The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I’m a physicalist myself — as I explain in The Big Picture and elsewhere, I think consciousness is best understood as weakly-emergent from the ordinary physical behavior of matter, without requiring any special ontological status at a fundamental level. In poetic-naturalist terms, consciousness is part of a successful way of talking about what happens at the level of humans and other organisms. “Being conscious” and “having conscious experiences” are categories that help us understand how human beings live and behave, while corresponding to goings-on at more fundamental levels in which the notion of consciousness plays no role at all. Nothing very remarkable about that — the same could be said for the categories of “being alive” or “being a table.” There is a great deal of work yet to be done to understand how consciousness actually works and relates to what happens inside the brain, but it’s the same kind of work that is required in other questions at the science/philosophy boundary, without any great metaphysical leaps required.
Not everyone agrees! I recently went on a podcast hosted by philosophers Philip Goff (former Mindscape guest) and Keith Frankish to hash it out. Philip is a panpsychist, who believes that consciousness is everywhere, underlying everything we see around us. Keith is much closer to me, but prefers to describe himself as an illusionist about consciousness.
S02E01 Sean Carroll: Is Consciousness Emergent?
Obviously we had a lot to disagree about, but it was a fun and productive conversation. (I’m nobody’s panpsychist, but I’m extremely impressed by Philip’s willingness and eagerness to engage with people with whom he seriously disagrees.) It’s a long video; the consciousness stuff starts around 17:30, and goes to about 2:04:20.
But despite the length, there was a point that Philip raised that I don’t think was directly addressed, at least not carefully. And it goes back to something I’m quite fond of: the Zombie Argument for Physicalism. Indeed, this was the original title of a paper that I wrote for a symposium responding to Philip’s book Galileo’s Error. But in the editing process I realized that the argument wasn’t original to me; it had appeared, in somewhat different forms, in a few previous papers:
- Balog, K. (1999). “Conceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem,” The Philosophical Review, 108: 497-528.
- Frankish, K. (2007). “The Anti-Zombie Argument,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 57: 650-666.
- Brown, R. (2010). “Deprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17 (3-4): 47-69.
- Balog, K. (2012). “In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84: 1-23.
- Campbell, D., J. Copeland and Z-R Deng 2017. “The Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments,” The Philosophical Quarterly, 67: 223—240.
So the published version of my paper shifted the focus from zombies to the laws of physics.
- Carroll, S.M. (2021). “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (9-10): 16-31.
The idea was not to explain how consciousness actually works — I don’t really have any good ideas about that. It was to emphasize a dilemma that faces anyone who is not a physicalist, someone who doesn’t accept the view of consciousness as a weakly-emergent way of talking about higher-level phenomena.
The dilemma flows from the following fact: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known. They even have a name, the “Core Theory.” We don’t have a theory of everything, but what we do have is a theory that works really well in a certain restricted domain, and that domain is large enough to include everything that happens in our everyday lives, including inside ourselves. I won’t rehearse all the reasons we have for believing this is probably true, but they’re in The Big Picture, and I recently wrote a more technical paper that goes into some of the details:
- Carroll, S.M. (2021). “The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes.” Submitted to Levels of Reality: A Scientific and Metaphysical Investigation (Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science), eds. O. Shenker, M. Hemmo, S. Iannidis, and G. Vishne.
Given that success, the dilemma facing the non-physicalist about consciousness is the following: either your theory of consciousness keeps the dynamics of the Core Theory intact within its domain of applicability, or it doesn’t. There aren’t any other options! I emphasize this because many non-physicalists are weirdly cagey about whether they’re going to violate the Core Theory. In our discussion, Philip suggested that one could rely on “strong emergence” to create new kinds of behavior without really violating the CT. You can’t. The fact that the CT is a local effective field theory completely rules out the possibility, for reasons I talk about in the above two papers.
