For many people, the phenomenon of consciousness is the best evidence we have that there must be something important missing in our basic physical description of the world. According to this worry, a bunch of atoms and particles, mindlessly obeying the laws of physics, can’t actually experience the way a conscious creature does. There’s no such thing as “what it is to be like” a collection of purely physical atoms; it would lack qualia, the irreducibly subjective components of our experience of the world. One argument for this conclusion is that we can conceive of collections of atoms that behave physically in exactly the same way as ordinary humans, but don’t have those inner experiences — philosophical zombies. (If you think about it carefully, I would claim, you would realize that zombies are harder to conceive of than you might originally have guessed — but that’s an argument for another time.)
The folks who find this line of reasoning compelling are not necessarily traditional Cartesian dualists who think that there is an immaterial soul distinct from the body. On the contrary, they often appreciate the arguments against “substance dualism,” and have a high degree of respect for the laws of physics (which don’t seem to need or provide evidence for any non-physical influences on our atoms). But still, they insist, there’s no way to just throw a bunch of mindless physical matter together and expect it to experience true consciousness.
People who want to dance this tricky two-step — respect for the laws of physics, but an insistence that consciousness can’t reduce to the physical — are forced to face up to a certain problem, which we might call the causal box argument. It goes like this. (Feel free to replace “physical particles” with “quantum fields” if you want to be fastidious.)
- Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations.
- Human beings seem to be made up — even if not exclusively — of physical particles.
- To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception.
- Therefore, consciousness does not exist.
Nobody actually believes this argument, let us hasten to add — they typically just deny one of the premises.
But there is a tiny sliver of wiggle room that might allow us to salvage something special about consciousness without giving up on the laws of physics — the concept of downward causation. Here we’re invoking the idea that there are different levels at which we can describe reality, as I discussed in The Big Picture at great length. We say that “higher” (more coarse-grained) levels are emergent, but that word means different things to different people. So-called “weak” emergence just says the obvious thing, that higher-level notions like the fluidity or solidity of a material substance emerge out of the properties of its microscopic constituents. In principle, if not in practice, the microscopic description is absolutely complete and comprehensive. A “strong” form of emergence would suggest that something truly new comes into being at the higher levels, something that just isn’t there in the microscopic description.
Downward causation is one manifestation of this strong-emergentist attitude. It’s the idea that what happens at lower levels can be directly influenced (causally acted upon) by what is happening at the higher levels. The idea, in other words, that you can’t really understand the microscopic behavior without knowing something about the macroscopic.
There is no reason to think that anything like downward causation really happens in the world, at least not down to the level of particles and forces. While I was writing The Big Picture, I grumbled on Twitter about how people kept talking about it but how I didn’t want to discuss it in the book; naturally, I was hectored into writing something about it.
But you can see why the concept of downward causation might be attractive to someone who doesn’t think that consciousness can be accounted for by the fields and equations of the Core Theory. Sure, the idea would be, maybe electrons and nuclei act according to the laws of physics, but those laws need to include feedback from higher levels onto that microscopic behavior — including whether or not those particles are part of a conscious creature. In that way, consciousness can play a decisive, causal role in the universe, without actually violating any physical laws.
One person who thinks that way is John Searle, the extremely distinguished philosopher from Berkeley (and originator of the Chinese Room argument). I recently received an email from Henrik Røed Sherling, who took a class with Searle and came across this very issue. He sent me this email, which he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce here:
Hi Professor Carroll,
I read your book and was at the same time awestruck and angered, because I thought your entire section on the mind was both well-written and awfully wrong — until I started thinking about it, that is. Now I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore, but I’m trying to work through it by writing a paper on the topic.
I took Philosophy of Mind with John Searle last semester at UC Berkeley. He convinced me of a lot of ideas of which your book has now disabused me. But despite your occasionally effective jabs at Searle, you never explicitly refute his own theory of the mind, Biological Naturalism. I want to do that, using an argument from your book, but I first need to make sure that I properly understand it.
Searle says this of consciousness: it is caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, but is not ontologically reducible to these; consciousness is not just a word we have for something else that is more fundamental. He uses the following analogy to visualize his description: consciousness is to the mind like fluidity is to water. It’s a higher-level feature caused by lower-level features and realized in a system of said lower-level features. Of course, for his version of consciousness to escape the charge of epiphenomenalism, he needs the higher-level feature in this analogy to act causally on the lower-level features — he needs downward causation. In typical fashion he says that “no one in their right mind” can say that solidity does not act causally when a hammer strikes a nail, but it appears to me that this is what you are saying.
