Seating Consciousness

This short piece by Tam Hunt in Nautilus asks whether the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness.

What does that even mean? Let’s start with a sensible answer. It could just mean that electromagnetic effects are an essential part of the way the brain works. A few ideas along these lines are discussed in the piece, and it’s a perfectly respectable hypothesis. But it’s hard to see why that would mean the electromagnetic aspects of brain processes are the seat of consciousness any more than the chemical or physical aspects. In fact the whole idea of separating electromagnetic effects from the physical events they’re associated with seems slightly weird to me; you can’t really have one without the other, can you?

A much more problematic reading might be that the electromagnetic fields are where consciousness is actually located. I believe this would be a kind of category error. Consciousness in itself (as opposed to the processes that support and presumably generate it) does not have a location. It’s like a piece of arithmetic or a narrative; things that don’t have the property of a physical location.

It looks as if Hunt is really thinking in terms of the search, often pursued over the years, for the neural correlates of consciousness. The idea of electromagnetic fields being the seat of consciousness essentially says, stop looking at the neurons and try looking at the fields instead.

That’s fine, except that for me there’s a bit of a problem with the ‘correlates of consciousness’ strategy anyway; I doubt whether there is, in the final analysis, any systematic correlation (though things may not be quite as bad that makes them sound).

By way of explanation I offer an analogy; the search for the textual correlates of story. We have reams of text available for research, and we know that some of this text has the property of telling one or another story. Lots of it, equally, does not – it’s non-fiction of various kinds. Now we know that for each story there are corresponding texts; the question is, which formal properties of those strings of text make them stories?

Now the project isn’t completely hopeless. We may be able to identify passages of dialogue, for example, just by examining formal textual properties (occurrence of quote marks and indentation, or of strings like ‘said’). If we can spot passages of dialogue, we’ll have a pretty good clue that we might be looking at a story.

But we can only go so far with that, and we will certainly be wrong if we claim that the textual properties that suggest dialogue can actually be identified with storyhood. It’s obvious that there could be passages of text with all those properties that are in fact mere gibberish, or a factual report. Moreover, there are many stories that have no dialogue and none of any of the other properties we might pick out. The fundamental problem is that storyhood is about what the text means, and that is not a formal property we can get to just by examination. In the same way, conscious states are conscious because they are about something, and aboutness is not a matter of patterns of neural or electromagnetic activity – though at a practical level we might actually be able to spot conscious activity at success rates that are relatively good, just as we could do a fair job of picking out stories from a mass of text even if we can’t, in fact, read.

Be that as it may, Hunt’s real point is to suggest that electromagnetic field correlates might be better than neural ones. Why (apart from research evidence) does he find that an attractive idea? If I’ve got this right, he is a panpsychist, someone who believes our consciousness is built out of the sparks of lower-grade awareness which are natural properties of matter. There is obviously a question there about how the sparks get put together into richer kinds of consciousness, and Hunt thinks resonance might play a key part. If it’s all about electromagnetic fields, it clearly becomes much easier to see how some sort of resonance might be in play.

I haven’t read enough about Hunt’s ideas to be anywhere near doing them justice; I have no doubt there is a lot of reasonable stuff to be said about and in favour of them. But as a first reaction resonance looks to me like an effect that reduces complexity and richness rather than enhancing them. If the whole brain is pulsing along to the same rhythm that suggests less content than a brain where every bit is doing its own thing. But perhaps that’s a subject I ought to address at better length another time, if I’m going to.

A short solution

Tim Bollands recently tweeted his short solution to the Hard Problem (I mean, not literally in a tweet – it’s not that short). You might think that was enough to be going on with, but he also provides an argument for a pretty uncompromising kind of panpsychism. I have to applaud his boldness and ingenuity, but unfortunately I part ways with his argument pretty early on. The original tweet is here.

Bollands’ starting premise is that it’s ‘intuitively clear that combining any two non-conscious material objects results in another non-conscious object’. Not really. Combining a non-conscious Victorian lady and a non-conscious bottle of smelling salts might easily produce a conscious being. More seriously, I think most materialists would assume that conscious human beings can be put together by the gradual addition of neural tissue to a foetus that attains consciousness by a similarly gradual process, from dim sensations to complex self-aware thought. It’s not clear to me that that is intuitively untenable, though you could certainly say that the details are currently mysterious.