That’s not to say we are certain the Core Theory is correct, even in its supposed domain of applicability. As good scientists, we should always be open to the possibility that our best current theories will be proven inadequate by future developments. It’s absolutely fine to base your theory of consciousness on the idea that the CT will be violated by consciousness itself — that’s one horn of the above dilemma. The point of “Consciousness and the Laws of Physics” was simply to emphasize the extremely high standard to which any purported modification should be held. The Core Theory is extraordinarily successful, and to violate it within its domain of applicability means not only that we are tweaking a successful model, but that we are somehow contradicting some extremely foundational principles of effective field theory. And maybe consciousness does that, but I want to know precisely how. Show me the equations, explain what happens to energy conservation and gauge invariance, etc.
Increasingly, theorists of consciousness appreciate this fact. They therefore choose the other horn of the dilemma: leave the Core Theory intact as a theory of the dynamics of what happens in the world, but propose that a straightforward physicalist understanding fails to account for the fundamental nature of the world. The equations might be right, in other words, but to account for consciousness we should posit that Mind (or something along those lines) underlies all of the stuff obeying those equations. It’s not hard to see how this strategy might lead one to a form of panpsychism.
That’s fine! You are welcome to contemplate that. But then we physicalists are welcome to tell you why it doesn’t work. That’s precisely what the Zombie Argument for Physicalism does. It’s not precisely an argument for physicalism tout court, but for the superiority of physicalism over a non-physicalist view that purports to explain consciousness while leaving the behavior of matter unaltered.
Usually, of course, the zombie argument is deployed against physicalism, not for it. I know that. We find ourselves in the presence of irony.
The intuition behind the usual zombie argument stems from a conviction from introspection — from our first-person experience of the world, inaccessible in principle to outsiders — that there is something going on other than the mere physical behavior of physical stuff. And if that’s true, we can imagine the same behavior of physical stuff with or without consciousness. A (philosophical) zombie is a creature that behaves exactly as an ordinary person would in every way, but lacks the inner experience of consciousness — the qualia that characterize “what it is like” to be something. The argument is then that, if we can conceive of precisely the same physical behavior with and without consciousness, consciousness must be something other than a way of talking about physical behavior. It’s a bit reminiscent of Descartes’s argument for mind-body dualism: I can imagine my body not existing, but I can’t imagine my mind not existing, so the mind and body must be different things. But the conclusion here is not supposed to be that the mind must be a distinct substance from the body, merely the somewhat weaker conclusion that our conscious experiences cannot be reduced to the behavior of physical matter.
Let me stress the radicalness of the zombie concept, because I think people sometimes underestimate it, even some proponents of the usual zombie argument. When first presented with the idea of a philosophical zombie, it is natural to conjure up something like a Vulcan from Star Trek: humanoid in appearance, rational, and indisputably alive, but lacking some kind of affect or emotion. That is not right. The zombie, to reiterate, behaves exactly as a conscious creature would behave. If you interacted with a zombie, it would exhibit all the features of love and joy and sadness and anxiety that an ordinary person would. Zombies would cry of heartbreak, compose happy songs, giggle while rolling around on the ground with puppies, and write densely-argued books against the idea that consciousness could be entirely physical. If you asked a zombie about its inner conscious experiences, it would earnestly assure you that it had them, and would describe “what it was like” to experience this or that, on the basis of its introspection. The difference is that, unlike conscious creatures who are purportedly accurate when they make those claims, the zombie is wrong. You would never be able to convince the zombie they were wrong, but too bad for them.
Nobody is claiming the zombies actually exist or even are possible in our world, only that they are conceivable. And that if we can conceive of them, our notion of “consciousness” must be distinct from our notion of the behavior of matter.
But if there is an intuition that our conscious experience is something more than the motion of physical stuff, there is also a countervailing intuition: surely my consciousness affects my behavior! To a person on the street, rather than a highly-trained philosopher, it’s pretty obvious that your conscious experiences have some effect on your behavior. Such intuitions aren’t really reliable — a lot of people are intuitive dualists about the mind. But they provide pointers for us to dig into an issue and understand it better.
Taking a cue from our intuition that consciousness surely affects our behavior, and a suspicion that zombie advocates aren’t really thinking through the implications of the thought experiment, leads us to flip the usual argument on its head. The zombie scenario is actually a really good argument for physicalism (at least by contrast to the kind of passive panpsychism that doesn’t affect physical behavior in any way).