So to my questions. Is it right to say that your argument against the existence of downward causation boils down to the incompatible vocabularies of lower-level and higher-level theories? I.e. that there is no such thing as a gluon in Fluid Dynamics, nor anything such as a fluid in the Standard Model, so a cause in one theory cannot have an effect in the other simply because causes and effects are different things in the different theories; gluons don’t affect fluidity, temperaturs and pressures do; fluids don’t affect gluons, quarks and fields do. If I have understood you right, then there couldn’t be any upward causation either. In which case Searle’s theory is not only epiphenomenal, it’s plain inaccurate from the get-go; he wants consciousness to both be a higher-level feature of neuronal processes and to be caused by them. Did I get this right?
Best regards,
Henrik Røed Sherling
Here was my reply:
Dear Henrik–
Thanks for writing. Genuinely not knowing what to think is always an acceptable stance!
I think your summary of my views are pretty accurate. As I say on p. 375, poetic naturalists tend not to be impressed by downward causation, but not by upward causation either! At least, not if your theory of each individual level is complete and consistent.
Part of the issue is, as often happens, an inconsistent use of a natural-language word, in this case “cause.” The kinds of dynamical, explain-this-occurrence causes that we’re talking about here are a different beast than inter-level implications (that one might be tempted to sloppily refer to as “causes”). Features of a lower level, like conservation of energy, can certainly imply or entail features of higher-level descriptions; and indeed the converse is also possible. But saying that such implications are “causes” is to mean something completely different than when we say “swinging my elbow caused the glass of wine to fall to the floor.”
So, I like to think I’m in my right mind, and I’m happy to admit that solidity acts causally when a hammer strikes a nail. But I don’t describe that nail as a collection of particles obeying the Core Theory *and* additionally as a solid object that a hammer can hit; we should use one language or the other. At the level of elementary particles, there’s no such concept as “solidity,” and it doesn’t act causally.
To be perfectly careful — all this is how we currently see things according to modern physics. An electron responds to the other fields precisely at its location, in quantitatively well-understood ways that make no reference to whether it’s in a nail, in a brain, or in interstellar space. We can of course imagine that this understanding is wrong, and that future investigations will reveal the electron really does care about those things. That would be the greatest discovery in physics since quantum mechanics itself, perhaps of all time; but I’m not holding my breath.
I really do think that enormous confusion is caused in many areas — not just consciousness, but free will and even more purely physical phenomena — by the simple mistake of starting sentences in one language or layer of description (“I thought about summoning up the will power to resist that extra slice of pizza…”) but then ending them in a completely different vocabulary (“… but my atoms obeyed the laws of the Standard Model, so what could I do?”) The dynamical rules of the Core Theory aren’t just vague suggestions; they are absolutely precise statements about how the quantum fields making up you and me behave under any circumstances (within the “everyday life” domain of validity). And those rules say that the behavior of, say, an electron is determined by the local values of other quantum fields at the position of the electron — and by nothing else. (That’s “locality” or “microcausality” in quantum field theory.) In particular, as long as the quantum fields at the precise position of the electron are the same, the larger context in which it is embedded is utterly irrelevant.
It’s possible that the real world is different, and there is such inter-level feedback. That’s an experimentally testable question! As I mentioned to Henrik, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of our lifetimes. And there’s basically no evidence that it’s true. But it’s possible.
So I don’t think downward causation is of any help to attempts to free the phenomenon of consciousness from arising in a completely conventional way from the collective behavior of microscopic physical constituents of matter. We’re allowed to talk about consciousness as a real, causally efficacious phenomenon — as long as we stick to the appropriate human-scale level of description. But electrons get along just fine without it.
@Julio,
Yes indeed, I agree that there’s a definite problem with the ’emergence’ argument, that Sean doesn’t seem to appreciate.
The fact is, the ’emergence’ of any new physical properties at any level of complexity can easily fit into a physical framework, whereas mental properties don’t.
It’s true that there are ‘many ways of talking about reality’ (many vocabularies). The trouble is that *all* the different vocabs for *all* the different physical domains can be reduced to the *same* set of semantic primitives: matter (or fields), forces (or transforms) and space-time. And mental properties *don’t* reduce to this set of primitives.
Pick any physical domain you like: Particle physics, mechanics, cosmology, biology, physiology, neuroscience, chemistry, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering.
