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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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 [...]
- - -
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)