To make things clear, consider a very explicit version of the zombie scenario. We imagine two possible worlds (or at least conceivable, or at least maybe-conceivable). We have P-world (for “physical”), which consists solely of physical stuff, and that stuff obeys the Core Theory in its claimed domain of applicability. Then we have Ψ-world (for “psychist”), which behaves in precisely the same way, but which is fundamentally based on consciousness. The physical properties and behavior of Ψ-world should be thought of as aspects (emanations? not sure what the preferred vocabulary is here) of an underlying mentality.
(Note our use of “behavior” here means all of the behavior of all physical stuff, down to individual electrons and photons; not just the macroscopic behavior of human beings. There’s no connection to “behaviorism” in psychology.)
The starting point of the zombie argument for physicalism is that, when we sit down to compare P-world and Ψ-world, we realize that the purported “consciousness” that is central to Ψ-world is playing no explanatory role whatsoever. It might be there, ineffably in the background, but it has no impact at all on what human beings do or say. As Keith put it in our conversation, it offers no “differential” explanatory power to discriminate between the two scenarios.
And — here is an important point — whatever that background, causally-inert stuff is, it’s not what I have in mind when I’m trying to explain “consciousness.” The consciousness I have in mind absolutely does play an explanatory role in accounting for human behavior. The fact that someone is conscious of some inner experience (falling in love, or having the feeling they are being watched) manifestly affects their behavior. So the consciousness of Ψ-world isn’t the consciousness I care about, and I might as well be a physicalist.
Aha, says the panpsychist, but you’re leaving out something important. The behavior of which you speak can be seen by the outside world. But I also, personally, have access to my inner experience: the first-person perspective that cannot be witnessed by outsiders. Science is used to explaining objective third-person-observable behavior, but not this. I therefore have a reason — based on data, even if it’s not publicly-available — to prefer Ψ-world over P-world.
That move doesn’t work, as we can see if we think a bit more carefully about what’s going on in Ψ-world. How should I interpret someone’s claim that they have inner conscious experiences of the kind a zombie wouldn’t have? The claim itself — the utterance “I have conscious experience” — is a behavior. They said it, or wrote it, or whatever. The matter in their bodies acts in certain ways so as to form those words. And that matter, within either P-world or Ψ-world, exactly obeys the equations of motion of the Core Theory. That theory, in turn, is causally closed: you tell me the initial conditions, there is an equation that unambiguously describes how the universe evolves forward in time.
So the utterance claiming that a person has inner conscious experiences has precisely the same causal precursors in either P-world or Ψ-world: a certain configuration of particles and forces in the person’s brain and body. But we’ve agreed that non-physical consciousness plays no role in explaining those things within the context of P-world. Therefore, consciousness cannot play any role in explaining those utterances in Ψ-world, either.
Thus: you are welcome to claim that you have access to inner first-person experiences of some non-physical conscious experiences, but that claim bears no relationship whatsoever to whether or not you actually do have such experiences. So there is no “data” at all, in the ordinary sense.
Said another way: the claim is that we have a certain kind of knowledge based on introspection. But a zombie would make exactly the same claim, and you are arguing that the zombie is wrong. The lesson is that this kind of introspection is completely unreliable. And therefore there is no reason to favor Ψ-world over P-world. (The point is not that introspection itself is completely unreliable, just that if you think zombies are conceivable, you have to admit that introspection gives us no evidence for the non-physical nature of consciousness.)
Of course philosophers are very clever people, and they can invent different categories of “introspection” and “experience” and “evidence” in an attempt to make it all work out. But the essential point is clear and robust: by sequestering off “consciousness” from playing any causal role in the world, you’ve turned it into something very different from what we were originally trying to explain. Time to turn to some other strategy.
There is one dangling thread here, which is what Philip brought up in the conversation and I don’t think we did justice to. Sure, you might say, there is no differential explanatory role being played by consciousness in the comparison between P-world and Ψ-world. They both behave in the same way, even though one has consciousness and the other doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean there is no explanatory role being played within Ψ-world itself. In other words, maybe consciousness doesn’t distinguish between what happens in the two worlds, but surely it is crucial to Ψ-world considered by its own lights. That world is literally made of consciousness!
