I have enjoyed this series immensely. Thank you, John. Also, I concur that Philip Goff, whose position I don’t agree with, has written a fascinating book nonetheless.
Thanks John! I'm glad you enjoyed the series. You've convinced me to revisit Galileo's Error with fresh eyes. The first time around, I may have analysed it too much through the lens of what I was working on at the time.
Some of the arguments presented in his book “Why” are also fascinating and well expounded. Neither do I agree with them - definitely an improving read though.
Not personally a panpsychist but quite interesting considering the area of thought I'm thinking about with my Substack, the Frontier Letter - also yes, very long comment but whenever I have a long comment it indicates someone's work resonated deeply - so thank you.
A comment:
"One popular way to avoid the combination problem is to claim micro-consciousnesses don’t actually combine at all (this is called the reductionist approach). But this view doesn’t seem to align with our everyday experience of a single unified conscious experience."
I would push back and challenge you (or panpsychist if this was a thought representative of their beliefs and not yours) to consider the following:
I wouldn't be so sure about that claim in the last sentence of the quote. I actually think it does align with everyday experience, in that whatever my aim is, it seems as if those things make themselves apparent to me. It's why goals are necessary, because the world almost lays out a pathway for you when aim at something by demonstrating to you the things that will get you to that goal and providing you with dopaminergic rushes when you achieve steps toward that goal, and anxiety signals when obstacles emerge. I don't have scientific studies I can point to about this, I haven't looked into the science of perception guiding action deeply, but I have learned it from listening to Jordan Peterson personality and Maps of Meaning lectures. To me, this actually feels as if things are telling me they are potential pathways to my goals, or my consciousness manages to propagate revelations of potential utility as it sees them - but the strange thing about that is sometimes, the things that make themselves apparent to me feel like something I could have not possibly known - which I think, in my current understanding, I would argue has to do with the unconscious mind and the relationship of the collective unconscious's ability to speak to me consciously. For example, I was obsessing over every thought I had, even if it felt like it wasn't me. I read Bjorn Natthiko's 'I May Be Wrong,' not because it was next on my reading list, but because it seemed to jump out at me on the bookshelf. I had no way of knowing the contents of the book though. As I read the book, it taught me lessons that I fundamentally needed at the time, one of them being - You are not your every thought. Just because you have a thought, does not mean you have to associate with it. Those thoughts that arise may be voices from your past of people you despise or do not agree with in the slightest, but because they were part of your family, their voices still crowd your mind
Curious about your thoughts on this.
Fascinating on point 3 as well - Almost as if Panpsychism is a scientific cope of explaining things so there's not a necessity to default to religion.
Hi Dominic! Thanks for pushing back on the point that our everyday experience of consciousness is a single unified experience. I agree with you on this one. My tendency is to think that consciousness might be better described as a collection of phenomena, not a single thing that can be explained by one equation or measurement. Not everyone agrees though, and its currently one of the hotly debated questions in consciousness research. Is consciousness a unified thing that can be measured, like temperature, or is it a collection of phenomena, more like how we define life?
Ahh interesting, what is the school of thought for the collection of phenomena argument?
Consciousness is an interesting field of study because I feel like it's multimodal and there are so many domains of expertise that can tackle this problem - What field of study would you say most people pursue who end up studying consciousness? Mixed bag?
There are many different theories that align with the idea that consciousness is a collection of phenomena. I think Anil Seths book -- Being You is probably the most accessible read that proposes this kind of view.
Yes, there are many domains to tackle! I'd say currently philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience are the two big ones. Although computer science is having a lot to say on the topic these days with the increased interest in artificial intelligence. And quantum physics has a lot to say on the topic, too.
From the naturalistic dualist perspective, we don’t know and we cannot know. Conscience is superimposed on reality, and probably is related to some kind of information loops (see Tononi “Intergrated Information Theory” for a serious attempt of a theory about which systems create conscience: still axiomatic, because the only conscience you can really experiment with is yours, and at most those similar enough to trust their reporting).
Those information loops are very likely to exist on large animals, and the more different is any physical system from ourselves, the harder is to guess. We don’t know, and probably we cannot know.
Hi Arturo! I like how you've combined Chalmers' naturalistic dualist approach with Tononi's Information Integration Theory. That's an interesting idea to think about. And the problem you raise about consciousness being subjective and confounded with reporting is definitely a big challenge for consciousness research. There are other similar challenges, such a isolating consciousness from other cognitive processes, like attention and memory.
