For many people, the phenomenon of consciousness is the best evidence we have that there must be something important missing in our basic physical description of the world. According to this worry, a bunch of atoms and particles, mindlessly obeying the laws of physics, can’t actually experience the way a conscious creature does. There’s no such thing as “what it is to be like” a collection of purely physical atoms; it would lack qualia, the irreducibly subjective components of our experience of the world. One argument for this conclusion is that we can conceive of collections of atoms that behave physically in exactly the same way as ordinary humans, but don’t have those inner experiences — philosophical zombies. (If you think about it carefully, I would claim, you would realize that zombies are harder to conceive of than you might originally have guessed — but that’s an argument for another time.)
The folks who find this line of reasoning compelling are not necessarily traditional Cartesian dualists who think that there is an immaterial soul distinct from the body. On the contrary, they often appreciate the arguments against “substance dualism,” and have a high degree of respect for the laws of physics (which don’t seem to need or provide evidence for any non-physical influences on our atoms). But still, they insist, there’s no way to just throw a bunch of mindless physical matter together and expect it to experience true consciousness.
People who want to dance this tricky two-step — respect for the laws of physics, but an insistence that consciousness can’t reduce to the physical — are forced to face up to a certain problem, which we might call the causal box argument. It goes like this. (Feel free to replace “physical particles” with “quantum fields” if you want to be fastidious.)
- Consciousness cannot be accounted for by physical particles obeying mindless equations.
- Human beings seem to be made up — even if not exclusively — of physical particles.
- To the best of our knowledge, those particles obey mindless equations, without exception.
- Therefore, consciousness does not exist.
Nobody actually believes this argument, let us hasten to add — they typically just deny one of the premises.
But there is a tiny sliver of wiggle room that might allow us to salvage something special about consciousness without giving up on the laws of physics — the concept of downward causation. Here we’re invoking the idea that there are different levels at which we can describe reality, as I discussed in The Big Picture at great length. We say that “higher” (more coarse-grained) levels are emergent, but that word means different things to different people. So-called “weak” emergence just says the obvious thing, that higher-level notions like the fluidity or solidity of a material substance emerge out of the properties of its microscopic constituents. In principle, if not in practice, the microscopic description is absolutely complete and comprehensive. A “strong” form of emergence would suggest that something truly new comes into being at the higher levels, something that just isn’t there in the microscopic description.
Downward causation is one manifestation of this strong-emergentist attitude. It’s the idea that what happens at lower levels can be directly influenced (causally acted upon) by what is happening at the higher levels. The idea, in other words, that you can’t really understand the microscopic behavior without knowing something about the macroscopic.
There is no reason to think that anything like downward causation really happens in the world, at least not down to the level of particles and forces. While I was writing The Big Picture, I grumbled on Twitter about how people kept talking about it but how I didn’t want to discuss it in the book; naturally, I was hectored into writing something about it.
But you can see why the concept of downward causation might be attractive to someone who doesn’t think that consciousness can be accounted for by the fields and equations of the Core Theory. Sure, the idea would be, maybe electrons and nuclei act according to the laws of physics, but those laws need to include feedback from higher levels onto that microscopic behavior — including whether or not those particles are part of a conscious creature. In that way, consciousness can play a decisive, causal role in the universe, without actually violating any physical laws.
One person who thinks that way is John Searle, the extremely distinguished philosopher from Berkeley (and originator of the Chinese Room argument). I recently received an email from Henrik Røed Sherling, who took a class with Searle and came across this very issue. He sent me this email, which he was kind enough to allow me to reproduce here:
Hi Professor Carroll,
I read your book and was at the same time awestruck and angered, because I thought your entire section on the mind was both well-written and awfully wrong — until I started thinking about it, that is. Now I genuinely don’t know what to think anymore, but I’m trying to work through it by writing a paper on the topic.
I took Philosophy of Mind with John Searle last semester at UC Berkeley. He convinced me of a lot of ideas of which your book has now disabused me. But despite your occasionally effective jabs at Searle, you never explicitly refute his own theory of the mind, Biological Naturalism. I want to do that, using an argument from your book, but I first need to make sure that I properly understand it.
Searle says this of consciousness: it is caused by neuronal processes and realized in neuronal systems, but is not ontologically reducible to these; consciousness is not just a word we have for something else that is more fundamental. He uses the following analogy to visualize his description: consciousness is to the mind like fluidity is to water. It’s a higher-level feature caused by lower-level features and realized in a system of said lower-level features. Of course, for his version of consciousness to escape the charge of epiphenomenalism, he needs the higher-level feature in this analogy to act causally on the lower-level features — he needs downward causation. In typical fashion he says that “no one in their right mind” can say that solidity does not act causally when a hammer strikes a nail, but it appears to me that this is what you are saying.
So to my questions. Is it right to say that your argument against the existence of downward causation boils down to the incompatible vocabularies of lower-level and higher-level theories? I.e. that there is no such thing as a gluon in Fluid Dynamics, nor anything such as a fluid in the Standard Model, so a cause in one theory cannot have an effect in the other simply because causes and effects are different things in the different theories; gluons don’t affect fluidity, temperaturs and pressures do; fluids don’t affect gluons, quarks and fields do. If I have understood you right, then there couldn’t be any upward causation either. In which case Searle’s theory is not only epiphenomenal, it’s plain inaccurate from the get-go; he wants consciousness to both be a higher-level feature of neuronal processes and to be caused by them. Did I get this right?