Nice try, but this move also fails. Consider an analogy: two identical coffee cups sitting on two tables. The tables themselves are identical in form, except that one table is made of wood and the other of iron. You can’t distinguish between the two worlds just by the fact that the coffee cup is being held up by the two tables (analogous to the behavior of matter in P-world and Ψ-world); in either case, the table holds up the up, despite them being made of different materials. But surely the iron is playing a role in the world where that’s what the table is made of!
Well, yes, the iron is “playing a role.” But it’s not a role that is relevant to understanding what keeps the cup from falling. If you had a “hard problem of coffee cups,” which involved understanding why cups sit peacefully on a table rather than falling to the ground, nobody would think that a table made of iron provided a better solution than a table made of wood. The explanation is material-independent. It’s the table-ness that matters, not the substance of which the table is made.
The actual analogy that Philip used in a post-discussion Twitter thread was to software, and the substrate-independence of computer algorithms.
Likewise, the thesis that human behavioural functions could be realised in non-conscious zombie stuff doesn't entail that human consciousness doesn't do anything. 2/2
— Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff) November 13, 2021
The same response applies here. Sure, you could run the same software on different hardware. But the entire point of substrate independence is that you cannot then say that the nature of the substrate influenced the outcome of the calculation in any way! Analogously, the panpsychist who wants to differentiate between the software of reality running on physical vs. mental hardware cannot claim that consciousness gets any credit at all for our behavior in the world.
I get why non-physicalists about consciousness are reluctant to propose explicit ways in which the dynamics of the Core Theory might be violated. Physics is really strong, very well-understood, and backed by enormous piles of experimental data. It’s hard to mess with that. But the alternative of retreating to a view where consciousness “explains” things in the world, while exhibiting precisely the same behaviors that the world would have if there were no consciousness, pretty clearly fails. It’s better to be a physicalist who works to understand consciousness as a higher-level description of ordinary physical stuff doing its ordinary physical things. If you’re not willing to go there, face up to the challenge and explain exactly how our physical understanding needs to be modified. You’ll probably be wrong, but if you turn out to be right, it will all be worth it. That’s how science goes.
The argument against Panpsychism seems very strong with or w/o ‘zombies’:
1. It doesn’t actually explain consciousness. It’s no better than ascribing to ghost.
2. Elementary particles have no internal structure and thus no internal state to respond to or even remember information or make choices.
Here are two thoughts. I suggest that we consider “human” and “zombie” to be on a spectrum, just
as there are spectra of autism and spectra of psychopathy. Perhaps evolutionarily, there is a connection with the notion of the “uncanny valley” and these non-neurotypical polarities. Maybe we are all a kind of zombie and don’t know it.
Regarding “pan-psychism”, following Sean’s movie science fiction movie rule. Is there anything that we already know that exists that could plausibly be a sort of pan psychism. I suggest that nonlinearity may be the missing ingredient. We get a huge amount of milage out of ignoring nonlinearity, but aren’t things like hysteresis behavior, which is a kind of primitive memory, a kind of primitive intelligence?
For me, the big mystery about consciousness is what I might qualify as a broken symmetry.
My human body is somewhat equivalent/similar to many others I see around.
From afar, no one human is fundamentally the center of the universe to the exclusion of the others.
Yet I inhabit one specific body, not the others. I see through my eyes, not through yours.
Why? Why do I feel this body from the inside, and not feel the others?
These arguments miss a third possibility: That the world is entirely physical and consciousness is entirely emergent, causality going from the Core Theory to consciousness (even if explanatory power occasionally goes the other way). And yet, it could be that consciousness remains a brute fact. That certain computations or configurations of the universe have subjective experiences, but we never have direct access to those experiences. And that we never develop an explanation or calculus of what a bit of the universe feels like to itself, except by comparing its structure and its behavior to ourselves.
Personally I’d use the term ‘strong emergence’ for that possibility. Something which is strictly emergent but not open to observation or analysis other than at the microscopic level. On the other side of an emergence horizon so to speak. Strong emergence appears to mean something else, I’m not sure what.
