Alters of the Cosmos

We are the alternate personalities of a cosmos suffering from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). That’s the theory put forward by Bernardo Kastrup in a recent JCS paper and supported by others in Scientific American. I think there’s no denying the exciting elegance of the basic proposition, but in my view the problems are overwhelming.

DID is now the correct term for what used to be called Multiple Personality Disorder, a condition in which different persons appear to inhabit the same body, with control passing between them and allowing them to exhibit distinct personalities, different knowledge, and varied behaviour. Occasionally it has been claimed that different ‘alters’ can even change certain physical characteristics of the host body, within limits. Sceptical analysis notes that the incidence of DID has been strongly correlated with its portrayal in the media. A popular film about multiple personalities always seems to bring a boom in new diagnoses, and in fact an early ‘outbreak’ corresponded with the popularity of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’. Sceptics have suggested that DID may often, or always, be iatrogenic in part, with the patient confabulating the number and type of alter the therapist seems to expect.

Against that, the SA piece cites findings that when blind alters were in control, normal visual activity in the brain ceased. This is undoubtedly striking, though a caveat should be entered over our limited ability to spot what patterns of brain activity go along with confabulation, hypnosis, self-deception, etc. I think the research cited establishes pretty clearly that DID is ‘real’ (though not that patients correctly understand its nature), but then I believe only the hardest of sceptics ever thought DID patients were merely weird liars.

Does DID have the metaphysical significance Kastrup would give it, though? One fundamental problem, to get it up front, is this; if we, as physical human beings, are generated by DID in the cosmic consciousness, and that DID is literally the same thing as the DID observed in patients, how come it doesn’t generate a new body for each of the patient’s alters? There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer on this. I would say that the most reasonable response would be to deny that cosmic and personal DID are exactly the same phenomena and regard them as merely analogous, albeit perhaps strongly so.

Kastrup’s account does tackle a lot of problems. He approaches his thesis by considering related approaches such as panpsychism or cosmopsychism, and the objections to them, notably the combination or decombination problems, which concern how we get from millions of tiny awarenesses, or from one overarching one, to the array of human and animal ones we actually find in the world. His account seems clear and sensible to me, providing convincing brief analyses of the issues.

In Kastrup’s system we begin with a universal consciousness which consists of a sort of web of connected thoughts and feelings. Later there will be perceptions, but at the outset there’s nothing to perceive; I’m not sure what the thoughts could be about, either – pure maths, perhaps – but they arise from the inherent tendency of the cosmic consciousness to self-excite (just as a normal human mind, left without external stimulus, does not fall silent, but generates thoughts spontaneously). The connections between the thoughts may be associations, logical connections, inspirational, and so on. I’m not clear whether Kastrup envisages all these thoughts and feelings being active at the same time, or whether new ones can be generated and added in. There is a vast amount of metaphysical work to be done on this kind of aspect of the theory – enough for several generations of philosophers – and it may not be fair to expect Kastrup to have done it all, let alone get it all into this single paper.

I think the natural and parsimonious way to go from there would be solipsism. The cosmic consciousness is all there is, and these ideas about other people and external reality are just part of its random musings. The only argument against this simple position is that our experience insistently and pretty consistently tells us about a world of planets, animals, and evolution which not only forces itself on our attention, but on examination provides some rather good partial explanations of our nature and cognitive abilities. But to accept that argument is to surrender to the conventional view, which Kastrup – he identifies as an idealist – is committed to rejecting.

So instead he takes a different view. Somehow (?), islands of the overall web of cosmic consciousness may get detached. They then become dissociated consciousnesses, and can both perceive and be perceive. Since their associative links with the rest of the cosmos have been broken, I don’t quite know why they don’t lapse into solipsistic beings themselves, unable to follow the pattern of their thoughts beyond its own compass.

In fact, and this may be the strangest thing in the theory, our actual bodies, complete with metabolism and all the rest, are the appearance of these metaphysical islands: ‘living organisms are the revealed appearance of alters of universal consciousness’. Quite why the alters of universal consciousness should look like evolved animals, I don’t know. How does sex between these alters give rise to a new dissociative island in the form of a new human being; what on earth happens when someone starves to death? It seems that Kastrup really wants to have much of the conventional world back; a place where autonomous individuals with private thoughts are nevertheless able to share ideas about a world which is not just the product of their imaginations. But it’s forbiddingly difficult to get there from his starting position. For once, weirder ideas might be easier to justify.

These are, of course, radical new ideas; but curiously they seem to me to bear a strong resemblance to the old ones of the Gnostics. They (if my recollection is right) thought that the world started with the perfect mind of God, which then through some inscrutable accident shed fragmentary souls (us) which became bound in the material world, with their own true nature hidden from them. I don’t make the comparison to discredit Kastrup’s ideas; on the contrary if it were me I should be rather encouraged to have these ancient intellectual forebears.

