeat physicalism itself as they are intended to do.

In the "Mary's room" thought experiment, we imagine a woman named Mary who has been raised her entire life in a black-and-white room experiencing the world only through a black-and-white TV screen, but who has extensively studied and become an expert on the topic of color. She knows everything there is to know about the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation produced by various physical processes, how those interact with nerves in the eye and create signals that are processed by the brain, even the cultural significances of various colors, but she has never herself actually experienced color. We then imagine Mary leaving her room and seeing the color red for the first time, and in doing so, learning something new, despite supposedly knowing everything there was to know about color already: what the color red looks like.

This thought experiment was originally put forth to argue that there is something non-physical involved in the experience of color that Mary could not have learned about by studying the physical science of color, and I don't think it succeeds at all in establishing that, but I do think that it conclusively establishes that there is a difference between knowing, in a third-person fashion, how physical systems behave in various circumstances, and knowing, in the first person, what it's like to be such a physical system in such circumstances. In essence, I think it succeeds merely in showing that we are not philosophical zombies.

A more visceral analogous thought experiment I like to think of is that no amount of studying the physics, biology, psychology, or sociology of sex will ever suffice to answer the question "what's it like to have sex?" Actually doing it yourself is the only way to have that first-person experience; at best, that third-person knowledge of the way things behave can be instrumentally useful to recreating a first-person experience. But even then, you have to actually subject yourself to the experience to experience it, and that experience that can only be known in the first person is all that's meant by phenomenal consciousness.

One way I look it physicalism, is that if true, it should be possible, in principle, to construct a machine that operates identically to human consciousness.

How would a machine experience qualia, in a non-zombie way?

How would a machine experience qualia, in a non-zombie way? — Relativist

The same way a human does: by instantiating the same function as a human, and so having its phenomenal experience (which correlates with function, in all things) be like that of all things that instantiate such a function, like humans.

Instantiating the function isn't enough - a zombie could record the frequency of reflected light and proceed to function appropriately.

elativist
wrong thread?

That’s the part where my panpsychism comes in. Whatever it is besides mere function that human consciousness involves, I hold that EVERYTHING already has that in some form or another, and the specific form of it becomes more sophisticated along with the functionality, because it is the other half of functionality besides the behavioral output.

Capacity for experience is not necessarily magical or non-physical. And granting it to everything is the only reasonable way of preserving the existence of minds in a physicalist account, since the only logical alternatives are that either nothing, not even humans, have any first-person experience (and so minds in the normal sense don't really exist); or else some things, like humans, magically get it from nothing (and so something non-physical happens)."

some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full,

If minds/consciousness consists of both physical and/non physical elements, then they cannot be properly taken into account in terms of one or the other.

The physicalism project is to account for mental activity, not some incompatible, abstract concept of "mind".

If minds/consciousness consists of both physical and/non physical elements, then they cannot be properly taken into account in terms of one or the other.
— creativesoul
Sure, but you have the burden of showing that minds are things, not just a reified abstraction, and that these things have non-physical parts.

This boulder has the capacity for experience, but it differs in two important ways from us: 1) it lacks self-reflection on those experiences; 2) it does not experience qualia.

I can write a hundred sentences describing the pain, but nothing I say will be equivalent to the raw experience.

Not all matter is wet, even in the slightest degree, but liquids usually are.

rocks don't have experiences. What is it like to be an electron? is a nonsensical question

If the claim is that things like rocks have experiences, you're so close to idealism, just go whole hog and ditch the physical.

Minds consist entirely of thought and belief. Thought and belief... correlations between different things. Correlations are not physical. Not much of a burden really.

I can write a hundred sentences describing the pain, but nothing I say will be equivalent to the raw experience.
— Relativist

Agreed. But that says nothing at all about what kinds of things can have such experiences.

And correlation occurs all the way down...

