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.
If we agreed to the idea that science and philosophy are words meant to point to whatever we believe happens when we admit to being curious, even if not disinterestedly, there is nothing fundamental to disagree about. One can applaud Dr. Carroll’s positive enthusiasm about his demonstrated positive fervor from drinking deeply at the well of engaged scientific research and not find in that any reason to denounce the parallel, essentially framing work, of philosophical description (a different animal than philosophical speculation). The most lucid discussion I know of about the intelligent but misguided Descartes instigated death struggle between philosophy and science about how propositional truth has, or doesn’t have, a bearing on deciding what to believe about the natural world, is the article by the philosopher P.F. Strawson, “Perception and Its Objects.” Strawson makes a convincing case for how talk and truth matter for both science and philosophy in their separate descriptive domains: commonsense reality (realism) for the philosopher and scientific reality(realism) for the scientist. The are separate domains only insofar as scientific discourse is an extended form of commonsense discourse. It is obviously the case that the discoveries of science by experimental efforts do not depend upon discourse (human or not): Everything is what it is and not another thing. But, it just as much the case that what is found out experimentally in nature oddly seems to have no need of understanding or explanation. When Science sees itself as on a mission to find the Holy Grail (scientism), it can tell itself the story about the terminal condition of human life as we know it: if it’s not enough that our own sun will expand and recuperate all of its planets, including Earth, any intrepid pioneer wanting to escape into a beyond more clement should be told our universe is expanding.
James,
I would just point out the logical fallacy of monotheism being that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell.
The light shining through the film, than the images on it.
To the Ancients, gods were like public ideas, Plato’s ideals animated. Monotheism symbolized monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures, as they were multicultural.
Rome adopted and co-opted gnostic Christianity to be the Catholic church, as the Empire solidified and reminders of the Republic were being erased. Given it was to validate rule by oligarchs, the default political mechanism became monarchy. When the West went back to less centralized political systems, it has required the separation of church and state, culture and civics.
The problem is the long shadow of this monist worldview remains deeply ingrained in society, where people tend to feel obliged to support singular beliefs and ideologies, rather than sensing there tend to be two sides to every coin.
The anarchies of desire, versus the tyrannies of judgement. The heart is centrifugal, the head is centripetal.
Like banking and government. It’s politics all the way down, but it’s economics all the way up.
It’s information all the way down, but it’s energy all the way up.
See this:
https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/mp-2019-0026/html
Your argument assumes the metaphysics of casual closure. What if that is shown like in this article to be false or just laughable?
Read this :https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/mp-2019-0026/html and this
https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1952/1/wachter_2006-causal-closure.pdf
Your arguing a principle of casual closure and it’s up to you to prove that metaphysically.
One commenter above said, “if only I could explain away one little disconnect … that being the supposition of consciousness collapsing the quantum wave function.”
That supposition is false. Google will find the relevant experiments which show that. My favorite is the two-slit experiment performed with C60 molecules, in which the diffraction pattern did not form unless the molecules were below a certain temperature. Otherwise they emit thermal photons which could be used to determine their trajectories (as to which slot they went through), but no consciousness measured those photons during the experiment or calculated trajectories from them. Just the fact that such information existed was sufficient to collapse the wave functions, regardless of whether any consciousness was aware of it.
My own physicalism divides the consciousness “problem” into two parts: how it works, and how it feels. We understand in broad strokes how it works: like a the operating system of a computer, which detects external inputs, directs them to internal routines for processing, and transmits the results externally. How it feels is just a given, Given our nervous system and a rose’s chemistry, a rose smells like a rose, not an orange. This is the identical “hard problem” of why electrons exist. Certain things exist in our universe and how our nervous systems react to external stimuli are among them.
As to zombies, I regard them as mythical impossibilities. Supposedly they can tell a rose scent from an orange scent without experiencing any sensation. I translate this into: they experience things without any experience of them, which seems to me a contradiction in terms.
There are wavelengths we cannot see and birds can. We do not experience them and birds do. If we could see them there would be corresponding experiences. Nervous systems evolved to detect relevant external information and the detections produce noticeable sensations otherwise they could not have evolved.
