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.
I agree with TBABB
Phillip, thanks much for that Tegmark link. Clearly I am not the only one who thinks information is important for consciousness. I mean, there’s the Integrated Information Theory. But what appears to me, that these others (Tegmark, Tononi, etc.) seem to miss, is emphasis on the role of correlation (as used most commonly). The fact that a particular pattern of photons hitting my retina can be highly correlated with an actual bear being on the trail I’m walking allows me to take an action in response to those photons that will stop me from approaching the bear. Failing to take that action may be highly correlated with some very bad future consequences.
For this purpose, “information processing” refers to the manipulation of these correlations. What does the COPY operation copy? It copies the correlations. If B is a COPY of A, B has the same correlations as A (plus some other correlations, probly).
Has anyone discussed/worked on the relation between the information theoretic operations (COPY,NOT,AND) and the resulting correlations (mutual information)?
*
Good read, and well-articulated position.
My issue is: One can accept the “Core Theory” about the physical workings of the cosmos, and that they represent our best (thus far) understanding of how reality operates, and yet arguably still not have a full ontological understanding of the universe–unless you take it for granted (metaphysical premise) that only physical phenomena are “real,” thereby excluding any non-physical things (abstract thought, et al.) as, at worst, illusion or, at best, poetic fancy. Which is an a priori.
A perhaps unintended consequence of such an approach is that it seemingly places a diminished and secondary value on what is arguably all that we know–namely, our own first-person perspective and its contents.
P.S. I would add that the zombie argument has always struck me as a questionable line of argumentation, as it seems to beg “the solipsist’s delight” question of: “Well, how do you know if anybody else is conscious…?” Which then inevitably leads to “What is this consciousness stuff, anyway?”
But I would suggest there exist variant views (cosmopsychism, for instance, or forms of idealism) which are not explicitly dualist but rather a kind of inverse monism (physical phenomena and its attendant laws “emanating” from some background, non-physical phenomena–versions of Platonism on one hand, and perhaps Tegmark’s mathematical universe on the other). You can argue, as I believe you touched on above, that this view plays no explanatory role and is therefore philosophically valueless, but this suggests that the end goal of philosophy is…science. Which is a value judgment exalting one particular domain of human experience above all others.
Thank you.
It’s becoming clear that with all the brain and consciousness theories out there, the proof will be in the pudding. By this I mean, can any particular theory be used to create a human adult level conscious machine. My bet is on the late Gerald Edelman’s Extended Theory of Neuronal Group Selection. The lead group in robotics based on this theory is the Neurorobotics Lab at UC at Irvine. Dr. Edelman distinguished between primary consciousness, which came first in evolution, and that humans share with other conscious animals, and higher order consciousness, which came to only humans with the acquisition of language. A machine with primary consciousness will probably have to come first.
The thing I find special about the TNGS is the Darwin series of automata created at the Neurosciences Institute by Dr. Edelman and his colleagues in the 1990’s and 2000’s. These machines perform in the real world, not in a restricted simulated world, and display convincing physical behavior indicative of higher psychological functions necessary for consciousness, such as perceptual categorization, memory, and learning. They are based on realistic models of the parts of the biological brain that the theory claims subserve these functions. The extended TNGS allows for the emergence of consciousness based only on further evolutionary development of the brain areas responsible for these functions, in a parsimonious way. No other research I’ve encountered is anywhere near as convincing.
I post because on almost every video and article about the brain and consciousness that I encounter, the attitude seems to be that we still know next to nothing about how the brain and consciousness work; that there’s lots of data but no unifying theory. I believe the extended TNGS is that theory. My motivation is to keep that theory in front of the public. And obviously, I consider it the route to a truly conscious machine, primary and higher-order.
My advice to people who want to create a conscious machine is to seriously ground themselves in the extended TNGS and the Darwin automata first, and proceed from there, by applying to Jeff Krichmar’s lab at UC Irvine, possibly. Dr. Edelman’s roadmap to a conscious machine is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10461
The whole problem here is the assumption that the world is physically closed. The very fact that consciousness is causally efficacious, the very fact I am able to type the appropriate characters into sentences to express my view, shows that the physical world is not closed.
Nor do we have any reason to suppose it does anyway. Theories in physics do not describe reality in their totality. The history of science teaches us that our theories give approximations only, even if those approximations might be very close approximations. Generally, our old scientific theories are often perfectly adequate to describe a given domain, but break down when attempting to describe that which resides outside that domain.