Best regards,
Henrik Røed Sherling
Here was my reply:
Dear Henrik–
Thanks for writing. Genuinely not knowing what to think is always an acceptable stance!
I think your summary of my views are pretty accurate. As I say on p. 375, poetic naturalists tend not to be impressed by downward causation, but not by upward causation either! At least, not if your theory of each individual level is complete and consistent.
Part of the issue is, as often happens, an inconsistent use of a natural-language word, in this case “cause.” The kinds of dynamical, explain-this-occurrence causes that we’re talking about here are a different beast than inter-level implications (that one might be tempted to sloppily refer to as “causes”). Features of a lower level, like conservation of energy, can certainly imply or entail features of higher-level descriptions; and indeed the converse is also possible. But saying that such implications are “causes” is to mean something completely different than when we say “swinging my elbow caused the glass of wine to fall to the floor.”
So, I like to think I’m in my right mind, and I’m happy to admit that solidity acts causally when a hammer strikes a nail. But I don’t describe that nail as a collection of particles obeying the Core Theory *and* additionally as a solid object that a hammer can hit; we should use one language or the other. At the level of elementary particles, there’s no such concept as “solidity,” and it doesn’t act causally.
To be perfectly careful — all this is how we currently see things according to modern physics. An electron responds to the other fields precisely at its location, in quantitatively well-understood ways that make no reference to whether it’s in a nail, in a brain, or in interstellar space. We can of course imagine that this understanding is wrong, and that future investigations will reveal the electron really does care about those things. That would be the greatest discovery in physics since quantum mechanics itself, perhaps of all time; but I’m not holding my breath.
I really do think that enormous confusion is caused in many areas — not just consciousness, but free will and even more purely physical phenomena — by the simple mistake of starting sentences in one language or layer of description (“I thought about summoning up the will power to resist that extra slice of pizza…”) but then ending them in a completely different vocabulary (“… but my atoms obeyed the laws of the Standard Model, so what could I do?”) The dynamical rules of the Core Theory aren’t just vague suggestions; they are absolutely precise statements about how the quantum fields making up you and me behave under any circumstances (within the “everyday life” domain of validity). And those rules say that the behavior of, say, an electron is determined by the local values of other quantum fields at the position of the electron — and by nothing else. (That’s “locality” or “microcausality” in quantum field theory.) In particular, as long as the quantum fields at the precise position of the electron are the same, the larger context in which it is embedded is utterly irrelevant.
It’s possible that the real world is different, and there is such inter-level feedback. That’s an experimentally testable question! As I mentioned to Henrik, it would be the greatest scientific discovery of our lifetimes. And there’s basically no evidence that it’s true. But it’s possible.
So I don’t think downward causation is of any help to attempts to free the phenomenon of consciousness from arising in a completely conventional way from the collective behavior of microscopic physical constituents of matter. We’re allowed to talk about consciousness as a real, causally efficacious phenomenon — as long as we stick to the appropriate human-scale level of description. But electrons get along just fine without it.
Oh, finally some actual discussion!
Leslie Allan, follow what I’m going to say and you’ll see that we maybe agree but frame this problem VERY differently, and I think your is erroneous in the context of THIS specific debate.
I know that discussions on Free Will have a cascading effect on different fields, but this discussion isn’t pertinent to the human legal system. It can lead to it as consequence, but specifically we’re talking about *science*, maybe dabbing a bit in epistemic philosophy. So we talk of Free Will in the specific context of Determinism, which is a scientific model of reality, and argue whether or not humans beings and human brains could be *SPECIAL CASES*, exceptions within this overall description.
This is what the person in the street usually thinks: that they have a soul, and that soul grants them a special status that makes their individuality matter in the larger world. It’s about “choice”. And in general terms choice is the power to trigger an effect in the world that couldn’t be deduced by previous states. This is a metaphysics perspective on top of the scientific Determinism.
The STRONG core of this idea is: the choice is MINE. Consequently: causation begins here, with me. I AM the cause. The origin of the action, and the true will behind this action.
This is the argument. Incompatibilists say it’s not compatible with Determinism because Determinism offers a model where the causation chain ALWAYS PRECEDES YOU. The cause can always be traced upstream. You are floating in the river, moving in the direction of the river, but you aren’t the WILL of the river, not you are the true cause of its direction.
You instead APPROPRIATE that cause. You think you are the origin because the scarcity of information in your hands makes you believe you are the culprit. It’s mere illusion.
And, in practical terms, if there’s someone around you who could have a more complete knowledge of the environment around you, a “lesser Laplace’s demon”, he could technically manipulate you by manipulating your environment, while you wouldn’t notice any of it. Because you are only floating in that river, and causation precedes you instead of being created by you.
Does anyone sees this specifically is the context?
It’s INSIDE this context that we can then argue and divide ourselves into compatibilists and incompatibilists. I’m compatibilist, but not by turning this debate into mere worldplay. When I discuss Free Will it’s in the context of causation, of the chain of cause and effect, and the role a human being has in it. Whether he is cause or consequence. A puppet or the master.