It’s true they all have different vocabs, but *all* of these different vocabs reduce to the *same* set of semantic primitives: matter, forces and space-time. Every single one of the thousands of different vocabs for physical domains can be reduced to matter, forces and space-time.
The big problem is that the vocabs used to describe mental domains *don’t* reduce to physical semantic primitives. They use a *different* set of primitives: agents, decisions and values. Pick any domain in the cognitive or social sciences. They are *not* talking about matter, forces and space-time. They are talking about something quite different: agents, decisions and values.
@Paul Torek
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“Or, you could, I dunno, click on the link Sean provided?!”
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Thank you Paul. Since Sean said that that would be an argument for later on (his words: “but that’s an argument for another time.”), I just assumed that his argument on that either had not yet been developed or that it had not yet been maturely developed to a level that he himself would consider satisfactory. Therefore, it is always good to have full-time apple polishers on the look out to help us out of the writer’s mishandling of proper logical phrase building. So, thank you again.
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Curiously enough, the very first commentator on Sean’s next gem (that we now understand was actually previous, and not next…) starts like that: “Sadly, I think the author has misunderstood the zombie proposition.” I noticed that his family name is Picador. Well, it goes hand in hand with the barbecue I mentioned. Curious coincidences…
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Best Wishes,
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Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
@Patrice Ayme,
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You have raised very interesting and relevant points regarding evolution, its mechanisms, and the functionings of living organisms. I have took note of them for further reading.
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Best Regards,
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Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
BARBECUE PART 2
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“People who want to dance this tricky two-step — respect for the laws of physics, but an insistence that consciousness can’t reduce to the physical”
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Sean, I think you often, in your writings, oversimplifies or misrepresents things. I really think this is done not due to bad intentions. But the net result, nonetheless, is bad for the reader and for your own line of reasoning too. The Plaintiffs do not say that consciousness cannot be reduced to the physical. Some of them do say so. Many do not. What all of them do say is that our best theories do not describe accurately the totality of what there is. It is important not to start sidetracking into using straw man fallacies.
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” — are forced to face up to a certain problem, which we might call the causal box argument. It goes like this.”
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The causal box, the way it is portrayed in this article, is incorrect. You cannot, in the premises, use attenuating expressions like “seem” (premise 2) and “to the best of” (premise 3) and in the conclusion apply pure and simple absolute terms (does not). Yet, it is important to stress: those who see the equations of physics as a complete description of what there is will say that we can use them to conclude that telepathy (as seem to be showed in Ganzfeld Protocol experiments) and psychokinesis (micro-PK, PEAR studies and similar ones at Princeton University and elsewhere) are *impossible* phenomena, and that consciousness is impossible too.
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“But there is a tiny sliver of wiggle room that might allow us to salvage something special about consciousness without giving up on the laws of physics ”
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Again, at the threshold of the straw man fallacy. One does not have to give up on the laws of physics. We haven’t even given up on Newton. But it might be that we have to better our theories and equations.
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“— the concept of downward causation. Here we’re invoking the idea that there are different levels at which we can describe reality, as I discussed in The Big Picture at great length.”
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This idea that Sean defends in his book (The Big Picture) that you can have different descriptions for different levels of what goes on in the Universe is an idea that seems to be an anathema to his own position. If a physical theory (Newtonian Physics, Quantum Mechanics, String Theory, General Relativity, whatever) cannot describe *everything* faithfully, then it is not the final theory. These two passages that I will quote below are highly emblematic of what I consider utterly mistaken:
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“At the level of elementary particles, there’s no such concept as “solidity,” and it doesn’t act causally.”
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“We’re allowed to talk about consciousness as a real, causally efficacious phenomenon — as long as we stick to the appropriate human-scale level of description. But electrons get along just fine without it.”
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As to the core of his objections against downward causation and its possibility of helping out in the issue of consciousness, I tend to side with Sean, with maybe some disagreement over some points, though.
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Best Wishes to all,
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Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
“The big problem is that the vocabs used to describe mental domains *don’t* reduce to physical semantic primitives. They use a *different* set of primitives: agents, decisions and values. ”
The concept of “physical” has changed over time. I read in J. Gleick’s biography of Isaac Newton that Newton’s Theory of Gravity was opposed by Liebniz and others on the grounds that it did not involve a physical mechanism. This is obviously our problem, not nature’s problem.
