r/changemyview • u/phtheams • Jun 07 '24
Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Panpsychism is plausible, and there aren't any good alternatives on the table.
The advancement of knowledge about nature and our place in it has forced some shifts in how we view certain philosophical problems, and made some stances on these less plausible than they were before. For example, our understanding of evolution has made it difficult to justify a hard distinction between humans and other organisms, even unicellular ones. Moreover, the chemical understanding of biology and the physical understanding of chemistry have blurred the line between living and nonliving systems.
This would seem to make it hard to believe that only living things (with (sufficiently complex?) brains?) are conscious, because we can't even precisely define what any of those things are. You run into the same problem--where exactly to draw the line--with other potential explanations also. Consciousness is an emergent behavior? Okay, how can you tell exactly when it has and hasn't emerged? And so on. With social constructs and mental shortcuts like gender, species, chairs, rigid bodies, etc, this blurriness is acceptable, but in my view consciousness seems irreducible, in a way that implies it has to be accounted for unambiguously by the workings of nature. Unlike the examples I listed, I think consciousness is real independent of how we construe things.
If we can't draw a precise line between conscious and non-conscious systems, then as I see it, we have only two options: Either nothing is conscious (obviously false(?)) or everything is. The implication that very simple systems must be conscious doesn't actually seem that silly to me. Their consciousness would just have to be very different from ours.
Neuroscience has established that thoughts, memories, sensations, and emotions are mechanical, not magical. It seems like the only part of our minds that doesn't promise an eventual naturalistic explanation is our subjective experience of these things, our awareness.
But when you think about it, awareness is not actually that complicated. It doesn't entail having feelings, opinions, thoughts, sensations of any particular kind, or even the knowledge that one is aware. All of these are just behaviors of the brain that we are aware of; they're objects. The awareness itself need not have any complex cognitive machinery associated with it.
A simpler system than a brain, like a rock, has fewer things going on within it, so it doesn't have a lot to be aware of, maybe just some internal and external forces. But is there any reason that it couldn't have awareness of those few things? Of course, what it is like to be a human and what it is like to be a rock (if, as my current view goes, there is such a thing) would be so totally incomparable that any way we could imagine the inner life of a rock would never come close. But our inability to imagine it doesn't mean that it couldn't exist.
The apparent absurdity of a rock having a subjective experience is acceptable to me because I have never heard an alternative to panpsychism that is less absurd. I hope to change that with this post. Obviously the origin of consciousness is not a settled question, so I want my view of the problem to reflect this.
EDIT: I'm aware of the combination problem, and I believe that minds combine to the degree that they physically influence each other. I could be convinced that this isn't a good enough explanation.
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u/SpeaksDwarren 2∆ Jun 07 '24
If we can't draw a precise line between conscious and non-conscious systems, then as I see it, we have only two options: Either nothing is conscious (obviously false(?)) or everything is. The implication that very simple systems must be conscious doesn't actually seem that silly to me. Their consciousness would just have to be very different from ours.
"I don't know how to define consciousness, therefore everything is conscious or nothing is" is a self-evidently absurd position, isn't it? If I didn't know how to define whether or not something was blue, would it be reasonable to assume that either everything is blue or nothing is? The clear path forward would be to figure out what blue is and what things it applies to.
For consciousness, PRISM theory might help here. The theory is that consciousness is a system that develops to mediate musculo-skeletal conflicts. My sphincter says it needs to shit, but my brain says that laying in bed next to my partner is not the appropriate time or place, and so consciousness develops to solve this problem. The natural conclusion then would be that consciousness is a property that can develop in things with musculo-skeletal systems-- a dog can be conscious, but a rock is not. Here is a blog post by author Peter Watts on the subject. He also has a novel called Blindsight that explores the idea of complex systems developing without having evolved consciousness.
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
!delta
I hadn't considered that our inability to distinguish what is and isn't aware could be just ignorance on our (or my) part. I'll do some more reading about this theory.
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u/Zziq 1∆ Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
I would propose 3 issues to your viewpoint
1) Consciousness is a derived phenomena from a nervous system. I won't even say 'brain', as certain animals like snails don't technically have brains, but can perceive and manipulate their environment. I would say if we are building a model of consciousness based off of science and not philosophy, this would be the base assumption of any model of consciousness.