Tononi's Information Integration Theory is a popular, but highly controversial, one. It's an interesting approach and part of me hopes it will succeed. The idea that consciousness is something we could measure, like temperature, is very appealing. But I also think there are some good reasons to be sceptical of this theory. I'm currently working on an article on IIT that I will publish in a few weeks.
Well, I like IIT, but being conscience epiphenomenal, I would say that it cannot really “succeed”. But I agree that the problem is so hopeless that an axiomatic approach at least is compatible with the epiphenomenic nature of consciousness.
I am enjoying the series; thanks for the good work.
"And if you put your head near your friend’s head, it doesn’t seem like your consciousness merges with theirs."
Oh yeah? Then why do we say "Two heads are better than one"?!
Checkmate, skeptics!
Jokes aside, I find it fascinating and somewhat unsettling to imagine that everything is conscious. If all the tiny atoms and bacteria and microbes and cells that make up my body have a mind of their own, then I'm a walking hive of billions of conscious beings.
hmmm... perhaps you have a point. I've always thought that the saying 'let's pick each other's brains' was creepy. Perhaps it's a creepy way to merge brains 🤔
Was waiting for this one ever since I heard about John Vervaeke talk about this, I think on Tim Ferriss.
I think i fall in the Non-constitutive panpsychism camp but in a unique way.
I think awareness is the building block of all consciousness with there being an ultimate awareness (call it God why not) and we are expressions of that awareness having a human experience.
I think this because when you meditate you can observe the observable mind (thoughts, desires, ego), but you can’t observe the observer (the awareness)
In that way it’s non-constitutive panpsychism.
But a bat is still aware and there is still an experience of what it is like to be a bat, alla David Chalmers and the hard problem of consciousness.
So in that way, a bat is “conscious” in that it’s aware.
But humans have “consciousness” because we have self-referentiality and can observe our own awareness (consciousness)
Hey Matthew! That's an interesting distinction you make between awareness and consciousness. So consciousness might be meta-awareness -- being aware of our own awareness? Similar to the idea of meta-cognition - thinking about one's thinking. I'll have to check out the Tim Ferriss interview.
As we would define consciousness, yes I would characterize it as meta-awareness, with the caveat that something like an octopus may be conscious but may or may not have consciousness
One place to start could be to imagine trying to explain the Internet to your dog. Your dog can see and hear the net, and may even bark at a video you play. But your dog simply doesn't have the equipment needed to grasp the level of abstraction involved. Your dog is never going to understand the Net, and this can't be fixed. Point being, it's likely that we are in this same position in regards to some of the most fundamental questions. But, that's no fun, so let's continue....
A turning point came for me when I was educating myself about CRISPR, gene editing technology. I learned that bacteria grab a chunk of DNA from invading viruses, store the virus in DNA in the bacteria's own DNA, and then reference that stored information to identify future virus invaders.
Bacteria have no brain or nervous system. They are VERY small. A square inch of your skin can have around 32 million bacteria. And yet...
Bacteria perform data management operations that we would label as intelligent if we were doing them ourselves. How to explain? I don't know the answer, but this behavior of bacteria raises some interesting questions.
What if the phenomena we call "intelligence" is not a property of particular things, but rather a property of reality as a whole? As example, everything is ruled by the laws of physics, but those laws are not a property of particular things but rather a property of reality itself.
In my mind, a leading suspect here is space, the single unified field which unites all things everywhere in all of reality. If space has some "intelligence-like" property then all things everywhere would be affected in some manner, even bacteria. It's interesting to observe that while space is very real, indeed the realest of all phenomena, space also doesn't exist, in the sense of having weight, mass, form etc.
SPACE: Real, but non-existent, and thus invisible. Ever present in everything in all places and times.
Is the God of the great religions actually space?
And now we must return to the dog story from the top. If space has some property related to what we call intelligence, trying to understand that phenomena would likely be like our dog trying to understand the Net. We can bark at the screen, but are unlikely to ever really grasp something as big as space.
This may be good news! We typically think of space as being nothing. A state of mind incapable of understanding could also be described as a state of nothing. What if the ignorance we're always trying to kill is a key to the door?
Hey Phil! I love your comments! They really make me think. Your idea seems to line up with some physicists, who suggests that it is information that is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time. The physicist John Wheeler coined the term 'it from bit' meaning we get physical reality (the it), from information (bits). The problem, of course, is what does that mean for a biological creature that feels like they live in a physical world?