The “core theory” we know necessarily breaks down within our bodies, probably our brains.
Use Absolute logic and you should realise that consciousness is completely emergent. To understand it you need to think of it as a verb, like biological running, or biological breathing. No such thing as panbiologicalbreathing where a pile of stones past a threshold will start breathing like a human! It’s a collection of processes above the unconscious processes of monitoring in the brain. It can and is turned on and off or modulated by the brain. If it was pan-anything then it could not be turned off. It also can not be defined as existing at an instantaneous moment in time t. It can only exist as a temporal loop, in terms of a duration of time. Same logic as running and breathing. You can’t make an omelette if you think that the ingredients are flour and water, no matter how much flour or water you use or mix! Find the ingredients, ie. The conditions of consciousness first then you can recreate it. Your axioms are in error.
Is consciousness truly imperceptible?
Personally I grew up training race horses and developed a pretty good intuition as to what they were sensing, focused on, how to interfere with their concerns, etc. With people it falls in the category of what we might call empathy. Yet reading the news, it does seem like quite a few people lack any sense of empathy, or morality. Are they zombies?
As for that stream of verbal consciousness that seems to surge to the forefront of our minds by about four, personally I found mine to be very distracting from all my other senses and would make it formulate nonsense words, give it ideas to focus on and otherwise distract it, in order to function in a highly physical world. Which was quite consciously real, so I’m not sure I would equate consciousness entirely with processing information. Maybe if that’s the part of the brain one has developed, it might seem like consciousness is all about rational thought, but my sense is that’s only the surface and is as subjective as any other expression of sentience.
I don’t think consciousness can be entirely explained by the frame through which it’s expressed.
Someone who doesn’t meditate hours a day for years (until they are enlightened) holding forth on consciousness is like someone who has been blind from birth holding forth on the paintings of Picasso. One must become aware of the *given data*.
If it can be defined it is a trait among others, and we cannot often point to traits and say that these are uniquely human exceptional. We know that, say, dogs dream and that rats model their past and their future in the room map part of their brain when they dream.
Modeling, then likely evolved for energy minimization, seems by the way being a contender for explaining basal brain functionality. [“To Be Energy-Efficient, Brains Predict Their Perceptions Results from neural networks support the idea that brains are “prediction machines” — and that they work that way to conserve energy.”, Quanta Magazine November 15, 2021]
They even have a name, the “Core Theory.”
As an interested layman here, I note that effective quantum field theory, as in Core Theory, has sailed up as a prime candidate for inflation in the latest BICEP3/Keck results. The remaining parameter space is centered around a Higgs-like hilltop scalar field. [“Squeezing down the Theory Space for Cosmic Inflation”, Daniel Meerburg, Physics 14, 135; overlay the Planck 2018 cosmological paper theory space on the constraint image]
My lede was not copied:
I write here as a bioinformatician to explain that I’m not bothered by “consciousness” (and have to note that I’m not bothered by the superstition that calls itself “philosophy” either).
” Clearly I am not the only one who thinks information is important for consciousness.”
Yes, but that is like saying that metabolism is important for cell function – it is so basal so you still don’t model the cell much. In any case, consciousness is an undefined concept, which many seem to confuse with introspection and the particular human ability to verbalize the experience. But it is still only an experience and we seem to share it with some other animals (but we certainly can’t tell when it evolved). You say “consciousness”, I say “taste like sausage” – ho, hum.
“One can accept the “Core Theory” about the physical workings of the cosmos, and that they represent our best (thus far) understanding of how reality operates, and yet arguably still not have a full ontological understanding of the universe–unless you take it for granted (metaphysical premise) that only physical phenomena are “real,” thereby excluding any non-physical things (abstract thought, et al.) as, at worst, illusion or, at best, poetic fancy. Which is an a priori.”
I’m not sure I have an understanding what “ontological” would be, but to borrow from our host there’s no question that the human goal of figuring out the basic rules by which the entire universe works was one that was achieved once and for all in the last twenty years. We now know a model – LCDM* – that describes 100 % of nature. That is not a philosophical “a priori” or even a physics initial condition, it is an observation.
As Douglas Adams could have said, [magic agency] promptly vanishes in a puff of physics. I stopped labeling myself on a superstitious scale 3 years ago, no longer an “atheist” I’m satisfied to label myself secular – nature did the rest.
*Anybody else noted that the O3b LIGO/Virgo data release on gravitational wave astronomy had cosmological results in their papers? Their new method to use black hole mergers to estimate the Hubble rate place the likelihood peak on top of Planck’s value – except it is purely local data!