Bollands believes there are three conclusions we can draw: humans are not conscious; consciousness miraculously emerges, or consciousness is already present in the matter brains are made from. The first, he says, is evidently false (remember that); the second is impossible, given that putting unconscious stuff together can’t produce consciousness; so the third must be true.

That points to some variety of panpsychism, and in fact Bollands goes boldly for the extreme version which attributes to individual particles the same kind of consciousness we have as human beings. In fact, your consciousness is really the consciousness of a single particle within you, which due to the complex processing of the body has come to think of itself as the consciousness of the whole.

I can’t recall any other panpsychist who has been willing to push fully-developed human consciousness right down to the level of elementary particles. I believe most either think consciousness starts somewhere above that level, or suppose that particles have only the dimmest imaginable spark of awareness. Taking this extreme position raises very difficult questions. Which particle is my conscious one? Or all they all being conscious in parallel? Why doesn’t my consciousness feel like the consciousness of a particle? How could all the complex content of my current conscious state be held by a single invariant particle? And why do my particles cease to be conscious when my body is dead, or stunned? You may notice, incidentally, that Bollands’ conclusion seems to be that human beings as such are not, in fact, conscious, contradicting what he said earlier.

Brevity is perhaps the problem here; I don’t think Bollands has enough space to make his answers clear, let alone plausible. Nor is it really clear how all this solves the Hard Problem. Bollands reckons the Hard Problem is analogous to the Combination Problem for panpsychism, which he has solved by denying that any combination occurs (though his particles still somehow benefit from the senses and cognitive apparatus of the whole body). But the Hard Problem isn’t about how particles or nerves come together to create experience, it’s about how phenomenal experience can possibly arise from anything merely physical. That is, to put it no higher, at least as difficult to imagine for a single particle as for a large complex organism.

So I’m not convinced – but I’d welcome more contributions to the debate as bold as this one.

Dismissing materialism

Eric Holloway gives a brisk and entertaining dismissal of all materialist theories of consciousness here, boldly claiming that no materialist theory of consciousness is plausible. I’m not sure his coverage is altogether comprehensive, but let’s have a look at his arguments. He starts out by attacking panpsychism…

One proposed solution is that all particles are conscious. But, in that case, why am I a human instead of a particle? The vast majority of conscious beings in the universe would be particles, and so it is most likely I’d be a particle and not any sort of organic life form.

It’s really a bit of a straw man he’s demolishing here. I’m not sure panpsychists are necessarily committed to the view that particles are conscious (I’m not sure panpsychists are necessarily materialists, either), but I’ve certainly never run across anyone who thinks that the consciousness of a particle and the consciousness of a human being would be the same. It would be more typical to say that particles, or whatever the substrate is, have only a faint glow of awareness, or only a very simple, perhaps binary kind of consciousness. Clearly there’s then a need to explain how the simple kind of consciousness relates or builds up into our kind; not an easy task, but that’s the business panpsychists are in, and they can’t be dismissed without at least looking at their proposals.

Another solution is that certain structures become conscious. But a structure is an abstract entity and there is an untold infinite number of abstract entities.

This is perhaps Holloway’s riposte; he considers this another variety of panpsychism, though as stated it seems to me to encompass a lot of non-panpsychist theories, too. I wholeheartedly agree that conscious beings are not abstract entities, an error which is easy to fall into if you are keen on information or computation as the basis of your theory. But it seems to me hard to fight the idea that certain structural (or perhaps I mean functional) properties instantiated in particular physical beings are what amounts to consciousness. On the one hand there’s a vast wealth of evidence that structures in our brains have a very detailed influence on the content of our experiences. On the other, if there are no structural features, broadly described, that all physical instances of conscious entities have in common, it seems to me hard to avoid radical mysterianism. Even dualists don’t usually believe that consciousness can simply be injected randomly into any physical structure whatever (do they?). Of course we can’t yet say authoritatively what those structural features are.

Another option, says Holloway, is illusionism.

But, if we are allowed to “solve” the problem that way, all problems can be solved by denying them. Again, that is an unsatisfying approach that ‘explains’ by explaining away.

Empty dismissal of consciousness would indeed not amount to much, but again that isn’t what illusionists actually say; typically they offer detailed ideas about why consciousness must be an illusion and varied proposals about how the illusion arises. I think many would agree with David Chalmers that explaining why people do believe in consciousness is currently where some of the most interesting action is to be found.