Sure, but you have the burden of showing that minds are things, not just a reified abstraction, and that these things have non-physical parts.
— Relativist

Minds consist entirely of thought and belief. Thought and belief... correlations between different things. Correlations are not physical. Not much of a burden really.

Thoughts draw on memories. Aren't memories stored in the brain?

Have you heard the theory that the memory is stored in the tissue of the body, analogous to tape recording, and the brain mere acts as the processor for accessing those memories? I think there is a name for it but I can't recall. ironic huh?

How does an immaterial mind extract the data in a physical medium?

The mind also stores data into the brain: we can remember past thoughts, so it can't just be a passive reading.

Explain the physical-immaterial interface, both input and output.

Is there a single point of access into the brain?

Can the mind directly access every component of the brain?

Can my mind interact with physical things other than my brain? If not, why not?

What becomes of the mind when the brain is dead?

Did it exist before my body? If not, when did it come to exist? Did it pop into existence all at once, or did it slowly develop, like the brain?

No. Correlation is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things. So...

Correlation is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of drawing correlations between different things.

You need to account for the mind-brain relationship.

For example, you say the mind is immaterial, but is it spatially located? If so, where is it?

My thoughts can cause me to raise my hand. Why can't my thoughts cause your hand to raise?

Thoughts draw on memories. Aren't memories stored in the brain?

Memories become lost, or at least inaccessible, when the brain is damaged by trauma or disease. How do you account for that?

If memories are in the brain, how does an immaterial mind access them?

If my mind can access my memories, why can't it access yours?

Let's talk about the kinds of things that experience pain.

Start with its function: it alerts us to damage, induces us to seek remediation, and to avoid the behavior that caused it. So only objects that can function in this way can have it: complex, living organisms. Maybe they don't all experience pain (do grapevines experience pain?), but this at least narrows it a good bit.

This doesn't get us any closer to understanding how to reproduce the experience in a robot.

Not the way I see it. Correlation is existentially dependent upon a physical system capable of structurally manifesting evidence of that correlation.

Rock molecules manifest correlations with each other, transferring temperature changes, electrons, etc. If you break a rock, those molecules suddenly exposed to the air manifest a correlation with interacting oxygen molecules instead. The correlation may exist only in each instant of interaction, but there is physical evidence of its existence, nonetheless.

That evidence is relevant information to a creature capable of extrapolating the potential existence of correlations between different things.

That is a bit of a tautology. It makes more sense to say "Correlation is existentially dependent upon a creature capable of distinction of determinate forms."

Seems to me that you're conflating causal physical systems/interactions with correlations, or more directly, conflating causality and meaning. The former is not existentially dependent upon a mind. To quite the contrary, minds are existentially dependent upon causality.

Fire causes pain when touched. The pain is the result of physical interactions between fire and body. It is not the result of correlations. When a creature draws correlations between it's own behaviour(touching fire) and the ensuing pain, it has rightly attributed and/or recognized causality. The experience of touching fire becomes meaningful to the creature as a result of those correlations. The creature will no longer touch fire as a result of drawing correlations between the behaviour and the pain, and that holds good regardless of whether or it it is capable of taking it's own experience into account. Contrary to Hume and those who hold his problem of induction so dear, such recognition/attribution of causality does not require repeated experience. Once is enough.

All attribution of meaning requires a mind capable of drawing correlations between different things. Purely physical causal relationships do not. All meaning is existentially dependent upon a plurality of things and a creature capable of drawing correlations between them. So, minds are existentially dependent upon both physical and non physical things.

Phenomenal consciousness is defined in opposition to that kind of process. Nothing that the ordinary mechanical properties of matter can build up to, including the full complex and nuanced behavior of a human being, can constitute phenomenal consciousness by itself, as it is defined by the people who came up with the idea.

Distinguishing between things seems to me to require quite a bit more than just drawing a correlation between things. The former takes note of and/or sets out the differences between things, whereas the latter does not.

Correlation is dependent on distinction. Before we can draw any correlation between one thing and another, we must distinguish one thing from another, otherwise there would be no content to correlate.