You cannot confuse the level of Determinism, where we give a model of how reality works in its entirety, and then switch to an idea of Free Will that is downsized to the information available to an individual being.
Specifically my position is based on an epistemic freedom, or ontological Free Will, and it’s based on a scientific falsification of the ideal of Science to prove that certain statements, as the one about Determinism, cannot happen within the field of Science, and so consequently Free Will cannot be disproved, simply. It falls outside the domain of what Science can speak about. So yes, we can hypothesize a Deterministic model of reality, but it isn’t enough to directly falsify Free Will, because that statement includes an epistemic violation.
But that’s another discussion. What’s important here is that the debate on the legal system, morality and so on are different contexts. And what instead when we talk about scientific ideas and models as Determinism we cannot play with words and turn to a serviceable and convenient definition of Free Will.
Free Will = I’m the novel cause of an effect in the system of reality that begins with me and that I’m responsible of. If we establish that causes precede you and don’t instead originate with you, then we come to the logical conclusion that Free Will is incompatible with that model.
This is really a big deal: before we begin to argue we should at least agree the context we’re arguing about. Otherwise it’s just a collection of misunderstandings.
Sean,
You faked me out in the first paragraph where you made mention of “philosophical zombies.” The underlying issue (described by John Merryman in his comment, I believe) is really interesting and crucial. Would we be the same behaviorally (including laughing and crying) if we didn’t have a mind/consciousness? The fake out came from your dropping the subject. If consciousness has no causal efficacy, is an epiphenomenon, the answer would be “yes.” So you have the spectacle of people shedding tears at graveside but having no feelings of grief, or people swapping jokes and laughing but not feeling what people do when they hear a joke and so on and on and on and on. I am dubious. I would love to hear what your view on this is.
From the nutritious subject of the nature of consciousness, you abruptly move on to a talmudic-like question of how believers in consciousness who are also friendly to science can harmonize physics and mind. You act as if this is a burning issue. But it seems to me almost to be a straw man. It enables you to avoid having to speak of what consciouness is.
Let’s go back to the question of personal identity. There’s clearly some truth to the idea of consciousness as a self-model (from neuroscience theories).
What actually determines the ‘identity’ of something? Take an electron; If that electron did not have a definite location in space and time, could it even be said to have a unique identity? I think the answer is no. Something has a unique ‘identity’ precisely to the extent that we can pin down its location in space and time.
Now imagine the same sort of uncertainty for people. Let’s say you suddenly wake up in a dark room suffering from amnesia, and you remember absolutely nothing. You don’t know the time, the place, or even your name. (This of course is a favourite scenario of thrillers).
Isn’t it true that your personal identity is precisely determined by the extent to which you can pin-down your location in space and time? I think the answer is yes. If you knew your *exact* location in the multiverse, then indeed, as Ben pointed out, I think everything about you would be completely determined.
But here’s the rub: You *don’t* know your exact location in the multiverse! (This is called ‘indexical uncertainty’). When you make a choice, your macroscopic actions had to be consistent with unknown microscopic brain states, so new information about your location in the multiverse is coming to light every time you are making a choice. Each choice you make ‘pins down’ your location in the multiverse further.
It’s important to understand that finding out your location is an actual physical process. What physical process? What I want to suggest is that whatever this process is that ‘narrows down’ your location in multiverse, it is consciousness! Consciousness is what locks in your identity!
Oh, and about the debate moving on the legal and moral fields, if you think all this doesn’t have very direct repercussions on those, look up on youtube a video:
The dark side of free will | Gregg Caruso
That video is short and will explain directly why we aren’t just discussing abstract metaphysical stuff and why the legal system would work better if we used a more accurate model of reality (and consciousness).
zarzuelazen,
my idea is that identity is a division. You make an observation by pointing a form (yourself) and distinguish it from its environment (again Spencer Brown Laws of Form).
But you mix things up with the other example. There’s “identity” as a sense of the qualia, and “identity” as a sense of a very specific personality, history, memories and so on.
And I think how you frame your example hides a fallacy: you assume intentionality of consciousness, by implying that consciousness “does” something (you say it pins down location and makes choices).
What a consciousness is, is a sub-system where only limited information enters and is processed. The special property that makes consciousness a thing different from every other process, is that it’s recursive and self-observing. It includes itself in its model. Self-observes and self-represents. So it doesn’t passively operates on an external object, but it performs an operation (observation) where the subjects self-observes and distinguishes itself from its environment. This creates a form of perceptual or illusory “dualism”: the idea you are a separate process from the environment (and that you “own” your choices because it feels they originate from you, since you have a limited information horizon).
That split, that separation embedded in the mechanic of the observation creates the paradox that is dualism: it’s environment that self-observes and splits itself from itself.
It’s always all part of the same process/substance (you can call it multiverse in your model) but by taking the shape of the self-observing loop, it closes itself and separates itself. Creating an inside (identity) distinct from the outside (environment). Even if we can assume the “true” condition is not an actual separation. It’s only a perceptive one.