Zombies are much more common than we’re led to believe. Take my learning to ride a bike. Since I have mastered the practice of bodily movement having developed (by doing) a complex set of coordinated muscular activity and a means of balancing myself for doing such things a walking, or running or skipping rope, I copy what I seem to see other bike riders do to ride down the street, and by forming an integrated response to visual and kinesthetic sensors in my body, I am able to successfully zombify my bike-riding ability in such a way that my body more or less automates my means of agency and of sensory information. Humans could not do much without the ability to zombify. Knowing how to ride a bike is irreducibly particular, a mechanical way of responding to environmental information unique to me. There is no such thing as “learning to ride a bike” in general. I know how to ride a bike if I am able to show I can: Wittgenstein distinguished what that is learned from experience can be captured by a description, and what has to be “shown.” If I decide to ride my bike to a shop to buy a sweet bun, my bike riding zombie is not involved outside of the bike riding to the shop. My zombie functions within the mental and physical events of experience of action. Experiences of eating a loving sweet buns belongs to the experiential domain of my “person.” I’ll not be one to bad-mouth zombies as long as I continue to bike about in a physical, Newtonian type circumstance.
I’m glad I read your comment Jim V, not because of wave function collapse etc. In which my model sees wave function collapse etc. as ‘complex volume’ interactions. All observations are just interactions at different levels. So whether a sub atomic particle reacts with another subatomic particle (fermions or bosons) this is an ‘observation’. Higher level observations are no different except that you see different phenomena. People just see higher level interactions that follow slightly different rules because of the phenomenon of strong emergence. Having said the above, the reason I like your comment is because you start to talk about more details of consciousness, ie. You see it as 2 parts. I see it as many parts, so each of your 2 is in fact many parts (I call them modules). So you can be conscious at varying degrees. Expanding on your example of the rose. You could be conscious of a visual rose only, or conscious of the texture of a rose, or conscious of the smell of the rose, each with varying degrees, or any combination and degree of all of these and more. So your experience of ‘feeling’ will be slightly different to others (subjective feelings), because everyone will have what I call different ‘persistent contexts’ of consciousness. I think it better to talk about the details (and interacting mechanisms) of consciousness rather than the vague concepts of consciousness.
I am not clear as to why everyone keeps talking about zombies? Different people are talking about different types of zombies. In Michael Cassady comment, he just appears to be saying that the unconscious mind of bike riding is a zombie. I don’t think of it as a zombie, even though that the coordinated mechanisms are complexly learnt, it is just not required to bring this into consciousness, unless the conscious mind wishes to do so. I don’t think it is helpful to think of being conscious or not, of unconscious processes as being a zombie or not? Being mechanistic is not necessarily being a zombie, because ultimately everything will be complexly mechanistic, at which point will you stop being a zombie and become human? Will it be when you are conscious of being a zombie?
Further to my last comment on zombies. The reason that everyone disagrees with each other on objective views and subjective views is that every one has a different experience of consciousness due to each and every one’s different ‘persistent contexts’ of consciousness. Ie. When 2 people see the same thing they see 2 different objective views dependant on their subjective views. Therefore they think they are talking about the same objective view, and they can’t understand why each sees and experiences things differently. There is a real absolute objective view, but this is outside of our experience, so needs to be defined outside of us, such that we all see it in the same way(or context).
