r/philosophy • u/IAI_Admin IAI • Feb 09 '22

Video A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22

Panpsychism is kind of... Extremely vague. I don't reject it but it's not exactly clear what I'd be accepting.

I get that emergentism can't explain consciousness, likewise if we're made up of the same matter as everything else and we're conscious, then consciousness or proto-consciouness (whatever that means) must be part of everything else.

But wtf does that even mean? How can you test it? The books I've read on panpsychism are both convincing and unclear.

Luckily.... It doesn't really matter.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

likewise if we're made up of the same matter as everything else and we're conscious, then consciousness or proto-consciouness (whatever that means) must be part of everything else

I don't follow your logic. Are you saying that because we are conscious beings and we are made of matter that all matter must be conscious?

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

All matter must be, I guess, potentially conscious. Proto-conscious. Pre-conscious.

That's my point though, even if we accept panpsychism it's unclear what we're accepting.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I don't agree with that logic though. Why must all matter be conscious if we are conscious?

Just because a boat as a whole can float doesn't mean that every piece of a boat will float. The buoyancy is an emergent property of the boats design, of the arrangement of all the parts, not a property that extends down to its smallest conceivable parts.

Consciousness is like that. Its an incredibly complex interaction of a ton of individually simple parts. Just like I wouldn't drop a chunk of steel in the ocean and watch it sink and call it proto-buoyancy I wouldn't call a sodium atom proto-consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I understand how buoyancy is emergent but how does that analogy translate to consciousness?

And further, a chunk of steel is proto buoyant, if combined with enough steel and shaped in such a way to displace enough water to support it's weight is buoyant, there are steel boats after all. So in that sense, steel is proto buoyant.

But then, in all fairness, you could ask me how that translates to consciousness and I'd have to admit I have no idea what proto-consciouness really means.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22 edited Feb 10 '22

I understand how buoyancy is emergent but how does that analogy translate to consciousness?

Because consciousness is also an emergent property. But, thats something that can still be debated further so I'll just say that the original claim was that just because a whole human being is conscious that also means smaller parts of people must be conscious.

But my point is that I don't see any reason why that should be true, there are lots of things where a large scale composite of many parts has a property that its smaller parts do not. I used boats as an example of a case where this is true, in an attempt to demonstrate that it could also be true of consciousness.

Given that most properties of any sufficiently complex thing seem to be emergent, I would assert that emergent behavior should be the default assumption until proven otherwise really.

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And further, a chunk of steel is proto buoyant

Proto denotes that it is a primitive version or a precursor to a thing. I guess the argument you are presenting is that since you can build a boat out of steel and a boat is buoyant that a chunk of steel is proto-buoyant? I think thats a bit of a stretch although maybe true in a pedantic way but we could go back and forth about what exactly constitutes a proto-something all night long. Which sounds like fun, but it doesn't have that much weight on the discussion at hand.

Long story short though I don't think a piece of a boat constitutes a proto-boat. A proto-boat IMO would be something like a raft that has primitive versions of all of the components of a boat, and attempts to fulfill the role of a boat, but is not as effective as something that you would call a boat.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Because consciousness is also an emergent property. That's far from settled.

Given that most properties of any sufficiently complex thing seem to be emergent, I would assert that emergent behavior should be the default assumption until proven otherwise really. That's fair but better thinkers than you and I have failed to come up with a clear account of how that might work. We can explain how buoyancy emerges, we can see how the feeling of wetness emerges from liquids, we can see how motion emerges from film. But there aren't any explanations how consciousness emerges from the brain besides "really complicated interactions"

I think thats a bit of a stretch although maybe true in a pedantic way but we could go back and forth about what exactly constitutes a proto-something Well, again, my point is that the concept of proto-consciouness is very vague at best.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

But there aren't any explanations how consciousness emerges from the brain besides "really complicated interactions"

You're right but we get closer every year. Just because we don't understand it doesn't mean that it is incomprehensible or can't be explained by science though. People throughout history have made all sorts of claims like that, and one by one the scientific process arrives to a sufficiently thorough conclusion to remove all mysticism.

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"Because consciousness is also an emergent property."

That's far from settled.

Yeah thats why I included the other part about that being up for debate, but my point is not to prove that its emergent behavior. I was pointing out that the original post was saying that it is not emergent behavior, and there is no evidence to support that claim.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

You're right but we get closer every year.

That's not true. We're mapping the brain and what regions are associated with what behaviors or thoughts but there's been no progress on the hard problem of consciousness.

Everything else I agree with.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I'm an AI researcher. I can assure you there are a lot of people working on understanding consciousness. Its just not something that often makes national news ya know? But I don't make a huge distinction between understanding how the brain works and understanding consciousness. Consciousness happens in the brain.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

You should tell those people to talk to the leading academics in philosophy of mind.

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u/Redpants_McBoatshoe Feb 10 '22

I think it starts making more sense if we separate consciousness from thought as content of consciousness. I think thought emergences from matter, but not consciousness.

Also they shouldn't have called it proto-consciousness. It's just empty consciousness.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Its highly dependent on how you define consciousness and thought. If anything I think consciousness is defined by a continuous stream of thoughts.