Computers have beaten human experts in chess, Jeopardy, verbal IQ tests, and now Go (see AlphaGo for details – the program taught itself to play Go at an expert level via evolution). They are purely mechanical devices which can make good decisions in complex games which involve agents and values. We non-dualists consider these accomplishments proof-of-principle. Meanwhile the Amazing Randi’s Million-Dollar prize remains unclaimed for any reliable evidence of extra-physical effects under controlled conditions (dowsing, ESP, miraculous healing, clairvoyance, etc.).
JimV:
“The concept of “physical” has changed over time”
As I stated, when you ‘break-down’ the vocab of *all* physical concepts to their bare essentials, they *all* reduce to only 3 basic concepts: matter (or fields), forces (or transforms) and space-time.
These 3 concepts apply equally to quantum physics and Newtonian physics and any other physical domain you can choose. Yes the definitions have shifted somewhat and the modern definitions are much more abstract and sophisticated, but it’s still basically elaborations on the same 3 general concepts (matter, forces and space).
In the cognitive and social sciences by contrast, when you break-down the concepts to their bare essentials, a totally different set of semantic primitives is used: agents, decisions and values. Yes, again, the definitions shift somewhat over time and become more sophisticated, but at root it’s still the same 3 basic concepts. And these semantic primitives don’t match up with the physical ones.
I’m not a dualist by the way, I’m a panpsychist. I think it’s plausible that computers can indeed duplicate all aspects of human thought. That would be consistent with panpsychism. What I really doubt is the notion that mental properties are ’emergent’.
Moe,
“Special relativity tells us that time is relative. My past can be your future. Your past can be my future. “Now” is not a fixed thing at all.”
Special Relativity tells us we view events in different order, depending on their proximity to us. In other words, if you are quite far away and we observed two events, one close to you and one close to me, we would see them in different order. Yet that is really no more remarkable than when we look up at the night sky and see the moon as it was a moment ago and the stars as they were years ago. It is the light striking your eyes that is simultaneous, not the events recorded in it. Given those events had to radiate away the energy which manifested them, in order for you to see them, they no longer exist. The energy is conserved. It can’t be still in the star and in your eye.
Leslie Allan,
yeah, I do get your point.
If you read my paper, you will see that I argue that modern legal reasoning is agnostic to the truth or falsity of determinism. That’s precisely what makes the legal term “free will” compatible with determinism.
I understand your point, but it’s expressed in a way I still consider erroneous and easy to misunderstand. I agree with that quote, but saying the legal term free will is *compatible* with determinism is quite a stretch.
The legal term free will is UNRELATED to determinism, not compatible. That’s the issue.
Whereas there’s a scientific and philosophical debate where those two ARE related. When we talk of compatibilist and incompatibilist positions we imply those two terms are related and contextual. So what you describe is not a strictly “compatible” position, at least not in the way that term is used in this specific debate.
@John Merryman,
“Special Relativity tells us we view events in different order, depending on their proximity to us.”
No, that is not what it says at all! It says that simultaneity is actually relative; absolute times of occurance are relative to the observer.
Even if we are the exactly the same distance apart from each other and from ‘an event’ in two different cases, simultaneity of that event is relative to our velocities relative to each other and to the event for each case. It is not about distance at all, it is about how time and distance are really the same ‘stuff’, hence: “space-time”.
You really should re-read about special and general relativity.
zarzuelazen,
The fact is, the ’emergence’ of any new physical properties at any level of complexity can easily fit into a physical framework, whereas mental properties don’t.
Yes. Do you realize what creates this distinction? What is the quality that creates these two, apparently incompatible groups?
My view is fairly simple: the contradiction arises from the trick of self-observation and self-representation. The mind works “fine” when it has to represent an external force, but it gets caught in a paradox when it self-represents.
It’s the direct problem of how the brain evolved. It developed heuristics to interpret an external environment, and was good at doing that, but when it tried to use the same heuristic tools to observe itself it got caught in a paradox since those tools are not suited for that kind of task (and because the brain is mostly blind to its own functionality, so it always intuitively guesses wrongly and confabulates an explanation that is merely illusory).
All these terms you use: agents, decisions, these are just the description of a perceptive dualism. A distinction between how the environment functions, and how how a person self-describes (or describes other persons). There’s a perceptive divide (see dual-aspect monism).
By the way, how any of you would explain something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant
Because that’s en example of an emergent pattern that very obviously is not “alive”. So it’s really not about consciousness, unless you identify consciousness as the agent that *recognizes* that thing happening as weird.
John Merryman,
Just as a clear example, look at the ladder paradox. When you are traveling with the ladder, the doors can shut at the same time. When you are traveling with the barn, the doors shut one after the other.