Some say consciousness is an emergent property of a complex structure of matter… …At what point is a structure complex enough to become conscious?

I agree that complexity alone is not enough, though some people have been attracted to the idea, suggesting that the Internet, for example, might achieve consciousness. A vastly more sophisticated form of the same kind of thinking perhaps underlies the Integrated Information theory. But emergence can mean more than that; in particular it might say that when systems have enough structural complexity of the right kind (frantic hand-waving), they acquire interesting properties (meaningful, experiential ones) that can only be addressed on a higher level of interpretation. That, I think, is true; it just doesn’t help all that much.

Holloway wraps up with another pop at those fully-conscious particles that surely no-one believes in anyway. I don’t think he has shown that no materialist theory can be plausible – the great mainstream ideas of functionalism/computationalism are largely untouched – but I salute the chutzpah of anyone who thinks such an issue can be wrapped up in one side of A4 – and is willing to take it on!

Good vibrations?

Is resonance the answer? Tam Hunt thinks it might be.

Now the idea that synchronised neuron firing might have something to do with consciousness is not new. Veterans of consciousness will recall a time when 40 hertz was thought to be the special, almost magical frequency that generated consciousness; people like Francis Crick thought it might be the key to the unity of consciousness and a solution to the binding problem. I don’t know what the current state of neurology on this is, but it honestly seems most likely to me that 40 hertz, or a rate in that neighbourhood, is simply what the brain does when it’s thrumming along normally. People who thought it was important were making a mistake akin to taking a car’s engine noise for a functional component (hey, no noise, no move!).

Hunt has a bit more to offer than simply speculating that resonance is important somehow, though. He links resonance with panpsychism, suggesting that neurons have little sparks of consciousness and resonance is the way they get recruited into the larger forms of awareness we experience. While I can see the intuitive appeal of the idea, it seems to me there are a lot of essential explanatory pieces missing from the picture.

The most fundamental problem here is that I simply don’t see how resonance between neurons could ever explain subjective experience. Resonance is a physical phenomenon, and the problem is that physical stuff just doesn’t seem to supply the ‘what-it-is-like’ special quality of experience. Hard to see why co-ordinated firing is any better in that essential respect than unco-ordinated. In fact, in one respect resonance is especially unsuitable; resonance is by its nature stable. If it doesn’t continue for at least a short period, you haven’t really got resonance. Yet consciousness often seems fleeting and flowing, moving instantaneously and continuously between different states of awareness.

There’s also, I think, some work needed on the role of neurons. First, how come our panpsychist ascent starts with neurons? We either need an account of how we get from particles up to neurons, or an account of why consciousness only starts when we get up to neurons (pretty complex entities, as we kee finding out). Second, if resonating neurons are generating consciousness, how does that sit with their day job? We know that neurons transmit signals from the senses and to the muscles, and we know that they do various kinds of processing. Do they generate consciousness at the same time, or is that delegated to a set of neurons that don’t have to do processing?  If the resonance only makes content conscious, how is the content determined, and how are the resonance and the processing linked? How does resonance occur, anyway? Is it enough for neurons to be in sync, so that two groups in different hemispheres can support the same resonance? Can a group of neurons in my brain resonate with a group in yours? If there has to be some causal linkage or neuronal connection, isn’t that underlying mechanism the real seat of consciousness, with the resonance just a byproduct?

What about that panpsychist recruitment – how does it work? Hunt says an electron or an atom has a tiny amount of consciousness, but what does ‘tiny’ mean? Is it smaller in intensity, complexity, content, or what? If it were simply intensity, then it seems easy enough to see how a lot of tiny amounts could add up to something more powerful, just as a lot of small lights can achieve the effect of a single big one. But for human consciousness to be no more than the consciousness of an atom with the volume turned up doesn’t seem very satisfactory. If, on the other hand, we’re looking for more complexity and structure, how can resonance, which has the neurons all doing the same thing at the same time, possibly deliver that?

I don’t doubt that Hunt has answers to many of these questions, and perhaps it’s not reasonable to expect them all in a short article for a general readership. For me to suspend my disbelief, though, I do really need a credible hint as to the metaphysical core of the thinking. How does the purely physical phenomenon of resonance produce the phenomenal aspect of my conscious experience, the bit that goes beyond mere data registration and transmutes into the ineffable experience I am having?