If one accepts emergent properties, then a reductionist argument cannot apply because the very idea of emergence is antireductive. If one insists on reductionist explanations for everything, then there *are no emergent properties* to explain and higher levels are simply aggregates of lower level properties. Either there *are* emergent properties and they require antireductive explanations, or there *are not* and reductionism explains everything.
However, as you say on p.100 of The Big Picture.
“It’s not possible to specify the state of a system by listing the state of its subsystems individually. We have to look at the system as a whole, because different parts of the system can be entangled with one another.”
I take this as an admission that there is at least one situation in which there is an emergent property to which reductionism does not apply. Only an antireductive (i.e. emergentist or systems) approach can comprehend this kind of system, precisely because it exists as an irreducible system. So reductionism does *not* have universal applicability. Metaphysical reductinionism is off the table. Sometimes structure makes a real contribution. Ontological reductionism is incoherent because it cannot account for this black swan. And in fact at least several other such scenarios exist, consciousness being the most obvious.
Searle’s philosophy of mind says that conscious states are wholly caused by neurobiological processes and that such states are irreducibly subjective. Like you, Sean, Searle confuses the reader through ambiguous and shifting use of the word “ontology”. Your ontology is Quantum Field Theory; you are an ontological reductionist. Sure, you are ambivalent about it, and you accept that levels of *description* are useful. But what you are talking about are epistemologies, not ontologies. Fundamentally you seem to believe that everything is fields. You say it often enough! This apsect of your Poetic Narturalism is consistent with “weak epistemological antireductionism”. Your explanation of the fine/coarse grain theory through the physical properties of a gas is chosen precisely to demonstrate this: the coarse grained theory you choose is *wholly reducible* to a fine grained theory; but it is merely *expedient* to have a coarse grained theory because in everyday use the fine grained theory is impractical. This is not an ontological position, it is quintessential weak epistemological antireductionism. So your philosophical position combines ontological reductionism, with weak epistemological antireductionism. But its important to point out that this philosophical position does not explain the entangled quantum system.
Downward causation is a red-herring. As you say causation is not found in physics. Which is what we would expect post-Kant. Causation, according to Kant, is a *metaphysical* concept, an a priori judgement. Therefore causation ought to have no place in our definitions of reality! Explaining ontology or reality by referencing metaphysical notions is incoherent. Causation is not part of our ontology; it’s part of our epistemology. QED.
The quote about entanglement from TBP shows up an internal contradiction in Poetic Naturalism. It’s still an attractive way of looking at things, but it is not entirely coherent. In my view, what we all need to come to grips with, philosophically, is the reality of structure. If we grant that structures are real, then we can shift from an ambivalent and incoherent reductionism to a view which combines the best of both worlds, i.e. substance reductionism and structure antireductionism. The view is still monist, but it lacks the ambiguity between ontology and epistemology in TBP. One kind of stuff, made into many kinds of complex objects (up to an including the whole universe).
Substance reductionism preserves the very great successes of scientific materialism to date. The world *is* made of fields. But as we have seen reductive approaches cannot explain everything preciely because of structure. Fields are *made into* more complex objects across about 100 orders of magnitude in mass, length, and energy. And the contribution of structure is *real*. Entanglement is a *real* phenomena that creates a system that cannot be understood by listing the state of its subsystems (i.e. by reductionism). The entangled system is real, *in the same way* that fields are real.
This is not simply because it is expedient to talk about it that way (because our ontology produces inconvenient levels of complex mathematics wrt systems). Structure is real because the structural element is irreducible. With entanglement we have to look at the whole system, which has properties not attributable to simple elements. Remove the entanglement and we go back to an aggregate that *can* be described by listing the properties of the simple elements (as in TBP example of fine/coarse grained descriptions of a gas). So entanglement is real, as real as the fields themselves. Our ontology has to include structure as well as substance by sheer logical necessity.
And this hybrid ontology is a far more powerful way of thinking about reality. It opens up all kinds of possibilities for description and exploration of reality that are not found in the artificial polarity between standard presentations of reductionism and emergentism. The poetry of Poetic Naturalism is far more deeply rooted than TBP suggests. The “stories” are real.
Dr Carroll
A few thoughts…
Wiener pointed out that: “Information is information, not matter or energy.” (We only see the effects of information in the structures or process of matter and energy, but there is no equivalence, no mimumum amount of energy per bit.)
It is implicit in science that the laws are causative (even if you cannot accept that matter and energy were “caused” in a lawful way, you cannot deny that what they do is constrained lawfully).
Laws consist of information, which is not matter or energy.
The behaviour of particles may well be constrained by cosciousness – in fact that is implicit in experimental science (if the experimenter has no choice, then experiments – especially the Aspect delayed choice experiment – are meaningless).
Wheeler intuited this as: “It from bit.”
Logico,
Consider that information is inherently static. If it was dynamic, it would be fuzzy, so in order for form to be precise, it has to be stable.
Then consider that our central nervous system is designed to process information. It extracts signal from the noise. Yet we have the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems to process the energy which propels us, as well as all other form and information.
So is information really the fundamental constituent of reality, or of our perception of it? What comes first, the noise, or the signal? Are frequency and amplitude the basis of the wave, or descriptive of it?
I would argue energy manifests, while form defines.