“Space” in one reference frame is “time” in another reference frame.
This is not the result of light having a certain speed of travel. It is only that light is the most convienent way of observing things, yet it “travels through” space-time, in which space and time are relative to motion.
Of course an electron is also influenced by all the other particles with which it is entangled – not just local fields. It seems that accounting for this implies that there must be more than just a sum of “microcausalities” when it comes to determining causality. Odd that entanglement – a hallmark of Quantum Theory- is not mentioned….
jon a on,
Especially if space-time itself is a structure built only from entanglement, as ER=EPR predicts.
The discussion, and the post itself, are talking about the illusion of ‘causation’ within a very tiny sliver of reality.
There are so many metaphors, but we can just say it is like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Socrates suggests that the shadows constitute reality for the prisoners because they have never seen anything else; they do not realize that what they see are shadows of objects in front of a fire.
The important fact is that the universe has both patterns and pattern recognizers – and we wonder how it is that those Dirac Matrices actually have anything to do with electrons ! Wigner thought it ‘unreasonable’ that math is so effective. But it might just be possible that not only is it Reasonable, but Necessary !
It seems that Algebra is at the nexus between Pattern and Recognizer – electrons and brains.
I doubt that there is any need for ‘downward causation’ or even Teleology.
Perhaps it is more like the simplest versus the most elaborate constructions.
Leslie Allan:
I could not write a better indictment of the term if I tried. If nobody can even agree on what phenomenon the term is supposed to be describing, why are we wasting our time pondering its existence? It’s do different from the gods — all the religions insist that the gods are real, but nobody can agree on which gods, let alone why one god is better deserving of worship than another.
That, I would suggest, is why cognitive neuroscientists aren’t wasting their time looking for “free will” in the brain, and instead are busy describing cognition. Just as physicians aren’t looking for humors or daemons, physicists aren’t looking for calorific or the Luminiferous Aether, astronomers aren’t trying to measure the psychological influences of the constellations, and so on.
zarzuelazen:
Cart before the horse, again. Your mind has nowhere near such power of magic, however superficially it might seem from dream analysis.
Jayarava:
Emergence is perfectly compatible with reductionism. Take a fair coin, toss it. Tally up the number of “streaks” — that is, the number of consecutive times that the coin lands the same way. Plot the two and watch a very pretty graph emerge.
I’m increasingly drawn to the position that emergence is simply a different way of talking about entropy: a count of the microscopic states that have the same macroscopic appearance. When you have sufficiently high entropy, when there are enough microscopic states that look the same way macroscopically, you can characterize the macroscopic state independently from the microscopic one and describe it as an emergent behavior.
Logicophilosophicus:
This is emphatically not true. Claude Shannon was instrumental in establishing minimum energy amounts, especially in terms of signal-to-noise ratio, for any sort of communication. It follows very naturally and inescapably from the wave nature (and speed) of light.
John Merryman:
On the contrary. Information is that which is communicated. Communication requires energy with minimum limits as described by Shannon. The communication may be delayed indefinitely, such as with a book sitting on a shelf. But it took energy to encode the message into the book, and it takes more energy to decode the message when you read it.
Lord:
Sean has written and spoken poetically and exhaustively on why it is that the physics of Earth and all its inhabitants are completely known. I won’t try here to re-re-re-recap that discussion; rather, I’ll jump to the conclusion by noting that the LHC would long since have produced evidence to the contrary if such evidence were even hypothetically forthcoming — it looked everywhere evidence could possibly be found and found nothing. We know overwhelmingly that brains are classical, not quantum, entities. And we have overwhelming reason to conclude that Church-Turing holds, meaning that a computer with adequate resources and proper programming could do anything our brains can do.
Logicophilosophicus:
That goes back to the simulation discussion of a week or three back. Computation requires energy and other physical resources. Resources on a scale sufficient to compute the Universe as we observe it would looooooong since simultaneously collapse into a black hole from the density of the circuitry and explode like a supernova from the energy input. Therefore, if the Universe really is a computation, either the physics of the computer doing the computing are so radically different from ours that calling it a computer makes no sense, or else the Universe is radically different from how we perceive it (such as if we’re really brains in vats).
John Merryman:
No, emphatically. Explicitly not since Laplace, and strongly implied at least since Newton. Given the complete state of the Universe at any given moment of time plus the complete laws of physics, the entire past and future can both be determined.