It's said that an unborn child becomes familiar with the sound of it's own mother's voice. That familiarity is the result of correlations draw between it's own contentment/discontentment and the mother's voice. I see no reason to say that that unborn child has distinguished between it's own physiological and biological processes and the sound of it's mother's voice.

Perceiving different things is not the same as perceiving them as different things.

if you make something with that function, it will both exhibit that behavior, and undergo that experience.

It's said that an unborn child becomes familiar with the sound of it's own mother's voice. That familiarity is the result of correlations draw between it's own contentment/discontentment and the mother's voice. I see no reason to say that that unborn child has distinguished between it's own physiological and biological processes and the sound of it's mother's voice.
— creativesoul

You see, you've proven my point. You are incapable of even speaking of any correlation between things without first making a distinction: viz. child and mother.

The child may not be able to articulate it, but he definitely feels himself as distinct and separate from his mother. The correlations might (arguably) occur coincidentally with distinction, but they definitely do not precede it.

How is it possible to perceive different things without perceiving those different things as different things?

Take whatever the supposed difference is between a real human and a philosophical zombie. On my account, everything has that. Because the alternative is either that nothing has that, and we're all zombies; or that some magic happens such that that only we have that, and other things don't.

Isn’t the third alternative that only we (or things like us) have that, but without some magic happening?

Pan-psychists' being wrong about zombies doesn't make them right about pan-psychism.

Pan-psychists' being wrong about zombies

Phenomenal consciousness is defined in opposition to that kind of process. Nothing that the ordinary mechanical properties of matter can build up to, including the full complex and nuanced behavior of a human being, can constitute phenomenal consciousness by itself, as it is defined by the people who came up with the idea.

If it could happen without “magic”, that would mean it was something that could be built up from non-conscious processes, and so would not be whatever the supposed difference is between a philosophical zombie and a real person.

If it could happen without “magic”, that would mean it was something that could be built up from non-conscious processes, and so would not be whatever the supposed difference is between a philosophical zombie and a real person.

Seems you're using the term "correlation" as a synonym for any and all connections, including physical causal chains(causality) whereas I'm not. I do not think we're too far apart, but it's hard to tell. I cannot perform substitution without difficulty.

I'm gathering that correlation is not the result of a creature's drawing correlations on your view.

Anyway, I’d almost lost sight of my original reason for wanting to post here, which was to ask you: what reason is there to attribute minds or experience to things, such as rocks, that show absolutely no signs of having minds or experience?

...Correlation, as I see it, is the process of establishing a mutual relationship or connection between two things... ...The process as a structural relation exists without any resulting ‘correlation’ being manifest as such. When one is manifest, it informs the system’s most complex organisational structure, whether it’s as a causal correlation or a conceptual one.

Causal physical systems/interactions ARE correlations.

And between magic happening, us being zombies, or everything “having a mind” in some trivial way that has no bearing on their function in the real world, the last seems least absurd.

..between magic happening, us being zombies, or everything “having a mind” in some trivial way that has no bearing on their function in the real world, the last seems least absurd.

Why do you prefer panpsychism to emergentism (leaving aside the issue of weak vs strong)?

I would think that given what we already know about the evolutionary progression of life on earth, minds would slowly emerge.

The issue of weak vs strong is precisely the issue, so we can't leave it aside. Well, strong vs weak, and access vs phenomenal consciousness.

I think access consciousness does emerge, weakly. And the specific content of our phenomenal consciousness emerges, weakly, along with it.

The mere having of any phenomenal consciousness at all is the kind of thing that, by the way it's defined, could only emerge strongly. And strong emergence is like magic, so a no go.

everything has a first-person perspective

...everything has a first-person perspective, because the alternative is either that even we do not, or that something is metaphysically special about us.

There is another sense of the word that means awareness of something, or knowledge of it; that topic is not directly relevant to philosophy of mind, but rather to epistemology.