My reply speaks to what seems to be an impenetrable wall between Natural Science and Analytic Philosophy on “reality” according to empiricist assumptions stemming from the conceptual amputation of mind and body by Descartes’ ego-cogito argument about how anything can be factually known about mind-independent fact, including the content of the physical world of interest to Natural Science. Descartes himself saw the scientific thought process as a method for isolating (from church dogma) observed objects as recognizably observed and never-minding their “eternal” significance. It’s nothing strange about how persons with minds physically dependent upon brains (particular brains) integrate practices to routinize responses to person-concerning events observed in the physical world and strategic intentional action. A fully mature person (minded) has developed from experience, i.e., from externalities of brain activity, many reflexive responses to personally circumstanced experience. The physical world, including the brain, remains as is: the brain we have now is the brain we were born with. In philosophy today, the concept of “unconsciousness” is functionally dead; there may be lots of forms of “phenomenal” activity, awake and asleep. When we “zombify” practical strategies of effective action (not behavior, whatever that is ), we are totally conscious to the degree needed for what we have learned is best through repetition and by inference. We don’t reinvent the wheel every time we use a wheel. Wherever our brain may be, we are there too, and being where we are, when and how, is much more available to us in appearances and as something of interest than is our having a brain. The mind-body amputation gave us the “ghost in the machine” and gave some the conceptual tools they had been searching for like the Holy Grail that would give our herd directors license to make us a mass of machines available to be engineered and mass-managed. Persons ought to be resistant to being made ghosts of. I suggest reading P.F. Strawson’s article “Perception and its Objects”, to get a better understanding of why science and philosophy are two ways of conceptualizing the same sentient creature. We are “persons”, in radical fact. Persons are always particulars, nothing to understand “in general.”
Hey Sean,
Sorry for the late comment. I found much of this fascinating, and also disagreed with much of what you had to say. Your claim about panpsychism lacking explanatory power seems to be two-fold:
A) Everything that’s relevant to our world and experiences can be explained under the core theory.
B) Since panpsychism doesn’t add or subtract anything to the core theory, it lacks explanatory power.
You then went on to buttress B by pointing out that the conscious component of the Ψ-world doesn’t physically do anything.
If A is true, on the other hand, panpsychism can’t even explain the existence of consciousness. There’s no first person experience that Ψ-world explains because if we had knowledge of any first-person experience, then it must be something that also exists in P-world. To support this, you pointed out that any propositional claim made in Ψ-world can also be made in P-world.
Personally, I think the critiques along the lines of B miss the mark. As you pointed out, the only way that consciousness is causally impotent is in some differential sense. But importantly, one doesn’t need to give such a differential causal account to do away with the puzzle of epiphenomenalism. The whole problem just arises because we want to explain how we can know of conscious experiences (e.g., how are we having this conversation now if there was no causal influence by our own consciousness?).
Panpsychism can accommodate this puzzle, just as physicalism can. We know of conscious experiences because our brain is a conscious thing interacting with other externally conscious (or-proto conscious) systems. Yes, it wasn’t important that physical matter had a phenomenal component in particular, just as it doesn’t matter that the table is made of iron. But no one thinks that there remains a serous puzzle of how iron things can cause stuff to stay up, just because the coffee mug did not fall in virtue of ‘ironness’.
This brings me to the topic of A:
All of this ultimately hinges on your argument for introspective knowledge being unreliable. It’s only if we imagine that there’s no reason to believe in the existence of the phenomenal component intrinsic to Ψ-world, that panpsychicism becomes useless.
You say that it’s impossible to test whether the zombie claim about consciousness is true. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Yes a zombie world is conceivable, but it doesn’t follow from this that a zombie world akin to ours is anything close to probable. Of all the possible zombie-worlds, worlds where zombies talk about consciousness in analogous ways to how we do, are probably among the smallest of subsets. Why? Because it would be a near miracle that a physical zombie should just happen to be able to perfectly describe the existence of something (conscious experience) that it knows nothing about.
Similarly, it is physically possible there might exist a nearby world where everyone spontaneously decided to walk outdoors naked for one day, but it’s also extremely improbable. The very fact that we live in a world where our behaviors are so closely aligned with our conscious states is hence strong evidence that the phenomenal stuff exists, even if a zombie world perfectly parallel to us is conceivable.
So I think your argument about the unreliability of introspective evidence concerning the existence of consciousness falls flat (it fails to make a probability/possibility distinction).
Cheers!
I love these conversations . . . recreationally . . . but substantively they remind me of Brandolini’s law.
In college I majored in chemistry and minored in philosophy, so you are in my wheelhouse. But I am afraid that my philosophical colleagues have retreated so far from quotidian things and engaged in obfuscatory nomenclature that they end up just blowing smoke, as the saying goes.