As for panpsychism, one interpretation seems mystical and not very charitable. Rocks and electrons have rich inner lives, I don’t think so. But while we have zero theoretical insight on how computations or structures yield subjective experiences, or what a bit of the universe feels like to itself, that leaves the hard to falsify idea that any reasonably complex system maybe feels like something. That seems like a version of panpsychism compatible with physicalism.
As a physicist, it’s legitimate to not care. To compare functionally the zombie with the known human and claim that observational equivalence fully resolves the question. My opinion is, while true, that’s not a satisfactory theory or explanation of what a part of the universe feels like to itself. Therefore the ‘hard problem’ may remain hard. And example of progress might be to say: Here, these computations have inner feelings, those don’t. They do when played on this hardware but not that for some reason, or it’s the same. Time plays this role, or evolution plays that role. We simply have no tools to access the phenomenon directly, and my guess is we’ll only be able to go as far as simulation and comparison with known natural consciousness allows.
A very straightforward way to way to see how a non-physicalist reality can work around us is a consciousness-centric simulation – not run by computer hardware somewhere in the future or in a distant other ‘real’ world, but as an integral part of a master-consciousness. In such a reality, CT becomes just the configuration of the simulation we have worked to uncover by observing and calculating. In it, consciousness is not some underlying force present all over, but a participant – the target audience – of the simulation. This model of reality accounts for consciousness: it enters the system from outside, for the duration of the experience, just like this happens to all of us during our nightly dreaming, and to some of us participating in computer simulated games.
Can one look for the cause or origin of players’ consciousness within a simulated game? Nope. It enters the system from the outside, and an outside player ‘lends’ its consciousness to an avatar within the game. When modeling reality like this, the sciences are fully accommodated, as is consciousness. Not to mention the other ‘meaningful consequences’ of this world view, while not suffering any disadvantages or shortcomings in thinking.. I outline the details of such a model of reality and its far-reaching consequences on my website and in my book, Normeoli.
I might push back somewhat on Carroll’s article.
1. Carroll seems to be forever saying that consciousness makes no difference to the *behavior* of a person. But behavior is just outright *irrelevant* (to most conceptions of dualist panpsychism). I might thus have two questions:
A. Does Carroll have an argument against ‘the reality of consciousness over-and-above the physical’ that does *not* invoke behavior? (If not, he has no argument against consciousness.)
B. What *would* count as evidence for the existence of consciousness over-and-above the physical to Carroll, given that behavior is irrelevant?
2. I would contend that consciousness is part of the *data* of the world that is given to us.
3. I would also contend that whether a (3rd-person) zombie has consciousness is not the right question. The question is whether (the 1st-person) *I* have consciousness. I would also contend that the latter cannot be reduced to the former.
4. I am not saying things depend on this, but I give three arguments that consciousness is (or might be) efficacious over-and-above the physical, in Section 10 of https://philpapers.org/rec/MEROTB-3, one of which references a paper on the arXiv by Carroll himself!
Best
I would have much more confidence in the concept of mind and consciousness being no more than a property of a sufficiently complex brain, if only I could explain away one little disconnect … that being the supposition of consciousness collapsing the quantum wave function.
And while the human brain may be complex enough to enable sentience/consciousness, it does not yet appear to be up to the task of modeling the true nature of reality.
IMO Panpsychism is a fad and will pass.
