{"id":13829,"date":"2021-11-17T11:48:39","date_gmt":"2021-11-17T19:48:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=13829"},"modified":"2021-11-17T17:43:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T01:43:57","slug":"the-zombie-argument-for-physicalism-contra-panpsychism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2021\/11\/17\/the-zombie-argument-for-physicalism-contra-panpsychism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Zombie Argument for Physicalism (Contra Panpsychism)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I&#8217;m a <a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/physicalism\/\">physicalist<\/a> myself &#8212; as I explain in <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/bigpicture\/\">The Big Picture<\/a><\/em> and elsewhere, I think consciousness is best understood as <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Emergence#Strong_and_weak_emergence\">weakly-emergent<\/a> from the ordinary physical behavior of matter, without requiring any special ontological status at a fundamental level. In <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/poetic-naturalism\/\">poetic-naturalist<\/a> terms, consciousness is part of a successful way of talking about what happens at the level of humans and other organisms. &#8220;Being conscious&#8221; and &#8220;having conscious experiences&#8221; 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 &#8212; the same could be said for the categories of &#8220;being alive&#8221; or &#8220;being a table.&#8221; 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&#8217;s the same kind of work that is required in other questions at the science\/philosophy boundary, without any great metaphysical leaps required.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Not everyone agrees! I recently went on a podcast hosted by philosophers <a href=\"http:\/\/www.philipgoffphilosophy.com\/\">Philip Goff<\/a> (former <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/podcast\/2019\/11\/04\/71-philip-goff-on-consciousness-everywhere\/\">Mindscape<\/a> guest) and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.keithfrankish.com\/\">Keith Frankish<\/a> to hash it out.  Philip is a <a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/panpsychism\/\">panpsychist<\/a>, who believes that consciousness is everywhere, underlying everything we see around us. Keith is much <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/keithfrankish\/status\/1458527609139105810\">closer to me<\/a>, but prefers to describe himself as an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.keithfrankish.com\/illusionism-as-a-theory-of-consciousness\/\">illusionist<\/a> about consciousness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<pre class=\"wp-block-code\"><code><div class=\"lyte-wrapper\" title=\"S02E01 Sean Carroll: Is Consciousness Emergent?\" style=\"width:640px;max-width:100%;margin:5px;\"><div class=\"lyMe\" id=\"WYL_qcCEZzNCNBI\" itemprop=\"video\" itemscope itemtype=\"https:\/\/schema.org\/VideoObject\"><div><meta itemprop=\"thumbnailUrl\" content=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/qcCEZzNCNBI\/hqdefault.jpg\" \/><meta itemprop=\"embedURL\" content=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qcCEZzNCNBI\" \/><meta itemprop=\"duration\" content=\"PT3H14M44S\" \/><meta itemprop=\"uploadDate\" content=\"2021-11-11T17:29:36Z\" \/><\/div><div id=\"lyte_qcCEZzNCNBI\" data-src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/qcCEZzNCNBI\/hqdefault.jpg\" class=\"pL\"><div class=\"tC\"><div class=\"tT\" itemprop=\"name\">S02E01 Sean Carroll: Is Consciousness Emergent?<\/div><\/div><div class=\"play\"><\/div><div class=\"ctrl\"><div class=\"Lctrl\"><\/div><div class=\"Rctrl\"><\/div><\/div><\/div><noscript><a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/qcCEZzNCNBI\" rel=\"nofollow\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.ytimg.com\/vi\/qcCEZzNCNBI\/0.jpg\" alt=\"S02E01 Sean Carroll: Is Consciousness Emergent?\" width=\"640\" height=\"340\" \/><br \/>Watch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/noscript><meta itemprop=\"description\" content=\"Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll joins us to discuss whether it make sense to think of consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, and whether contemporary physics points in this direction. We discussed Sean&#039;s essay responding to Philip&#039;s book &#039;Galileo&#039;s Error,&#039; and Philip&#039;s counter-response essay. Both are available here: https:\/\/conscienceandconsciousness.com\/2021\/08\/01\/19-essays-on-galileos-error\/ We also discussed Philip&#039;s Scientific American article making the case that the move from the fine-tuning to the multiverse commits the &#039;inverse gambler&#039;s fallacy&#039;: https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/our-improbable-existence-is-no-evidence-for-a-multiverse\/#:~:text=Weexistandweare,withtheexistenceoflife. Finally, Keith and Philip discussed the PhilPapers 2020 survey of philosophers&#039; opinions on philosophical questions, which is linked to from this blog post of Philip&#039;s: https:\/\/conscienceandconsciousness.com\/2021\/11\/01\/materialism-remains-the-majority-view-but-only-just\/\"><\/div><\/div><div class=\"lL\" style=\"max-width:100%;width:640px;margin:5px;\"><\/div><\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Obviously we had a lot to disagree about, but it was a fun and productive conversation. (I&#8217;m nobody&#8217;s panpsychist, but I&#8217;m extremely impressed by Philip&#8217;s willingness and eagerness to engage with people with whom he seriously disagrees.) It&#8217;s a long video; the consciousness stuff starts around 17:30, and goes to about 2:04:20.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But despite the length, there was a point that Philip raised that I don&#8217;t think was directly addressed, at least not carefully. And it goes back to something I&#8217;m quite fond of: the <strong>Zombie Argument for Physicalism<\/strong>. Indeed, this was the original title of a paper that I wrote for a symposium responding to Philip&#8217;s book <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Galileos-Error-Foundations-Science-Consciousness\/dp\/1524747963\/smcarroll-20\">Galileo&#8217;s Error<\/a><\/em>.  But in the editing process I realized that the argument wasn&#8217;t original to me; it had appeared, in somewhat different forms, in a few previous papers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Balog, K. (1999). \u201cConceivability, Possibility, and the Mind-Body Problem,\u201d The Philosophical Review, 108: 497-528.<\/li><li>Frankish, K. (2007). \u201cThe Anti-Zombie Argument,\u201d The Philosophical Quarterly, 57: 650-666.