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WillowOne's Positions

Panpsychism

My Positions

  1. I reject panpsychism: the view that consciousness, or some rudimentary form of experience, is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of matter, present in electrons and quarks and summing somehow to the experience of a person.
  2. It is offered as a solution to the hard problem and it is nothing of the kind. It takes the thing to be explained, declares it fundamental so that it no longer needs explaining, and then discovers that it has an equally hard problem about how the fundamental bits add up (Combination problem). Mystery has been conserved, not reduced.
  3. There is no evidence for it, there could not be on its own terms, and it is immune to disconfirmation by design: an electron with a flicker of experience behaves exactly like an electron without one. That is the signature of a claim that is not about the world (Popper's Razor).
  4. I note, since it is often missed, that the position is not opposed to physicalism in the way dualism is. Its leading defenders call themselves physicalists or monists. It is better described as a disagreement about where in the physical world experience sits: in the ingredients, as the panpsychist says, or in the arrangement, as I say. On that question every other high-level property we know of sides with me.

Notes

  1. The view and its reasons. Panpsychism is old (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monads each mirror the universe from their own point of view; Alfred North Whitehead made "occasions of experience" the atoms of his process philosophy) and has had a revival since the 1990s led by Galen Strawson, Philip Goff and, with reservations, David Chalmers. The modern argument runs: (a) consciousness is real and cannot be denied; (b) it cannot be explained in terms of non-conscious ingredients, because of the hard problem; (c) physics describes matter only by its structure and dispositions and says nothing about its intrinsic nature (Russell's point); (d) so the intrinsic nature of matter is the natural place to put consciousness, and we should suppose that fundamental physical entities have some very simple experiential nature which, suitably combined, constitutes ours. Goff adds that this is more parsimonious than dualism (one kind of stuff) and more honest than physicalism (which, he says, has no account of experience at all).
  2. Premise (b) is the whole dispute, and it is asserted rather than shown. "Experience cannot arise from the non-experiential" has exactly the form of "life cannot arise from the non-living" and "the properties of a compound cannot arise from its elements" (Emergentism note 1), and those were asserted with the same confidence by people who could not see how the derivation would go. Every other property we know of that is absent from the parts and present in the whole, from liquidity to metabolism to the ability to play chess, arises from arrangement. The panpsychist's claim that experience is the one exception rests on an intuition about what arrangement cannot do, and I have said what I think of arguments from what we cannot imagine (Personal Incredulity, Owens Tryptic of Ignorance). The question to put back is this: why should it be more intelligible that an electron has a small experience than that a brain has a large one? Neither is intelligible yet. One of them we have evidence for.
  3. The combination problem. William James stated it in 1890 and it has not moved. Take a hundred feelings and pack them together as closely as you like; they remain a hundred feelings, and no hundred-and-first feeling of the whole appears, any more than a hundred people each thinking one word of a sentence produces anyone who thinks the sentence. The panpsychist must explain how the micro-experiences of ten to the twenty-seventh particles become one unified point of view with none of the parts' points of view surviving in it. This is the hard problem with the sign changed: instead of "how does the non-experiential become experiential?" it is "how do many experiences become one?", and there is no more of an answer. Goff concedes that it is unsolved and expresses hope. I would accept that from a physicalist about the hard problem, and so should he.
  4. The thermostat, and where to stop. If experience is fundamental and combines, then anything made of matter has some, and the question becomes which arrangements have the interesting kind. Chalmers bit this bullet in 1996 and allowed that a thermostat might have an experience "of a maximally simple kind". Once that is said, the position has either given up on explaining anything (everything is conscious, so being conscious explains nothing about brains in particular) or it needs a theory of which arrangements concentrate experience and why. The second is the physicalist's research programme with an extra axiom in front of it. The axiom does no work; the arrangement does all of it.
  5. Integrated Information Theory. Giulio Tononi's IIT, championed by Christof Koch, is the only version of the view with a number in it: consciousness is integrated information, measured by a quantity called phi, and anything with non-zero phi has some. I give it credit for being a theory, and it has the consequences a theory has. Critics have shown that a suitably wired grid of logic gates doing nothing of interest has a phi far higher than a human brain, so that on the theory a large enough grid is more conscious than you. Tononi accepts this. I take it as a reductio. In 2023 over a hundred researchers signed a letter calling the theory pseudoscience, which was unfair to it as a theory and fair to the panpsychist conclusions drawn in its name. A testable theory is worth more than an untestable one; this one has been tested against the one thing we can check it against, and lost.
  6. What it is for. Panpsychism is enjoying a revival not because new evidence has arrived but because the hard problem has been pressed for thirty years, and some philosophers have concluded that if matter cannot produce experience then experience must have been there all along. That is a reasonable move given the premise, and the premise is what I deny. It also has an audience outside philosophy for the reasons Pantheism and the New Age do: a universe that is faintly conscious all the way down is a friendlier place than one that is not, and "consciousness is fundamental" is a sentence that sells. I do not think the leading proponents are selling anything. I think they have mistaken the difficulty of a problem for a reason to give up on its obvious solution.
  7. What I take from it. The panpsychist is right that experience is real and that any complete physics must include the systems that have it. He is right that the hard problem is hard. He is right, against the dualist, that a single kind of stuff is enough. He is wrong about where in that stuff experience sits, and the history of every other high-level property is on my side.

Sources

  • Goff, P., Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness (2019)
  • Strawson, G., "Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism", Journal of Consciousness Studies 13 (2006)
  • Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind (1996), chapter 8, on the thermostat; "Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism", Amherst Lecture in Philosophy 8 (2013) — https://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf
  • James, W., The Principles of Psychology (1890), vol. 1, chapter 6, "The Mind-Stuff Theory"
  • Tononi, G. and Koch, C., "Consciousness: here, there and everywhere?", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 370 (2015)
  • Aaronson, S., "Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist (or, The Unconscious Expander)", Shtetl-Optimized, 21 May 2014 — https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799
  • Fleming, S. M. et al., "The Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness as Pseudoscience", open letter, PsyArXiv (2023)
  • Goff, P., Seager, W. and Allen-Hermanson, S., "Panpsychism", Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/

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