Fascinating stuff! Thank you, Sean, for all of your insight into such a complex subject that has long been a favorite subject of mine . I remember once reading Schrodinger’s thoughts that he believed consciousness was fundamental and was acting through each of us individually, though of course that was primarily a reflection of his interest in eastern mysticism. It always seemed to me that panpsychists basically base their beliefs or theories on the fact that we haven’t yet been able to identify what consciousness actually is or how it has come to exist. They seem to rationalize that it must therefore be fundamental. This always seemed to have parallels with theology to me (in that it bases a theory on ignorance or the unknown, essentially). Regarding the emergence of consciousness, I often wondered if perhaps that could somehow be explained via quantum electrodynamics, since (as Feynman said), QED is basically driving everything in biology and chemistry. Therefore, perhaps one must consider the interactions of light and matter to understand the emergence of consciousness (i.e. quantum biology)? Or for all we know, could consciousness be the result of a chemical reaction? (Neurotransmitters, etc.). It makes no sense to me, really, why anyone would even attempt to ponder the existence of consciousness without first having some understanding of neuroscience and neuro-chemistry, I guess, and the electrical signals that basically form or generate our “thoughts” and feelings (or what we experience as consciousness). I therefore loosely define consciousness as “electrical activity in the brain,” though I suppose that still does not solve the qualia problem and how exactly we are, essentially, able to experience ourselves. If you consider the nervous system to be an emergent phenomenon, why would not (or why could not) consciousness therefore be easily considered an emergent function of the nervous system? I apologize for rambling. I look forward to viewing / hearing the full discussion tomorrow, as it is late here in Zurich now, and I must go to sleep. But one question I do have… and that I have pondered before… Are we essentially electric fields experiencing themselves? That being the electrical signals that compose our functioning nervous systems. Is consciousness really that much more than nerve impulses triggered by stimuli? Good night… and thank you again! 🙂
There are may problems with Panpsychism. Sometimes they say that science only explains what electron does e.g. has spin, charge and mass but does not say anything about what it IS. And then they say that electron IS a form of consciousness as if it explains anything. Sometimes they say electron is made out of consciousness. This is like the strings of string theory, which are supposed to be everything is made out of. Then sometime they say electron has consciousness. This is a property argument which is same as electron has a spin. A good thing going for a spin is it interacts with things and can be detected based on physical laws. Consciousness cannot be detected based on know physical laws by definition. They sometimes say fruit on a tree is conscious but a fruit on the ground is non conscious. Sometimes they say rock or a cup is not conscious but sometimes they say even a cup is conscious (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL09IZ1D7HE). Sometimes they say someone is in a state of consciousness (this is a process argument). So all in all they pick and choose different definitions of consciousness as they please and suites them to make a argument at hand.
To me consciousness is not a thing. It is a conventional word we use as shorthand to talk about a class of phenomenon we have agreed to consider as conscious phenomenon. So we should stop looking for consciousness as a thing. I guess that is the argument Sean is making.
I would not be comfortable by believing that the brain must be ‘complex enough’ to ‘somehow’ produce intelligent consciousness – for that, I would require a working prototype, proving that certain arrangements of material components (atoms, quarks, fields, etc.) will necessarily give rise to intelligent consciousness, the type that produces a piece of Debussy and can uncover the math behind the Standard Model, for example. Once this is accomplished, I would be comfortable wagering my life on a materialist/naturalist model of reality. But not until then..
It seems to me that panpsychism not only fails the criteria for a good explanation, but it makes the problem of consciousness insoluble…
1. It doesn’t answer or even address the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, it makes it fundamental & universal.
2. It makes no testable predictions.
3. It isn’t parsimonious, introducing a new ontological concept.
4. It has no specificity – It gives no insight into or understanding of the phenomenon.
5. It is ad-hoc.
6. There is no evidence to support it.
7. It raises more questions than it answers, all unanswerable.
8. Its universal scope provides no unifying advantage or principle to help explain or understand other phenomena.
9. It has no proposed mechanism, structure, or behaviour.
10. It is not conservative, i.e. it doesn’t cohere with our existing body of knowledge.
Items 8, 9, & 10 are not a problem if the explanation satisfies some of the other criteria well, but for me, the others are serious objections. For example, with item 7 it raises questions about the very meaning of consciousness; we devised the concept of consciousness to describe aspects of our own experience – what does it mean to apply it to a proton, or a table? Do the individual consciousnesses of protons, neutrons and electrons combine to make a separate atomic consciousness? Why do we only see the signs of what we understand to be consciousness in creatures with brains, and roughly in proportion to the size & complexity of the brain? and so-on.
If it is an explanation at all, I don’t see how it is a better explanation than “Magic”.
I’ve probably missed some important reason for taking panpsychism seriously, so I’d welcome some explanation of where I may have gone wrong or misrepresented it.
If “conceivability” is a corner stone of Zombies Argument in favor of Panpsychism, then Panspychism is doomed already. I have not seen “conceivability” used in any scientific theory to justify it. That is why we have words like plausible and possible which still need to be verified (detected) to become a theory.