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.

Intrinsic natures

Following up on his post about the simplicity argument for panpsychism, Philip Goff went on to defend  the idea that physical things must have an intrinsic nature. Actually, it would be more accurate to say he attacks the idea that they don’t have intrinsic natures.  Those who think that listing the causal properties of a thing exhausts what we can say about its physical nature are causal structuralists, he says, committed to the view that everything reduces to dispositions; dispositions to burn, to attract, or to break, for example.

But when we come to characterise these dispositions, we find we can only do it in terms of other dispositions. A disposition to burn may involve dispositions to glow, get hot, generate ash, and so on. So we get involved in an endless circularity. Some might argue that this is OK, that we can cope with a network of mutual definitions that is, in the end, self-supporting; Goff says this is as unsatisfactory as making our living by taking in each other’s washing.

There’s a problem there, certainly. I think a bit more work is needed to nail down the idea that to reject intrinsic natures is necessarily to embrace causal structuralism, but no doubt Goff has done that in his fuller treatment. A more serious gap, it seems to me, is an explanation of how intrinsic natures get us out of this bind.

It seems to me that in practice we do not take the scholarly approach of identifying a thing through its definition; more usually we just show people. What is fire? This, we say, displaying a lit match. Goff gives an amusing example of three boxes containing a Splurge, a Blurge, and a Kurge, each defined in terms of the next in an inescapable circle. But wouldn’t you open the box?

We could perhaps argue that recognising the Splurge is just grasping its intrinsic nature. But actually we would recognise it by sight, which depends on its causal properties; its disposition to reflect light, if you like. Those causal properties cannot have anything to do with its intrinsic nature, which seems to drop out of the explanation; in fact its intrinsic nature could logically change without affecting the causal properties at all.

This apparently radical uselessness of intrinsic properties, like the similar ineffectual nature of qualia, is what causes me the greatest difficulty with a perspective that would otherwise have some appeal.

Conscious Electrons

Philip Goff gives a brief but persuasive new look at his case for panpsychism (the belief that experience, or consciousness in some form, is in everything) in a recent post on the OUPblog site. In the past, he says, explanations have generally been ‘brain first’. Here’s this physical object, the brain – and we understand physical objects well enough  – the challenge is to explain how this scrutable piece of biological tissue on the one hand gives rise to this evanescent miracle, consciousness, on the other. That way of looking at it, suggests Goff, turns out to be the wrong way round.  We don’t really understand the real nature of matter at all: what we understand is that supposedly mysterious consciousness. So what we ought to do is start there and work towards a better understanding of matter.

This undoubtedly appeals to a frustration many philosophers must have felt. People at large tend to take it for granted that what we really know about is the physical external world around us, described in no-nonsense terms (with real equations!) by science. Phenomenology and all that stuff about what we perceive is an airy-fairy add-on.  In fact, of course, it’s rather the other way round. The only thing we know directly, and so, perhaps, with certainty, is our own experience; the external world and the theories of science all finally rest on that first-person foundation. Science is about observation and observation is ultimately a matter of sensory experience.

Goff notes that physics gives us no account of the intrinsic nature of matter, only its observable and causal properties. We know things, as it were, only from the outside. But in the case of our own experience, uniquely, we know it from the inside, and have direct acquaintance with its essential nature. When we experience redness we experience it unmasked; in physics it hides behind a confusing array of wavelengths, reflectances, and other highly abstract and ambiguous concepts, divorced from experience by many layers of reasoning. Is there not an argument for the hypothesis that the intrinsic nature of matter is the same as the intrinsic nature of the only thing whose intrinsic nature we know -our own experience? Perhaps after all we should consider supposing that even electrons have some tiny spark of awareness.

In fact Goff sees two arguments. One is that there simply seems no other reasonable way of accounting for consciousness. We can’t see where it could have come from, so let’s assume it has always been everywhere. Goff doesn’t like this case and thinks it is particularly prone to the compositional difficulties often urged against panpsychism; how do these micro-consciousness stack up in larger entities, and how in particular do they relate to the kind of consciousness we seem to have in our brain? Goff prefers to rest on simplicity; panpsychism is just the most parsimonious explanation. Instead of having two, or multiple kinds of intrinsic natures, we assume that there’s just one. He realises that some may see this as a weak argument far short of proof, but parsimony is a strong and legitimate criterion for judging between theories; indeed, it’s indispensable.