You claim that the Core Theory describes our everyday reality completely. But I’m not sure it does. Here’s a question the CT can’t answer: What time is it?
That is, the tensed nature of the world is absent from the CT, and indeed from physics generally. While there is a notion of which events lie to the past or future of others, there’s no accounting of the now. So in a sense, what the CT describes stands to the world in the same relation as a painting, or perhaps a (four-dimensional) diorama (maybe branching, to account for quantum mechanics). But in so far as there are matters of fact regarding tense, these are entirely absent. So in that sense, it’s not really right to say that the P-world ‘behaves’ in the same way as the Ψ-world, that its occupants ‘act’ the same: nothing behaves, nothing acts at all—there just isn’t any action.
So if there is a role for consciousness in the world, it’s perhaps in providing the little marker that wrests ‘now, here’ from ‘nowhere’, turning the static world of facts provided for by the CT into the dynamic world of lived experience.
Turned the other way around, the apparent absence of consciousness from the P-world is just because it’s a mere image, a map, a representation of the real world—and you wouldn’t argue that because the people in a painting lack conscious experience, so must its real subjects. (Indeed, this sort of argument always at least has the flavor of overestimating the regulating power of our descriptive instruments: it’s a bit like saying, because we can only draw 2D maps, the Earth must be flat.)
You might complain that this sort of consciousness still isn’t the sort that’s relevant to our actions. But that’s not true: it’s the reason there is any action at all, so to speak. That I’m now grabbing for the apple now is because I was hungry earlier; the laws of physics then provide a marvelously detailed description of this grabbing, but they are unable to produce that explanatory inference, because from their point of view, there’s nothing special about the now when I’m doing the grabbing. That there is no conscious experience in the account given by the laws shouldn’t surprise us any more than that there is no conscious experience in the description ‘because he was hungry, he grabbed for the apple’. That description, likewise, exists ‘all at once’, but I don’t think that because there’s nothing that’s conscious in that description, we should conclude there’s nothing that’s conscious in what’s being described.
Torbjorn,
The difference between consciousness and “tastes like sausage,” is that as consciousness exists as the present, it goes past to future, while “tastes like sausage” is an event, so it goes future to past.
Meanwhile, there is no physical dimension of time, because of causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Feedback loops all the way down.
A thought experiment, if you please:
In World 1, scientists, having a comprehensive understanding of physics and technology, put together the appropriate physical components such that they are able to generate consciousness out of a particular substrate, say, a rock. The rock now exhibits full consciousness, according to the various tests that are applied to it, and the scientists (and everyone else) are amazed and overjoyed. In this world, consciousness is truly emergent: put together particles at the appropriate levels of complexity and consciousness emerges from them.
In World 2, scientists, having a comprehensive understanding of physics and tech, do the same thing as in World 1–they manage to elicit consciousness from a rock. The physics of World 1 and World 2 are otherwise identical. But in World 2, consciousness is an ubiquitous field, concomitant with all the laws of physics, that localizes under certain conditions–it is emanative, in that individual consciousnesses emanate from the larger “background consciousness.” The scientists (and everyone else!) in World 2 are amazed and overjoyed–they have solved the problem of consciousness, or so they think. In World 2, however, they fail entirely to understand the properties of consciousness, which seems to reside at a super-physical level.
How would scientists rule out that they were in World 2? Would it even matter to do so?
Thanks.
Hi in my previous post I mentioned omelette! What I should have said was pan-cake. The ref to no amount of mixing flour and water will make a pan-cake. You need the correct ingredients to make consciousness.
I also believe that consciousness is not as intensive neurological demanding as the unconscious processes of monitoring your senses and motions.
I sometimes call myself a panpsychist. Not because I think that consciousness is needed to explain anything about how the world moves. I agree with Sean that the laws of physics do this job just fine, no additional working parts needed (or if we were to find additional laws at work, by definition we would call them physical laws). Therefore panpsychism also isn’t strictly necessary to explain why humans claim to possess consciousness.
No I like panpsychism because it acknowledges that in the vein of solipsism, our first knowledge and the first mystery is the existence of qualia. What has been called the hard problem of consciousness. That the only thing I truly know is the quality of my experience in this moment. It is a problem on par with the question why anything exists at all rather than nothing (really, in my book the same problem).
