Platonic turtles all the way down

The article's title belies the author's intent, but it's still a very good article. Panpsychism is a popular concept. Articles range from the desperately religious (the notion that we're all "shards in the mind of God"), the miserably stupid (in which the author absurdly confuses "possible" with "probable"), right up to the intelligent and philosophical (noting that conscious experiences and relational properties are fundamentally different from discrete physical objects).

Max Tegmark boldly claims that “protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars” are all redundant “baggage.” Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behaviour of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself. For Tegmark, the universe is a “set of abstract entities with relations between them". He attributes existence solely to descriptions, while incongruously denying the very thing that is described in the first place. Matter is done away with and only information itself is taken to be ultimately real. This abstract notion, called information realism is philosophical in character, but it has been associated with physics from its very inception.

By way of analogy, it is possible to write—as Lewis Carroll did—that the Cheshire Cat’s grin remains after the cat disappears, but it is another thing entirely to conceive explicitly and coherently of what this means. To say that information exists in and of itself is akin to speaking of spin without the top, of ripples without water, of a dance without the dancer, or of the Cheshire Cat’s grin without the cat. It is a grammatically valid statement devoid of sense; a word game less meaningful than fantasy, for internally consistent fantasy can at least be explicitly and coherently conceived of as such.

Whereas vagueness may be defensible in regard to natural entities conceivably beyond the human ability to apprehend, it is difficult to justify when it comes to a human concept, such as information. We invented the concept, so we either specify clearly what we mean by it or our conceptualisation remains too vague to be meaningful. In the latter case, there is literally no sense in attributing primary existence to information.

Well, the map is not the territory and all that. Language, with the dubious exception of mathematics, in an inevitably imperfect description of the world around us. We all of us know (or think we know) at some level what the difference is between physical objects and non-physical concepts. Yet trying to describe the difference with any degree of rigour is bloody difficult. If information is all there is, if it's just descriptions and descriptions of descriptions - a latter-day "turtles all the way down" approach combined with Platonic Forms, then that hardly seems to make sense of the world. So far as we can tell, the Universe seems to obey very strict rules. Replacing its components from physical to non-physical feels like a pointless linguistic sleight-of-hand, a sophistic tactic that doesn't actually achieve anything but sounds damn good.

The untenability of information realism, however, does not erase the problem that motivated it to begin with: the realisation that, at bottom, what we call “matter” becomes pure abstraction, a phantasm. How can the felt concreteness and solidity of the perceived world evaporate out of existence when we look closely at matter?

To make sense of this conundrum, we don’t need the word games of information realism. Instead, we must stick to what is most immediately present to us: solidity and concreteness are qualities of our experience. The world measured, modelled and ultimately predicted by physics is the world of perceptions, a category of mentation. The phantasms and abstractions reside merely in our descriptions of the behaviour of that world, not in the world itself.

The mental universe exists in mind but not in your personal mind alone. Instead, it is a transpersonal field of mentation that presents itself to us as physicality—with its concreteness, solidity and definiteness—once our personal mental processes interact with it through observation. This mental universe is what physics is leading us to, not the hand-waving word games of information realism.

I think the author is playing their own word games here. The heart of the issue is the difference between physical, real objects like chairs and atoms and sausages, and relational properties like velocity and justice. My own take is that these non-physical properties clearly do exist and influence us, though exactly how that happens I leave as a cheerful mystery. The point, though, is that saying, "it's just a subjective experience", or the notion that consciousness is just our experience of the world, (or even an emergent property) gets us nowhere. What the hell is an experience ? Why should I perceive some electrochemical flows but not others ? Do calculators have thoughts ? Do plants ? What do we mean by "non-physical" ? It's often taken to mean something like a ghost, which has something very similar to physical reality but on another "plane", whatever that means. Yet emergent properties, or concepts like justice and colour and mischievousness, are clearly something very different again  - they are much more subtle than merely being a different kind of physical.

No, I don't find the author's argument that it's just our experience at all convincing. It is obvious that our descriptions and perceptions are not the same as the things themselves (Plato worked that one out in depth). That gets us no closer to understanding what the difference between things and our perception of things really is, let alone perception itself.

Physics Is Pointing Inexorably to Mind

In his 2014 book, Our Mathematical Universe, physicist Max Tegmark boldly claims that "protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars" are all redundant "baggage." Only the mathematical apparatus used to describe the behavior of matter is supposedly real, not matter itself.