I still don’t understand why you prefer panpsychism to emergentism.

because the alternative is either that even we do not [have phenomenal consciousness], or that something is metaphysically special about us.

Also, you claim that phenomenal consciousness can "only emerge strongly" and is "like magic", so is impossible. Yet, you also define phenomenal consciousness as having a first-person perspective. Having a first-person perspective is impossible?

I think you are defining “first-person perspective” in such a way that it has nothing to do with minds.

I suggest that our ability to talk about our own thought and belief as well as other people's is special enough.

I've no idea what "metaphysically special" is supposed to mean.

First person perspectives are self reports.

everything has a first-person perspective, because the alternative is either that even we do not, or that something is metaphysically special about us.

Yet you've not explained why you have an issue with there being something metaphysically special about us.

I oppose transcendentalism ... as a direct consequence of my position against fideism. While fideism is only a methodology, a process by which to accept or reject opinions, and does not in itself mean any set of such opinions, there are some kinds opinions that cannot possibly be justified except by fideistic methods, so the rejection of fideism demands the rejection of such opinions. Transcendentalist opinions, as I mean the word, are precisely those that would demand appeals to faith to support them, because they make claims about things that nobody could ever check, those things being beyond all experience.

...

The most archetypical kind of transcendentalist opinion is belief in the supernatural. "Natural" in the relevant sense here is roughly equivalent to "empirical": the natural world is the world that we can observe with our senses, directly or indirectly. That "indirectly" part is important for establishing the transcendence of the supernatural. We cannot, for example, see wind directly, but we can see that leaves move in response to the wind, and so find reason to suppose that wind exists, to cause that effect. Much about the natural world posited by modern science has been discovered through increasingly sophisticated indirect observation of that sort. We cannot directly see, or hear, or touch, or otherwise observe, many subtle facets of the world that are posited by science today, but we can see the effects they have on other things that we can directly observe, including special instruments built for that purpose, and so we can indirectly observe those things.

Anything that has any effect on the observable world is consequently indirectly observable through that very effect, and is therefore itself to be reckoned as much a part of the natural world as anything else that we can indirectly observe. For something to be truly supernatural, then, it would have to have no observable effect at all on any observable thing. Consequently, we would have no way to tell whether that supernatural thing actually existed, as the world that we experience would seem exactly the same one way or the other, so there could be no reason to suppose its existence, no test that could be done to suggest any answer to the question of its existence. And so if we held a belief in it anyway, we would have to do so only on faith; and if we reject appeals to faith, we consequently have to reject claims of the supernatural.

...

But by "faith" I don't mean any particular religious beliefs, such as belief in gods, souls, or afterlives, but rather a more abstract methodology that could underlie any particular opinion about any particular thing. I also don't mean just holding some opinion "on faith", as in without sufficient reason; I don't think you need reasons simply to hold an opinion yourself. I am only against appeals to faith, by which I mean I am against assertions — statements not merely to the effect that one is of some opinion oneself, but that it is the correct opinion, that everyone should adopt — that are made arbitrarily; not for any reason, not "because of..." anything, but "just because"; assertions that some claim is true because it just is, with no further justification to back that claim up. I am against assertions put forth as beyond question, for if they needed no justification to stand then there could be no room to doubt them.

In short, I am against supposing that there are any such things as unquestionable answers.

I object to fideism thus defined on pragmatic grounds. I think it is fine and even unavoidable that we pick our initial opinions arbitrarily, for no good reason. But when we do, we then have a very high chance of those initial opinions just happening to be wrong. If we go on to hold those arbitrary opinions (that we just happened into for no solid reason) to be above question, which is the defining characteristic of fideism as I mean it here, then we will never change away from those wrong opinions, and will remain wrong forever. Only by rejecting fideism, and remaining always open to the possibility that there may be reasons to reject our current opinions, do we open up the possibility of our opinions becoming more correct over time. So if we ever want to have more than an arbitrary chance of our opinions being right, we must always acknowledge that there is a chance that our opinions are wrong.