To be sure, there are inescapable practical problems for teeny tiny subsets of the Universe extrapolating the whole from the parts, never mind the quality of the faery cake. Which means, as a practical matter, we’re left with heuristics and approximations of various sorts. But that’s our problem, and completely unrelated to how the Universe actually works (as best we understand it).
zarzuelazen:
I’ve multiple times linked to what I like to call, “Sean’s Big Equation.” You can buy a T-shirt with it printed on the chest. Your summary is not a reasonable accounting of that equation.
Panpsychism is the ultimate expression of dualism.
jon a:
No. An electron is a fluctuation in the electron field, a fluctuation that appears as a point-like particle when we “observe” it by various interactions of the electron field, the photon field, and all the other fields. At a fundamental level, it is an error (though often a very useful error) to think of electrons as individual entities. At that level, you’re much better off visualizing them as ripples in the electron field.
Cheers,
b&
“An electron responds to the other fields precisely at its location, in quantitatively well-understood ways that make no reference to whether it’s in a nail, in a brain, or in interstellar space. We can of course imagine that this understanding is wrong, and that future investigations will reveal the electron really does care about those things. That would be the greatest discovery in physics since quantum mechanics itself, perhaps of all time; but I’m not holding my breath.”
When an eddy forms in a stream, are the electrons in the water molecules responding to the eddy?
James Cross:
No.
Your confusion comes from mixing levels of description; you’re doing the exact same thing Sean explicitly warns against in thinking that, because brains think and brains are made of atoms, that means that atoms think.
You can either describe the stream in terms of water flows and eddies, or you can describe it as the interactions of all the constituent quantum fields — but not both simultaneously.
The electrons are fluctuations in the electron field and are interacting with each other as well as all the other fluctuations in all the other fields (including the quark fields, the weak nuclear force field, and so on through the entire bestiary). When you zoom out and look at the net aggregate effect of all those submicroscopic interactions, you can see patterns of behavior that are consistent across other similar submicroscopic interactions. Because the submicroscopic interactions have well-defined behaviors, the emergent macroscopic ones do, too. Some of those patterns we describe as being eddies in a stream of water.
Since it’s very difficult for us as large macroscopic entities to directly observe the submicroscopic interactions, and since we basically never care about that level of detail and are only interested in the macroscopic behaviors, we almost always ignore all that detail and rely on the regularities up and down the scale of detail to describe what we observe. That eddy, after all, is part of a larger pattern, a “stream,” which, itself, is part of the watershed of the respective river delta, itself a small part of the Earth’s hydrologic cycle. If you wouldn’t say that the eddy is responding to the low-pressure zone being guided by the jet stream, you shouldn’t say that the electrons are responding to the eddy.
Cheers,
b&
Jon…. thanks for re-suggesting a question about how entanglement might fit in. I raised it earlier in this thread of tangled, tangential comments but it got skipped when someone looking to declare Rightness simply pointed out some Egregious Error of Thinking elsewhere in the comment and it never really became a topic of discussion. It’s a fascinating topic to me though, and I welcome any actual conversation around it as a potential factor of consciousness. 🙂
“For many people, the phenomenon of consciousness is the best evidence we have that there must be something important missing in our basic physical description of the world.”
I have to confess to some mysterian/pan-psychist sympathies, so perhaps unsurprisingly Sean’s description here doesn’t seem to address the concerns of my tribe (possibly a tribe of one).
I don’t see the problem with assuming that:
1. Our physical model of is complete and correct (at least for the purposes of this analysis).
2. Qualia have no physical consequences (and perhaps have no physical causes).
3. Yet, I experience qualia, so I know that they are real (everything else, I’m not so sure about).
Lest you get hung up on Item 2 and object that people talking about having qualia is an example of qualia getting tangled up in physical causation: there is a difference between qualia (conscious experience) and “introspection” in some broader sense. It’s easy to write a computer program that can read its own memory state or source code, but most people would be skeptical of attributing conscious experience to such a program. Similarly, it’s not difficult to imagine a meat computer that can invoke its Introspection module and feed the output to its Language module in order to communicate facts about its internal computational state without necessarily attributing conscious experience (qualia) to such a freakish monster.
So downward causation doesn’t really address my fundamental uncertainty, i.e. whether consciousness is coupled to physical causation in the first place. Some being experiences the world through my body; this much I know. Everything else is speculation, including the assumption that my decision-making and information-processing is somehow under the control of this being, and the assumption that this being would stop having experiences if my body were to cease to exist. (I say this not to sound like a spiritualist nutjob, but just to state the facts available to me.)