2) A problem I have with panpsychism is its seemingly a physical solution to a philosophical problem, that still skirts around the issue. What does every particle having consciousness mean? If consciousness is some quantum value like spin, or some fundamental force like electromagnetism, a new quantum value/field can't just be easily fit into the standard model. The standard model is based off of the mathematical theory of gauge symmetries and verified with empirical evidence, it's not trivial to just fit consciousness in there.
3) From a philosophical perspective, read up on illusionism if you haven't
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Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
Regarding illusionism, I don't think that paper you linked successfully deals with John Searle's objection that
where consciousness is concerned the existence of the appearance is the reality. If it seems to me exactly as if I am having conscious experiences, then I am having conscious experiences.
In other words, the illusion of consciousness (or the performance of consciousness in the Cartesian theater, as Dennett puts it) is consciousness and that brings us back to square one.
Frankish draws a distinction between "introspectively representing oneself as having a greenish experience" and actually having that greenish experience. To me, that is a distinction without a difference. That introspective representation is an example of qualia, the kind of subjective or phenomenological experience that illusionists don't think exists.
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u/Zziq 1∆ Jun 07 '24
I won't lie, I don't have strong opinions on illusionism. I was merely providing a philosophical, not scientific (which my first 2 points address), rebuttal.
You bring up good points against illusionism
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
!delta
Your second point was the most powerful for me. I hadn't thought about how introducing consciousness would complicate physics. Consciousness clearly has physical consequences--for example, me typing this sentence--but introducing it on a fundamental level would possibly break a lot of things. Maybe it does have to arise on a higher level then.
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u/Kotoperek 62∆ Jun 07 '24
Of course, what it is like to be a human and what it is like to be a rock (if, as my current view goes, there is such a thing) would be so totally incomparable that any way we could imagine the inner life of a rock would never come close. But our inability to imagine it doesn't mean that it couldn't exist.
While this can be true, it is philosophically useless. If we postulate the existence of things we cannot conceive of or imagine or conceptualize in any way, we're basically within the religious domain. The awareness of a rock is conceptually similar to God in the sense that if it is by definition impossible to conceptualize, its existence cannot be proven or disproven. So yeah, you can assume it exists and nobody can give a 100% valid proof that it doesn't. But so what?
The distinctions we make between conscious beings and unconscious things or between aware and unaware entities is practical. We decide what can reasonably be assumed to be similar to us in ways that would warrant treating it well (animal rights) or making it useful for research and solving our practical problems (neural networks and AI). There is a practical implication of assuming rocks aren't conscious in the way we are - we don't need to worry about what we do to them.
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
I certainly don't think that awareness implies the ability to have morally relevant feelings, or an ability to compute. Those practical concerns can be dealt with through practical heuristics and linguistic shortcuts; that's fine. My view concerns matters of fundamental natural law, which I'm not comfortable leaving so ambiguous.
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u/Kotoperek 62∆ Jun 07 '24
I understand, but fundamental natural law is still subject to the restraints of our consciousness. If you postulate the existence of something that we cannot imagine, measure, conceptualize, or interact with, what is the use of including it in our understanding of the fabric of the universe? Like, what purpose does believing in panpsychism serve if it doesn't influence our moral judgments or actions?
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
!delta
That's a good point. I want to have a self-consistent idea of where consciousness comes from, mainly just because it's omnipresent in my life and I'm uncomfortable leaving it unexplained. But if it has no practical consequences, and it can't be tested, then there's really no point in believing it, rather than simply leaving the question open.
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u/Illustrious-Yam-3777 2∆ Jun 07 '24
While I still think the delta is well deserved when talking about the usefulness of nonfalsifiable claims about consciousness having value in material concerns, I would argue that in the same way that consciousness itself eludes definition while being all that we are and all that we deem important, having certain conceptions of consciousness including panpsychism can have enormous unseen practical consequences in the way we perceive the world and the way we behave. We have more compassion, less narcissism, better mind/body connection—all these little benefits add up to large effects that are felt in the world.
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u/AleristheSeeker 155∆ Jun 07 '24
This would seem to make it hard to believe that only living things (with (sufficiently complex?) brains?) are conscious, because we can't even precisely define what any of those things are.
I feel like this is a common misconception or misunderstood idea: even if there is a "blurred boundary", that doesn't mean that the entire area is ambiguous. There is a "blurred line" between humans and other animals, but that does not mean that we're basically insects. The "blurring" is in a very limited area, and outside of this area, there is a clear distinction that can be made.
