A clash of perspectives on panpsychism

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INTRO: In recent years the concept of panpsychism, “which entertains the possibility that all matter is imbued with consciousness,” writes Annaka Harris, has been firing up cognitive scientists who plumb the nature of consciousness. Some entertain the possibility with enthusiasm and some entertain the possibility with the enthusiasm of an archer eyeing a choice target. Nautilus has sparked the debate with articles by leading thinkers about panpsychism, which continues this week with two new essays, by, respectively, Harris and science writer George Musser, and a rerun of our most popular essay on the subject, in support of panpsychism, by Norwegian philosopher Hedda Hassel Mørch. To amplify the clash, here are three more perspectives from Nautilus articles and interviews.

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AFFINITY WITH NATURE ... Philip Goff, author of Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher and consciousness researcher at Durham University, United Kingdom:

While materialists and dualists believe that consciousness exists only within the brains of humans and other animals, panpsychists believe that consciousness pervades the universe, and is as basic as mass and charge. [...] This view is much misunderstood. Drawing on the literal meaning of the term—“pan”=everything, “psyche”=mind—it is commonly supposed that panpsychists believe that all kinds of inanimate objects have rich conscious lives: that your socks, for example, may be currently going through a troubling period of existential angst.

This way of understanding panpsychism is wrong. Panpsychists tend not to think that literally everything is conscious. They believe that the fundamental constituents of the physical world are conscious, but they need not believe that every random arrangement of those particles results in a conscious subject. Most panpsychists will deny that your socks are conscious, while asserting that they are ultimately composed of things that are conscious.

Perhaps more importantly, panpsychists do not believe that consciousness like ours is everywhere. The complex thoughts and emotions enjoyed by human beings are the result of millions of years of evolution by natural selection, and it is clear that nothing of this kind is had by individual particles. If electrons have experience, then it is of some unimaginably simple form.

In human beings, consciousness is a sophisticated thing, involving subtle and complex emotions, thoughts, and sensory experiences. But there seems nothing incoherent with the idea that consciousness might exist in very simple forms. We have good reason to think that the conscious experience of a horse is much less complex than that of a human being, and the experiences of a chicken less complex than those of a horse. [...] But it is also possible that the light of consciousness never switches off entirely, but rather fades as organic complexity reduces, through flies, insects, plants, amoeba, and bacteria. For the panpsychist, this fading-while-never-turning-off continuum further extends into inorganic matter, with fundamental physical entities—perhaps electrons and quarks—possessing extremely rudimentary forms of consciousness, to reflect their extremely simple nature.

The main attraction of panpsychism is not its ability to account for the data of observation, but its ability to account for the reality of consciousness. We know that consciousness is real and so we have to account for it somehow. [...]


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INTEGRATED INFORMATION THEORY ... Christof Koch, chief scientist and president, Allen Institute for Brain Science:

There are different versions of panpsychism depending on which philosophical or religious tradition you follow, but basically ancient or philosophical panpsychism meant that everything is ensouled. Now, I don’t believe that a stone is ensouled or a planet is ensouled. But if you take a more conceptual approach to consciousness, the evidence suggests there are many more systems that have consciousness [...]

Panpsychism can be terribly elegant in its simplicity. You don’t say consciousness only exists if you have more than 42 neurons or 2 billion neurons or whatever. Instead, the system is conscious if there’s a certain type of complexity. And we live in a universe where certain systems have consciousness. [...]

What makes systems conscious? Are there any systems that are not conscious? Panpsychism doesn’t answer these questions. But Integrated Information Theory does. It makes some very specific predictions. It says, for instance, all complex neurobiological systems—all creatures that have brains—may well have consciousness [...] It may also be possible that if you build a brain out of wires and transistors, that you find consciousness there, too.

Integrated Information Theory makes a number of very precise predictions that philosophical panpsychism was never able to make, so it’s a much richer, more quantitative, more scientific form of panpsychism. It has an informational structure that measures quantity, so you can now make some very precise statements about consciousness. While I don’t think Integrated Information Theory is the final word on consciousness, it’s certainly a big step in the right direction. It’s the sort of theory that will take us in the direction where we can turn metaphysics into physics, into a scientific subject. It will ultimately explain this most mysterious of all phenomena [...]

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METAPHYSICS, NOT SCIENCE ... Massimo Pigliucci, professor of philosophy, CUNY-City College:

[...] My specialty is philosophy of science and so I tend to be sensitive to the difference between metaphysics and science, and whenever an account or theory makes no empirical predictions, and there is no way to test it, at least no foreseeable way to test it, then to me that’s just not science, it’s a metaphysical construct.