Cosmopsychism and the Blobject

cosmosIs cosmopsychism the panpsychism we’ve all been waiting for? Itay Shani thinks so and sets out the reasons in this paper. While others start small and build up, he starts with the cosmos and works down. But he rejects the Blobject…

To begin at the beginning. Panpsychism is the belief that consciousness is everywhere; that it is in some sense a basic part of the world. Typically when people try to explain consciousness they start with the ingredients supplied by physics and try to build a mind out of them in a way which plausibly accounts for all the remarkable features of consciousness. Panpsychists just take awareness for granted, the way we often take matter or energy for granted; they take it to be primary, and this arguably gets them out of a very difficult explanatory task. There are a number of variants – panexperientialism, panentheism, and so on – which tend to be bracketed with panpsychism as similar considerations apply to all members of the family.

This kind of thinking has enjoyed quite a good level of popularity in recent years, perhaps a rising one. Regular readers may recall, though, that I’m not attracted by panpsychism. If stones have consciousness, we still have to explain how human consciousness comes to be different from what the stones have got. I suspect that that task is going to be just as difficult as explaining consciousness from scratch, so that adopting the panpsychist thesis leaves us worse off rather than better.

Shani, however, thinks some of the problems are easily dealt with; others he takes very seriously. He points out quite fairly that panpsychists are not bound to ascribe awareness to every entity at every level; they’re OK just so long as there is, as it were, universal coverage at some level. Most panpsychists, as he rightly observes, tend to push the basic home of consciousness down to a micro level, which leaves us with the problem of how these simple micro-consciousnesses can come together to form a higher level one – or sometimes not form a higher one.

Thus combination issue is a difficult one that comes in many forms: Shani picks out particularly the questions of how micro-subjects can combine to form a macro-subject; how phenomenal experience can combine, and how the structure of experience can combine. Cutting to the chase, he finds the most difficult of the three to be the problems with subjects, and in particular he quotes an argument of Coleman’s. This is, in brief, that distinct subjects require distinct points of view, but that in merging, points of view lose their identity. He mentions the simplified case of a subject that only sees red and one that only sees blue: the combined point of view includes both blue and red and the ‘just-red’ and ‘just-blue’ points of view are lost.

I think it requires a good deal more argumentation than Shani offers to make all this really convincing. He and Coleman, for example, take it as given that the combination of subjects must preserve the existence of the combined elements, more or less as the combination of hydrogen and oxygen to make water does not annihilate the component elements. Maybe that is the case, but the point seems very arguable.

Shani also seems to give way to Coleman without much of a fight, although there’s plenty of scope for one. But after all these are highly complex issues and Shani only has so much space: moreover I’m inclined to go along with him because I agree that the combination problem is very bad; perhaps worse than Shani thinks.

It just seems intuitively very unlikely that two micro-minds can be combined. Two of the things that seem clearest about our own minds is that they combine terrific complexity with a strong overall unity; both of those factors seem to throw up problems for a merger. To me it seems that two minds are like two clocks: you cannot meaningfully merge them except by taking them apart into their basic components and putting something completely new together – which is no use at all for panpsychism.

For Shani, of course, combination must fail so that he can offer his cosmic solution as an alternative route to a viable panpsychism. He sets out his stall with six postulates.

  1. The cosmos as a whole is the only ontological ultimate there is, and it is conscious.
  2. It is prior to its parts.
  3. It is laterally dual in nature, having a concealed and a revealed side (the concealed side being phenomenal experience while the revealed side is the apparently objective world around us).
  4. It is like a fluctuating ocean, with waves, ripples and vortices assuming temporary identity of their own.
  5. The cosmic consciousness grounds the smaller consciousnesses within it.
  6. Conscious entities’ are dynamic configurations within the cosmic whole.
  7. These consciousnesses are severally related to particular surges or vortices of the cosmic consciousness and never fully separate from it.

That seems at least a vision we can entertain, but it immediately faces the challenge of the Blobject. This is the universal cosmic object championed by Terry Horgan & Matjaž Potr?. They are happy with the grand cosmic unity proposed by Shani but they go further; how can it have any parts? They believe the great cosmic consciousness is the Blobject; the only thing that truly exists; the idea that there are really other things is deluded.

The austere ontology of the Blobject and its splendid parsimony can only be admired. We might talk more about it another time; but for now I’m inclined to agree with Shani that the task of reconciling it with actual experience is just too fraught with difficulty.

So does Shani succeed? He does, I think, set out, albeit briefly, a coherent and interesting view; but it does not have the advantages he supposes. He believes that starting at the top and working down avoids the difficult problems we encounter if we start at the bottom and work up. I think that is an illusion derive from the fact that the bottom-up approach has just been discussed more. I think in fact that just the same problems must recur whichever way we approach things.

Take the Coleman point. Coleman’s objection is that in combining, two points of view lose their separate identity, while it needs to be preserved. But surely, if we take his blue-and-red pov and split it into just-blue and just-red we get a similar loss of the original identity. Now as I said, I’m not altogether sure that this need be a problem, but it seems to me clear that it doesn’t really matter which way we move through the problem; and the same must be true of all arguments which relate different levels of panpsychist consciousness. Is there really any fundamental asymmetry that makes the top-down view stronger?