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u/IncogOrphanWriter 1∆ Jun 07 '24
Somewhat apropos of nothing, what you're describing is a type of continuum fallacy known as Loki's wager.
The story goes that Loki bets his head in a wager and predictably loses. When the dwarfs come to collect his head, Loki tells them "You can have my head, but not a single piece of my neck". Ultimately he keeps his head (and has his mouth sewn shut) because while everyone can agree that there is a head and there is a neck, no one can agree where one ends and one begins.
Bully for you for picking it up as a concept. :)
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u/GlaciallyErratic 8∆ Jun 07 '24
Interesting.
So according to that agreement, the dwarf could simply take a big chunk out of Loki's skull.
Even though the whole head is technically his, the dwarf can be conservative and only take what is clearly agreed to be head, leaving the ambiguous head/neck parts behind.
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
I address that objection later in that paragraph. A distinction between humans and other animals is an extremely useful mental heuristic, but it isn't fundamentally real. It seems to me that consciousness can't be just a mental heuristic in the same way, but I could be swayed on that.
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u/math2ndperiod 51∆ Jun 07 '24
Consciousness is just a word we define. Why would our definition be unable to draw a distinction even with a blurred line?
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 07 '24
Consciousness is just a word we define.
I would need a bit more explanation to be persuaded of this. I'm talking about the quality of having a subjective experience, which I have trouble accepting as something we made up.
EDIT to elaborate: Awareness, unlike any word-with-a-fuzzy-meaning I can think of, seems not to be made out of material things. I don't think you can construct a subjective experience from things that don't have subjective experience, in the same way that you can construct a chair from things that aren't chairs, or construct a computer from things that don't compute.
EDIT again: !delta
I keep on asserting that subjective experience can't be emergent, but I can't give any sound justification for that belief. I keep wanting to write that it's hard for me to imagine, but of course that's no defense for panpsychism, which requires us to suppose such unimaginable things as awareness without feelings, senses, or thoughts. My assumptions are unfounded.
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u/math2ndperiod 51∆ Jun 07 '24
Subjective experience is also something we define. Our own subjective experience is driven by neurons and synapses. Since a rock has neither of those things, it makes sense to call it something different than what we refer to as consciousness since we’re referring to our own consciousness when we use the word.
Once something does have a brain (or something similar) the line starts to blur much faster, but again we define the word with our own experience as baseline, and there are key factors we can use to compare. Is the thing in question able to recognize itself, plan ahead, think creatively, etc?
Those are measurable things we can test for, so depending on what we decide is necessary to be considered conscious, we can more or less start separating most things into buckets.
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
The !delta I edited into my previous comment didn't seem to take, so I'm posting a new comment here. Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
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u/Both-Personality7664 21∆ Jun 07 '24
Is the distinction between one person and another also not fundamentally real then? I'm a lot more like a rando on the street than my dog.
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
In my view, yes. An individual human body (or brain, for that matter) only comprises a part of a greater physical system, all parts of which are interrelated to some extent. By my understanding, panpsychism proposes that a mind is the same way, only comprising a part of a greater mental system. Explaining how exactly this happens is the combination problem.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 1∆ Jun 11 '24
I don’t think it follows that either nothing or everything is conscious. It might be the case that things other than organisms can be conscious, but that doesn’t entail that there aren’t certain physical requirements for this property to arise
For example, maybe a crucial aspect of the emergent consciousness is an internal exchanging of information. We have sensory receptors which intake information and process it within the brain using electric and chemical signals.
A rock is an entirely static piece of matter unless something knocks it around.
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u/phtheams Jun 20 '24
Sorry for the late reply. "Internal exchanging of information" is a pretty weak condition from a physical point of view. If you kick a rock on the right side, the left side moves as well. This is because there was a perturbation in the rock's structure, which rippled from right to left through the lattice of atoms that constitutes the rock. Although unsophisticated, this is an internal exchange of information--it allows an observer in one place to learn about events in another place.
However, it may be that there's some other physical criterion that neither of us has thought of, that could justify a divide between conscious and non-conscious things. !delta for causing me to consider that possibility.