The pan-psychism arises from, believe it or not, a less flaky line of reasoning. I’ve always thought it was pretty embarrassing that we tend to attribute consciousness only to beings who are capable of using language to express their cognitive states. Seems a lot like the case of the guy looking for his lost car keys under the streetlight instead of under the bush where he dropped them, on account of the light being much better there. So we attribute consciousness to other language-using humans, and we’re sort of on the fence about meat-piles that are pretty closely related, e.g. non-language-using humans, non-human mammals, etc. There’s really no evidence to limit the attribution of qualia to things that look like human brains on the sole basis that the only thing that ever told us it had qualia (or ever told us anything) was a human brain. It’s like assuming that only humans are made out of matter because I asked 1000 objects if they were made out of matter and the human was the only one that said Yes.
So I’m down for the notion that “consciousness” (which might be a really bad term for what we’re talking about, especially in a non-human context) may be a property that suffuses the universe and “looks out through” any of a number of physical systems in various ways idiosyncratic to those systems.
Anyway, I have to go rub some crystals and take my homeopathic antipsychotic meds now. But I hope somebody can educate me about why my assumptions and uncertainties are stupid and unwarranted. This has been bugging me a lot for the last, like, fifteen years.
Thanks!
Moe,
I’m a bit of a heretic on that. I see “spacetime” as a physical explanation for Relativity about like giant cosmic gear wheels as the physical explanation for epicycles.
Consider one example: Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns, relative to the sun. This explains time as an effect of action. There is no fourth dimension of time, on which all events exist.
Think of the various problems it solves; No need for block time. Asymmetry is due to it being a measure of action and action is inertial, i.e. goes one way. Different clocks run at different speeds and remain in the same present because they are different actions. There is no universal “flow of time,” just change within the present state.
Which makes time more like temperature, as an effect of action. Measures of time are frequency, while temperature is a combination of frequency and amplitude.
We could use ideal gas laws to equate temperature to volume and call it spacetemperature, such that changing the volume of a certain amount of energy would affect the temperature proportionally, but because temperature is only foundational to our biological processes, rather than our sequencing and ordering of thought, as time is, we can be more objective about it.
Our mental lives are a narrative in space, yet temperature is a far more elemental quality of reality. Vacuum fluctuation doesn’t have a time component, but it does have a temperature.
The problem is trying to figure out how the present moves from past to future, but it is bit like trying to figure out how the sun move across the sky. The reality is simply that we see both backward. The earth turns and events coalesce and dissolve.
Now I realize this will stir up feelings, but if you want to rebut it, first ask yourself; Does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth turns, or do all these days stretch out along some temporal dimension? Which would Ockham chose?
Ben,
How could they be determined, given any observer is part of the system? As I said, to do so would imply a god’s eye view, outside of space and (the effect of)time.
Ben,
I’m not confused. I asked a question.
Downward causation has nothing to do with whether atoms think. Did you think it might?
I think Searle, whose position that this post seems to be addressed to, actually prefers not to use the term “downward causation” and prefers the term “system causation”. The system has properties that act on its elements. The interconnectedness of the elements creates their own properties. So the eddy in the stream in the ecosystem is connected to the water molecules with the electrons and swirling happens.
Ben:
“Panpsychism is the ultimate expression of dualism.”
In fact, panpsychism removes the last vestige of dualism from science, whereas ’emergence’ still has a quasi-dualist element to it.
Let me explain. Sean says ‘there are many ways of talking about reality’, and he says the notions of “agents”, “decisions” and “values” are simply vocabs used to talk about signals in the brain.
But this already *presupposes* an artificial separation between a ‘talker’ (someone who is talking about reality), and the reality itself.
In panpsychism, you could define a complete equivalence between physical and mental properties (for every physical property A, there’s an equivalent mental property B, and vice versa , so A = B and B=A).
For ’emergence’ though, as you pointed out in the earlier threads, it just doesn’t make sense to talk about mental properties being ‘equivalent’ to physical ones. With ’emergence’, you could define mental properties in terms of physical ones, but not vice versa. (Physics is primary, so the basic physical things don’t have mental properties).
Emergence is relying on a quasi-Cartesian separation between ‘objective reality’ on the one hand (the thing being talked about), and an ‘observer’ on the other (a ‘talker’ who is supposed to be ‘poetic’ and have a ‘vocabulary’).