An imp would say there are no mindless particles. They are explained by consciousness and exist in consciousness. There is no downward causation but Sean is confused about which is the lower level. He would find everything deterministic if he knew everything because his consciousness would be making it so. A simple counter to a simple argument. Such discussions are unproductive until we have at least traced consciousness to the quantum level or determined that unnecessary and that won’t happen until we have a much better understanding of it.
John M
“…fuzzy… noise…” You are implicitly assuming infirmation is material. The information in a signal is not degraded because of the nature of information, but because of the nature of matter and energy. Noise is additional information, of course, just not the information we are interested in.
“…information is inherently static…” No. Konrad Zuse suggested the universe might be a cellular automaton in 1967. That is the basis of it-from-bit thinking, information evolving. Conway’s Game of Life is Turing Complete: anything computable can be computed in GOL.
“…frequency… amplitude… wave…” Cellular automata are digital. At the hypothetical fundamental level, there would be no waves, no continuous functions.
@Abalieno Thank you for your response. To respond as fully as I would like to your comments would mean repeating a lot of arguments I present in my essay, and that would not be fair doing that here. So, I direct you to the arguments for compatibilism contained in my essay, Free Will and Compatibilism at http://www.RationalRealm.com/philosophy/metaphysics/freewill-compatibilism.html
I will say that I think your assumption that the person in the street thinks their “choice is the power to trigger an effect in the world that couldn’t be deduced by previous states” is very mistaken. This is a mistake that many incompatibilists make. I devote a lot of time in my essay showing how this assumption is a mistake. I’ve just written a review of some experimental studies on folk intuitions about free will. Of the ones I review, they come down on the side of compatibilism; that is, that the person on the street is a compatibilist. You can access my review here >
http://www.RationalRealm.com/philosophy/metaphysics/psychological-research-free-will-intuitions.html
Thanks again for taking the time to respond.
A STATEMENT OF FAITH:
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First, I must declare that I am a believer in (1) God Almighty, in (2) the existence of spirits, and in (3) the survival of our consciousness after death.
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Second, I must warn the readers that each of these three bizarre (weird indeed) beliefs of mine are, surprisingly enough, absolutely independent of each other. Belief 3 could be true despite beliefs 1 and 2 being false, and so on (most shockingly: belief 2 may be true and beliefs 1 and 3 false!).
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Most importantly: all these beliefs of mine, in principle, are absolutely irrelevant to the modern debate of consciousness (with the *possible* exeption of belief 3…).
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Having said that, what I really want to say with this post is this: consciousness is not a mystery only in regards to materialism or physicalism or poetic naturalism or whatever one may name it. It is actually a mystery regarding almost all worldviews that we have in stock. It is an utter mystery in regards to dualism. As a matter of fact, if God Almighty really exists, we can all be sure that HE does not have an inkling of an idea of how this thing of consciousness came to be imbued into HIS creatures.
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We should not be surprised in the least if it turns out that God is NOT a conscious entity (being instead a philosophical zombie) whereas human beings and all other living creatures are conscious.
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Best Regards to all posters, and to Mr. Sean Carroll,
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Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
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Ben,
Information is descriptive. If it doesn’t have some medium to convey it, it isn’t describing anything. What would information be, if it isn’t communicated?
Bits are units. As I said, units come and go, future to past, while the process, the medium, moves onto the next bit/unit, past to future.
It is a bit of a node versus network/tree versus forest/organism versus ecosystem dichotomy. Even cellular automata need that contextual background, rules, processing, etc. to function.
Our thought processes are very frame oriented, like frames of a film, yet to work, it requires the larger process of flashing them in front of a projector light, onto a screen.
The frames go future to past, while the projector light, as the present, goes past to future.
Agreed it’s fun to look at phenomenon from the perspective of different paradigms, but only one paradigm at a time!
So here is a view of consciousness from a (much hackneyed) computability perspective.
Consciousness effectively witnesses itself and arguably is nothing else other than it witnesses itself. This is a self referential or infinitely recursive definition. And therefore is not computable. Therefore it cannot be rendered by anything that is limited to expressing computable functions, i.e. the mind or a computable universe. The assumption here is that the mind is separate from consciousness and is ordinary physical. I realize this is a mis-mash of Penrose / Hofstadter / Turing ideas. The implication is that there is a super reality that is not computable and that we can only work downwards in this hierarchy. So to “reason” about consciousness you need to get above it, whatever that means.
Here is a “Big Picture” view.
Consciousness appears to be unobservable objectively. It only has a subjective presence. Therefore it appears to have no real effect. This is consistent with it not existing i.e., the popular view, that seems to be contradicted by our personal experience. However this no effect feature is also consistent with consciousness being the cause of everything. If it causes everything then it does not have to have a differential effect within what it causes, and so won’t be detectable from within. So we are back to a super reality that cannot be detected from below, only from above. So the vehicle for understanding consciousness is super consciousness, not our mind.
The is of course quasi religious pseudo science, and that is always how the edge of science has been perceived. If it does not appear like this, then it is not the edge. So let’s not be too fast to step away from the edge.