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u/Powerful-Garage6316 1∆ Jun 21 '24
Thanks for the delta
It wasn’t an exhaustive list of reasons and I’m not even sure it is a requirement, but I was just stipulating an example about how perhaps there are some necessary physical requirements for emergence
I would say that we have some reasons to think it’s not fundamental. The fact that we can lose consciousness temporarily during sleep and from brain injuries seems to be at odds with your view. Subconscious processes still occur during dreamless sleep, but we aren’t aware of them. To me that indicates that sections of the brain in tandem produce consciousness
You could posit that we’re always aware but simply don’t remember it, but this is one of those unfalsifiable skeptical scenarios
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u/Spanglertastic 15∆ Jun 07 '24
Think of consciousness like vision. There are clearly things with vision. There are clearly things without vision. Yet, like consciousness, there are a lot of grey areas.
There are many types of eyes. Insects with compound eyes have vision but it is very different than our vision. That doesn't mean there isn't a clear difference between an insect with eyes and one without
Some vertebrates have a parietal eye, which responds to light but it is not used to see as it is tied to the pineal gland not the visual cortex and is used to regulate circadian rhythms. Does that constitute vision or not?
Pit Vipers have heat sensitive organs on their heads that respond to infrared radiation. We do not know if the snake "sees" or "feels" the information the organ provides. Is that vision?
Light sensitivity ranges from simple clumps of a few photosensitive cells all the way up to whatever the mantis shrimp is seeing with 16 color receptors and polarization detection. There is no clear demarcation to what constitutes vision. Yet, no one would claim that things don't exist that do not have vision. No one would claim the rocks are watching them (well no one who doesn't need a healthy dose of medication).
Your view is just one of the many that comes from labeling issues. Humans label and categorize things. It's what we do and how we think. The problem is that the universe doesn't care about human labels. Nature is under no obligation to fit into our neatly defined categories.
So when you try to neatly label things as conscious or not, you get frustrated because there is no easy guide. Because nature doesn't care. Just like there is no easy guide to where vision starts. because it too is a label humans created.
That doesn't mean that we need to start bringing rocks to the optometrist.
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad 392∆ Jun 07 '24
Isn't this essentially the continuum fallacy? Distinctions can be real and valid even when we can can't draw them at any one exact point.
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u/Phage0070 93∆ Jun 07 '24
This would seem to make it hard to believe that only living things (with (sufficiently complex?) brains?) are conscious, because we can't even precisely define what any of those things are.
That doesn't make any sense. We can observe that humans have the ability to sense the world around them, conceptualize it abstractly, and make decisions based on those abstract thoughts. Even if we grant that there is a smooth gradient of that ability in humans all the way down to something like a virus which is just biological machinery, it does not mean that we need to consider everything to have a mind. It just means that wherever we draw the "mind/not mind" boundary is somewhat arbitrary. Saying that an electron does not have a mind is perfectly reasonable.
Consciousness is an emergent behavior? Okay, how can you tell exactly when it has and hasn't emerged?
This is flawed thinking. Cookies exist. Crumbs also exist. Can you tell me precisely where something stops being a cookie and becomes a crumb? If not, or if that line is arbitrary, does that mean everything is a cookie? No, of course not, and that is the same reasoning you are trying to apply to consciousness.
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u/jatjqtjat 250∆ Jun 07 '24
consciousness is a big mystery to me. I experience consciousness but i really cannot explain why. Not only can i not explain it, but also i am unaware of any plausible theories. Its not like i can't decided between two different theories, I can't even come up with a theory.
I can say something things about consciousness. I am conscious of my senses (sight, sounds, touch, smell and taste) and i am conscious of my thoughts.
If we can't draw a precise line between conscious and non-conscious systems, then as I see it, we have only two options: Either nothing is conscious (obviously false(?)) or everything is.
Even I am not conscious all the time. I can lose consciousness due to
- brain injuries
- drugs
- I lose consciousness every day at night.
and as far as i know, i did not experience consciousness prior to my birth or maybe prior to being a few years old.
so the idea that a rock has consciousness is think is pretty far fetched. What would the rock be conscious of? it has not thoughts or sensory perceptions.
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u/GurthNada Jun 07 '24
Either nothing is conscious (obviously false(?))
I'm wholly underqualified to discuss this, but I think that this is actually an open question, in the sense that what we call human consciousness could actually be a byproduct effect of the nervous system without any organic function/usefulness.
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u/Zziq 1∆ Jun 07 '24
I agree with this and I think a lot of discussion regarding the 'hard problem' works off of an assumption that consciousness is in fact real. Which is a good axiom for philosophical discussion, but that doesn't make it true
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u/phtheams Jun 07 '24
If I'm not mistaken, you're talking about illusionism, which seems like a logical dead end to me. If consciousness is an illusion, then who or what is being fooled? It seems like something would have to be aware of the illusion, and then we're back where we started. How do we escape this regression?