I'm surprised to hear you of all people asking for a justification to physicalism. Aren't you hard-core all-there-is-to-the-mind-is-the-brain?

In any case, you've already seen my arguments against the supernatural, as you were engaged extensively in the thread where I presented them. And by "metaphysically special" I mean pretty much "supernatural"

Ah, then we have crossed wires somewhere. Here's what I get thus far from your argument...

1. There exists a metaphysical construct called 'phenomenal consciousness' or 'first-person experience'.
2. This appears to be unique to humans (or sentient life)
3. It cannot not be there because otherwise we'd be philosophical zombies
4. It cannot appear out of nowhere simply by the action of some cells coming together otherwise that would require supernatural intervention.

So it must have been present feature of the cells (and other objects?) all along, just weakly expressed.

What I don't get (and I think this is Luke's question as well). Is why you're concerned about a metaphysical construct emerging out of nowhere. It has no implications for physicalism at all. Metaphysical constructs are aspects of the human minds which hold them, they can be attached to absolutely anything by any rules whatsoever. If we want to attach 'first person perspective' to only humans, then what is preventing us from doing so? We made it up after all, we can attach it to whatever we like, surely?

No, I claim that strong emergence is like magic, and so impossible.

So phenomenal consciousness (like anything else) cannot strongly emerge.

But if it emerges at all, it must emerge strongly, by the way it is defined (as something that no combination of the ordinary behavior of physical stuff can equate to, and therefore not something that can weakly emerge from ordinary physical stuff that completely lacks anything like it).

Therefore it must not emerge at all.

So either it does not exist at all (and we ourselves are zombies), or else it is omnipresent.

We are not zombies, so it must be omnipresent.

They talk about the concept of philosophical zombies who behave in every way like a human, so there's nothing behavioral, no test we can do from the third person, to tell if they are zombies. They say these things that certainly act in every way like they have minds could conceivable lack "minds", in the sense of lacking a first-person perspective: though from the outside they seem exactly like humans, from the inside nothing seems like anything because there is no seeming-from-the-inside to them.

And I just say that there's a seeming-from-the-inside (a first person perspective) to anything, and that's completely trivial and nothing special at all for most things, because most things don't have any complicated sensory apparatuses and interpretive intelligence and reflexive awareness and control, and those are the things that make our first-person perspective interesting the way it is.

What I don't get (and I think this is Luke's question as well). Is why you're concerned about a metaphysical construct emerging out of nowhere. It has no implications for physicalism at all.

The only two options for phenomenal consciousness are either strong emergence (i.e. magic/supernatural, so impossible) or else panpsychism? Surely there's another option.

I don't follow your leap in reasoning from your first paragraph to your second. Wouldn't a better response be - as you say elsewhere - that the idea of p-zombies is simply incoherent?

Why take the extreme position that everything must have a first-person perspective? I view this as diminishing the usual meaning of the word "mind" to the point that it evaporates entirely. You are no longer talking about the "mind" at that point (in the non-trivial sense), because not everything has one, unless you are a panpsychist. Correct me if I misunderstand you, but I think your position is not that everything has a mind - according to the usual meaning of the word "mind". And therefore, you also aren't using the word "panpsychism" in its typical sense, which I understand to mean that everything does have a mind - according to the usual meaning of the word "mind".

Or else we are zombies ourselves (which eliminativists would say), but yes basically.

I only say it's incoherent because I hold that you can't have something without a first-person perspective, and the first-person perspective of anything matches its third-person-observable function, so any "zombie" that's functionally identical to a human must have the same experience as a human and so not actually be a zombie.

I did clarify in the OP that my view is specifically pan-proto-experientialism, and not the old-fashioned kind of panpsychism. It's pan"psych"ism about phenomenal "consciousness", which I hold is just the prototypical capacity for experience, not fully fledged actual mind/psyche/consciousness in the usual sense.

