Science beyond science

Rather than doing each one individually, here's a summary of a selection of the latest batch of "we have no idea what consciousness is" posts. Recently I was very impressed with the way philosopher Bernardo Kastrup dealt with the stupid idea that consciousness is a mere illusion, that we just think we're thinking but not actually thinking. Unfortunately I have less praise for his other musings, which seem, by and large, strange and pointless.


First, in this essay he goes on at length about why he doesn't like panpsychism, the idea that everything has some rudimentary form of consciousness. Since no-one has ever been able to explain how subjective experience arises from objective physical processes, panpsychists posit that consciousness itself is a base property like charge or mass. Thus an electron can be said to possess some very rudimentary awareness. Consciousness, in this view, simply is.

This of course ducks the question and doesn't explain anything at all. That's not to say it isn't true, but if we resorted to saying, "it's a fundamental property of nature" whenever we found anything we couldn't explain... well, it'd make my PowerPoint presentations a lot shorter.

To be fair, Kastrup takes a novel angle of attack on panpsychism by looking at the double-slit experiment. If subatomic particles don't have discrete locations, then what happens to their consciousness when they pass through a slit ? It's a good question, but I'm not seeing how this helps. We already know we don't understand either consciousness or wave-particle duality, so it seems a bit weird to say that this splitting constitutes any kind of a difficulty.

Where I think he goes really wrong (but again he does it in an interesting way) is to blur the lines between panpsychism and idealism - the notion that everything is part of a greater consciousness, that we are all, in effect, shards in the mind of God (or subroutines in a computer program if that's your thing). Whereas panpsychism is an attempt to reconcile the different natures of awareness and physicality by allowing both to exist, idealism goes a step further, saying that this can't be done. Although the problem of getting subjective consciousness out of objective matter has stumped humanity since the dawn of time, there's no problem going the other way around. While so-called illusionists say that there's no such thing as consciousness, idealists go to the opposite extreme and say there's no such thing as matter.

Kastrup says that quantum effects blur the distinctions between panpsychism and idealism :

Panpsychism is physically coherent only if the quantum field is conscious as a whole, as a unitary subject. And because the field doesn’t have spatial boundaries, panpsychism implies universal consciousness and fails to explain our own personal subjectivities. 

Leaving aside the thorny issue of what the "quantum field" actually is for now, it would seem very strange for Kastrup to dismiss panpsychism because of its problem of universal consciousness and then embrace idealism, but that's exactly what he does.

There is nothing absurd about this theory; the common impression that there is is just a knee-jerk reaction of our current intellectual habits. As a matter of fact, the theory is arguably the most parsimonious, internally consistent and empirically sound view yet devised. Importantly, as I have extensively discussed elsewhere, idealism—unlike panpsychism—can explain how our private, personal subjectivities arise within universal consciousness.

Maddeningly that's the end of the post, and he links only to a book. So he essentially refuses to tell us why idealism is any better than panpsychism despite having argued himself into the corner of saying that it's basically the same thing. Never mind that idealism says "it's all a dream", which explains everything and nothing.

Personally, I think it's more useful at this stage to keep panpsychism and idealism separate : we just don't understand enough about quantum effects to incorporate them yet. I'd define things as follows :

• Panpsychism : the notion that the consciousness is a fundamental property than can be possessed by pretty much anything.
• Idealism : the notion that there are no physical substances, only manifestations of subjective awareness; everything is a sort of objective illusion.
• Eliminativism/illusionism : everything is materialistic and consciousness doesn't actually exist at all in any sense.
• I don't know the technical term for it, but the much more common idea that consciousness exists and is non-physical but can only arise from specific, complex physical processes.

That last one is an example of dualism, but a very particular sort - not the Descartian version in which conscious was posited as a distinct "substance". Reading the Meditations, I found it interesting how literally Descartes seemed to take that : the Descartian ghost is more like another variety of ordinary matter than anything truly different.

But I digress. In a second post Kastrup attacks materialism. At least, coming from an idealist, this is a bit more self-consistent. But he forgets that few, if any, materialists are so literal as to believe that all things must have physical substance - it's only the extremist fringe who think we're not really thinking. The vast majority accept that there are non-physical components that they may or may not think they can explain  - they are dualist, albeit in a very limited sense. So when he says, "our very sentience contradicts materialism", there is no kind of amazing revelation here. Everyone knew this already. That's the whole problem !

More bizarre is his claim that sentience contradicts evolution. He has a truly odd way of reasoning this :

All chains of cause and effect in nature [according to materialism] must be describable purely in terms of quantities. Whatever isn’t a quantity cannot be part of our physical models and therefore—insofar as such models are presumed to be causally-closed—cannot produce effects. According to materialism, all functions rest on quantities.

I know of no reason why this would be. If you can't quantify it, it can't affect you ? That's as daft as illusionism; I can't quantify how annoyed I am by astrology or homeopathy but it definitely affects me. I have no problem with the claim that we can't construct scientific models of non-quantifiable properties (which is not to say that we can't make any models at all), but to say "and therefore it can't be a thing" is pretty stupid. That's not what materialism says, except for a handful of lunatics. I call straw man.


The author of Why Evolution Is True gets pretty irritated by all this, but hasn't done their homework, and thinks Kastrup is a panpsychist. They clearly lean towards the stronger aspect of materialism, which is fine, but I have no truck with their claim that panpsychists are simply "nuts"*. Certainly consciousness might be a product of complex material interactions. But to say that this "explains" anything is missing the whole point. How does the non-physical arise from the physical ? That's the issue. Saying, "it just does" is not satisfactory, and is at best a description, not an explanation. "Panpsychism of the gaps" ? Hardly. It's the same mystery there's always been. No-one has moved any goalposts, we've simply been trying to work out where they are. As with so-called AI, I haven't heard a single thing that suggests materialists have made the slightest progress in understanding consciousness. All they do and have ever done is find ever-more elaborate ways of saying, "consciousness is affected by external reality". Slow clap for that.

* Look, no-one is saying that everything has the same kind or level of consciousness. An electron need not have the same rich inner life as a philosopher, or experience pain or emotion - which is what the WEIT author seems to presume.

Or in other words, all of the possibilities for consciousness have crazy implications. Their problems are different, but they're no less weird and difficult for that.

That's why I've linked at the end an article by the notorious Deepak Chopra. Yes, he may well be a nutter, but I tend to agree with what he's written here at least. I reserve judgement on how mysterious consciousness really is or whether it requires a new kind of science to understand, but I'm fully sympathetic to the view that it's an everyday miracle : it is qualitatively different from anything observable, defies analysis, yet demonstrably exists. I think it's entirely credible to suggest a scientific revolution could be lurking here, even without having the foggiest idea of what shape that could take, or, equally, to say that it's something forever beyond our comprehension.

Physics Must Evolve Beyond the Physical

Deepak Chopra Contemporary physics finds itself pondering questions about mind and consciousness, an uncomfortable area for theorists. But historically, key figures at the founding of quantum theory assumed that reality was composed of two parts, mind and matter, which interacted with each other according to some new laws that they specified.