Now that’s perfectly legitimate. That’s what metaphysicians do all the time, but to me falls pretty squarely outside of science. [...] We are experiencing a period where fundamental physics is really playing close to metaphysics. ... A number of physicists are accusing some of their colleagues of engaging in metaphysical speculation rather than science because they keep pushing a theory that has not made any contact with the empirical world, and nobody knows how that contact might work out or when.

But there is a difference between panpsychism and string theory. String theory is built on top of quantum mechanics, which is a very empirically based ... Panpsychism on the other hand is ... just a way to solve ... the hard problem of consciousness [...] Postulating that consciousness is another mental property of the universe is one way to get around that...

Some people think that consciousness is made possible by the way in which the brain processes information, which implies that it is about not what the brain is made of but how the brain is structured [...] You could have presumably artificial systems that are not made of biological materials that will be conscious simply because they have the right structure.

I don’t find that convincing at all. I come at consciousness from a point of view of a biologist. To me, consciousness is a highly evolved property of certain biological systems and it does require not only a certain structure, but certain materials. [...] it ... is made possible by not only certain structures in the brain but also certain chemicals and certain chemical reactions and certain interactions between chemicals.

Consciousness probably evolved for specific reasons because, after all, it costs a lot metabolically to maintain the kind of brain that can engage in conscious thoughts.... (MORE - details)

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The hard problem of consciousness revolves sparingly around the puzzle of experience in the context of materialist philosophy. Not around cognition, which adds the extras of understanding/identification, memory, reasoning (all quite explicable via mechanistic organization). The diversity of brain experiences in turn reduce down to what they all have in common and is necessarily entailed by them: "materialization". The presence of anything, whether objects, feelings, qualia, etc. Material-ization ironically conflicts with the "inert material" of materialism since the latter's traditional conception of matter is that it does not manifest to itself as anything. Outside of brain representations via perceptions and invented abstract symbols, matter exists invisibly.[*]

So if Goff really wants to avoid confusion, he needs to drop the panpsychism label altogether and go more of a Russellian Monism route of just recognizing that impersonal materialization is how matter exists in itself independent of more elaborate brain-produced corporeal appearances and the abstract quantitative representations of physics. Don't conflate basic, impersonal materialization (as intrinsic ontological properties) with cognition by calling such consciousness.

Pigliucci, just like the proponents, perhaps doesn't get that the "structural explanations" of experience would themselves be tacitly embracing either panpsychism or Russiallian Monism. As they would be dependent upon those dynamic configurations recruiting and manipulating a primitive precursor that would make the complex experiences possible. Otherwise that view collapses into appeals to "process conjuring" or magic.

While Pigliucci does reject that general idea of active "form" alone being the cause, his own restriction to biological substrates is still just a more specific version of it. If chemical interactions don't have experiences/materializations associated with them in the world abroad, then it's magical-thinking to assert they suddenly acquire that capacity simply because they're transpiring in a skull or a biological classified material. The solution is to eliminate that dogmatic precondition which the "if" stems from, which is a metaphysical orientation itself -- but a particularly stifling one that creates the hard problem (in materialism)

Pigliucci also seems to engage in the common fallacy of treating evolution as if it is omnipotent. IOW, that the latter can output any property or ability if it is useful to an organism (like the pseudoscience powers of Marvel superheroes). This ascription of omnipotence ignores that evolution is confined to limitations of nature. Which includes how higher-level affairs fall out of combinations of already existing or applicable lower-level characteristics. Astonishing new developments don't wholly arise from the vacuum at the microbiological and macroscopic level (i.e., without precursors).

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[*] V. I. Lenin: The materialists, we are told, recognise something unthinkable and unknowable -- "things-in-themselves" -- matter "outside of experience" [non-phenomenal] ... They lapse into genuine mysticism by admitting the existence of something beyond, something transcending the bounds of "experience" ... When they say that matter, by acting upon our sense-organs, produces sensations, the materialists take as their basis the "unknown," nothingness; for do they not themselves declare our sensations to be the only source of knowledge? The materialists lapse into "Kantianism" (Plekhanov, by recognising the existence of "things-in-themselves," i.e., things outside of our consciousness); they "double" the world and preach "dualism," for the materialists hold that beyond the appearance there is the thing-in-itself; beyond the immediate sense data there is something else, some fetish, an "idol," an absolute, a source of "metaphysics," a double of religion ("holy matter," as Bazarov says). --Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

[Zinjanthropos]

What are they arguing about? For me it's something like this....

Belief systems come along and invariably they take different shapes with people eventually defending their take. Are consciousness beliefs any different than say, the three Abrahamic religions, nothing vs something, free will, etc? Beliefs and hypotheses, nothing proven, can't be tested. Pure speculation and conjecture with semantics.