Other philosophers talk about "mind" in that other sense though, the sense I think is trivial and not the usual sense, and they seem to find plenty of traction with lay people.

Yes, which I consider to be a better response than resorting to the extreme position of panpsychism.

I don't see what this has to do with phenomenal consciousness or minds in the usual sense

Is this the same sense of "mind" you are talking about when you say that a rock has a first-person perspective? Which philosophers talk about "mind" in this other sense?

Phenomenal conscious is not about minds in the usual sense, it’s about whatever it is that zombies indistinguishable from humans in the third person could supposedly lack. A zombie world have a mind in the ordinary sense: it would say it has a mind and report on its contents just like you do.

That difference between behaving in every way like a human and actually having the same experience as a human is just having a first-person perspective correlating with its behavior. I think that’s such a trivial thing to ask for that it can even be ascribed to rocks, so it’s not actually conceivable that something otherwise indistinguishable from a human would somehow lack it.

they lack the sense experiences normal humans have of sight, sound, taste, etc, but they outwardly act the same as humans

Which requires that they have brains and sense organs that function just the same as ours, and so can “see”, “hear”, etc, in every functional way — a zombie could explain over the phone a scene it is witnessing, for example. The only thing lacking is whether they “really experience” all of those fully functional senses. That is the trivial difference that I ascribe to everything.

What is it you think you are ascribing to everything?

The trivial thing that zombies still lack, after all of their functionality that gives every appearance of them being conscious to a 3rd person observer has already been accounted for.

Having a perspective on the world via sight, sound and touch; being able to taste strawberries and smell perfumes. These things are far from trivial to me.

What reason do you have to assume that rocks might have this same kind of first-person experience?

And how might a zombie conceivably function without them?

It's that actually experiencing the things that we do that makes a humans different from a zombie.

I don't think rocks can see, or taste, or smell, or anything like that, because they don't actually do the things that humans do when we see, taste, smell, etc. But I think a rock has the same capacity to experience what it does that humans have

A rock just doesn't really do much, so there isn't really much there to experience. Its experience is as trivial as its behavior, but just as its behavior is technically there, just in a super pedantic sense, so too is its experience.

Right, so why do you consider “actually experiencing the things that we do” to be trivial?

We might say that humans have the capacity to perceive and experience the world because we have - among other things - sensory organs.

I’m not sure whether you’re just conflating a rock’s (outward) behaviour with its experience here, but I doubt that you are talking about a rock’s perceptions, or that ‘inner’ perspective which distinguishes humans from zombies. If you think a rock has this, then please explain why.

Because in comparison to all of the functional differences between a human and a rock, that difference between a human and a zombie is tiny.

Take the concept of a rock without phenomenal consciousness. Now add the concept of phenomenal consciousness to it and you still have... a rock. Nothing really notable has changed: it doesn’t have any perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, anything like that.

Now take that original rock without phenomenal consciousness concept, and make all of the many, many, many changes it would take to instead have a concept of a philosophical zombie: you have to build up the chemical processes needed to built the cellular processed needed to build the biological processes needed to build the neurological processes needed to convincingly “pretend” all of the perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, etc, of a human being.

Take the concept of the rock with phenomenal consciousness and make all those same many changes to it, and you now have the concept of a real human.

Take that real human and somehow make that functionality “just pretend“, and you’re back to a philosophy zombie.

A philosophical zombie has sense organs and can use them in all the ways a real human can, they just don't “really experience” using them.

A rock doesn’t have a brain to be active, so it can’t experience what it’s like to have that kind of brain activity. But it can experience what it’s like to be a rock, which is... not much.

It's a bit akin to how in quantum mechanics, one physical system can be said to "observe" another physical system and in doing so collapse the "observed" system from a state of probabilistic superposition into a definite classical state, but that doesn't really imply anything substantial about the "observer"; it doesn't require something like a human being to do the observation, it just requires any kind of object to interact with the other object

Because in comparison to all of the functional differences between a human and a rock, that difference between a human and a zombie is tiny.