This seems suspiciously analogous to the mistake classical physicists made when they thought you could completely separate the thing being measured from the measuring apparatus. In fact this can’t be done, and that realization is what lead to the quantum mechanics revolution.
Sean and you are claiming you can completely separate the notion of consciousness (that perceives and talks about reality), from the reality itself (objective reality devoid of observers). Whereas in fact, all observations about reality are filtered through consciousness.
@Abalieno You say of free will and compatibilism: “So what you describe is not a strictly “compatible” position, at least not in the way that term is used in this specific debate.”
You are mistaken.
John Merryman,
“The problem is trying to figure out how the present moves from past to future”
I don’t think that that is the problem. There is no reason that the present has to do any ‘moving’ at all.
I think that Ockham would choose the simplest explanation. This would be something like the multiple worlds idea, with all possible permutations of information existing. Time and space and motion and objects are illusions arising from the fact that each different permutation has a different level of information entropy.
There are then only a few real questions. What “medium” is the information “stored” within, how did it come to exist, and do the permutations interact with each other, or simply exist? The answers to these questions are probably beyond the limits of possible understanding.
John Merryman:
That’s a good very high-level / emergent perspective…but it’s very far removed from the fundamental physics. To the extent that it’s potentially as confusing as thinking that because thinking brains are made of atoms, atoms must therefore think.
Microscopically, time is still poorly understood — though it’s inescapably in all the important equations, which is why Sean is pretty confident it’s fundamental. Macroscopically, time is basically completely understood as a consequence of the extraordinarily low entropy of the Big Bang.
As I noted, there are practical limitations to anybody within the Universe performing such a determination. There’re even practical limitations to somebody in an Universe similar to ours simulating the Universe as we observe it; the Matrix, even if you wish to posit its existence, must either be in an Universe with radically different physics or our Universe must be radically different from how we think it is.
And, yet, at the same time, it is our best understanding of the Universe that that really is how it functions. That is not a statement that you or I could directly perceive it as such, but why should that be an impediment to our understanding? We can’t directly observe ultraviolet or infrared radiation, but that doesn’t stop us from having confidence in its reality.
James Cross:
No; I don’t think that. But it’s implied by your writing, including this bit:
And, yet, that continues to make the fundamental error of mixing languages from different levels of descriptions.
Consider the case of the Bell Curve that emerges from coin tosses. Does it in any way make sense to describe some sort of connectedness of the individual tosses that causes the clumping behavior of the Bell Curve to manifest? No? Because the physics of your stream is, at its most fundamental level, not all that different from the coin tosses.
zarzuelazen:
That’s a bug, not a feature. Because it comes with it the implication of Chopra’s absurd claim that the Moon stops existing when he stops looking at it — which, in turn, inevitably brings to my mind the fearsome Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal a monster which is dangerous only to those who look at it.
Conversely, this is a feature, not a bug.
No, it’s not. It’s instead an observation that there are plenty of situations — especially those with high entropy — in which many microstates are macroscopically indistinguishable; those macrostates can then be described with emergent language. Again consider the emergence of a Bell Curve from coin tosses.
That is, as Daniel Dennett would put it, a deepity: trivially true but profoundly worng. For you imply that all of reality is filtered through consciousness, neglecting the fact that our consciousnesses are but an insignificantly nonexistent rounding error in any catalog of reality.
Indeed, it’s a favorite definition of mine, from a source I’ve long since forgotten. Reality is that which persists even after you stop believing in it. When it comes right down to it, reality gives not one damn how much your — or any — consciousness is aware of it.
Moe:
The first sentence might not be on the worng track, but the second likely goes too far.
That is, it is possible for time to be both real and static in some sense. And we should have a very strong suspicion that it’s real, because nobody’s ever managed to write it out of any of the equations.
And the answer is going to have to incorporate the fact that time really is there at the microscopic level, but it goes in both directions equally happily, and seems very closely interrelated with a physicist’s idea of information, which is close enough to eternal to the past and future as makes no difference for humans. At the same time, we pretty much already have the macroscopic answer: the entropic arrow of time orients the past in the direction of the Big Bang, just as the equally-nonexistent gravitational arrow of space on Earth orients down in the direction of the Earth’s center.
Put the two together, and you effectively have all times existing simultaneously, but an observer at any given moment has, due to entropy, the perception of time flowing. Slice any instant out of eternal time and it can (one might imagine, but not really) exist on its own, that observer frozen forever but still feeling like all is in motion…much like a frame from a movie.
Cheers,
b&