As a computer scientist involved in fundamental AI research, I'm of course fascinated by all theories of mind, and I have enjoyed this series end to end, so thank you for that!
I'm not entirely sure what is my position here, I was mainly a naive physicalist coming out of college (as I think most people coming from quant backgrounds tend to be) but the problems of physicalism are too jarring once you notice them. I also dislike dualism, not sure why, maybe just some anti theological bias on my side. But pansychism is way too weird! So I guess I'm lost now, I don't know what to believe anymore ;)
(I've heard somewhere that computer scientists are often closet dualists disguised as physicalists, so maybe that's the answer ;)
I've read some of IIT but honestly I don't understand it at all, so I'm eagerly waiting for your take on it.
I resonate so much with how you are feeling about what to believe. That's one of the main reasons I decided to start this newsletter. There are so many different theories and issues to contend with. It seems like an unsolvable problem.
My tentative view is that there are some key questions that we need to answer. We may need to keep an open mind. While addressing these questions will probably not give us all the answers we want, it may get us a little closer to an idea that makes some sense.
Thank you for replying ;) At the very least, I'm convinced this thing called consciousness is not any sort of illusion. It is the most evident phenomenon in all of reality, if only because we can't even experience reality without going through the substrate of conscious thought. That, for me, eliminates all theories that pretend to explain it away by claiming it is something less real than, say, quarks.
I agree, claiming that we don't have conscious experience at all is a difficult one to swallow. Some like to distinguish between strong and weak versions of illusionism. Strong illusionism -- claims like experiences do not have ‘what-it’s-like’ properties (physical or non-physical) -- are probably not worth spending the time considering. But there are weak versions, which may be worth exploring (even if we do end up throwing them out). These weaker versions claim that conscious experiences are real, but the illusion is that they may not have all the properties we think they do. For example, we might think that conscious experiences are ineffable, but the ineffability of consciousness is an illusion.
Interesting! Definitely there are some parts of our conscious experience that are made-up by our brains, that much I'm convinced of, if only because it makes sense that your brains evolved not to show how the world is, but how it is more useful for us to perceive it, given the physical constraints we live with and the scales at which we interact with the universe. For example, there is no such a thing as a solid object.
A while ago I was working on a thought piece about the relationship between perspective and consciousness from the viewpoint of biological equipment and brain size. Hawks, for example, can see for miles with great acuity (I’d just read Chalmers bat essay). I had long discussions with the bot and grew increasingly confused. How we can get from worms to bats to elephants and pigs seemed inexplicable. But Chalmers question resonated. How do we know bats have consciousness?
I read about homo habilis, the handy man, whose brain size almost doubled in the blink of an evolving eye, its jawbone shrinking to accommodate phonological articulation—but not quite enough for language to happen. Can you imagine what it would be like to have the capacity for language before language had been invented?
Your comment, Alejandro, together with Suzis discussions of physicalists and panpsychists come together here for me: “Definitely there are some parts of our conscious experience that are made-up by our brains, that much I'm convinced of, if only because it makes sense that your brains evolved not to show how the world is, but how it is more useful for us to perceive it, given the physical constraints we live with and the scales at which we interact with the universe. “
We are limited in our perceptions of reality by our perspectives whether a worm or a human, but consciousness is manifest according to what is useful to us in interaction with the physical universe. There has to be a two way causal relationship between brain activity and consciousness, brain activity more instrumental in sense data analysis and evaluation filtered through memory of some sort (very primitive in worms), consciousness more of a decision making, guiding, sensing of experience (redness of tomatoes) feeding back to the brain for action.
You two have remodeled my thinking about consciousness in short order. I was a bit unconscious and naive theoretically, still popping off, can’t help it:) But you broke through my biases and assumptions. Many thanks.
Yours and Alejandro's comments are great! This point, "There has to be a two-way causal relationship between brain activity and consciousness" is indeed a key question in the consciousness debate. Does consciousness serve an evolutionary advantage, or is it an accidental by-product?
Many philosophers and scientists have weighed in on this issue. Those who argue consciousness is causally inert and has no evolutionary function point to examples where unconscious neural processes seem sufficient to generate behaviour. Others counter that subjective conscious experience plays a crucial role in integrating information, exercising metacognition, and making complex decisions in ambiguous situations.
Ultimately, whether consciousness is a mere byproduct or has an adaptive purpose is still hotly debated.
If it is a byproduct it’s a serendipitous byproduct and it gives us an advantage (of course we also kill each other). Consider metacognition. I’ve never thought about this function as a characteristic of consciousness, but if it is, it is as crucial as language itself. I’ve been thinking about AI’s inability to explain how it thinks. It has no metacognitive capacity. I mean, it thinks, then it regenerates from ground zero right? It doesn’t know how it does its thing. We do. Consciousness? You got me thinking Suzi.
I agree. Metacognition seem very characteristic of consciousness. It's definitely a big part of our sense of self, I would think. AI doesn't seem to do what we do in terms of metacognition. But, like AI, I'm not sure we have access to all levels of how we work either. We do have metacognition, but understanding how we have metacognition, I'm not sure we have access to that level of abstraction? 🤔 You've got me thinking again!
In reading pedagogical theory it’s axiomatic that metacognition can be assessed and taught from the level of word recognition to comprehension and interpretation of text.
Try this on. When we read, consciousness is focused on the cutting edge of the text. As consciousness deals with what is immediately in front of it (micro comprehension)an aspect called metacognition works to send signals to short term memory and then to working memory which interacts with longterm memory deeper in the unconscious what mind? brain? Has to be a physical location in the brain. While this more heavily regulated less conscious activity in intermediate term memory is happening consciousness has moved further into the text and is working with linguistic cognition to prepare a micro comprehension signal for metacognition to direct STM and so on. Two types of mental
activity at once. And don’t ask me what mental activity is:)
My knee jerk reaction when I first heard of panpsychism was that it's just mysticism pretending to be science. That would fall under the "panpsychism of the gaps" objection you mentioned. So far, I haven't seen anything to change my mind. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks for the comment! I agree. The combination problem has been said to be panpsychism biggest problem, but for me the 'panpsychism of the gaps' objection feels like the stronger objection.
I've really enjoyed this series, thanks for writing it!
As an aside, the "boundary" of consciousness is just a labeling problem for us. Nature often has spectrums without well-defined boundaries. Defining consciousness is hard because we don't understand it. And some things resist definition and can only be described through examples.
I've wondered if panpsychism in part comes from a conflation induced by the word "experience". We say that we "experience" the world and that an electron "experiences" a magnetic field. Which leads us to think those are similar. (Some might argue they are identical, not because electrons are conscious, but because we are not!)
The combination problem alone rules panpsychism out for me. I'm a structuralist. I believe mind emerges from the brain in virtue of the latter's structure and composition. Electrons, as far as we know, have no structure, and only a handful of properties. (Further, all electrons are identical, which doesn't seem to allow for personal experience, let alone consciousness.)
I can't think of any place in nature where a thing is made of smaller versions of the same thing. Houses aren't made of tiny houses, dogs aren't made of tiny dogs, etc. Panpsychism strikes me like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Both legitimately claim parsimony on one particular count but raise a host of issues in doing so. And both do seem a handwave at, even a dismissal of, a challenging issue.
I'm looking forward to your exploration of non-constitutive panpsychism and IIT!
Thank you so much! I've enjoyed reading your comments :)
Yes, that's where I find myself too, the idea that consciousness has a labelling problem -- that's a good way to put it.
And great point about things not being made by smaller versions of the same thing -- although I kinda secretly hoped that dogs were made of tiny little dogs 🐶
I’ll check out those articles. IIT strikes me as perhaps necessary but not sufficient, but I’m not familiar enough with its details to know how much weight it grants the synaptic connections (which I think are crucial).
Hi Suzi, I hope you don’t mind if I post a link here to an academic philosopher I invited to do a guest post who has written numerous articles on panpsychism. I can’t vouch for the scientific aspect of his writing, but the rest is very clear and easy to read. Just thought you and maybe some of your readers might be interested:
Thanks Matthew. Yes, the interactive field idea is an idea I see popping up a lot these days.
I have enjoyed this series immensely. Thank you, John. Also, I concur that Philip Goff, whose position I don’t agree with, has written a fascinating book nonetheless.
Thanks John! I'm glad you enjoyed the series. You've convinced me to revisit Galileo's Error with fresh eyes. The first time around, I may have analysed it too much through the lens of what I was working on at the time.
Some of the arguments presented in his book “Why” are also fascinating and well expounded. Neither do I agree with them - definitely an improving read though.
Thanks John! I'll add it to my want-to-read list.
Not personally a panpsychist but quite interesting considering the area of thought I'm thinking about with my Substack, the Frontier Letter - also yes, very long comment but whenever I have a long comment it indicates someone's work resonated deeply - so thank you.
A comment:
"One popular way to avoid the combination problem is to claim micro-consciousnesses don’t actually combine at all (this is called the reductionist approach). But this view doesn’t seem to align with our everyday experience of a single unified conscious experience."
I would push back and challenge you (or panpsychist if this was a thought representative of their beliefs and not yours) to consider the following:
I wouldn't be so sure about that claim in the last sentence of the quote. I actually think it does align with everyday experience, in that whatever my aim is, it seems as if those things make themselves apparent to me. It's why goals are necessary, because the world almost lays out a pathway for you when aim at something by demonstrating to you the things that will get you to that goal and providing you with dopaminergic rushes when you achieve steps toward that goal, and anxiety signals when obstacles emerge. I don't have scientific studies I can point to about this, I haven't looked into the science of perception guiding action deeply, but I have learned it from listening to Jordan Peterson personality and Maps of Meaning lectures. To me, this actually feels as if things are telling me they are potential pathways to my goals, or my consciousness manages to propagate revelations of potential utility as it sees them - but the strange thing about that is sometimes, the things that make themselves apparent to me feel like something I could have not possibly known - which I think, in my current understanding, I would argue has to do with the unconscious mind and the relationship of the collective unconscious's ability to speak to me consciously. For example, I was obsessing over every thought I had, even if it felt like it wasn't me. I read Bjorn Natthiko's 'I May Be Wrong,' not because it was next on my reading list, but because it seemed to jump out at me on the bookshelf. I had no way of knowing the contents of the book though. As I read the book, it taught me lessons that I fundamentally needed at the time, one of them being - You are not your every thought. Just because you have a thought, does not mean you have to associate with it. Those thoughts that arise may be voices from your past of people you despise or do not agree with in the slightest, but because they were part of your family, their voices still crowd your mind
Curious about your thoughts on this.
Fascinating on point 3 as well - Almost as if Panpsychism is a scientific cope of explaining things so there's not a necessity to default to religion.
Hi Dominic! Thanks for pushing back on the point that our everyday experience of consciousness is a single unified experience. I agree with you on this one. My tendency is to think that consciousness might be better described as a collection of phenomena, not a single thing that can be explained by one equation or measurement. Not everyone agrees though, and its currently one of the hotly debated questions in consciousness research. Is consciousness a unified thing that can be measured, like temperature, or is it a collection of phenomena, more like how we define life?
Ahh interesting, what is the school of thought for the collection of phenomena argument?
Consciousness is an interesting field of study because I feel like it's multimodal and there are so many domains of expertise that can tackle this problem - What field of study would you say most people pursue who end up studying consciousness? Mixed bag?
There are many different theories that align with the idea that consciousness is a collection of phenomena. I think Anil Seths book -- Being You is probably the most accessible read that proposes this kind of view.
Yes, there are many domains to tackle! I'd say currently philosophy of mind and cognitive neuroscience are the two big ones. Although computer science is having a lot to say on the topic these days with the increased interest in artificial intelligence. And quantum physics has a lot to say on the topic, too.
From the naturalistic dualist perspective, we don’t know and we cannot know. Conscience is superimposed on reality, and probably is related to some kind of information loops (see Tononi “Intergrated Information Theory” for a serious attempt of a theory about which systems create conscience: still axiomatic, because the only conscience you can really experiment with is yours, and at most those similar enough to trust their reporting).
Those information loops are very likely to exist on large animals, and the more different is any physical system from ourselves, the harder is to guess. We don’t know, and probably we cannot know.
Hi Arturo! I like how you've combined Chalmers' naturalistic dualist approach with Tononi's Information Integration Theory. That's an interesting idea to think about. And the problem you raise about consciousness being subjective and confounded with reporting is definitely a big challenge for consciousness research. There are other similar challenges, such a isolating consciousness from other cognitive processes, like attention and memory.
Tononi's Information Integration Theory is a popular, but highly controversial, one. It's an interesting approach and part of me hopes it will succeed. The idea that consciousness is something we could measure, like temperature, is very appealing. But I also think there are some good reasons to be sceptical of this theory. I'm currently working on an article on IIT that I will publish in a few weeks.
Well, I like IIT, but being conscience epiphenomenal, I would say that it cannot really “succeed”. But I agree that the problem is so hopeless that an axiomatic approach at least is compatible with the epiphenomenic nature of consciousness.
I am enjoying the series; thanks for the good work.
Thanks for the great comment! I too like that IIT is trying to approach consciousness with an axiomatic method -- it's bold.
"And if you put your head near your friend’s head, it doesn’t seem like your consciousness merges with theirs."
Oh yeah? Then why do we say "Two heads are better than one"?!
Checkmate, skeptics!
Jokes aside, I find it fascinating and somewhat unsettling to imagine that everything is conscious. If all the tiny atoms and bacteria and microbes and cells that make up my body have a mind of their own, then I'm a walking hive of billions of conscious beings.
Yeah, so, more creepy than fascinating, actually.
hmmm... perhaps you have a point. I've always thought that the saying 'let's pick each other's brains' was creepy. Perhaps it's a creepy way to merge brains 🤔
My mind is officially blown. This means there's now more of it. Yay!
Was waiting for this one ever since I heard about John Vervaeke talk about this, I think on Tim Ferriss.
I think i fall in the Non-constitutive panpsychism camp but in a unique way.
I think awareness is the building block of all consciousness with there being an ultimate awareness (call it God why not) and we are expressions of that awareness having a human experience.
I think this because when you meditate you can observe the observable mind (thoughts, desires, ego), but you can’t observe the observer (the awareness)
In that way it’s non-constitutive panpsychism.
But a bat is still aware and there is still an experience of what it is like to be a bat, alla David Chalmers and the hard problem of consciousness.
So in that way, a bat is “conscious” in that it’s aware.
But humans have “consciousness” because we have self-referentiality and can observe our own awareness (consciousness)
Hey Matthew! That's an interesting distinction you make between awareness and consciousness. So consciousness might be meta-awareness -- being aware of our own awareness? Similar to the idea of meta-cognition - thinking about one's thinking. I'll have to check out the Tim Ferriss interview.
As we would define consciousness, yes I would characterize it as meta-awareness, with the caveat that something like an octopus may be conscious but may or may not have consciousness
Interesting, thanks Suzi.
One place to start could be to imagine trying to explain the Internet to your dog. Your dog can see and hear the net, and may even bark at a video you play. But your dog simply doesn't have the equipment needed to grasp the level of abstraction involved. Your dog is never going to understand the Net, and this can't be fixed. Point being, it's likely that we are in this same position in regards to some of the most fundamental questions. But, that's no fun, so let's continue....
A turning point came for me when I was educating myself about CRISPR, gene editing technology. I learned that bacteria grab a chunk of DNA from invading viruses, store the virus in DNA in the bacteria's own DNA, and then reference that stored information to identify future virus invaders.
Bacteria have no brain or nervous system. They are VERY small. A square inch of your skin can have around 32 million bacteria. And yet...
Bacteria perform data management operations that we would label as intelligent if we were doing them ourselves. How to explain? I don't know the answer, but this behavior of bacteria raises some interesting questions.
What if the phenomena we call "intelligence" is not a property of particular things, but rather a property of reality as a whole? As example, everything is ruled by the laws of physics, but those laws are not a property of particular things but rather a property of reality itself.
In my mind, a leading suspect here is space, the single unified field which unites all things everywhere in all of reality. If space has some "intelligence-like" property then all things everywhere would be affected in some manner, even bacteria. It's interesting to observe that while space is very real, indeed the realest of all phenomena, space also doesn't exist, in the sense of having weight, mass, form etc.
SPACE: Real, but non-existent, and thus invisible. Ever present in everything in all places and times.
Is the God of the great religions actually space?
And now we must return to the dog story from the top. If space has some property related to what we call intelligence, trying to understand that phenomena would likely be like our dog trying to understand the Net. We can bark at the screen, but are unlikely to ever really grasp something as big as space.
This may be good news! We typically think of space as being nothing. A state of mind incapable of understanding could also be described as a state of nothing. What if the ignorance we're always trying to kill is a key to the door?
Hey Phil! I love your comments! They really make me think. Your idea seems to line up with some physicists, who suggests that it is information that is more fundamental than matter, energy, space and time. The physicist John Wheeler coined the term 'it from bit' meaning we get physical reality (the it), from information (bits). The problem, of course, is what does that mean for a biological creature that feels like they live in a physical world?
As a computer scientist involved in fundamental AI research, I'm of course fascinated by all theories of mind, and I have enjoyed this series end to end, so thank you for that!
I'm not entirely sure what is my position here, I was mainly a naive physicalist coming out of college (as I think most people coming from quant backgrounds tend to be) but the problems of physicalism are too jarring once you notice them. I also dislike dualism, not sure why, maybe just some anti theological bias on my side. But pansychism is way too weird! So I guess I'm lost now, I don't know what to believe anymore ;)
(I've heard somewhere that computer scientists are often closet dualists disguised as physicalists, so maybe that's the answer ;)
I've read some of IIT but honestly I don't understand it at all, so I'm eagerly waiting for your take on it.
Hi Alejandro!
I resonate so much with how you are feeling about what to believe. That's one of the main reasons I decided to start this newsletter. There are so many different theories and issues to contend with. It seems like an unsolvable problem.
My tentative view is that there are some key questions that we need to answer. We may need to keep an open mind. While addressing these questions will probably not give us all the answers we want, it may get us a little closer to an idea that makes some sense.
Thank you for replying ;) At the very least, I'm convinced this thing called consciousness is not any sort of illusion. It is the most evident phenomenon in all of reality, if only because we can't even experience reality without going through the substrate of conscious thought. That, for me, eliminates all theories that pretend to explain it away by claiming it is something less real than, say, quarks.
I agree, claiming that we don't have conscious experience at all is a difficult one to swallow. Some like to distinguish between strong and weak versions of illusionism. Strong illusionism -- claims like experiences do not have ‘what-it’s-like’ properties (physical or non-physical) -- are probably not worth spending the time considering. But there are weak versions, which may be worth exploring (even if we do end up throwing them out). These weaker versions claim that conscious experiences are real, but the illusion is that they may not have all the properties we think they do. For example, we might think that conscious experiences are ineffable, but the ineffability of consciousness is an illusion.
Interesting! Definitely there are some parts of our conscious experience that are made-up by our brains, that much I'm convinced of, if only because it makes sense that your brains evolved not to show how the world is, but how it is more useful for us to perceive it, given the physical constraints we live with and the scales at which we interact with the universe. For example, there is no such a thing as a solid object.
A while ago I was working on a thought piece about the relationship between perspective and consciousness from the viewpoint of biological equipment and brain size. Hawks, for example, can see for miles with great acuity (I’d just read Chalmers bat essay). I had long discussions with the bot and grew increasingly confused. How we can get from worms to bats to elephants and pigs seemed inexplicable. But Chalmers question resonated. How do we know bats have consciousness?
I read about homo habilis, the handy man, whose brain size almost doubled in the blink of an evolving eye, its jawbone shrinking to accommodate phonological articulation—but not quite enough for language to happen. Can you imagine what it would be like to have the capacity for language before language had been invented?
Your comment, Alejandro, together with Suzis discussions of physicalists and panpsychists come together here for me: “Definitely there are some parts of our conscious experience that are made-up by our brains, that much I'm convinced of, if only because it makes sense that your brains evolved not to show how the world is, but how it is more useful for us to perceive it, given the physical constraints we live with and the scales at which we interact with the universe. “
We are limited in our perceptions of reality by our perspectives whether a worm or a human, but consciousness is manifest according to what is useful to us in interaction with the physical universe. There has to be a two way causal relationship between brain activity and consciousness, brain activity more instrumental in sense data analysis and evaluation filtered through memory of some sort (very primitive in worms), consciousness more of a decision making, guiding, sensing of experience (redness of tomatoes) feeding back to the brain for action.
You two have remodeled my thinking about consciousness in short order. I was a bit unconscious and naive theoretically, still popping off, can’t help it:) But you broke through my biases and assumptions. Many thanks.
Yours and Alejandro's comments are great! This point, "There has to be a two-way causal relationship between brain activity and consciousness" is indeed a key question in the consciousness debate. Does consciousness serve an evolutionary advantage, or is it an accidental by-product?
Many philosophers and scientists have weighed in on this issue. Those who argue consciousness is causally inert and has no evolutionary function point to examples where unconscious neural processes seem sufficient to generate behaviour. Others counter that subjective conscious experience plays a crucial role in integrating information, exercising metacognition, and making complex decisions in ambiguous situations.
Ultimately, whether consciousness is a mere byproduct or has an adaptive purpose is still hotly debated.
If it is a byproduct it’s a serendipitous byproduct and it gives us an advantage (of course we also kill each other). Consider metacognition. I’ve never thought about this function as a characteristic of consciousness, but if it is, it is as crucial as language itself. I’ve been thinking about AI’s inability to explain how it thinks. It has no metacognitive capacity. I mean, it thinks, then it regenerates from ground zero right? It doesn’t know how it does its thing. We do. Consciousness? You got me thinking Suzi.
I agree. Metacognition seem very characteristic of consciousness. It's definitely a big part of our sense of self, I would think. AI doesn't seem to do what we do in terms of metacognition. But, like AI, I'm not sure we have access to all levels of how we work either. We do have metacognition, but understanding how we have metacognition, I'm not sure we have access to that level of abstraction? 🤔 You've got me thinking again!
In reading pedagogical theory it’s axiomatic that metacognition can be assessed and taught from the level of word recognition to comprehension and interpretation of text.
Try this on. When we read, consciousness is focused on the cutting edge of the text. As consciousness deals with what is immediately in front of it (micro comprehension)an aspect called metacognition works to send signals to short term memory and then to working memory which interacts with longterm memory deeper in the unconscious what mind? brain? Has to be a physical location in the brain. While this more heavily regulated less conscious activity in intermediate term memory is happening consciousness has moved further into the text and is working with linguistic cognition to prepare a micro comprehension signal for metacognition to direct STM and so on. Two types of mental
activity at once. And don’t ask me what mental activity is:)
My knee jerk reaction when I first heard of panpsychism was that it's just mysticism pretending to be science. That would fall under the "panpsychism of the gaps" objection you mentioned. So far, I haven't seen anything to change my mind. Thanks for writing this.
Thanks for the comment! I agree. The combination problem has been said to be panpsychism biggest problem, but for me the 'panpsychism of the gaps' objection feels like the stronger objection.
I've really enjoyed this series, thanks for writing it!
As an aside, the "boundary" of consciousness is just a labeling problem for us. Nature often has spectrums without well-defined boundaries. Defining consciousness is hard because we don't understand it. And some things resist definition and can only be described through examples.
I've wondered if panpsychism in part comes from a conflation induced by the word "experience". We say that we "experience" the world and that an electron "experiences" a magnetic field. Which leads us to think those are similar. (Some might argue they are identical, not because electrons are conscious, but because we are not!)
The combination problem alone rules panpsychism out for me. I'm a structuralist. I believe mind emerges from the brain in virtue of the latter's structure and composition. Electrons, as far as we know, have no structure, and only a handful of properties. (Further, all electrons are identical, which doesn't seem to allow for personal experience, let alone consciousness.)
I can't think of any place in nature where a thing is made of smaller versions of the same thing. Houses aren't made of tiny houses, dogs aren't made of tiny dogs, etc. Panpsychism strikes me like the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Both legitimately claim parsimony on one particular count but raise a host of issues in doing so. And both do seem a handwave at, even a dismissal of, a challenging issue.
I'm looking forward to your exploration of non-constitutive panpsychism and IIT!
Thank you so much! I've enjoyed reading your comments :)
Yes, that's where I find myself too, the idea that consciousness has a labelling problem -- that's a good way to put it.
And great point about things not being made by smaller versions of the same thing -- although I kinda secretly hoped that dogs were made of tiny little dogs 🐶
I've written a little on IIT https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/what-is-information-1 and https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/what-is-information-the-ins-and-the
I have a more detailed article on IIT in draft, but I think I might include it in a series on the scientific theories of consciousness.
Ha, tiny dogs would be awesome!
I’ll check out those articles. IIT strikes me as perhaps necessary but not sufficient, but I’m not familiar enough with its details to know how much weight it grants the synaptic connections (which I think are crucial).
Hi Suzi, I hope you don’t mind if I post a link here to an academic philosopher I invited to do a guest post who has written numerous articles on panpsychism. I can’t vouch for the scientific aspect of his writing, but the rest is very clear and easy to read. Just thought you and maybe some of your readers might be interested:
https://open.substack.com/pub/philosophyandfiction/p/a-testable-solution-to-the-mind-body?r=schg4&utm_medium=ios
Don't mind at all! Thanks for sharing.
Thanks!