Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Argument from Psychophysical Harmony

Form

A new argument, published by Brian Cutter and Dustin Crummett in 2022:

  1. Conscious experiences are matched to physical states in a way that is harmonious: pain goes with bodily damage and with avoidance behaviour, pleasure with benefit and with pursuit, beliefs with the behaviour that would be rational given them, and perceptual experiences with the environment.
  2. On naturalism, the psychophysical laws that pair brain states with experiences are brute: there is no reason why the brain state that produces avoidance should feel bad rather than good, or feel like anything at all. Since physics is causally closed, what the experiences are like makes no difference to behaviour, so natural selection could not tune them. The laws could have paired damage with bliss, or belief with irrelevant experience, and behaviour would be identical.
  3. Harmony is therefore vastly improbable on naturalism, but expected on theism, since a good God would want experience to fit its circumstances.
  4. Therefore psychophysical harmony is strong evidence for theism.

My Positions

  1. The argument needs a dualism I do not hold. Premise 2 assumes that experiences are extra items, paired with brain states by separate laws that could have been otherwise. If pain simply is the functional state that produces avoidance and learning, as I hold (Consciousness, Substrate Independence, Functionalism), then there is no separate law to tune and the "harmony" is analytic: a state that felt like pain but drove pursuit would not be pain. The authors acknowledge that the argument targets non-reductive views, which is to say that it is an argument against dualist naturalism, and I am not a dualist naturalist (Mind-body dualism).
  2. If experience does affect behaviour, selection explains harmony directly. On any view where what pain feels like makes a difference to what the animal does (identity theory, interactionism), a creature whose damage felt good would seek damage and die, and harmony is what selection produces. The argument only works if experiences are causally idle, and a causally idle experience is a strange thing to then claim God cares about.
  3. The data are not harmonious. Chronic pain with no injury, phantom limbs, cluster headaches, the pain of the dying, dysmenorrhoea, depression's misery without cause, the pleasures of addiction that destroy the addict, and the whole of animal suffering before any creature could learn from it: the apologist selects the matched cases and calls the match evidence (Cherry-picking). The mismatched cases are the Problem of evil, and the same evidence that is supposed to show a good God ordering experience shows one who did it carelessly. Theism predicts harmony only if one forgets what else theism has to explain.
  4. The probability "on naturalism" is undefined. As with the Fine-Tuning Argument, the claim that harmony is improbable needs a distribution over possible psychophysical laws, and there is none. The number is intuition, and intuition about what conscious experience could have been like is exactly the thing nobody has.
  5. Theism explains it by a mind that is itself unexplained. "God wanted experience to fit" is a personal explanation with no mechanism, no prediction, and no constraint; it would equally "explain" disharmony as a test of faith (Popper's Razor). And it posits an unembodied consciousness whose own experiences, presumably, harmonise with nothing physical, which on the argument's own terms is the most improbable arrangement of all.

Notes

I rate this the most interesting new argument for theism in decades, and I note that its existence is a concession: if the older arguments worked, nobody would need it. Its force is parasitic on the hard problem of consciousness, and it is in effect the Argument from Consciousness with a probabilistic engine attached. Where the hard problem goes, this goes with it.

Sources

  • Cutter, B. and Crummett, D., "Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism", Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion 11 (2024; preprint 2022)
  • Chalmers, D., The Conscious Mind (1996), for the dualist framing the argument needs
  • Dennett, D., Consciousness Explained (1991), for the functionalist reply

Also see