Now I’m on record as suggesting that things out there have one property that falls outside all physical theories – namely reality.  Am I not tempted to throw in my lot with Goff and suggest that as a further simplification we could say that reality just consists in having an intrinsic nature, ie having experience?  Not really.

Let’s go back a bit. Do we really understand our conscious experience?  We have to remember that consciousness seems to have two faces. To use Ned Block’s terms, there is access or a-consciousness; the sort that is involved in governing our behaviour, making decisions, deciding what to say, and other relatively effable processes. Then there is phenomenal or p-consciousness, pure experience, the having of qualia. It seems clear it is p-consciousness that Goff, and I think all panpsychists, are taking about. No-one supposes electrons or rocks are making rational decisions, only having some kind of experience. The problem is that though we do seem to have direct acquaintance with that sort of consciousness, we haven’t succeeded in saying anything much about it. In fact it seems that nothing we say about it can have been caused by it, because in itself it lacks causal powers. Now in one way this is exactly what Goff would expect; these difficulties are just those that come up when talking about qualia anyway, so in a back-handed sort of way we could even say they support his case. But if we’re looking for good explanations, the bucket is coming up dry; no wonder we’re tempted to go back and talk some more about the relatively tractable brain-first perspective.

In addition there are reasons to hesitate over the very idea that physical things have an intrinsic nature. Either this nature affects observable properties or it doesn’t. If it does, then we can use its effects to learn about it and discuss it; to naturalise it, in fact, and bring it within the pale of science. If it doesn’t – how can we talk about it? It might change radically or disappear and return, and we should never know. Goff rests his case on parsimony; we might counter that by observing that a theory that fills the cosmos with experiencing entities looks profligate in some respects. Isn’t there a better strategy anyway? Goff wants to simplify by assuming that apparently dead matter is in fact inwardly experiential like us: but why not go the other way and believe that we actually are as dead matter seems to be; lacking in qualic, phenomenal experience? Why not conclude that a-consciousness is all we’ve got, and that the semblance of p-consciousness is a delusion, as sceptics have argued? We can certainly debate on many other grounds whether that view is correct, but it seems hard to deny that dispensing with phenomenal experience altogether must be the most parsimonious take on the subject.

So I’m not convinced, but I think that within the natural constraints of a blog post, Goff does make a lucid and attractive presentation of his case.

(In another  post, Goff brings further arguments to defend the idea of intrinsic natures. We’ll have a look at those, though as I ought to have said in the first place, one should really read his book to get the full view.)

Panpsychism vindicated?

Could the Universe be conscious? This might seem like one of those Interesting Questions To Which The Answer Is ‘No’ that so often provide arresting headlines in the popular press. Since the Universe contains everything, what would it be conscious of? What would it think about? Thinking about itself – thinking about any real thing – would be bizarre, analogous to us thinking about the activity of the  neurons that were doing the thinking. But I suppose it could think about imaginary stuff. Perhaps even the cosmos can dream; perhaps it thinks it’s Cleopatra or Napoleon.

Actually, so far as I can see no-one is actually suggesting the Universe as a whole, as an entity, is conscious. Instead this highly original paper by Gregory L. Matloff starts with panpsychism, a belief that there is some sort of universal field of proto-consciousness permeating the cosmos. That is a not unpopular outlook these days. What’s startling is Matloff’s suggestion that some stars might be able to do roughly what our brains are supposed by panpsychists to do; recruit the field and use it to generate their own consciousness, exerting some degree of voluntary control over their own movements.

He relies for evidence on a phenomenon called Parenago’s discontinuity; cooler, less massive stars seem to circle the galaxy a bit faster than the others. Dismissing a couple of rival explanations, he suggests that these cooler stars might be the ones capable of hosting consciousness, and might be capable of shooting jets from their interior in a consistent direction so as to exert an influence over their own motion. This might be a testable hypothesis, bringing panpsychism in from the debatable realms of philosophy to the rigorous science of astrophysics (unkind people might suggest that the latter field is actually about as speculative as the former; I couldn’t possibly comment).

