Consciousness Condensed (II)

Welcome back to part two of my summary of a three hour video covering Robert Kuhn's mighty overview of 325+ theories of consciousness. In part one I looked at materialism, non-reductive physicalism, quantum theories, and (sort of) integrated information theory. In this concluding part I'll look at the remaining categories, then summarise some of the recurring themes that crop up throughout the video, and finally offer some of my own conclusions.

1) The Theories, Continued

5) Panpsychism

Back on more familiar ground, panpsychist theories say that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of some or all parts of reality. I've always felt this is a bit of a cop-out : rather than explaining how minds form, we simply make electrons conscious. Which feels like a cure which is worse than the disease, or at least more radical. I don't rule it out as being true – not at all – I just fail to see how it helps to explain anything. 

Kuhn says that the biggest problem for panpsychism is how consciousnesses in this scenario combine. We're made of atoms, each of which is apparently conscious to some small degree (though not sapient or even sentient), so why do we experience a singular consciousness ? This is the opposite problem for idealism (category 8) which has problems in differentiating different consciousnesses. Kuhn, incidentally, isn't convinced that either of them can solve these problems.

Panpsychism, says Kuhn, is sometimes described as a stepping stone to idealism, though he isn't convinced this is the case... it might depend on one's starting perspective. To me panpsychism says that matter has consciousness whereas idealism holds that matter is made of consciousness. I suppose that if you take it to the ultimate extreme of making every single physical thing conscious, then panpsychism might approximate to something like idealism, but in general the ideas feel quite distinct.

6) Monism

There is only one thing, or at least one sort of stuff, one sort of base building material. Physicalism and idealism are both monisms, to the point where they easily start to blur. Both say that what appear at first glance to be distinct (consciousness and the physical world) only do so because of different perspectives; what looks like consciousness/physical material is only because that's what matter/mental constructs appear like in different conditions.

As per numerous posts here, I'm highly sympathetic to neutral monism  : the idea that reality is neither consciousness nor matter but some unknown third stuff. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that neither materialism not idealism even make conceptual sense. We can't know the world except through our mental representations of it, so as soon as we say "consciousness is all there is" or "matter is all there is", we've said we can't distinguish between the two... in which case we've declared that neither mind nor matter have any distinctive meaning from each other. They're all, according to both positions, exactly the same stuff, so what difference does it make what we call that stuff ? We can only know it through our minds, so even trying to separate them feels hopeless.

Neutral monism at least acknowledges that we can't really know the fundamental nature of reality. The appeal of this to me is that both physicalism and idealism posit that we know something about both mind and matter and that's how we can say what either is truly like, which feels paradoxical since we have nothing but our minds through which to know the world. Neutral monism avoids this problem entirely.

7) Dualism

Substance dualism we've essentially covered already, the idea that both mind and matter are different kinds of "stuff". The problem – arguably – is that if they're so fundamentally distinct, how can they ever possibly interact ?

I'd like to suggest that this isn't much of a problem at all. If the stuff of mind is really non-physical*, then by definition it isn't bound by physical laws. So why would something not restricted by the laws of physics have any problem in controlling physical materials ? Indeed, anything above physics would be precisely that which is able to set physical laws... which is perhaps why Kuhn mentions this in the context of many Western religions.

* Although in some ways substance dualism somewhat misses the point of non-physicalism. The very word "substance" implies something with distinct properties, measurable features, quantifiable and analysable. Something truly non-physical has none of this. English, however, is ill-equipped to deal with the very concept of something immeasurable, to the point where it becomes almost inexpressible.

The remaining lesser difficulty would be not how consciousness interacts with matter at all, but why it apparently does so only in a coherent, relatively predictable fashion : we can't wish things into physical being; our minds only have any influence very locally in controlling how we move our limbs and suchlike (I'll here omit the discussions of the supernatural, which Kuhn takes more credibly than I do). 

But the interview mentions the other variant of property dualism. Whereas neutral monism claims that mind and matter are the same thing under different perspectives, property dualism says that they're still fundamentally different aspects of the same stuff. For example, it's difficult to see how, say, transparency and hardness could possibly be the same thing just from a different perspective, but it's far easier to simply describe them as different properties of the same thing.

Kuhn is clearly sympathetic to dualism, and notes that it's a minority view among scientists and philosophers but common among the public (I, for one, cling to common sense on this). He also mentions the idea of emergent dualism, in which the physical world has primacy but complexity allows the non-physical to arise via overarching rules. All of which is very similar to non-reductive physicalism, so why he's less keen on this one isn't all clear.

8) Idealism

Just as materialism comes in many flavours, so too does the concept that the world is made of consciousness. Berkleian idealism has all the world as the imagination of God, whereas others have it that everything is only the stuff of consciousness rather than an actual dream of a singular entity. As mentioned, in what way this is distinct from materialism isn't at all clear : both feel like they're really just labels for the same different material, with one being more appealing to scientific and the other to spiritual mindsets.

One major difference is that we can certainly imagine physical material : if we can't explain how matter comes from mind, then the reverse is not true. But just as it isn't easy under dualism to explain how a non-physical mind only acts under strict physical limitations, so with idealism it's even less clear why we get an apparently coherent, consistent, rigorous picture of reality. At least, not without degenerating back into materialism or neutral monism. Idealism also has the problem of keeping consciousnesses separate, the opposite of the difficulty for panpsychism (although since our whole understanding of physics would appear to be, in this case, built on sand, maybe this isn't such a big deal).

Kuhn describes how idealism has seen a resurgence in recent years, which to him is fine apart from people trying to use it to use their religious texts to explain science. Fair enough, as is – in my view – the recognition that materialism isn't working.