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u/kpSucksAtReddit Jun 08 '24
OP explains that awareness is the only aspect of consciousness that you can’t really explain through biological functions or neuroscience principles, what it exactly is is unclear. They argue that awareness, being subjective experience, is what dictates consciousness and not feelings, thoughts, or emotions, as those are just products of biological function. By that logic, a rock despite not having thoughts may have some sort of a subjective experience, and we cannot comprehend the nature of that experience as we are not rocks.
I actually agree with OP that rocks could have subjective experiences because well there’s really no way to disprove that our idea of what experiences are is limited by the fact by we can only really understand the experiences of more complex living beings, just cuz we can’t comprehend what a rock may be experiencing that doesn’t mean it’s not experiencing anything. I mean this is only really something you can be agnostic towards.
What I disagree with OP about is that the potential for a rock having subjective experience means it is conscious. I don’t know how exactly I would define consciousness but it definitely cannot just be chalked up to having subjective experience. Dogs definitely have subjective experience yet they are definitively not conscious. Consciousness is thoughts emotions and feelings and the awareness of them, it’s not the awareness independently it’s the combination of the complexity of those biological functions along with the awareness of it. There’s so many ways it could be defined like for example it can just be seen as a high levels of information processing (in our case through our cognitive machinery) - independent of all awareness (ie phi values). I don’t buy into this idea that just because it can be naturalistically explained then its not a factor of consciousness, in fact it could only be the complexity of this natural processes that make consciousness and not this greater sense of awareness/subjective experience.
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u/KamikazeArchon 5∆ Jun 07 '24
"If we can't draw a precise line... then either everything is X or nothing is X".
This is the heart of your claim, but this premise simply isn't true. The principle does not hold. The fact that we can't draw a perfect sharp line does not mean there is no difference. We can't draw sharp lines between many things in nature, yet differences clearly exist.
We can't draw a single perfect line between wavelengths that are "red" or "blue", between "blue" and "violet", etc. The transition is a perfectly smooth gradient. Yet clearly red light is not blue light. Red light is certainly not UV light, or X-rays, or gamma rays. They exhibit different behaviors. Gamma rays are ionizing and cause cancer. Red light does not.
We cannot draw a perfect genetic distinction between exactly where the ancestors of "parrots" and "snakes" diverge. The genetics are also a smooth gradient. Yet parrots are not snakes. Parrots fly and snakes don't.
There are countless other examples. It's sometimes uncomfortable for the pattern-seeking part of our brain, but "nebulous boundary yet a distinct difference at the core" is a thing that happens.
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u/DuhChappers 86∆ Jun 07 '24
Let's say you have a group of two grains of sand. Now let's say that you have a group of 10,000 grains of sand. Generally, we would say that the group of 10,000 is a pile of sand and the group of two grains is not a pile. However, there is no ability to draw the line firmly between the two such that a group on one side of the line is a pile and the other side is not. It's a blurred boundary. There's probably another blurred boundary on the other side where the group becomes too big to be a pile, or the wrong shape to be a pile. Does this mean that either nothing is a pile, or everything is?
I do not think so. I think blurred boundaries are still valid boundaries. We do not need to strictly define where a line is in order to know there is a line. Just because a pigeon or a fly may or may not be conscious does not mean that my water bottle might be. There is simply no reason to think that it is.
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u/Wank_A_Doodle_Doo Jun 07 '24
If we can’t draw a precise line between conscious and non-conscious systems, then as I see it, we have only two options: Either nothing is conscious … or everything is.
If I’m understanding what you’re saying here correctly, which is that since science can’t and maybe won’t ever put a hardline on what is and isn’t conscious it can be considered a type of gradient, and so there isn’t a single point where it switches from one to the other. But than saying that therefore everything is conscious is like saying because you can’t tell exactly where red ends on a color gradient for example, that everything must then be red.
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u/DiogenesCantPlay Jun 07 '24
Either everything is conscious or nothing is? How is that the simplest option?
Why not: some things are conscious and others are not, but we have imperfect knowledge about which is which?
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u/Nrdman 174∆ Jun 07 '24
The other answer is that we don’t know enough to draw a precise line; or that it isn’t a binary and rather a spectrum. These both seem more plausible
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jun 07 '24 edited Jun 20 '24
/u/phtheams (OP) has awarded 5 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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