In discussing panpsychism it is good to draw a distinction between types of consciousness. There is a certain practical decision-making capacity in human consciousness that is relatively well rooted in science in several ways. We can see roughly how it emerged from biological evolution and why it is useful, and we have at least some idea of how neurons might do it, together with a lot of evidence that in fact, they do do it.  Then there is the much mistier business of subjective experience, what being conscious is actually like. We know little about that and it raises severe problems. I think it would be true to claim that most panpsychists think the kind of awareness that suffuses the world is of the latter kind; it is a dim general awareness, not a capacity to make snappy decisions. It is, in my view, one of the big disadvantages of panpsychism that it does not help much with explaining the practical, working kind of consciousness and in fact arguably leaves us with more to account for  than we had on our plate to start with.

Anyway, if Matloff’s theory is to be plausible, he needs to explain how stars could possibly build the decision-making kind of consciousness, and how the universal field would help. To his credit he recognises this – stars surely don’t have neurons – and offers at least some hints about how it might work. If I’ve got it right, the suggestion is that the universal field of consciousness might be identified with vacuum fluctuation pressures, which on the one hand might influence the molecules present in regions of the cooler stars under consideration, and on the other have effects within neurons more or less on Penrose/Hameroff lines. This is at best an outline, and raises immediate and difficult questions; why would vacuum fluctuation have anything to do with subjective experience? If a bunch of molecules in cool suns is enough for conscious volition, why doesn’t the sea have a mind of its own? And so on. For me the deadliest questions are the simplest. If cool stars have conscious control of their movements, why are they all using it the same way – to speed up their circulation a bit? You’d think if they were conscious they would be steering around in different ways according to their own choices. Then again, why would they choose to do anything? As animals we need consciousness to help us pursue food, shelter, reproduction, and so on. Why would stars care which way they went?

I want to be fair to Matloff, because we shouldn’t mock ideas merely for being unconventional. But I see one awful possibility looming. His theory somewhat recalls medieval ideas about angels moving the stars in perfect harmony. They acted in a co-ordinated way because although the angels had wills of their own, they subjected them to God’s. Now, why are the cool stars apparently all using their wills in a similarly co-ordinated way? Are they bound together through the vacuum fluctuations; have we finally found out there the physical manifestation of God? Please, please, nobody go in that direction!

The Hard Problem of physics

Is there a Hard Problem of physics that explains the Hard Problem of consciousness?

Hedda Hassel Mørch has a thoughtful piece in Nautilus’s interesting Consciousness issue (well worth a look generally) that raises this idea. What is the alleged Hard Problem of physics? She say it goes like this…

What is physical matter in and of itself, behind the mathematical structure described by physics?

To cut to the chase, Mørch proposes that things in themselves have a nature not touched by physics, and that nature is consciousness. This explains the original Hard Problem – we, like other things, just are by nature conscious; but because that consciousness is our inward essence rather than one of our physical properties, it is missed out in the scientific account.

I’m sympathetic to the idea that the original Hard Problem is about an aspect of the world that physics misses out, but according to me that aspect is just the reality of things. There may not, according to me, be much more that can usefully be said about it. Mørch, I think, takes two wrong turns. The first is to think that there are such things as things in themselves, apart from observable properties. The second is to think that if this were so, it would justify panpsychism, which is where she ends up.

Let’s start by looking at that Hard problem of physics.  Mørch suggests that physics is about the mathematical structure of reality, which is true enough, but the point here is that physics is also about observable properties; it’s nothing if not empirical. If things have a nature in themselves that cannot be detected directly or indirectly from observable properties, physics simply isn’t interested, because those things-in-themselves make no difference to any possible observation. No doubt some physicists would be inclined to denounce such unobservable items as absurd or vacuous, but properly speaking they are just outside the scope of physics, neither to be affirmed nor denied. It follows, I think, that this can’t be a Hard Problem of physics; it’s actually a Hard Problem of metaphysics.

This is awkward because we know that human consciousness does have physical manifestations that are readily amenable to physical investigation; all of our conscious behaviour, our speech and writing, for example. Our new Hard Problem (let’s call it the NHP) can’t help us with those; it is completely irrelevant to our physical behaviour and cannot give us any account of those manifestations of consciousness. That is puzzling and deeply problematic – but only in the same way as the old Hard Problem (OHP) – so perhaps we are on the right track after all?

