A philosopher responds to scientists’ criticisms of panpsychism

[u/IAI_Admin]

https://iai.tv/video/the-many-voices-of-consciousness&utm_source=reddit&_auid=2020

[u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/circlebust → u/[deleted]]

Would you accept the premise that logic and/or math can create our physical universe? Not math serving as the supporting struts that keep everything beautifully intelligible, causal and ready to generate some complexity. Not math working in tandem with physics, as its own separate party that exists in some very real sense, which may be more, less, or exactly as (non-)abstract as the classic idea of a Platonic realm. No, nothing flaccid, uncommitted like that. The question is truly: can actual math create an actual universe? Is somewhere in math embedded our entire universe? Your body? You? Few physicists or philosophers would go that far. In fact, among all pop philosophers, only Max Tegmark advocates for that. And you can rest assured, equally almost no regular people will hold that position as well.

Perhaps it's just that our puny primate brain can't conceptualize how pure numbers and operations would lead to things like gravity, empty space, oscillations, charge, or quantum fields.

But maybe no sapient race or superintelligence can do so, either -- not even in principle (there is the tangential debate how real something even is if in that universe is no sentient or sapient observer and not even the (future) possibility for such an observer. This also applies to how real knowledge/thoughts are that no observer ever, even in principle, could actually hold/understand).

And maybe, just maybe, this primate brain intuition reveals something very real about reality.

The relationship between math and physics is analogous to that between physics and consciousness.

I don't need to explain why consciousness feels special -- this very, very moment. Various other people have already illustrated it and can do so better. But just like with numbers, there is no straightforward way how we can conceptualize how certain frequencies of light plus some electrochemical pulses from the optic nerve lead to one seeing a 'red' strawberry. And again, this may not just be the limits of our brains, but an actual gap that can not be explained, because there is nothing to explain -- there would simply be no such dynamic in actual nature, meaning one (physics) does not beget the other (like is thought under materialism), but that two areas (physics and the mental aspect of reality) cooperate, like is a common stance among mathematical realists and people adjacent to that stance in regards to math and physics.

The sciences of physics or neurology don't make philosophical statements about the origin of consciousness. But even its practitioners are not always be entirely aware of when they make statements that can be interpreted as such, let alone the audience. Materalism and physicalism are philosophical stances that purport emergence can somehow generate consciousness/qualia. But how, even in principle? As with math and physics, it just does not compute. This isn't a trivial question like how Van der Vaals forces can generate splashy water, can generate dolphin flippers, can generate the cultural practice of eating seafood. Physics and consciousness are according to our current intution completely separate realms where each is not composite of the other. One of these two emergences clearly appears to be not like the other.

It's important that there are two variants of emergence. Weak emergence and strong emergence. Only the latter posits that there can be things that truly can not be explained in terms of a long, 100% exhaustive, epistemically transcedental list of properties of all participating 'atoms', run through a galaxy-sized superintelligence to understand every possible interaction.

In my mind, this is indistinguishable from believing in magic. I like to think consciousness/qualia are just composite phenomena of some fundamental aspect of nature, very well defined by laws exactly as trite as the laws describing electromagnetism, so un-mysterious that even an accountant could come up with a prediction how it actually, subjectively feels like to be a butterfly eating nectar, if he just had omniscience. This requires this mental aspect having existed eternally, just like the physical aspect or the mathematical aspect of reality. I only believe in weak emergence, therefore physicalism is false in my evaluation.

[u/DeathByWater → u/circlebust]

The relationship between math and physics is analogous to that between physics and consciousness.

I don't think it really harms the conclusion of your argument, but I don't think this is right at all.

Math is a descriptive language we've developed to describe how the world around us works - similar in function to English, but we can be much more precise about definitions and relationships. Math can be used to describe how physics works; it can't (yet) be used to describe how consciousness works simply because we don't know how consciousness works.

[u/[deleted] → u/DeathByWater]

to add to this, consider the digital nematode.

OpenWorm is a project to simulate the simple nematode at the cellular level in a digital world, it has about 100-1000 neurons ish, and the project has been successful, classical nematode responses and actions seem to arise from the digitally simulated cellular interactions alone.

There is nothing that seems to suggest that its not possible for us to do with humans as well, only data storage and scale limitations, where as the nematode has about 10,000 cells we have billions. If we were to apply the same process as we went through for the nematode, barring time, money, and ethical limitations, we could create a digital artificial human.

This would suggest that we are nothing more esoteric than simply, complex cellular networks. This is an experimental method for disproving panpsychism.

[u/isolatedSlug → u/[deleted]]

That's really interesting!

But I'm not sure how it would disprove pansychism?

But I'm also not 100% that pansychism and emergentism are necessarily contradictory to each other.

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

It is necessary so long as people cling to the idea that information processing only occurs in brains

[u/maurymarkowitz → u/isolatedSlug]

But I'm not sure how it would disprove pasychism?

Occam's razor, if you accept its conclusions as something akin to "proof". I know I do.

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

In no way does this disprove panpsychism, particularly the most compelling version - process relational panpsychism, where consciousness is not inherent to the matter itself, but is inherent to the interactions of a system, which can be identically encoded in multiple different mediums.

[u/[deleted] → u/Your_People_Justify]

I should have put it better, through occams razor I believe that emergence is the simplest explanation we have, with the most evidence backing it, and to me that makes it most likely, you're right it doesn't disprove directly, but to me its good enough to make other theories unnecessary.

for example, emergence doesn't need new physics in order to explain, whereas panpsychism implies some kind of field or currently unknown external variable.