It’s interesting that at 1:55:00 in his conversation with Goff and Frankish, Sean agrees with Frankish about illusionism, that there are no qualia in experiences, which is also Dennett’s view: there’s no such thing as phenomenology. But here Sean adverts to “the inner experience of consciousness — the qualia that characterize ‘what it is like” to be something’ as being the explanatory target for physicalists. I agree that panpsychism is a non-starter, but a realist about phenomenal consciousness needs to explain how qualia emerge from neural activity, not just as a “way of talking” but as an actual phenomenon that’s both qualitative and subjective. I’ve not seen any physicalist-emergentist accounts thus far, but will stay tuned. Of course if Sean doesn’t think experiences involve the qualitative “what it’s like” to be in pain or see red, what we call qualia, then one wonders what about consciousness needs explaining.
I sometimes think we may have the P-world and Psi-World as you put it mixed up. I think intuitively(or imprecisely) we think the world of phyiscs is the p-world. But phyiscs is just the mathematical descreption using measurements of the p-world.
Maybe there is a translation differentiation. We boil down the photon lets say to its wavelength which we can represent as a single number, but that number is not the photon, just a representation of its measure. The photon itself still exist.
When we experience something, we are actually experiencing the thing itself which creates what we have qualia. In this manner maybe what we think of the psi-world is actually reality, and what we think of the p-world is our numeric, defintional descriptions of this reality.
The maybe a problem with why do we experience only our own experiences if all experiences are just the interactions themselves? I think this maybe due to conectivity and poor translation. The brain is highly connected so that may allow for unification of each microexperience. When we take a measurement outside the brain we are reducing reality and abstracting it to numerical and defintional values, which are not the things themselves.
Just a spit ball idea.
I have never heard of consciousness without a brain. All of us have seen brain without consciousness.
We should pursue the Real Problem of Consciousness proposed by Anil Seth, instead of getting choked on the insolubility of the Hard Problem of consciousness (David Chalmers).
We experience both the physical and consciousness as a function of being these mobile, bipedal, tactile organisms navigating around the biofilm of this planet, so wouldn’t the logical place to start be where they intersect, as opposed to either extremely abstracted physical principles, or assertions of awareness, without a great deal of clarity?
For instance, our sentience coalesces as a sequence of perceptions. Logically because, as fauna, we have to navigate. From this we experience the process of time as the point of the present, moving past to future. Logically though, change turns future to past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.
There can be no literal dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is ‘conserved,’ because it is the name for the dynamic manifesting this present state. It creates time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process and present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past.
Energy drives the wave, while the fluctuations rise and fall.
In a factory, the product goes start to finish, future to past, while the production line goes the other way, consuming material and expelling product. Toward the future, away fro the past.
As lives go birth to death, while life moves onto the next generation shedding the old.
Now consider that consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past.
Which implies that consciousness functions as an energy. Though it is the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the ‘flame,’ while the central nervous system sorts the information.
The problem then becomes that any description we can assign to consciousness is what it manifests, rather than what it is.
Also waves tend to either synchronize, which is centripetal, or harmonize, which is centrifugal. so there are nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems, even particles and fields.
While we assign consciousness to the organism, what we really are experiencing is more the interface of the organism with its environment. We are no more fully aware of what all our body is doing, especially when we are caught up in the myriad social interactions and physical encounters of the surrounding world, than we are of that world. So we fluctuate between synchronization and harmonization.
Though given our proclivities for obsessive compulsive behaviors, sometimes the synchronization overwhelms any harmonization with the larger world. This can especially apply to groups of people as well.
So then the question is whether our body is conscious, or simply sentient? Are all those various impulses like someone in another room trying to get our attention and conscious in their own right, but our need to function as singular organisms necessitates some degree of singular focus, so the more powerful impulses override the rest. Yet is that consciousness? Our cognitive thought process seems more a referee of the emotions, than source of this driving energy.
We seem to exist in that middle ground, between the anarchies of desire and the tyrannies of judgement.
Not everything has an experience. An Electron or a rock don’t experience anything. They may have different states, but that’s not the same as how consciousness experiences reality. Unless we redefine it, in which case it looses its meaning.