<\/li><li>Brown, R. (2010). \u201cDeprioritizing the A Priori Arguments against Physicalism,\u201d Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17 (3-4): 47-69.<\/li><li>Balog, K. (2012). \u201cIn Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy,\u201d Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 84: 1-23. <\/li><li>Campbell, D., J. Copeland and Z-R Deng 2017. \u201cThe Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments,\u201d The Philosophical Quarterly, 67: 223\u2014240.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the published version of my paper shifted the focus from zombies to the laws of physics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Carroll, S.M. (2021). &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/scholar.google.com\/citations?view_op=view_citation&amp;hl=en&amp;user=Lfifrv8AAAAJ&amp;sortby=pubdate&amp;citation_for_view=Lfifrv8AAAAJ:k_7cPK9k7w8C\">Consciousness and the Laws of Physics,<\/a>&#8221; Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (9-10): 16-31.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The idea was not to explain how consciousness actually works &#8212; I don&#8217;t really have any good ideas about that. It was to emphasize a dilemma that faces anyone who is <em>not<\/em> a physicalist, someone who doesn&#8217;t accept the view of consciousness as a weakly-emergent way of talking about higher-level phenomena.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The dilemma flows from the following fact: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/23\/the-laws-underlying-the-physics-of-everyday-life-are-completely-understood\/\">the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known<\/a>.  They even have a name, the &#8220;Core Theory.&#8221; We don&#8217;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&#8217;t rehearse all the reasons we have for believing this is probably true, but they&#8217;re in <em>The Big Picture<\/em>, and I recently wrote a more technical paper that goes into some of the details:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Carroll, S.M. (2021). \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2101.07884\">The Quantum Field Theory on Which the Everyday World Supervenes<\/a>.\u201d 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.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;t. There aren&#8217;t any other options! I emphasize this because many non-physicalists are weirdly cagey about whether they&#8217;re going to violate the Core Theory. In our discussion, Philip suggested that one could rely on &#8220;strong emergence&#8221; to create new kinds of behavior without really violating the CT. You can&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;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&#8217;s absolutely fine to base your theory of consciousness on the idea that the CT will be violated by consciousness itself &#8212; that&#8217;s one horn of the above dilemma. The point of &#8220;Consciousness and the Laws of Physics&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 <em>dynamics<\/em> of what happens in the world, but propose that a straightforward physicalist understanding fails to account for the fundamental <em>nature<\/em> 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&#8217;s not hard to see how this strategy might lead one to a form of panpsychism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That&#8217;s fine! You are welcome to contemplate that. But then we physicalists are welcome to tell you why it doesn&#8217;t work. That&#8217;s precisely what the Zombie Argument for Physicalism does. It&#8217;s not precisely an argument for physicalism <em>tout court<\/em>, but for the superiority of physicalism over a non-physicalist view that purports to explain consciousness while leaving the behavior of matter unaltered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Usually, of course, the zombie argument is deployed against physicalism, not for it. I know that. We find ourselves in the presence of irony. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<!--more-->\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The intuition behind<a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/zombies\/\"> the usual zombie argument<\/a> stems from a conviction from introspection &#8212; from our first-person experience of the world, inaccessible in principle to outsiders &#8212; that there is something going on other than the mere physical behavior of physical stuff. And if that&#8217;s true, we can imagine the same behavior of physical stuff with or without consciousness. A (philosophical) zombie is a creature that behaves <em>exactly<\/em> as an ordinary person would in every way, but lacks the inner experience of consciousness &#8212; the <a href=\"https:\/\/plato.stanford.edu\/entries\/qualia\/\">qualia<\/a> that characterize &#8220;what it is like&#8221; 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&#8217;s a bit reminiscent of Descartes&#8217;s argument for mind-body dualism: I can imagine my body not existing, but I can&#8217;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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 <em>exactly<\/em> 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 &#8220;what it was like&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 &#8220;consciousness&#8221; must be distinct from our notion of the behavior of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;s pretty obvious that your conscious experiences have some effect on your behavior. Such intuitions aren&#8217;t really reliable &#8212; 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Taking a cue from our intuition that consciousness surely affects our behavior, and a suspicion that zombie advocates aren&#8217;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&#8217;t affect physical behavior in any way).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 <strong>P<\/strong>-world (for &#8220;physical&#8221;), which consists solely of physical stuff, and that stuff obeys the Core Theory in its claimed domain of applicability. Then we have <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world (for &#8220;psychist&#8221;), which behaves in precisely the same way, but which is fundamentally based on consciousness. The physical properties and behavior of <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world should be thought of as aspects (emanations? not sure what the preferred vocabulary is here) of an underlying mentality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(Note our use of &#8220;behavior&#8221; 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&#8217;s no connection to &#8220;behaviorism&#8221; in psychology.