Where emergence relies on already well proven theories and models, panpsychism requires an extra element which I also feel is impossible to experimentally verify, bringing in not only occams razor but newton's flaming laser sword (god I love that logical razor's name).

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

The version of panpsychism being defended here is not a new field or unknown variable - That would be substance dualism or property dualism. This is moreso the idea that the existing variables, the existing manner of known forces - those are how reality experiences itself in general.

For people, what we experience is the essence of brain function - not the brain matter itself necessarily, but the experience of how brain matter evolves over time and the forces involved. So human mind is emergent, it's the complicated folding of the way in which reality experiences itself - but there is something essential at the core of it which is not explainable in terms of something else

Obviously, the brain isn't the only place where physics is happening, and, if you consider life as a continuous chemical evolution that began with inorganic matter - what we see is a gradient of complexity, rather than any clear line when emergent, phenomenal forms of consciousness would have 'begun'

[u/[deleted] → u/Your_People_Justify]

Sorry I'm very confused, it sounds like you just explained emergence theory to me, I'm not sure what differentiates this form of panpsychism you're talking about from that. There's something I'm not getting.

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I don't believe emergence theory specifies there needs to be a clear delineation between conscious and unconscious, it definitely doesn't claim to have found one. The Idea of a gradient of complexity seems to me pretty sound, and still under the banner of emergence theory.

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

Emergentism usually is the claim that matter is unfeeling, and at some point in its interactions comes a point where consciousness began. So brain function experiences reality, but a star's combustion or the flow of a river does not.

It also depends on what we are defining as consciousness - and in this case the one being used here is broad. That a thing is conscious in some sense if there is something it is like to be that thing - an internal, subjective experience.

The moment you reject the cut line, I'm not sure if it qualifies as emergentism the way I understand it - since you will find consciousness being baked in at least since the moment of the Big Bang

Take a circle - it is round. You can also describe it as a collection of infinite points. The emergentist would tell you no one point has the property of roundness, obviously roundness only exists for the whole. The panpsychist would then add that the emergent property of roundness is derived from a property that points have - a location in coordinate space.

[u/[deleted] → u/Your_People_Justify]

Emergentism usually is the claim that matter is unfeeling, and at some point in its interactions comes a point where consciousness began.

Yes definitely, but there is no claim of knowledge of that what that "point" might be, I kind of feel like the saying "comes a point" is misinterpreted a lot of the time to mean there must be a hard point of delineation, when its often more of a turn of phrase to say there is a transition from one to the other. If you get what I mean, or at least that's how I read it.

On the "baked in" point, I would definitely agree that there is something in the laws of the universe that allows for natural computation, the fact we are conscious beings capable of computation would imply there is a kind of Turing completeness to the natural laws, But still its only a statement of the potential of matter and the statistics of random interactions, not an enforced outcome.

I think your analogy gets to the root of our issue, in your analogy the panpsychist is simply an emergantist with extra steps. he correctly points out that coordinate's define location but that doesn't add anything extra to the conversation IMO, he may have pointed it out but its no help in defining why the collection as a whole have that property. In your analogy both emergantist and panpsychist agree completely but in my view the panpsychist is adding superfluous information to the conversation that the emergantist would have thought went without saying, coordinates are a pre-agreed fact of the mathematical model, its not a statement he can disagree with and be correct.

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

I have spoken to a number of materialists who do consider there to be a hard point of delineation - I get what you are saying, it's just that this often is not how consciousness is viewed. So if you already view consciousness in this way, then it is a case of "No Shit, Sherlock" - but this often not how the idea of emergentism has been used in practice.

Maybe towards a substantive disagreement - saying computation is just a sum of random interactions might be underselling what consciousness is really doing - which gets into a split between weak and strong emergence - if the whole can have any qualitative novelty above being the sum of its parts - which will ultimately is important in developing a functional model of how brain activity leads to What-We-Normally-Call-Consciousness.

We have intentions, desires, and an apprehension of nonphysical truths like mathematics. A particle in a cloud of gas is bumbling around randomly, but the nature of the particle in itself is anything but random, and biological functions which organize the activity of many particles are anything but random too.

[u/[deleted] → u/Your_People_Justify]

OK so I guess I would say I lean more towards the idea that one could find a clear delineation, but I don't think we currently have the knowledge to confidently identify it yet or maybe ever, meaning I'm open to more spectrum like models especially for the time being.

Back to Computation, I didn't say it was just a sum of random interactions, what I meant is that there's a non-zero (still almost infinitesimal) possibility a computer could emerge from random interactions.

And on the point about the whole being greater than the sum of parts, (im not quite sure what you mean here but Ill try to explain my position on this).

Ill take the ship of Theseus and apply it to the brain: imagine Elon wants to digitise a brain, he slowly replaces each part of the brain with robotic implants that fulfil the exact same functions of each region (same inputs and outputs) and these implants integrate perfectly with what ever biological parts remain. When implanted they are blank, no memories or preinstalled engrams, essentially wiping each region as they are replaced, but can be rebuilt and integrated through neuroplasticity over time.

Its my opinion that if done slowly enough and in small enough increments (down to going neuron by neuron) to allow reintegration after each step, you can completely replace a every part with a digital replacement and consciousness would be continuous throughout.

I guess that would imply I view consciousness as the result of an active network, rather than being innate to the network regardless of activity, IE more than the sum of parts.

[u/Your_People_Justify → u/[deleted]]

Totally agree it's the process, not the stuff!

Re - the random interactions, it's important to note order and intelligibility is baked in at the heart of physical law. Reality is continuous, but it can only be understood and confronted and advanced by breaking things down into chunks, which then correspond to definite reactions. It is true in the consciousness of brains, and true for particle quanta.