Howard Pattee:Biosemiotics recognizes this matter-symbol problem at all levels of life from natural languages down to the DNA.

I think we already agree that humans and zombies are functionally equivalent but that zombies lack phenomenal consciousness...

I think we already agree that humans and zombies are functionally equivalent but that zombies lack phenomenal consciousness...
— Luke

Not because such circumstances are actually possible, but rather simply because we can assert that they are.

I think the duality is not between mind and matter in that sense, but that instead intelligence, or reason, or what was known in the earlier philosophical tradition as nous, is 'that which perceives things as they truly are'. But, taking a leaf from nondualist philosophy of mind, this faculty is itself never the object of perception, and as today's empiricism wishes to ground itself wholly in objects of perception, then as far as it is concerned, this is a faculty that can't be accounted for, or doesn't really exist. There are of course many open questions left by that account, but considering the nature of the subject, this is preferable ...

Let's discuss either your position or mine. Attempting to cover both simultaneously is asking for trouble, especially when our respective positions use the same term in remarkably different ways...

I'm a bit disappointed. I was looking forward to reading your answer to the question I posed. Now, it seems that there are more pressing issues rearing their ugly heads...

...Correlation, as I see it, is the process of establishing a mutual relationship or connection between two things... ...The process as a structural relation exists without any resulting ‘correlation’ being manifest as such. When one is manifest, it informs the system’s most complex organisational structure, whether it’s as a causal correlation or a conceptual one.
— Possibility

Causal physical systems/interactions ARE correlations.
— Possibility

The above doesn't work(it's incoherent, self contradictory, and/or an equivocation fallacy). It also presupposes meaning at the subatomic level of existence, or it presupposes that not all information is meaningful.

Yet this tiny, trivial difference leads you to believe that zombies cannot exist.

In what sense does it have phenomenal consciousness at all if it “doesn’t have any perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, anything like that”?

I think we already agree that humans and zombies are functionally equivalent but that zombies lack phenomenal consciousness, so I’m not sure of your point here. Is it that there’s a large functional difference between rocks and humans? I don’t see how it’s relevant to phenomenal consciousness.

The only way I can make sense of this is if you think that our phenomenal consciousness has no causal influence, or that it is an unnecessary appendage to human function. In that case, why do you believe that zombies cannot exist?

Not much or nothing? It makes all the difference between having and not having phenomenal consciousness.

Note he says 'Even in the most detailed physical description of matter there is no hint of any function or meaning.' And this applies to physicalism, including yours.

In what sense does a philosophical zombie lack phenomenal consciousness even though it functionally has perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, etc?

The point is that the difference between a rock without phenomenal consciousness and a rock with phenomenal consciousness is tiny

On my account, the only way something could possibly lack phenomenal consciousness would be if it received no input at all -- in which case, not only could it not do all the mental things humans do, but it would effectively vanish from existence, no longer interacting via any of the physical forces.

Saying that only humans have a first-person perspective isn't saying that we (or someone) only think of first-person perspectives when humans are involved, it's saying that there's something incorrect about considering the first-person perspective of anything else.

I’m not all that capable of spotting incoherences, so you’ll have to help me with this. I consider all information to be meaningful, but only insofar as ‘all possible information’ is both meaningful/meaningless. This I consider to be a self-contradiction at the core of existence.

So, yes - you could say that I do presuppose meaning at the sub-atomic level of existence, but not with any certain or objective sense of definability. There is no distinction at the sub-atomic level between meaning, value/potential, action/change, substance, shape or distance. An electron correlates with a proton at a probabilistic distance, which may result in atomic structure. Meaning for a sub-atomic particle, though (in my view), is an arbitrary binary relation between existence and non-existence: matter/anti-matter.

So, what does a rock with phenomenal consciousness have that a rock without phenomenal consciousness doesn't?