The problem is that I don’t think the NHP helps us even on a metaphysical level. Since we can’t investigate the essential nature of things empirically, we can only know about it by pure reasoning; and I don’t know of any purely rational laws of metaphysics that tell us about it. Can the inward nature of things change? If so, what are the (pseudo-causal?) laws of intrinsic change that govern that process? If the inward nature doesn’t change, must we take everything to be essentially constant and eternal in itself? That Parmenidean changelessness would be particularly odd in entities we are relying on to explain the fleeting, evanescent business of subjective experience.

Of course Mørch and others who make a similar case don’t claim to present a set of a priori conclusions about their own nature; rather they suggest that the way we know about the essence of things is through direct experience. The inner nature of things is unknowable except in that one case where the thing whose inner nature is to be known is us. We know our own nature, at least. It’s intuitively appealing – but how do we know our own real nature? Why should being a thing bring knowledge of that thing? Just because we have an essential nature here’s no reason to suppose we are acquainted with that inner nature; again we seem to need some hefty metaphysics to explain this, which is actually lacking. All the other examples of knowledge I can think of are constructed, won through experience, not inherent. If we have to invent a new kind of knowledge to support the theory the foundations may be weak.

At the end of the day, the simplest and most parsimonious view, I think, is to say that things just are made up of their properties, with no essential nub besides. Leibniz’s Law tells us that that’s the nature of identity. To be sure, the list will include abstract properties as well as purely physical ones, but abstract properties that are amenable to empirical test, not ones that stand apart from any possible observation. Mørch disagrees:

Some have argued that there is nothing more to particles than their relations, but  intuition rebels at this claim. For there to be a relation, there must be two things being related. Otherwise, the relation is empty—a show that goes on without performers, or a castle constructed out of thin air.

I think the argument is rather that the properties of a particle relate to each other, while these groups of related properties relate in turn to other such groups. Groups don’t require a definitive member, and particles don’t require a single definitive essence. Indeed, since the particle’s essential self cannot determine any of its properties (or it could be brought within the pale of physics) it’s hard to see how it can have a defined relation to any of them and what role the particle-in-itself can play in Mørch’s relational show.

The second point where I think Mørch goes wrong is in the leap to panpsychism. The argument seems to be that the NHP requires non-structural stuff (which she likens to the hardware on which the software of the laws of physics runs – though I myself wouldn’t buy unstructured hardware); the OHP gives us the non-structural essence of conscious experience (of course conscious experience does have structure, but Mørch takes it that down there somewhere is the structureless ineffable something-it-is-like); why not assume that the latter is universal and fills the gap exposed by the NHP?

Well, because other matter exhibits no signs of consciousness, and because the fact that our essence is a conscious essence just wouldn’t warrant the assumption that all essences are conscious ones. Wouldn’t it be simpler to think that only the essences of outwardly conscious beings are conscious essences? This is quite apart from the many problems of panpsychism, which we’ve discussed before, and which Mørch fairly acknowledges.

So I’m not convinced, but the case is a bold and stimulating one and more persuasively argued than it may seem from my account. I applaud the aims and spirit of the expedition even though I may regret the direction it took.

Simply Panpsychism

eyesPhilip Goff tells us that panpsychism is an appealingly simple view. I do think he has captured an important point, and one which makes a real contribution to panpsychism’s otherwise puzzling ability to attract adherents. But although the argument is clear and well-constructed I could hardly agree less.

Even his opening sentence has me shaking my head…

Common sense tells us that only living things have consciousness.

Hm; I’m not altogether sure such questions are really even within the scope of common sense, but popular culture seems to tell us that people are generally happy to assume that robots may be conscious. In fact, I suspect that only our scientific education stops us attributing agency to the weather, stones that trip us up, and almost anything that moves. It isn’t only Basil Fawlty that shouts at his car!

Goff suggests that the main argument against panpsychism (approximately the view that everything everywhere is conscious: I skip here various caveats and clarifications which don’t affect the main argument) is just that it is ‘crazy’ – that it conflicts with common sense. He goes on to rebut this by pointing out that relativity and Darwinism both conflict with common sense too. This seems dangerously close to the classic George Spiggott argument so memorably refuted in the 1967 film Bedazzled;

Stanley Moon: You’re a nutcase! You’re a bleedin’ nutcase!
George Spiggott: They said the same of Jesus Christ, Freud, and Galileo.
Stanley Moon: They said it of a lot of nutcases too.
George Spiggott: You’re not as stupid as you look, are you, Mr. Moon?