With a materialist who allows that matter needs to allow for consciousness as a latent property or something I differ more or less only on semantics. Who I really disagree with are people who think that qualia are something of an illusion and the only real question is how to explain human behavior. To me that’s missing the deeper question of why there is experiencing happening at all (rather than just a zombie universe with lots of zombies claiming consciousness but absolutely no one experiencing anything of that. What would it mean to say that such a zombie universe even exists then?)
I thought the whole point of the P-zombie argument was that a P-zombie would argue, for example, that he knew what pain felt like but never have felt pain because he has never felt anything.
I don’t really see how that supports physicalism.
The problem is that we need an explanation of consciousness that is something that wouldn’t happen exactly the same way if there was no consciousness.
If Core Theory completely explains the world at the local level then it implies that a human would act the same way, conscious or not.
So Core Theory implies there can never be an explanation for consciousness.
The funny thing is that no-one has noticed that panpscychism and physicalism are, in fact, logically identical theories with slightly different terminology.
Another problem here is the claim that a violation of CT would entail a contradiction of CT and require new equations.
Not really. By analogy the little physics engine I have works fine in the little simulated universes I create with it. But I can violate the rules of the physics engine, for example by directly setting momentum or by moving a particle with my mouse.
I don’t have to make any changes to the physics engine to do that, don’t have to add any new equations. The physics engine handles the new values with no problem. Sure the changes violate conservation of momentum but it makes no difference because each particle does not have a memory of where all the other particles were.
My changes are made outside the physics engine, so the rules of the physics engine are violated without being contradicted.
So an actual non-physicalist is in the same position. Saying he needs to tell you the new equations, tell you about energy conservation, gauge invariance and so on would imply that he was another physicalist with a different physical theory.
“I don’t believe I exist. Therefore I don’t exist.”
Panpsychism is usually defined as the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. In a recent video podcast ‘Why can elementary particles decay?’, Sabine Hossenfelder (13 Nov 2021), makes the compelling argument that elementary particles (e,g, electrons, quarks, etc.) can’t be conscious:
‘… elementary particles can’t be conscious. It’s because we know they do not have internal states. Elementary particles are called elementary because they are simple. The only way you can assign any additional property to them, call that property “consciousness” or whatever you like, is to make that property entirely featureless and unobservable. This is why panpsychism which assigns consciousness to everything, including elementary particles, is either bluntly wrong – that’s if the consciousness of elementary particles is actually observable, because, well we don’t observe it – or entirely useless – because if that something you call consciousness isn’t observable it doesn’t explain anything.’
I must admit my first 2 comments were made without listening to the podcast. Everything that anybody comments on is based on their subjective beliefs. So now I have to be more blunt in what I believe.
1.Everything is strongly emergent(but weak emergence also exists).
2.This means the core theory is incomplete. (but still useful, similar to Newton’s view).
3.If I am going to justify the above then I must give another view point.
An example of emergence. We knew what electrons supposedly did, but this was modified when we discovered cooper pairs. New modified laws are created to take in new information about the physical world.
Quantum gravity can be explained by my model. Namely everything is made of complex volumes(this also applies to quantum mechanics) , which implies that everything has a structure. Therefore the notions of point particles and abstract waves is just a simplification of reality, for simplified computational purposes. So renormalise the core theory to account for the ‘null’ hole at the centre of all particles(fermions and bosons). You will as a consequence understand quantum tunnelling better, as well as quantum gravity, where the (force) and curvature are inversely proportional to the cross sectional area of the quanta involved. (including black holes). Once you understand the structure and properties of the quanta, you can construct both energy(which expands the space around it, expansion of the Universe) and matter(that contracts the space around it, collapsing stars and black holes). The Universe will have perpetual cycles, (many worlds, but serially and not parallel). This is achieved by an asymmetric universe (prime number of constant quanta, past/present/future, that makes it also biased). Therefore things become eventually inevitable, I. E. Emergence has to happen. Therefore No such thing as totally random(which is just another way of saying ignorance of the chaotic system).
Lower order ‘entities’ do not have the properties of higher order ‘things’ eg. An electron does not have a smaller version of the property of a pancake within it. The properties of pancakes are emergent at a higher level.
You can also create chirality by combining quanta that have the same properties, ie. All ‘Ape’s (quanta that create everything, are individually the same, but their joint properties are different, emergent, creating fermions and bosons). Different dimensions of space and different dimensions of time are also created. Enough said for now, just think of the possibilities. In short you have to complicate things to eventually simplify them.
wife: am I just a theory to you??
CONSCIOUSNESS IS EASIER DONE THAN SAID.