For example, philosophers have had over two millennia to gnaw on consciousness, science just a few decades. Which group has gotten farther? Hint: it is science because in science we have a final arbiter of whether we are right or wrong, nature. I suspect the so-called problem of consciousness will be solved in the coming decades if not within a century, if we don’t destroy ourselves first. (I am with you. It seems to be an emergent property of brains with enough connections, like what we all fear about AI, that one will achieve consciousness (like Skynet).
I would distinguish humans on autopilot from zombies, which are more like the people we call sociopaths or psychopaths.
Sean, the zombie argument for physicalism is a great idea to use against Chalmers, but I think Goff could wriggle out of it. He could deny your version of causal closure, while holding a different version.
Note, nothing I say here indicates that panpsychism is a good idea. It’s bad, because needlessly complex. But not because it makes consciousness inert.
Sean says “the purported “consciousness” that is central to Ψ-world is playing no explanatory role whatsoever. ” Actually it does, though, just as the iron table holds up the coffee cup – as Alex Popescu pointed out. Sure, an iron table isn’t any *more reliable* than a wooden one, but if Goff is/were right, here in our universe, it’s “iron” (conscious stuff) that’s doing the work. We only get causal closure when the “iron” is included. This is what separates Goff from Chalmers – Goff proposes that mentality is involved at the bottom level in all causal paths.
Another crucial argument Sean makes is “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.” Actually Goff doesn’t have to say the zombie is wrong. Most philosophers would say that the meaning of a word depends on the typical actual causes of its use in the speaker’s language. Since the typical cause of “heartbreak” by speakers in the zombie world is lost zove, rather than lost love – where “zove” is the behavioral analog of love – then the word “heartbreak” in their world refers to something different than it does in ours. They are not wrong, but they are saying something different.
There is an older variant of the zombic argument against dualism, in Raymond Smullyans’ “This Book needs no Title”. It is the story of an unhappy dualist who is in great pain and decides to take a drug that annihilates his soul but leaves his physical structure completely intact. It is not a happy story…
@Peter Ruhrberg
Ray’s story is titled:
“An Unfortunate Dualist”
You can read it in full here, legitimate downloading. It will appear in your downloads folder.
https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/SmullyanUnfortunateDualist1980.pdf
As someone who found his interest in philosophy as an activity, more cogently, as a “practice”, I stopped my formal study of philosophy at the undergraduate degree because I came to the decision that I was not interested in the subject as an avenue to an academic career. Naive as it may be, I was interested in philosophy as a form of action, of deliberative thinking about and within the inescapable condition of being a particular mind in an actual possible world responding to the contingent, finite events available to respond to with developed capacities of “reason”, to coin a phrase, and to act intentionally within as an agent able to creatively impact my environmental reality with focused action.
What is more, as a hypersensitive young person born of the post World War II “Boom”, if you will, I was particularly sensitive to any force I saw as seeking to orient my personal (moral) autonomy. The postwar climate was the poster-child of a disrupted status quo and it’s guiding, law-like assumptions. Proponents of different mobilized factions of Mass Society were bound up in what was presented as a death-struggle among the ruins of former nations and dysfunctional systems of governance. And, science was advertised as the provider of miracles, the Enlightenment’s idea of the religion of positivism as a key-in-hand replacement for religious mystification; science was the road to a modern, exciting community built on informed understanding; religion was a drug treatment aimed at keeping the herd distracted and unlikely to stampede. With my precious autonomy on the line, I was reduced to a quivering mass faced with such desperately ambitious enterprises that reduced an individual will to a powerless, unharnessed blip in the entropy game, and framed personal autonomy as the proper fodder for stand-up comedy. Ok, ok, I’ll finish with the confession. In a word, philosophy with the sceptic’s magic sword of doubt, seemed to allow a backdoor to a symphony stuck on high decibel Wagner.