I would (and have, probably too many times now) put it like this: why does consciousness consist of feelings? Because of this tautology: an experience has to produce some distinct sensation, or feeling, to be experienced. If pressing a key on my keyboard produced no sensation in Windows then Windows would ignore it (and I probably would have a dead key, although a Windows error is always an alternate possibility). I don’t know or care what that sensation feels like to Windows. It doesn’t have to be the same sensation I get from my sense of touch, but it has to be a distinct sensation to Windows. Yes, Windows receives an electronic signal and parses it into an ASCII code – just as my nerve cells pass on an electro-chemical signal which gets parsed in my cerebellum (or thereabouts). We both know we got input. How we experience it is our personal business.
(Granted, an air of mystery is added from the viewpoint of a higher-level operating system such as Windows or “consciousness” by results which pop into existence from lower-level background systems whose workings aren’t monitored. Windows does not itself known how to do spreadsheet calculations, for example. It gets an input ASCII string of numbers, passes it on to Excel, and presto, a result comes back for Windows to display. There are no nerve cells monitoring our brains’ neurons either.)
The further question, “But why does it feel the way it feels, instead of some other way?” is not very interesting to me. I see it as the same question as, “Why does a rose smell like a rose, instead of an orange (and vice-versa)?”, or “Why does an electron have a positive charge?” (I know, by definition. Definition recognizes something exists – usually – but does not explain why it exists.) Things are a certain way in this universe. If you don’t like it, move to another universe.
On to the next non-problem: free will to me means making your own decisions, without being constrained to obey external dictates, and therefore being responsible for them: as in, no one put a gun to your head to force you to sign a contract. I.e., “will” is a synonym for wishes or desires. To will something is to desire it to happen. Whether that desire is deterministic, chaotically random, quantum- random (which I believe it could partially be), or whatever, you are responsible for the actions you do of your own free will. “But judge, there is no free will, I didn ‘t have a choice,” is not a legal defense, nor should it be – because the rest of us can observe the consequences of certain desires, and factor that into our decisions.
No doubt others have said similar things in a better way. By the time that I saw there was a new post here, it already had 88 comments. I’ll try to read them now – maybe somebody will change my mind.
I agree with the idea of unique mathematical identity in comparison to non-existing things, of which there cannot be more than zero. There can be more than zero identifiers of non-existing things; those would be false predictions. If I understand correctly predictions unlimited until a system is observed (squaring the predictive function). In other words, I think the evidence we can differentiate before non-existing things exist, which is never. Mathematically, unique identity is the same as illustrating Cantor’s diagonal argument, predicting nothing as ‘zero’ and units as ‘one’. Non-existing things, as none, remain predictable (as between exclusive points, according to the squaring function).
Downward causation. I believe the problem lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word “cause.” Consider a molecule of CaCO3 in the thumb of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial. What caused it to be there? You could answer, if you had the information, by enumerating all of the forces that moved that molecule from the time it was metamorphised in Georgia until the time the statue was carved at the beginning of the 20th century. But would that tell you what caused it to be there? I think not. To understand what caused it to be there, you would need to tell a narrative of a great President who guided a nation through a terrible civil war and then was assassinated. You would need to tell how a grateful nation of his fellow human beings commissioned a memorial in his honor, and how the marble for the statue was transported from the state of Georgia and carved by the Piccirilli brothers into a giant likeness of Lincoln sitting in contemplation, his thumb extended from his hands resting on replicas of Roman fasces. In other words, you would need to explain the “causes” of the forces that moved the molecule. To me, that is downward causation.
The implication is that there is a super reality that is not computable and that we can only work downwards in this hierarchy.
Not quite. It is computable, but not from the inside.
The recursion of the process creates an occluded horizon (perception), so the fact that makes perception possible is also the fact that makes it not complete. And so not computable (from the inside).
But saying its nature is not-computable as an absolute state is wrong. It’s the human perspective making it not computable. And the human perspective can exist because it is limited.
I will say that I think your assumption that the person in the street thinks their “choice is the power to trigger an effect in the world that couldn’t be deduced by previous states” is very mistaken. This is a mistake that many incompatibilists make.
Oh, come on now. This discussion isn’t about creating a statistical model of what 50+1% of the population considers “free will”. It’s not an internet poll either, and it’s not a discussion about etymology of a world. You are commenting on a personal blog of a cosmologist, writing 99% of the time about the scientific debate on some argument. In this case it’s about various scientific models about consciousness and free will.
Whatever “the person in the street” thinks is not contextual to this discussion. And “incompatibilists” aren’t interested about what’s the discussion in the street, they are interested in the field of science and philosophy where terms have a precise and shared value. Of course the people in the street don’t divide themselves into compatibilists and incompatibilists. They hardly care.
So I really don’t see how it can contribute to THIS discussion the realization that the common idea of free will can be practical and outside the context of discussions about Determinism.
The word “free will” as used in the legal system doesn’t even remotely relate to a description of Determinism, so it’s neither compatible or incompatible. Because the legal system doesn’t have to hypothesize a model of reality and explain Quantum Mechanics. These are completely different fields that just HAPPEN to use the same words.
Yes, the average person in the street has usually very inaccurate scientific ideas and totally illogical assumptions, so what? This is hardly surprising.
It just bogs down to the realization that the people in the street believe in an idea of Free Will that they don’t really have. Same as they might believe in lots of other silly things.
