Here’s an IAI discussion between Philip Goff, Susan Blackmore, and Nicholas Humphrey, chaired by Barry Smith. There are some interesting points made, though overall it may have been too ambitious to try to get a real insight into three radically different views on the broad subject of phenomenal consciousness in a single short discussion. I think Goff’s panpsychism gets the lion’s share of attention and comes over most clearly. In part this is perhaps because Goff is good at encapsulating his ideas briefly; in part it may be because of the noticeable bias in all philosophical discussion towards the weirdest idea getting most discussion (it’s more fun and more people want to contradict it); it may be partly just a matter of Goff being asked first and so getting more time.
He positions panpsychism (the view, approximately, that consciousness is everywhere) attractively as the alternative to the old Scylla and Charybdis of dualism on oone hand and over-enthusiastic materialist reductionism on the other. He dodges some of the worst of the combination problem by saying that his version on panpsychism doesn’t say that every arbitrary object – like a chair has to be consciousness, only that there is a general, very simple form of awareness in stuff geneerally – maybe at the level of elementary particles. Responding to the suggestion that panpsychism is the preference for theft over honest toil (just assume consciousness) he rightly says that not all explanations have to be reductive explanations, but makes a comparison I think is dodgy by saying that James Clerk Maxwell, after all, did not reduce electromagnetism to mass or other known physical entities. No, but didn’t Maxwell reduce light, electricity, and magnetism to one phenomenon? (He also provided elegant equations, which I think no-one is about to do for consciousness (Yes, Tononi, put your hand down, we’ll talk about that another time)).
Susan Blackwell is a pretty thorough sceptic: there really is no such thing as subjective consciousness. If we meditate, she says, we may get to a point where we understand this intuitively, but alas, it is hard to explain so convincingly in formal theoretical terms. Maybe that’s just what we should expect though.
Humphrey is also a sceptic, but of a more cautious kind: he doesn’t want to say that there is no such thing as consciousness, but he agrees it is a kind of illusion and prefers to describe it as a work of art (thereby, I suppose, avoiding objections along the lines that consciousness can’t be an illusion because the having of illusions presupposes the having of consciousness by definition). He positions himself as less of a sceptic in some ways than the other two, however: they, he says, hold that consciousness cannot be observed through behaviour: but if not, what are we even doing talking about it?
Agreed. It is hard to take detractors or reductionists seriously. A one-sided argument if ever there was one! What are we even doing talking about it?
We have the word noumenon, but no example, Observation is an example of noumenon–even further–observation is not a sensation emotion or mentation; and observation should not be reduced to observer, because observer like consciousness is mindfulness and
both are some kind of thing like behavior or function…
Finally phenomena have no meanings when compared to noumenon or in this case observation…that’s what we’re talking about…
I don’t find panpsychism a productive outlook, and generally my views are much closer to Blackmore’s and Humphrey’s. (Although I remain leery of the word “illusion”, being a little more comfortable with Humphrey’s language.)
That said, listening to Goff, and his point that maybe he and the others were using the word “consciousness” in a different manner, made me realize that if he replaced the words “consciousness” and “experience” with “information”, a lot of what he’s saying might resonate with how modern physics sees information.
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Blackmore makes the good point that we’re not going to find consciousness as some sort of product of the brain and therefore that it won’t play a specific additional causal role in behavior beyond what the brain is already doing (to think it would she calls a type of dualism). This means it didn’t get selected for by evolution. She suggests that we’re under the illusion of it being something separate that arises from the brain, perhaps as a function of representation: “…it’s the representation or stories that are being built by whatever it is that leads to … the illusion of duality, that there is this separate thing called consciousness that is being given rise to by the material.”
Similarly, Humphrey says: “Let’s see how it could possibly be that the brain is creating this sense of living in the presence of qualia….We’re always living inside consciousness…Consciousness has [for instance, temporal] properties that couldn’t be instantiated objectively in a physical mechanism, therefore in some sense they may just be a way in which we’re representing something which isn’t in fact what it seems to be.”
If, as these remarks suggest, consciousness is a type of representational content – qualitatively rendered content – then of course we’re not going to see such content in addition to the neural representational vehicles which carry it, just as you can’t see concepts and propositions, only their vehicles like this electronically delivered text you’re now reading. Experiences won’t ever appear to neuroscience (Blackmore’s point that there is nothing besides the brain). Yet it isn’t as if content is unreal, and indeed as conscious creatures we manifestly consist of it (Humphrey’s point that we live completely inside consciousness). But since content isn’t a causal product of its vehicles, you’re not going to find it in the physical world, hence the puzzle of consciousness for physicalism.