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The starting point of the zombie argument for physicalism is that, when we sit down to compare <strong>P<\/strong>-world and <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world, we  realize that the purported &#8220;consciousness&#8221; that is central to <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world is playing <em>no explanatory role whatsoever<\/em>. 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 &#8220;differential&#8221; explanatory power to discriminate between the two scenarios.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And &#8212; here is an important point &#8212; whatever that background, causally-inert stuff is, it&#8217;s not what I have in mind when I&#8217;m trying to explain &#8220;consciousness.&#8221; 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 <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world isn&#8217;t the consciousness I care about, and I might as well be a physicalist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Aha, says the panpsychist, but you&#8217;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 &#8212; based on data, even if it&#8217;s not publicly-available &#8212; to prefer <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world over <strong>P<\/strong>-world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That move doesn&#8217;t work, as we can see if we think a bit more carefully about what&#8217;s going on in <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world. How should I interpret someone&#8217;s claim that they have inner conscious experiences of the kind a zombie wouldn&#8217;t have? The claim itself &#8212; the utterance &#8220;I have conscious experience&#8221; &#8212; 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 <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-world or <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So the utterance claiming that a person has inner conscious experiences has precisely the same causal precursors in either <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-world or <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world: a certain configuration of particles and forces in the person&#8217;s brain and body. But we&#8217;ve agreed that non-physical consciousness plays no role in explaining those things within the context of <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-world. Therefore, consciousness cannot play any role in explaining those utterances in <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world, either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 &#8220;data&#8221; at all, in the ordinary sense. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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 <em>completely unreliable<\/em>.  And therefore there is no reason to favor <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world over <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course philosophers are very clever people, and they can invent different categories of &#8220;introspection&#8221; and &#8220;experience&#8221; and &#8220;evidence&#8221; in an attempt to make it all work out. But the essential point is clear and robust: by sequestering off &#8220;consciousness&#8221; from playing any causal role in the world, you&#8217;ve turned it into something very different from what we were originally trying to explain. Time to turn to some other strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There is one dangling thread here, which is what Philip brought up in the conversation and I don&#8217;t think we did justice to. Sure, you might say, there is no <em>differential<\/em> explanatory role being played by consciousness in the comparison between <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-world and <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world. They both behave in the same way, even though one has consciousness and the other doesn&#8217;t. But that doesn&#8217;t mean there is no explanatory role being played <em>within<\/em> <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world itself. In other words, maybe consciousness doesn&#8217;t distinguish between what happens in the two worlds, but surely it is crucial to <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-world considered by its own lights. That world is literally made of consciousness!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;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 <meta charset=\"utf-8\"><strong>P<\/strong>-world and <strong>\u03a8<\/strong>-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&#8217;s what the table is made of!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Well, yes, the iron is &#8220;playing a role.&#8221; But it&#8217;s not a role that is relevant to understanding what keeps the cup from falling. If you had a &#8220;hard problem of coffee cups,&#8221; 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&#8217;s the table-ness that matters, not the substance of which the table is made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The actual analogy that Philip used in a post-discussion Twitter thread was to software, and the substrate-independence of computer algorithms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"500\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Likewise, the thesis that human behavioural functions could be realised in non-conscious zombie stuff doesn&#39;t entail that human consciousness doesn&#39;t do anything. 2\/2<\/p>&mdash; Philip Goff (@Philip_Goff) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Philip_Goff\/status\/1459554886555738114?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">November 13, 2021<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">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&#8217;s hard to mess with that. But the alternative of retreating to a view where consciousness &#8220;explains&#8221; things in the world, while exhibiting precisely the same behaviors that the world would have if there were no consciousness, pretty clearly fails. It&#8217;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&#8217;re not willing to go there, face up to the challenge and explain exactly how our physical understanding needs to be modified. You&#8217;ll probably be wrong, but if you turn out to be right, it will all be worth it. That&#8217;s how science goes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The nature of consciousness remains a contentious subject out there. I&#8217;m a physicalist myself &#8212; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13829"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13852,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13829\/revisions\/13852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}