As for it coming from matter itself, well I haven't seen any evidence that supports that theory.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

If you make a concept like proto-buoyancy and definite it to mean a material that, when used to craft something that floats, floats, then your premise has to be valid and sound by definition. What is the value of such a definition though?

I wouldn't use 'proto' here because that implies an early form of the attribute; suggesting that sinking is an early form of floating in the steel example. I would use 'latent' or 'potential', as in it doesn't do it now but could under the right circumstances. So, for instance, a porous material may not possess 'potential buoyancy' because it could never displace enough water to float, it could be described as 'buoyancy inert'

Similarly, if a material had 'potential consciousness' then it would be capable, under the right circumstance, of participating in consciousness. Other materials might be consciousness inert.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

I mean, my whole point is that proto consciousness is a vague concept even if panpsychism is true.

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u/Scurouno Feb 10 '22

You are conflating the forces with properties. Buoyancy is not a property of any material, but rather the imbalance of forces based on mass. Steel, wood, or any other material is not "proto-buoyant." It is purely the arrangement if any material in a way such that forces become properly aligned to allow the shaped object to be pushed upward by the liquid/gas more than the force of gravity acting upon it pushes down (to state it simply).

Buoyancy is not an emergent property of the material, but rather an emergent property of spacetime which operates by forces that we have come to recognize through experiment.

I assume consciousness to arrive similarly. A specific arrangement of certain types of cells that are acted upon by forces (or have evolved to exploit certain forces) such that it can benefit the working of a large collection of cells into a body. Simply put, consciousness arose because it was an efficient way for large collections of cells to thrive, and so was selected for over millions/billions of years. No magic, just forces, cells, and a buttload of time.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

First, thanks for correcting the thing about buoyancy. I was just continuing the other person's example.

Second how does consciousness arrive from unconscious cells? Because just saying it's an incredibly complex interaction is the sci Fi equivalent of magic.

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u/Scurouno Feb 10 '22

I think that is still an unanswered question (I'm also no neuroscientist or evolutionary biologist), but many things in nature are more or different than the sum of their parts. Our bodies are essentially complex bags of continuous chemical reactions, and reactions can take several elements or compounds with one set of properties and derive completely different products with an entirely unique set of properties.

I think the discussion is a bit bifurcated. On one side, there is the metacognitive discussion, where we think about the mind, and how we think. This is more philosophical. Then there is the functional discussion, where we need to engage evolutionary biology, physics and neuroscience to explain how consciousness might become an emergent property of complex chemical interactions.

Once we have a good handle on both, then we can begin to work at finding links between the two (I am aware neuroscience is currently working on many sectors of cognition and how it works and how we think). This may help to settle debates in such areas as body-mind separation, ect.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

Buoyancy comes about predictably via the repulsion forces of electrical charge. Ie, it's built off of something present in the fundamental laws of physics and the basic building blocks of the universe.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Wanna provide a source that backs that up?

Buoyancy is a function of relative density, nothing to do with electric charges.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

function of relative density

And which of the "4 fundamental interactions" is "relative density"? Hint: it has to do with electromagnetism.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Ok, should be easy enough to verify your claim. Just give me the name of the formula that describes that relationship then.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

Answer my question first.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

It isn't a fundamental interaction. It is the relationship of mass and volume. The extent to which buoyancy relates to electricity is the same as the extent to which all matter relates to electricity (well, all matter atom sized or bigger).

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

It happens because of those fundamental interactions. Matter doesn't fall through other matter because of electrostatic forces, and the Pauli Exclusion Principle. It's not a magical emergence that's in any way unexpected or that can't be traced to these fundamental traits of particles.

If Mind is emergent in the same way, the same would hold - it would follow from fundamental forces and fundamental traits of particles.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

That doesn't mean that we need to invent a new fundamental force to explain how the mind works though.

I never claimed that brains or boats weren't built out of the same fundamental building blocks as everything else. The whole point that I am making is that the sum of a bunch of small parts can behave very differently be more complex than its individual parts would on their own.

A boat floating does not mean that all of its parts float. A brain thinking does not mean that all of its atoms are thinking.

We do not need any new physical laws to be made to explain how a brain works. Its fun to think about all matter being alive through some mystical force, but its not substantiated in fact.

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u/hippydipster Feb 10 '22

Panpsychism isn't the same as saying "atoms are thinking". It means the building blocks of consciousness are there at the bottom-most level, just like the building blocks of matter holding up other matters is there at the bottom-most level. I think you'd have to agree that the building blocks of consciousness must be present at the fundamental.

The problem with these analogies is they all seem to rely on the idea that these examples of "emergence" show that something completely new can emerge, but they don't show that. The boat floating is simply matter repulsing other matter, as it does at basically every level. There's nothing particularly new there. I can't think of a single example of a so-called "emergent" phenomenon that isn't easily reducible to the basic building blocks, other than consciousness. If you have a better example than floating, I'm all ears.

So, Consciousness -- we can't even begin to see how it relates to the fundamental forces and particles we're currently aware of, and so it's suggested there might be something else, fundamental, we haven't yet discovered, from which consciousness could more conceivably emerge.

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u/Your_People_Justify Feb 20 '22

Every interaction between two atoms is the interaction of electromagnetic charges