You've told us that the difference is not "any perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, anything like that”, but this is exactly the type of thing that I would say that phenomenal consciousness is.

Aren't you conflating phenomenal consciousness with physics more generally?

my kind of physicalism is all about function, and not exactly meaning per se, but information.

Those signals are both the occasions of our phenomenal experience (the input into our functions), and the literal force of our behaviors upon other things (they are literally the force-carrying particles, mostly photons, that mediate our interactions with all other things, and so the only real output of our functions).

A philosophical zombie has sense organs and can use them in all the ways a real human can, they just don't “really experience” using them.

If philosophical zombies do not use sense organs to really experience using them

On my account, a rock with phenomenal consciousness is just an ordinary rock, and a rock without phenomenal consciousness would thereby cease to exist, or else be some kind of phantom rock that’s unresponsive to anything that’s done to it.

It seems to me like you just can't manage to separate the concepts of access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness. Those things you list are all functional, access-consciousness things. And that is what I think consciousness in the ordinary sense of the word is all about.

Phenomenal consciousness is just some philosophical nitpicking that's completely beside all of that.

And you can't seem to separate the concepts of phenomenal consciousness and physical existence. Phenomenal consciousness is about what it is like to have a particular experience from a first-person perspective. There is no qualitative aspect of experience (or qualia) for a rock. Unless rocks are somehow conscious - in the normal sense of that word (which is not synonymous with bare existence) - then there is nothing it is like to be a rock. Rocks don't have any awareness of their experience or any first-person perspective, so there is no "what it is like" for a rock (e.g. from a rock's perspective). At least, rocks certainly don't exhibit any perspective or awareness that is typically associated with, and often defined as, consciousness.

The only thing I think rocks have is whatever's left after that is accounted for, which gets called "phenomenal consciousness", but I think has nothing to do with consciousness in the ordinary sense of the word, and is something that is just a fundamental part of what it means for anything to exist: the capacity to receive input from other things, not just to act upon other things.

[Rocks have] the capacity to receive input from other things, not just to act upon other things.

Howard Pattee:The concept of Biosemiotics requires making a distinction between two categories, the material or physical world and the symbolic or semantic world.

In this thread I will lay out a hybrid philosophy of mind: one that is eliminativist (nothing has a “mind”) in one sense, panpsychist (everything has a “mind“) in another sense, and emergentist (only some things have a “mind”) in another sense.

my physicalist ontology, which straightforwardly rules out the possibility of mental substances, and it is only in that sense that my philosophy of mind is “eliminativist”:

"strong"emergentism holds some wholes to be truly greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, wholly new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts.

consciousness as we ordinarily speak of it is something that just comes about when physical things are arranged in the right way.

So when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, either it is wholly absent from the most fundamental building blocks of physical things . . . or else it is present at least in humans, as concluded above, and so at least some precursor of it must be present in the stuff out of which humans are built,

Panpsychism most broadly defined says that everything has a mind, . . . proto-experientialism

But in saying that everything has phenomenal consciousness,

but that first-person experience needn't amount to much if the thing having the experience is so simple as a rock or atom or electron.

with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions,

but then I also don't think supernatural things are possible or even coherent,

But "minds" in a more useful and robust sense . . . as subjects have an experience that is heavily of themselves as much as it is of the rest of the world.

I hold a view called functionalism, which holds that a mental state is not strictly identical to any particular physical state,

"functionalist panpsychism".

I hold that the function of an object, the mapping of the inputs it experiences to the behaviors it outputs,

The first of these important functions, which I call "sentience", is to differentiate experiences toward the construction of two separate models, one of them a model of the world as it is, and the other a model of the world as it ought to be.

Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch. When those sensations are then interpreted, patterns in them detected, identified as abstractions, that can then be related to each other symbolically, analytically, that is part of the function that I call "intelligence"

That reflexive function in general I call "sapience",

an experience taken as indicative, interpreted into a perception, and accepted by sapient reflection — is what I call a "belief".