Like some others here, I find panpsychism hopeless. I’d say it’s a misguided attempt to reify (physicalize) a type of representational content that might attend, but is not caused or produced by, the brain as it goes about its behavior-controlling work.
…some one has to be here for duty-study, “that’s what the hope is”, then observation becomes understood as appearing’ to oneself…
This all sounds like an engineering integration problem. All of the different sense organs can be understood in how they respond to different types of energy but the rise of content really points to how the brain integrates the senses and creates a higher sense which is the actual integration. Without this view, they all sit there talking about the trees without perceiving the forest of integration.
Debates such as these are difficult at best because there is no consensus on a definition of consciousness other than being grounded in subjectivity. This was evident in the debate, where the term consciousness meant something entirely different to Nicholas Humphrey then it does to Philip Goff. Philip was talking about an orange and Nicholas was talking about an apple. Humphrey’s blurred the definition of consciousness even further by implying that being conscious and consciousness are the same thing, where in fact, it should have been pointed out that being conscious and consciousness are two distinct phenomenon.
For further progress to be made on the frontier of consciousness, the question of “what is consciousness exactly?” needs to be answered first. Consciousness needs to be defined as an objective experience of some “thing” that is radically indeterminate and not a subjective experience.
Lee
Consciousness needs to be defined as an objective experience of some “thing” that is radically indeterminate and not a subjective experience.
I think they have fallen a bit for the old ontological issue about confusing the subjective nature of consciousness vs the objective existence of consciousness, a fact like any other objective fact.
Blackmore is like one of her books -a bit disappointing. I’ve no idea what Humphries is on about most of the time, that’s a dreadfully confused view. This stuff about it being a ‘delusion’ is a verbal wrapper for their own cinfusion on the issue. Wouldn’t it be better to just express some humility and say ‘I haven’t a clue?’
Goff is clearest and most of what he says sounds totally correct me – denial is idiotic, dualism is idiotic. But that doesn’t necessarily lead to a panpsychic path. But – he may be right. It’s more likely to be right than the alternatives.
JBD
John,
You articulated some very good points. Fundamentally, I agree with the underlying architecture of panpsychism as the paradigm for our phenomenal reality. To develop this theory, one has to take incremental metaphysical steps in that process. The quintessential question plaguing consciousness is always the same: How do physical states give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness? The most parsimonious and reasonable explanation for that question is that physical states themselves are forms of consciousness. It doesn’t take a genius to arrive at that conclusion, even a six year old could grasp the concept. And just because we do not understand the dynamics and mechanisms involved in that process, doesn’t mean we should freak out.
Metaphysics needs to take a deep breath and ask the fundamental question: What do all physical states have in common with our own experience of consciousness based upon an objective reality being its foundation, even though that objective reality may be indeterminate? The entire model of subject/object metaphysics as an architecture of reasoning is to blame. There are no such things as subjects and objects, just the things we do not understand, and because we do not understand them, we label them as subjects and objects, craft an intellectual construct (SOM), that in the end suppresses meaning. In our current paradigm, the distinction dividing the subject from the object is an arbitrary one. One could just as easily define an object as some thing which has characteristics that are determinate, just as one could define the subject as an object which has characteristics that are indeterminate, placing both the subject and the object in the same box without distinction. Its all a matter of preference, but something as simple as preference could lead to a better understanding of the things we currently do not understand.
Lee
I think there is also the subject of biology that no-one seems to think is relevant. We cannot cognitively reconcile our determinstic mechanical imagery with our agency-led theory of animal behaviours. The two don’t mix. Any attempt to argue that animal behaviour can be reduced to physics fails miserably because physics doesn’t have the biological vocabulary to start with. In effect the two do not compete – one isn’t “better” than the other – but they certainly don’t conform with each other either. If this is a limit of homo sapiens then that’s just that.
I include theories of mental phenomena amongst the theory of animal behaviours, as there does not appear to me any convincing evidence of consciousness outside of the animal kingdom.
Of that panel, all but Goff seem to have much comprehension of physics. Goff’s summation of the history of physics is absolutely spot on – a discipline invented by Galileo, formalised by Newton, and which was never intended to be global explanation for absolutely everything. It’s a human art. Blackmore and Humphries are just spieling out tired old 19th century liberal nonsense about the triumph of physics over everything else.
J