You make a very good argument against your own position in your last few paragraphs: the Core Theory is exactly your “iron table”!
Can consciousness be hosted on arbitrary Turing-complete systems? For example, could consciousness exist in a Conway’s Game of Life universe? If so, then the Core Theory has no explanatory power, because the rules of Conway’s Life completely “erase” the outer rules of physics. We can replace the table material (the particular rules of the Core Theory) with something utterly unrelated (the GoL rules) and still be left with a suspended coffee cup (the conceivable existence of subjective experiences)!
I agree that the Core Theory is the only explanation required for /behavior/. And I agree that there is no physical test that could be done that could distinguish me from a zombie to someone else. But surely /you/ know that you are not a zombie? Anyone who really does have a subjective experience has at least that one additional fact in need of explanation. Yes, we could not differentiate any other conscious being from a zombie who is inaccurately claiming to need an explanation for that same fact, but we don’t /need/ to: Each of us who is conscious already has that fact in hand (no matter what all the zombies are on about).
The utility of zombies is in illustrating that for any given entity in the universe, we have two viable hypotheses about it: That entity has a subjective experience, or it does not. We can’t do any physical test to tell the hypotheses apart, but /one/ of those hypotheses is objectively the correct one (and the other one need not be possible or even logically consistent).
It seems possible to me that the existence or non-existence of a subjective experience in any physical pattern may be an inaccessible objective truth, in the same way that the (prior) existence of other galaxies beyond the cosmic horizon would be a true but inaccessible fact to far-future scientists.
And whatever description we come up with that encapsulates the idea of consciousness should probably not make any reference to the details of the Core Theory, unless we think wooden tables (other Turing-complete systems) can’t support coffee cups (host subjective experiences).
[Excellent post, Sean]
I’m curious as to why no one (besides me) sees information processing as the basis of consciousness. It has all of the right properties, especially physical independence with respect to its description, but physical dependence in that it requires *some* physical realization. If you accept pattern recognition as a *feel*, there is something it feels like to be something that recognizes patterns (recognizing red vs. recognizing cats). It even has protopanpsychism, in that every physical process has an information processing (multi-realizable) description.
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First, I don’t think zombies are possible. In order to act exactly like human beings a zombie would have to accept and interpret external stimuli (perception) and it would have to compute decisions and take actions based on perception and memory and that information processing would instantiate consciousness. I think there are still interesting questions about whether there can be kinds of consciousness different than human, yet equally intelligent. For example, octopuses are quite smart, maybe on the level of a cat. But their neural structure is drastically different with lots of autonomous information processing in each arm. And obviously they don’t have language, which gives humans an inner narrative consciousness. But they recognize people, play, and solve puzzles.
Max Tegmark once proposed that everything mathematically possible happened (kind of Everettianism writ large) but when it was pointed out that some parts of mathematics contradict other parts he retreated to all computations (Church-Turing) exist. If consciousness is just a particular class of information processing then it is substrate independent. And in fact it has been proven by Matasevich that all possible Turning machines and their computations exist (Platonically) in arithmetic. Bruno Marchal has taken that idea even further and holds that Platonic computation is all that exists and various universes of physics exist as classes of consistent computations of conscious relations. But Bruno hasn’t been able to draw any interesting, testable conclusions from this model; and personally of don’t think Platonism is useful. For one thing I think intelligence and consciousness must be relative to an environment, which implies an external physics.
I think that ultimately we will learn to program machines, like Mars Rovers, to be as intelligent as humans (or more so) and that will include processing memories, having values (emotions), learning from experience, forming alliances (friendship). When we’ve done that and can adjust the AI’s humor or ambition or sarcasm or…then no one will worry about “the hard problem”. It won’t be solved. It will be dissolved.
”I’m curious as to why no one (besides me) sees information processing as the basis of consciousness. ”
Max Tegmark has written quite a bit about that idea. Start here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1219
I am a bit disappointed about his choice of journal, though. 🙁
It’s kind of the inverse of Carl Sagan’s Dragon: “what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all?”
Analogously: “What’s the difference between a zombie that talks, thinks and in all possible ways acts like a conscious human and an actual conscious human?”
Or perhaps more succinctly: “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck”