No reference to Laplace demon! You break my heart. Physicalism is far older than neuroscience (the canonical description was done by Laplace in the XVIII century), and connects with Democritus atomism. I also miss a comment on the relation between physicalism and reductionism.
Every week I struggle with what to keep and what needs to go. I decided to keep Laplace's demon for when I eventually get to the free-will debate. But you make a good point, it could have been included here too. And I'll have more to say about reductionism in upcoming posts.
Great as always, looking forward to the next chapters.
Two things:
"Simply bllions of neurons and trillions of neuronal connections in a physical blob of white and grey biological matter" - how did you get a hold of my Tinder bio?!
Oh! That was YOUR Tinder bio!? So, how's that working out for you?
Thanks for adding the link to Andrew's (@goatfury) article. It's a great read and perfect to read along side this one. I like how Andrew writes. His writing is enjoyable and highly accessible.
Does increases in heart rate breathing etc. cause fear? Or does fear cause these physiological events? What about increases in heart rate etc. that occurs when we are running long distance in a Zen state. To me, it’s inconceivable that the physical brain is anything but the engine of consciousness. The car engine moves the car but isn’t the same as the journey. They are however inseparable—we can’t have one without the other. It’s also inconceivable that consciousness is supernatural precisely because it is totally dependent on the brain and can’t happen without material. But it’s also inconceivable that imagination, theory building, emotions, literary response, writing, are physical processes. I agree with Chalmers. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming posts! I’d love to understand how Chalmers can be wrong if I’m understanding his position right. Thanks!
Thanks, Terry! Ah! I see you raise the interesting metaphysical question about causality. Does increased heart rate cause fear, does fear cause increased heart rate, or is increased heart rate fear itself. This has to be one of the key questions that we need to answer if we are going to have any hope in understanding consciousness. But I think there are a few other key questions we need to answer too. Looking forward to it!
I’m having trouble understanding how an increase in heart rate causes fear. My heart rate increases when I exercise and there is no fear. A threat causes fear.
I love this quirk. The theory is that when we have a palpable biological response we examine the surrounding circumstances to interpret the response. Is it fear or attraction? Is this anticipation or nervousness? Over the years I've tried to tell myself that I'm *not nervous* about some event that's increasing my heart rate and causing my mind to race - I'm just *excited*. In time, I might have even believed it ;]
This reminds me of a classic experiment in psychology conducted by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in 1974. In this study, male participants were asked to cross either a high, scary suspension bridge or a low, stable bridge. After crossing, they encountered an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey and gave them her number in case they had any questions. The results showed that the men who crossed the scary bridge were more likely to call the woman later, attributing their heightened physiological arousal to attraction rather than fear.
This phenomenon is part of what's known as the misattribution of arousal theory. Essentially, when we experience a significant biological response—like an increased heart rate or a rush of adrenaline—we search for an explanation in our surroundings. This can lead to confusing fear with attraction, or nervousness with excitement, depending on the context. It great that you figured out this way to "trick" ourselves -- calling nervousness excitement.
Great article, a very readable introduction and I was glad to see the different types of physicalism broken out.
I'm curious where you'll go from here -- you mention wanting to go deeper on each of the types of physicalism, but any plans to do anything on dualism or panpsychism? Personally I identify as a functionalist, but I find the recent renewed interest in panpsychism interesting. I've been reading about it a fair amount and to explore that in my own writing sometime in the future
Superb as usual. I think I'd consider myself, probably unsurprisingly, a functionalist. More specifically a computationalist. Boring, I know ;)
My question is, isn't the hard problem of consciousness by definition unscientific? And I don't mean it in a pejorative sense. Science, interpreted mostly as falsificationism, is a pretty narrow epistemic system. The hard problem of onsciousness for me seems to be asking precisely the type of questions that science is unequipped to answer: "why".
Yes, 100%. The hard problem of consciousness is unscientific in the sense that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable -- it is impossible to definitively prove or disprove through empirical testing or observation (an essential requirement of the scientific method). For this reason, many scientists avoid the question completely. Or they either say something like, 'it's a question that is uninteresting to science', or they say something like, 'the hard problem is neither hard nor a problem'.
The neuroscientist Anil Seth coined the term 'the real problem' to shift the focus away from the metaphysical question about what exists, and instead highlight the question of how the brain enables and constrains conscious perception and experience, which may be more amenable to scientific investigation.
Yeah it's a shame, though. So many of the most interesting questions are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Or maybe that's what makes them interesting in the first place. :)
Maybe science's fear of the unfalsifiable is why they don't work on any metaphysical problems, or claim that the metaphysical realm "doesn't exist", is "just woo woo", etc.
> The success of physicalism is largely due to the vast evidence from neuroscientific research, which suggests that subjective experiences are highly correlated with observable physical changes and patterns of activity in the brain.
This is a *much* more interesting claim than it may seem.
Really enjoyed the slow build of this post. Physicalism although a highly productive vehicle for engaging with the world still seems limited in some serious ways. I have always like phenomenology's externalizing of internal things. Thought things has always felt right to me. A thought can tangibly impact my physical being--- this I have learned the hard way many times in my life.
Thanks, Nick! I'm glad you enjoyed the post. You make a fair point about the limitations of physicalism and the value phenomenology takes on our experiences. I know what you mean - thoughts really do seem to have a physical impact, sometimes in the most uncomfortable of ways.
Hello! New in town and this joint. This was a great read! Consciousness has long been a favorite topic, and it looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me here.
FWIW, I do distinguish between materialism and physicalism based whether emergence is, respectively, weak or strong. Under materialism, water is fully predictable from quantum properties. Physicalism allows unpredictable properties. My minimum is physicalism, but I have dualist sympathies.
So, under physicalism, I'm non-reductive, and don't see the first three answers to Chalmers's hard problem as even answering the implied question: how does meat have subjective experience? Chalmers, as I understand him, seems to argue for a kind of property dualism -- a strong emergence of something with the right materials and structure. Somewhat, I've thought, like how laser light arises from the right materials and structure.
That leaves the fourth answer, the brain is greater than the sum of its parts. I see functionalism, like IIT, as only part of the answer. I think structuralism might be another part of the answer -- IIT is right about the network, but what's going on in the *connections* is, I think, more important. Maybe there is something it is like to be a huge network with synaptic connections.
Your comment is a great breakdown of the different views, so thank you.
As I've been writing this series, I've been thinking more and more about the breakdown and blurry lines between views. I'm curious what you think. How similar do you think property dualism is from strong emergent physicalist theories? I understand that technically there is a difference, but it seems possible to sit in the wiggle room between the strong emergent physicalist camp and the property dualist camp.
I have found, over and over, that taxonomy of anything interestingly complex is extremely difficult. Boundaries are fuzzy, there is overlap, and different thinkers express similar ideas in different terminology. I agree strong emergence in physicalism and property dualism share a basic concept. (I suspect some staunch physicalists might resist being called dualists, though.)
I was reading John Searle recently, and he dismisses brain/mind dualism on the grounds that mind is just what brains do. There's no dualism there just as there is no dualism between laser light and the lasing material. So, I read Searle as supporting strong emergence but not seeing it as a dualism, just a property of the system. Which is maybe word play but he's trying to demystify a topic that's had a lot of woo-woo.
Perhaps the key difference is that, with strong emergence, we presumably can, with low-level properties, still explain the mechanism of new properties arising without necessarily being able to predict their properties. We can deconstruct a high-level property once we understand it, but not predict it in advance. Given the properties of water, we can say, oh, yeah, sure, now I see how that arises from quantum ones, but we'd never predict those properties from just the quantum ones.
Property dualism, to me, suggests a stronger decoupling between substrate and emergent property. That it could be much harder to explain exactly how it arises. Something non-computable or Gödel-limited.
Well presented, it's a complex topic explained clearly. I hope you'll take this as constructive feedback rather than criticism, but why promote the merits of physicalism as the consensus among neuroscientists? Would you find it strange if someone promoted the merits of a neuroscience theory by mentioning the consensus opinion among philosophers?
Hi Prudence! Feedback and criticism are always appreciated. So, thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.
You raise some really interesting points here. But first, I want to clear up a potential misunderstanding. By claiming that physicalism is the consensus among neuroscientist and philosophers, I am not trying to make an appeal to consensus or authority, or to promote the merits of the view. My statement was simply to point out the fact that it is true that physicalism is the most popular view among these experts. Because it is the consensus, it's probably worth reviewing what people mean when they say they are a physicalist, and why someone might believe this view to be true. In other words, let's review the claims made by these views and make up our own minds.
But your comment raises some more interesting questions. For example, when is it appropriate to appeal to consensus or authority? It feels like appealing to consensus can sometimes be the appropriate thing to do -- we don't have all the time in the world to learn about and be experts in everything. Outsourcing the thinking to experts can sometimes be our best strategy.
Another interesting question your comment raises is how segregated should disciplines like philosophy and science be? Sometimes it feels like the most interesting work is being done at the intersection of ideas. And ideas in one discipline are important, if not essential, to ideas in the other. In my own work, I often feel that it is this intersection of ideas where I've learned the most. Of course, the intersection of ideas is not always rosy -- misunderstandings are bound to occur when differing frameworks and assumptions collide. But I tend to think this is where our understanding deepens and because of this, the boundaries between fields should be permeable. What do you think?
I don’t disagree with anything you say there. There’s no problem appealing to authority, or intersection between disciplines. I’d agree it’s not only best practice, but essential in this age of acute specialisation.
The problem as I see it is the predominance of naturalist thinking in our culture makes certain philosophical assumptions invisible to us. And if that naturalist assumption wasn’t hidden in there, why tell us what neuroscientists think rather than biologists? After all, consciousness is as tightly correlated with life as it with brains.
Take as an example Anil Seth’s book and his replacement of the hard problem with the real problem. I’d agree that’s probably the real problem - for neuroscience. But the hard problem is metaphysics. Seth avoids the hard problem but then goes on to promote a naturalist metaphysics (consciousness is a controlled hallucination). I think that’s an overstep, and misleading.
It’s not any big deal that these things happen, but I wonder if those hidden assumptions are important for making progress in neuroscience.
Assume hypothetically that some non-physicalist theory like substance dualism or idealism turns out to be true. We’re confident enough to say, consciousness doesn’t “emerge” from brain processes.
How would the fact physicalism is shown false change the work done in neuroscience?
I completely agree, hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) assumptions are are problems for making progress in understanding consciousness. Within physicalist views and neuroscience-based theories of consciousness, many of the disagreements are really disagreements about the underlying assumptions those theories make. This is probably true about many disagreements. It's an issue in the neuroscience of consciousness, for sure. Understanding the underlying assumptions and biases is one of the main reasons I am taking the time to review different views on consciousness in this newsletter.
I am really happy to have found your substack and enjoy your posts.
Here is another take on consciousness. The word consciousness is an adjective made into a noun—it is the nominalization of 'conscious'. Although I can be conscious or aware of something, that does that make consciousness or awareness into a physical or measurable thing like magnetic fields or air. Reification or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the error of treating an adjective, abstract idea, or hypothetical concept as if it were a physical entity.
We refer to plants and animals as living things, but ever since the demise of Vitalism, we no longer consider ‘life’ to be a noun for an independent essence that gets added to inanimate matter to make it alive. Vitalism was the theory that life depended on a force or essence distinct from inert or lifeless matter. Today we consider life to represent a set of properties or attributes that apply to plants and animals—it is an adjective posing as a noun. And I suspect that consciousness is also an adjective posing as a noun.
Although life-as-essence is no longer a popular idea, the related concepts of panpsychism and souls are still very much alive. Panpsychism is the belief that every thing contains some amount of consciousness (whatever that is). It is dualism reborn because, once again, the mind comprises a physical part and a non-physical part. In theological circles, a soul is a disembodied spirit that persists even after the body expires. Both ideas are beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.
Consciousness, like life-as-essence, is a reification—an abstract concept posing as a material thing. Life-as-essence, souls, panpsychism, and consciousness—as things—defy scientific inquiry because they cannot be detected or measured using physical instruments. However, once our understanding of natural intelligence matures, the properties and attributes associated with consciousness will make perfect sense within a natural intelligence framework. Any supernatural explanation, at that point, will appear less tenable. I predict that Consciousnessism will suffer the same fate as Vitalism.
Hi Tom! I love this comment. Yes, completely agree. I've used the life analogy many times myself. I think it was Anil Seth, who first mention this idea to me.
Still a dualist Suzi, though this article gave me a run for my money. Always a good read!
Haha! I would have been disappointed if it was that easy to change your mind. Thanks for the kind words, Matthew.
Always, look forward to it every week
No reference to Laplace demon! You break my heart. Physicalism is far older than neuroscience (the canonical description was done by Laplace in the XVIII century), and connects with Democritus atomism. I also miss a comment on the relation between physicalism and reductionism.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nY7oAdy5odfGqE7mQ/freedom-under-naturalistic-dualism
Every week I struggle with what to keep and what needs to go. I decided to keep Laplace's demon for when I eventually get to the free-will debate. But you make a good point, it could have been included here too. And I'll have more to say about reductionism in upcoming posts.
It is greatest topic, and there are many ways to deal with it. Probably your choices will make a very interesting narrative! Thx for the great work.
Great as always, looking forward to the next chapters.
Two things:
"Simply bllions of neurons and trillions of neuronal connections in a physical blob of white and grey biological matter" - how did you get a hold of my Tinder bio?!
This seems to be a good opportunity to plug Andrew Smith's relatively recent article about Phineas gage: https://goatfury.substack.com/p/phineas-gage
Oh! That was YOUR Tinder bio!? So, how's that working out for you?
Thanks for adding the link to Andrew's (@goatfury) article. It's a great read and perfect to read along side this one. I like how Andrew writes. His writing is enjoyable and highly accessible.
Does increases in heart rate breathing etc. cause fear? Or does fear cause these physiological events? What about increases in heart rate etc. that occurs when we are running long distance in a Zen state. To me, it’s inconceivable that the physical brain is anything but the engine of consciousness. The car engine moves the car but isn’t the same as the journey. They are however inseparable—we can’t have one without the other. It’s also inconceivable that consciousness is supernatural precisely because it is totally dependent on the brain and can’t happen without material. But it’s also inconceivable that imagination, theory building, emotions, literary response, writing, are physical processes. I agree with Chalmers. I’m looking forward to reading the upcoming posts! I’d love to understand how Chalmers can be wrong if I’m understanding his position right. Thanks!
Thanks, Terry! Ah! I see you raise the interesting metaphysical question about causality. Does increased heart rate cause fear, does fear cause increased heart rate, or is increased heart rate fear itself. This has to be one of the key questions that we need to answer if we are going to have any hope in understanding consciousness. But I think there are a few other key questions we need to answer too. Looking forward to it!
> Does increases in heart rate breathing etc. cause fear? Or does fear cause these physiological events?
If you study anxiety, you'll find it goes both directions.
I’m having trouble understanding how an increase in heart rate causes fear. My heart rate increases when I exercise and there is no fear. A threat causes fear.
Try having anxiety (the actual medical condition) and see how it goes!! :)
> A threat causes fear.
It does indeed. That is one among many things that cause fear.
I love this quirk. The theory is that when we have a palpable biological response we examine the surrounding circumstances to interpret the response. Is it fear or attraction? Is this anticipation or nervousness? Over the years I've tried to tell myself that I'm *not nervous* about some event that's increasing my heart rate and causing my mind to race - I'm just *excited*. In time, I might have even believed it ;]
This reminds me of a classic experiment in psychology conducted by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron in 1974. In this study, male participants were asked to cross either a high, scary suspension bridge or a low, stable bridge. After crossing, they encountered an attractive woman who asked them to fill out a survey and gave them her number in case they had any questions. The results showed that the men who crossed the scary bridge were more likely to call the woman later, attributing their heightened physiological arousal to attraction rather than fear.
This phenomenon is part of what's known as the misattribution of arousal theory. Essentially, when we experience a significant biological response—like an increased heart rate or a rush of adrenaline—we search for an explanation in our surroundings. This can lead to confusing fear with attraction, or nervousness with excitement, depending on the context. It great that you figured out this way to "trick" ourselves -- calling nervousness excitement.
Great article, a very readable introduction and I was glad to see the different types of physicalism broken out.
I'm curious where you'll go from here -- you mention wanting to go deeper on each of the types of physicalism, but any plans to do anything on dualism or panpsychism? Personally I identify as a functionalist, but I find the recent renewed interest in panpsychism interesting. I've been reading about it a fair amount and to explore that in my own writing sometime in the future
Hey Tommy! From your bio, it looks like we've taken similar career paths. I'm looking forward to reading some of your writing.
Yes, I have written a little on dualism in these articles:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/the-five-most-controversial-ideas
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/substance-dualism-and-the-interaction-problem
and panpsychism here:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/panpsychism-is-everything-conscious
and because IIT implies a type of panpsychism, these articles are also relevant to panpsychism:
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/what-is-information-1
https://suzitravis.substack.com/p/what-is-information-the-ins-and-the
Wow, I hadn't realized how much you had written on the topic! I look forward to reading them
And yes, I noticed the overlap in background -- yay for neuro-turned-datascientist! It's nice to find someone with such similar interests :)
Yes, I'm glad you're here. It will be fun to bounce ideas around.
Superb as usual. I think I'd consider myself, probably unsurprisingly, a functionalist. More specifically a computationalist. Boring, I know ;)
My question is, isn't the hard problem of consciousness by definition unscientific? And I don't mean it in a pejorative sense. Science, interpreted mostly as falsificationism, is a pretty narrow epistemic system. The hard problem of onsciousness for me seems to be asking precisely the type of questions that science is unequipped to answer: "why".
Thanks, Alejandro!
Yes, 100%. The hard problem of consciousness is unscientific in the sense that the hypothesis is unfalsifiable -- it is impossible to definitively prove or disprove through empirical testing or observation (an essential requirement of the scientific method). For this reason, many scientists avoid the question completely. Or they either say something like, 'it's a question that is uninteresting to science', or they say something like, 'the hard problem is neither hard nor a problem'.
The neuroscientist Anil Seth coined the term 'the real problem' to shift the focus away from the metaphysical question about what exists, and instead highlight the question of how the brain enables and constrains conscious perception and experience, which may be more amenable to scientific investigation.
Yeah it's a shame, though. So many of the most interesting questions are neither verifiable nor falsifiable. Or maybe that's what makes them interesting in the first place. :)
I think you're onto something there! ;)
Maybe science's fear of the unfalsifiable is why they don't work on any metaphysical problems, or claim that the metaphysical realm "doesn't exist", is "just woo woo", etc.
> Or they either say something like, 'it's a question that is uninteresting to science'
Which is a pretty hilarious claim, and demonstrates that the quality of "science" is exaggerated.
> Science, interpreted mostly as falsificationism, is a pretty narrow epistemic system.
I prefer "watered down to the point of deceit".
> The success of physicalism is largely due to the vast evidence from neuroscientific research, which suggests that subjective experiences are highly correlated with observable physical changes and patterns of activity in the brain.
This is a *much* more interesting claim than it may seem.
Really enjoyed the slow build of this post. Physicalism although a highly productive vehicle for engaging with the world still seems limited in some serious ways. I have always like phenomenology's externalizing of internal things. Thought things has always felt right to me. A thought can tangibly impact my physical being--- this I have learned the hard way many times in my life.
Thanks, Nick! I'm glad you enjoyed the post. You make a fair point about the limitations of physicalism and the value phenomenology takes on our experiences. I know what you mean - thoughts really do seem to have a physical impact, sometimes in the most uncomfortable of ways.
Hello! New in town and this joint. This was a great read! Consciousness has long been a favorite topic, and it looks like I have a lot of reading ahead of me here.
FWIW, I do distinguish between materialism and physicalism based whether emergence is, respectively, weak or strong. Under materialism, water is fully predictable from quantum properties. Physicalism allows unpredictable properties. My minimum is physicalism, but I have dualist sympathies.
So, under physicalism, I'm non-reductive, and don't see the first three answers to Chalmers's hard problem as even answering the implied question: how does meat have subjective experience? Chalmers, as I understand him, seems to argue for a kind of property dualism -- a strong emergence of something with the right materials and structure. Somewhat, I've thought, like how laser light arises from the right materials and structure.
That leaves the fourth answer, the brain is greater than the sum of its parts. I see functionalism, like IIT, as only part of the answer. I think structuralism might be another part of the answer -- IIT is right about the network, but what's going on in the *connections* is, I think, more important. Maybe there is something it is like to be a huge network with synaptic connections.
Looking forward to reading more!
Hi, and welcome!
Your comment is a great breakdown of the different views, so thank you.
As I've been writing this series, I've been thinking more and more about the breakdown and blurry lines between views. I'm curious what you think. How similar do you think property dualism is from strong emergent physicalist theories? I understand that technically there is a difference, but it seems possible to sit in the wiggle room between the strong emergent physicalist camp and the property dualist camp.
Nice to meet you!
I have found, over and over, that taxonomy of anything interestingly complex is extremely difficult. Boundaries are fuzzy, there is overlap, and different thinkers express similar ideas in different terminology. I agree strong emergence in physicalism and property dualism share a basic concept. (I suspect some staunch physicalists might resist being called dualists, though.)
I was reading John Searle recently, and he dismisses brain/mind dualism on the grounds that mind is just what brains do. There's no dualism there just as there is no dualism between laser light and the lasing material. So, I read Searle as supporting strong emergence but not seeing it as a dualism, just a property of the system. Which is maybe word play but he's trying to demystify a topic that's had a lot of woo-woo.
Perhaps the key difference is that, with strong emergence, we presumably can, with low-level properties, still explain the mechanism of new properties arising without necessarily being able to predict their properties. We can deconstruct a high-level property once we understand it, but not predict it in advance. Given the properties of water, we can say, oh, yeah, sure, now I see how that arises from quantum ones, but we'd never predict those properties from just the quantum ones.
Property dualism, to me, suggests a stronger decoupling between substrate and emergent property. That it could be much harder to explain exactly how it arises. Something non-computable or Gödel-limited.
Well presented, it's a complex topic explained clearly. I hope you'll take this as constructive feedback rather than criticism, but why promote the merits of physicalism as the consensus among neuroscientists? Would you find it strange if someone promoted the merits of a neuroscience theory by mentioning the consensus opinion among philosophers?
Hi Prudence! Feedback and criticism are always appreciated. So, thank you for taking the time to leave a comment.
You raise some really interesting points here. But first, I want to clear up a potential misunderstanding. By claiming that physicalism is the consensus among neuroscientist and philosophers, I am not trying to make an appeal to consensus or authority, or to promote the merits of the view. My statement was simply to point out the fact that it is true that physicalism is the most popular view among these experts. Because it is the consensus, it's probably worth reviewing what people mean when they say they are a physicalist, and why someone might believe this view to be true. In other words, let's review the claims made by these views and make up our own minds.
But your comment raises some more interesting questions. For example, when is it appropriate to appeal to consensus or authority? It feels like appealing to consensus can sometimes be the appropriate thing to do -- we don't have all the time in the world to learn about and be experts in everything. Outsourcing the thinking to experts can sometimes be our best strategy.
Another interesting question your comment raises is how segregated should disciplines like philosophy and science be? Sometimes it feels like the most interesting work is being done at the intersection of ideas. And ideas in one discipline are important, if not essential, to ideas in the other. In my own work, I often feel that it is this intersection of ideas where I've learned the most. Of course, the intersection of ideas is not always rosy -- misunderstandings are bound to occur when differing frameworks and assumptions collide. But I tend to think this is where our understanding deepens and because of this, the boundaries between fields should be permeable. What do you think?
I don’t disagree with anything you say there. There’s no problem appealing to authority, or intersection between disciplines. I’d agree it’s not only best practice, but essential in this age of acute specialisation.
The problem as I see it is the predominance of naturalist thinking in our culture makes certain philosophical assumptions invisible to us. And if that naturalist assumption wasn’t hidden in there, why tell us what neuroscientists think rather than biologists? After all, consciousness is as tightly correlated with life as it with brains.
Take as an example Anil Seth’s book and his replacement of the hard problem with the real problem. I’d agree that’s probably the real problem - for neuroscience. But the hard problem is metaphysics. Seth avoids the hard problem but then goes on to promote a naturalist metaphysics (consciousness is a controlled hallucination). I think that’s an overstep, and misleading.
It’s not any big deal that these things happen, but I wonder if those hidden assumptions are important for making progress in neuroscience.
Assume hypothetically that some non-physicalist theory like substance dualism or idealism turns out to be true. We’re confident enough to say, consciousness doesn’t “emerge” from brain processes.
How would the fact physicalism is shown false change the work done in neuroscience?
There was an interesting substack article by Erik Hoel arguing neuroscience is pre-paradigmatic because of consciousness - https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/neuroscience-is-pre-paradigmatic
Oh, I see! Thanks for clearing that up.
I completely agree, hidden (and sometimes not so hidden) assumptions are are problems for making progress in understanding consciousness. Within physicalist views and neuroscience-based theories of consciousness, many of the disagreements are really disagreements about the underlying assumptions those theories make. This is probably true about many disagreements. It's an issue in the neuroscience of consciousness, for sure. Understanding the underlying assumptions and biases is one of the main reasons I am taking the time to review different views on consciousness in this newsletter.
I am really happy to have found your substack and enjoy your posts.
Here is another take on consciousness. The word consciousness is an adjective made into a noun—it is the nominalization of 'conscious'. Although I can be conscious or aware of something, that does that make consciousness or awareness into a physical or measurable thing like magnetic fields or air. Reification or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness is the error of treating an adjective, abstract idea, or hypothetical concept as if it were a physical entity.
We refer to plants and animals as living things, but ever since the demise of Vitalism, we no longer consider ‘life’ to be a noun for an independent essence that gets added to inanimate matter to make it alive. Vitalism was the theory that life depended on a force or essence distinct from inert or lifeless matter. Today we consider life to represent a set of properties or attributes that apply to plants and animals—it is an adjective posing as a noun. And I suspect that consciousness is also an adjective posing as a noun.
Although life-as-essence is no longer a popular idea, the related concepts of panpsychism and souls are still very much alive. Panpsychism is the belief that every thing contains some amount of consciousness (whatever that is). It is dualism reborn because, once again, the mind comprises a physical part and a non-physical part. In theological circles, a soul is a disembodied spirit that persists even after the body expires. Both ideas are beyond the reach of scientific inquiry.
Consciousness, like life-as-essence, is a reification—an abstract concept posing as a material thing. Life-as-essence, souls, panpsychism, and consciousness—as things—defy scientific inquiry because they cannot be detected or measured using physical instruments. However, once our understanding of natural intelligence matures, the properties and attributes associated with consciousness will make perfect sense within a natural intelligence framework. Any supernatural explanation, at that point, will appear less tenable. I predict that Consciousnessism will suffer the same fate as Vitalism.
For more on this topic, see my substack post: https://tomrearick.substack.com/p/the-end-of-consciousnessism
Hi Tom! I love this comment. Yes, completely agree. I've used the life analogy many times myself. I think it was Anil Seth, who first mention this idea to me.
Thanks for the link, I will check it out!
Great read and full of interesting material. Frankly out of my expertise but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Thanks Suzi!
Thanks so much, Jacob! I’m happy you enjoyed it.