But really we’re fighting a straw man; the main argument against panpsychism is surely not a mere appeal to common sense. (Who are these philosophers who stick to common sense and how do they get any work done?) One of the candidates for the main counter-argument must surely be the difficulty of saying exactly which of the teeming multi-layered dynasties of entities in the universe we deem to be conscious, whether composite entities qualify, and if so, how on Earth that works. Another main line of hostile argument must be the problem of explaining how these ubiquitous consciousnesses relate to the ordinary kind that appears to operate in brains. Perhaps the biggest objection of all is to panpsychism’s staggering ontological profligacy. William of Occam told us to use as few angels as possible; panpsychism stations one in every particle of the cosmos.

How could such a massive commitment represent simplicity? The thing is, Goff isn’t starting from nothing; he already has another metaphysical commitment. He believes that things have an intrinsic nature apart from their physical properties. Science, on this view, is all about a world that often, rather mysteriously, gets called the ‘external’ world. It tells us about the objectively measurable properties of things, but nothing at all about the things in themselves. No doubt Goff has reasons for thinking this that he has set out elsewhere, probably in the book of which he helpfully provides an interesting chapter.

But whatever his grounds may be, I think this view is itself hopeless. For one thing, if these intrinsic natures have no physical impact, nothing we ever say or write can have been caused by them. That seems worrying. Ah, but here I’m inadvertently beginning to make Goff’s case for him, because what else is there that never causes any of the things we say about it? Qualia, phenomenal consciousness, the sort Goff is clearly after. Now if we’ve got two things with this slippery acausal quality, might it not be a handy simplification if they were the same thing? This is very much the kind of simplification that Goff wants to suggest. We know or assume that everything has its own intrinsic nature. In one case, ourselves, we know what that intrinsic nature is like; it’s conscious experience. So is it not the simplest way if we suppose that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of everything? Voila.

There’s no denying that that does make some sense. We do indeed get simplicity of a sort – but only at a price. Once we’ve taken on the huge commitment of intrinsic natures, and once we’ve also taken on the commitment of ineffable interior qualia, then it looks like good sense to combine the two commitments into, as it were, one easy payment. But it’s far better to avoid these onerous commitments in the first place.

Let me suggest that for one thing, believing in intrinsic natures poisons the essential concept of identity. Leibniz tells us that the identity of a thing resides in its properties; if all the properties of A are the same as all the properties of B, then A is B. But if everything has an unobservable inner nature as well as its observable properties, its identity is forever unknowable and there can never be certainty that this dagger I see before me is actually the same as the identical-looking one I saw in the same place a moment ago. Its inward nature might have changed.

Moreover, even if we take on both intrinsic natures and ineffable qualia, there are several good reasons to think the two must be different. If we are to put aside my fear that my dagger may have furtively changed its intrinsic nature, it must surely be that the intrinsic nature of a thing generally stays the same – but consciousness constantly changes? In fact, consciousness goes away regularly every night; does our intrinsic nature disappear too? Do sleeping people somehow not have an intrinsic nature – or if they have one, doesn’t it persist when they wake, alongside and evidently distinct from their consciousness? Or consider what consciousness is like: consciousness is consciousness of things; qualia are qualia of red, or middle C, or the smell of bacon; how can entities with no sensory organs have them? Is there a quale of nothing? There might be answers, but I don’t think they’re going to be easy ones.

There’s another problem lurking in wait, too, I think. Goff, I think, assumes that we all exist and have intrinsic natures, but he cannot have any good reason to think so, because intrinsic natures leave no evidence. We who believe that the identity of things is founded in their observable properties have empirical grounds to believe that there are many conscious entities out there. For him the observable physics must be strictly irrelevant. He has immediate knowledge only of one intrinsic nature, his own, which he takes to be his consciousness;  the most parsimonious conclusion to draw from there is not that the universe is full of intrinsic natures and consciousnesses of a similar kind, but that there is precisely one; Goff, the single consciousness that underpins everything. He seems to me, in other words, to have no defence against some kind of solipsism; simplicity makes it most likely that he lives in his own dream, or at best in a world populated by some kind of zombies.

Crazy? Well, it’s a little strange…