@Abalieno Thank you for your response. I’m NOT suggesting that to find out what people mean by free will, we take a poll. I suggest doing what lexicographers and grammarians do: seeing how people actually use the word in question. You seem to misunderstand a lot of what my views are and how I think an ordinary language analysis solves a lot of questions in the free will debate. It appears you have not read my essay, Free Will and Compatibilism, or my review of recent psychological studies on free will concepts. To respond to your comments more completely would mean repeating my published arguments. If you are interested in continuing this discussion, I encourage you to read my essays to become familiar with my line of reasoning.
So you’re persuaded that you can answer complex scientific questions by doing ordinary language analysis and psychological studies. Okay.
I’m pretty sure you are the one who’s not reading what the other is writing.
I repeat: here we aren’t discussing “how people use the word”, we are discussing how scientists and philosophers answer certain complex and radical questions.
It does seem neurology has accepted that consciousness does manifest as some degree of electro-static field. So it would be a physical factor and input into social actions. One which is often quite effective in leveraging its efforts.
The fact also remains that the past is determined and the future is probabilistic. So building models which assume the future is pre-determined, or the past remains probabilisitic, i.e., multiworlds, overlooks the actual process of occurrence that is the present.
We build, even subconsciously, these narratives to order our lives. Even dreams are emerging narrative.
Yet it is not the point of the present moving from past to future, along some eternal dimension of all events. It is change turning future into past. Tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns.
We still see the sun as moving across the sky from east to west, but we now recognize our point of view is subjective and it is the earth turning west to east. Similarly with time, we are very linear, object oriented creatures, so we have a linear, point A to point B notion of time, but time is quite evidently flowing through us, as we move through our world.
The energy manifesting all these events and changes is conserved. It doesn’t fade into the past, nor does it emerge from the future. It is simply coalescing and radiating in the present state. The form and momentum of prior events is as much consumed by the present, as it shapes it.
These feedback loops are far more foundational to nature, than Euclidian geometry. It is we who start out in kindergarten with a pencil, ruler and sheet of paper. Otherwise there would be many more straight edges and right angles occurring in nature. Dimensions are only mapping devices, like longitude, latitude and altitude.
@Abalieno You ask: “So you’re persuaded that you can answer complex scientific questions by doing ordinary language analysis and psychological studies.”
No. The question of whether free will is compatible with determinism is not a “complex scientific question”. It’s a philosophical question. It’s not taught in any science class I took. I studied it in my formal studies in philosophy.
To respond briefly to some of your earlier comments:
You say: “And “incompatibilists” aren’t interested about what’s the discussion in the street, they are interested in the field of science and philosophy where terms have a precise and shared value.”
Clearly, incompatibilists are not all that interested in how ordinary folk use free will language. I argue in my essay that that is a key problem with how incompatibilists frame the debate. And I’m not saying we should be interested in “what’s the discussion in the street”. I’m saying we should be interested in how ordinary folk make judgments about which human actions are freely chosen and which are not as they illuminate what ordinary folk mean by “free will”. Same goes for moral judgments.
Incompatibilists are free to define a term to give it precision and a shared value. That’s fine. Scientists and philosophers do that as a part of their professional work. But then hard determinists ought not pretend that when they say that ordinary folk should give up all talk of “free will” and “moral responsibility” that they are actually referring to these same words that ordinary folk use. It’s like the scientist redefining the common word “solid” to refer to the property of being devoid of empty space and then chastising common folk for calling tables “solid”. As I argue in my essay, hard determinists have uncritically accepted the theologian’s and philosophical substance dualist’s conception of “free will” as requiring indeterminism and then pretended that that is what the word means. I suggest that if incompatibilists want to redefine the word “free will'”, that they give it a different name, such as “phi will”. That gives the word a nice scientific feel and avoids confusion with what the rest of us are doing when we judge this act or that act “free”.
You say: ‘The word “free will” as used in the legal system doesn’t even remotely relate to a description of Determinism, so it’s neither compatible or incompatible.’
I never said it related. If you read my paper, you will see that I argue that modern legal reasoning is agnostic to the truth or falsity of determinism. That’s precisely what makes the legal term “free will” compatible with determinism. ‘It is raining’ is (logically) incompatible with ‘It is not the case that it is raining’. Both these sentences are compatible with ‘It is Tuesday’ as this sentence, as you put it, “doesn’t even remotely relate to” the domain of weather.
I do welcome challenges to my views. Abalieno, I suggest if you want to critique my views, that you first spend some time finding out what they are. My published views on this are fairly detailed. We can then save a lot of time trying to correct misapprehensions and get down to tin tacks. What do you say?
CHOPPING AND BARBECUING SEAN’S REASONING:
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At first I thought of using the title “Taking the Bull by the Horns”; but, frankly, I think we are way past that already… I do see lot’s of problems and naive reasoning in Sean’s article (with all due respect, Mr. Sean), so I decided that the only way to address that is to comment on *all* of it. I will have to cut it in many pieces (many different posts). Let’s hope my reasoning do bring some contribution to the debate. In this first post, I will take a look at four initial quotations from Sean:
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“According to this worry, a bunch of atoms and particles, mindlessly obeying the laws of physics, can’t actually experience the way a conscious creature does.”