As is usually the case with the wild horse of unbridled inspiration, philosophy in action proved to be a hard task-master and an opening onto a mine-field of complication and complexity. With a lot of unreasonable verve and daring tinged with madness, I found ways with philosophy to find a balance allowing me to give as much as I got. Never mind the cracked skull and mortal scars. Seeing examples of philosophy practiced by passionate amateurs driven by who knows what voices in the dark or quests of some order or other, I decided it was best to constrain myself to more limited goals, one of which is to finish each day minutely less silly than the day before. In that regard, success is still to rare and often more like punishment, but, let me add, always edifying. For going forth in my Public Person, I consider myself to be only a journalist of philosophy, an admitted gold-digger not too proud to throw out the occasional surprise gem when the gold is so fine-grained it risks becoming powder in my own eyes. Anyway, I hang out around philosophers with full flight certification and steal what I can for purposes of daily existence. I feel more comfortable among the unwashed, the deer looking into the headlights in complete amazement. My favorite Dickens character it is no surprise is the Artful Dodger. Now you see me, now you don’t. If my mind is not my own, I’m keeping it anyway. So, we were talking about zombies.
Philosophy and natural science are not competitors, nor enemies. Descartes’s seeming substance separation of mind and body was not aimed at making the study of the natural world more or less intelligible. Natural science is not in the business of accounting for experience, never minding what Chalmers and others say about “consciousness” and its gaps and hard (explanatory issues). Consciousness is not a “natural kind”, not a simple (the end point of an analysis). The words I write here are physical scratches and they are English words by assignment, so they are, as part of what Strawson calls the “embodied” (physical) domain scratches, and in the linguistic-mental domain words, sentences, the stuff of expressions. As Dr. Carroll can explain better than I, the physical consists of particulars, metaphysical (conceptual) individuals. This apple is identical with that apple for sensory observation, but materially no thing is identical with another unless it is the same matter. The sensory and the material are conceptual schemes useful for reasoning and linguistic expression among persons, There is no generality in Nature. Particulars grouped in sets are only descriptively generalized.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Frege and Russell both worked on accounting for the grammatical fact that sentences (used) have a sense and refer too. That thing there is a worldly object (a thing) referred to from a person’s point of view as (language) the first bright object to appear in the morning sky, by custom named the Morning Star. So, observers with telescopes determined that the first bright object to appear in the morning star was the same physical object as the last bright object to be seen in the evening sky, thus, the Evening Star. Descriptively, there are two objects. Referentially, or objectively (not dependent upon observation) there is only one thing. In another conceptual scheme, that same object is called Venus and is in the set of Earth’s planets. The sense of the expressions are observer-dependent. The reference is to the thing as observer independent. Scientists who want to say what is observer independent is all that’s worth talking about are confused. As observer-independent, a thing is not “experience independent”: both the observer dependent and the observer independent are part of experience, even if their function in experience is different.
For an account of the conceptual inadequacy of Nagel’s idea that consciousness as experience is what it feels like to be a specific, particular conscious being. If a conscious being is not born as conscious in any way like what that being becomes as a conscious person as developed in applied experience, mature conscious beings cannot be compared as such because they are not comparable natural kinds. From a neuroscience perspective, I suggest reading Mark Solms “The Hidden Spring” in which he distinguishes non-cognitive feeling consciousness from cognitive consciousness. It makes no sense to talk about something “feeling like what it is”. Our awareness is a feature of feeling consciousness. For the philosopher Wittgenstein feeling consciousness is not about anything in the way cognitive consciousness is (from the brain’s context): it belongs, as regards communication, or expression, to what can only show itself, or be shown, not said. Cognition produces propositions that are truth functional and, thus, can be said. What can be said meaningfully, is either true or false. Feeling consciousness and cognitive consciousness develop synergistically in a fully developed person, but my feeling consciousness cannot be known to another person qua feeling.
Natural science often invites conceptual confusion by a naive acceptance of empiricism, which is not aimed at accounting for experience. If experience includes (Russell) experience of X and the experience of the experience of X, Natural Science, by design, includes what the experience of experience is “about” (observer independent) without being subjectively circumstanced for observer-dependent purposes of making sense. Natural Science wants the objectively independent, and the possible world we are bound to as well, to be explained, but the Natural World isn’t begging to be explained to be real, while explanation is clearly useful for subjective persons. Natural science and philosophy have every reason to be friends, and say very stupid things when they play one-upmanship. But, I’m not Doing philsophy, I’m doing journalism.