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I have a feeling that Sean does not fully appreciate (and actually does not even appreciate to a considerable degree) what is meant by the objections from those who think consciousness is a pin in the bubble of modern science. Also, he uses double standards in this issue and in closely related ones, which is intellectually very grave indeed… In his book, The Big Picture (presently I am stuck at 42% of it, page 217, Kindle version), Sean preaches that it is impossible that things like metal bending or other forms of psychokinesis exist because the laws of physics as we know them rule it all out. He extends this “reasoning” of his to some other areas, like telepathy, and as a consequence he considers utterly pointless even to take the briefest peek at any purported evidence supporting things like that. Well, that is exactly the same situation that the phenomenon of consciousness is in. The relation of the laws of physics as we know them to consciousness is exactly the same as the relation of the laws of physics as we know them to the evidence gathered in micro-PK experiments (psychokinesis over subatomic particles) or in Ganzfeld telepathy experiments (As to *metal bending*, no serious research has ever, to my knowledge, turned up any evidence for it, even the studies done by Targ and Puthoff with Uri Geller in 1974, where they clearly stated that no evidence whatsoever was witnessed by them that Uri Geller possessed this power). Yet, Sean blindly believes that everybody has consciousness, while ridiculing the very possibility of telepathy or psychokinesis. Double standards.
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Our best theories describing Nature (Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, String Theory, whatever) do not describe the effective action of human electromagnetism over distances of hundreds of meters to successfully bend train metal rails. Also, they do not describe the appearance of consciousness. That is the problem. And that is what Sean Carroll does not seem to understand, or to want to understand. Consciousness is not part of the equations. Neither explicitly, nor implicitly. Think of that: Time is in the equations, even though time is a very mysterious thing; it is explicitly in the equations. Things like solidity, heaviness, are all in the equations, even if implicitly. There is only one thing out of the equations: consciousness. For the good philosophers and scientists who see consciousness as the modern “pin in the bubble” (let’s from now on call these guys The Plaintiffs), the problem is not that atoms cannot have subjective experience and humans can (contrary to what Sean said in his phrase above). The problem is that our theories just cannot tell either way… There is nothing in our theories that tells us that atoms have no consciousness; also, there is nothing telling us that humans have consciousness.
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“(If you think about it carefully, I would claim, you would realize that zombies are harder to conceive of than you might originally have guessed — but that’s an argument for another time.)”
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I challenge Sean Carroll to forward this argument. Let’s just wait and see.
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“The folks who find this line of reasoning compelling are not necessarily traditional Cartesian dualists who think that there is an immaterial soul distinct from the body.”
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Indeed. As I have already posted here in a previous message, dualism does not solve the mystery of consciousness. Even God could be an unconscious entity, a true philosophical zombie. So these folks that Sean talks about, The Plaintiffs, come from all sides.
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“But still, they insist, there’s no way to just throw a bunch of mindless physical matter together and expect it to experience true consciousness.”
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Do the math. That is what you, Sean, demand from substance dualists. And that is what you yourself should do in regards to consciousness. So I ask of you: do the math!
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Imagine you have a physical collection of items without consciousness. It could be a bunch of billions of neurons in state A. But let’s have it in a simpler form. Let’s call it NaOH and HCl (sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid), before they react. And then, all of a sudden, this collection changes into a new form that, surprisingly enough, is conscious! It could be a bunch of billions of neurons in state B. But then again, let’s have it in a simpler form. Let’s call it NaCl and H2O. The physical (chemical) equation is this:
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NaOH + HCl = NaCl + H2O.
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Ok, Sean, where is consciousness in the equation? Cannot find it? Neither can I in Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, or String Theory (and neither can anyone else, for that matter…). The only way to find it, it seems, would be to violate quantities (and to do so artificially – in ad hoc style):
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NaOH + HCl = NaCl + H2O and CONSCIOUSNESS.
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This, in a nutshell, is the problem and the mystery of consciousness.
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Best Regards for now,
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Julio Siqueira
juliocbsiqueira2012@gmail.com
http://www.criticandokardec.com.br/criticizingskepticism.htm
@Julio,
“I challenge Sean Carroll to forward this argument.” Or, you could, I dunno, click on the link Sean provided?!
@Abalieno,
The heart of Sean’s “poetic naturalism” is very much about discussing “how people use the word”, i.e. whether a given higher-level word has useful applications (e.g. “consciousness”) or not (“telekinesis”). It’s the uses of the words that put the “poetic” in “poetic naturalism”.
John Merryman,
“The fact also remains that the past is determined and the future is probabilistic. So building models which assume the future is pre-determined, or the past remains probabilisitic, i.e., multiworlds, overlooks the actual process of occurrence that is the present.”
This is naïve non-sense. You have no idea whether the past and/or future are pre-determined and/or probabilistic.
All you have is a gut feeling that that is true. But most people commenting here are living in an illusion that you are having a very hard time seeing through.
Special relativity tells us that time is relative. My past can be your future. Your past can be my future. “Now” is not a fixed thing at all.
Just take a few moments to understand the multiple worlds concept. It is the simplest explanation we have to interpret quantum mechanics, and it also works fine with relativity as well.
Both the future and the past are completely determined, they just are not unique in either direction.