2) The Themes

Every theory makes a leap of faith. Every position requires accepting something inherently unprovable. For materialism you have to say that what appear to be incredibly distinct phenomena – the material and the mental, experiential – are actually at some level one and the same, that qualia are somehow nothing more than a configuration of atoms and fields. For idealism you have to accept the world is made of literally the stuff of dreams yet somehow coherent and ordered. For dualism you accept something inexplicable about reality. For panpsychism you allow electrons to have awareness... and so on.

All theories, says Kuhn, also have an identity problem, with the possible exception of idealism. All of them point to something and say, "that's consciousness !" even though it might appear as nothing more than a bunch of neurons or copper wires or fluctuating fields. Idealism neatly avoids that by saying everything is consciousness, although how everything remains so clearly differentiable is another matter. Apart from that, how we're supposed to know what consciousness is just by looking at it... well, good luck with that.

Kuhn returns repeatedly to the idea of thinking scientifically even when not doing bona fide science, an notion I'm strongly drawn to. That is, not all things are subjectable to measurable, repeat testing with control experiments : you can't quantify guilt or measure mercy in any meaningful sense. But you can be scientific in your approach to understanding these issues, by being logical and clear, always stating your reasoning process so it be be subject to external scrutiny. We can still examine each other's inferences even if we can't repeat all the events that led us to a particular belief. 

Where Kuhn and I diverge is that he thinks there's some merit in parapsychology but we should stop trying to hold it to the rigorous standards of ordinary science; I might have agreed when I was a lot younger, but I've more or less given up on it completely. Plenty of mysteries remain unanswered, but UFOs and telepathy are not among them. Morality, on the other hand, this indeed we cannot treat as a scientific discipline, but it certainly isn't nonsense. And of course, if you believe the Hard Problem really is a problem, then this too points to a kind of everyday magic that demands investigation; it forces an awkward confrontation between our daily presumptions and intellectual beliefs. I agree with Kuhn that it may be the key to Ultimate Reality, so to speak.

Kuhn rejects the idea that the problem is unsolvable. The problem, he repeats, is not that we have too many theories, it's that we're missing the one that matters. None are sufficient to be widely convincing, still less to be considered scientific. His own preference – which he's only reluctantly drawn on – is a sort of dualism/idealism mash-up, where the non-physical has primacy but the physical world isn't an illusion. Failing that he favours some variety of a quantum explanation, and third on the list is (rather surprisingly) illusionism... which might be a case of admitting defeat entirely.

The video ends rather nicely by noting that these issues cut across the great divides of humanity. This is a common issue that people of all backgrounds have speculated on probably since humans were first able to think about something beyond the next meal. Sometimes the discussions become fraught and we realise that our thinking is so far apart that any reconciliation looks hopeless, but at least even in these cases we usually agree that there's an interesting problem to be solved. You do, however, have to at least agree that there is indeed a difficulty in our understanding. It's fascinating to me that there are people who think there isn't a problem at all – I just wish I knew what the bloody hell they were on about.

What I find especially strange is the idea that panpsychism actually explains anything. Again, I don't say it isn't true. But saying that "experience is just a thing that happens to all matter" is to try and have one's cake and eat it too, trying to claim (in effect) : "it's fundamental, deal with it". At least dualism acknowledges the difficulty head-on. Saying "it's just experience" is to catastrophically and inexplicably miss the point that that experience is hard to explain. I sense an unbridgeable gulf here : either you get the problem of why mental experience seems so profoundly different to the physical, or you don't*.

* Perhaps not quite unbridgeable though. I've had some success with ChatGPT – more than in many online discussions with real people or by reading philosophical articles – in getting it to explain to me how materialism is a sensible position. I may or may not follow up on this at some point.

I shall end this post with some revised thoughts on my own perspective. If you've ever read any of the philosophy posts on this blog, you'll know I strongly favour some variety of dualism, followed by neutral monism, and I suppose if I had to pick a third it might be non-reductive physicalism. 

After this video... I think I have to swing considerably towards just giving up entirely. Joseph Needham pointed out that we can't use our mental representations to understand themselves : we only have access to our mental imagery, so trying to understand those representations themselves is doomed in its circularity. By definition, we cannot know the true structure of matter, so trying to say we can get explain mind via our models of atoms and suchlike is hopeless because those models are themselves mere mental constructs.

Contrary to the post linked above, I now think that this does a lot more than shoot a hole in materialism. I think it might make the whole endeavour ultimately futile and we have little chance of any certainty whatever. We're forever trapped in our mental prisons.

Yet, more optimistically, I'm still drawn to dualism. Science only lets us explain that which is observable. Dualism does not posit there's anything wrong with that, it only relegates consciousness to the status of the non-observable things we know have some level of existence : guilt, yellowness, ennui. Nothing mystical about any of them, nor do they undermine science in any way. Dualism says overtly that here is something we cannot tackle scientifically. In doing so it isn't posing a "god of the gaps" difficulty, because the specificity of the issue is clearly defined. It does not say that anything mysterious must be supernatural, but rather says that this is beyond our comprehension – just as calculus is beyond the capabilities of a frog. It doesn't mean a frog has no understanding at all, just that this issue, for some very good reasons in my view, isn't something the poor froggy will ever make any progress with. 

And perhaps that comfortably fences-off the uncertainty, keeping it in a narrow domain where it won't cause any real trouble. Within our observables, understanding, clarity, and even true certainty remain possible. Again, I need to revisit the whole "non-foundational models" thing.

Dualism humbly acknowledges our own limitations. Yes, it says, there's a problem in that we can't understand how things interact (but see above), but so what ? We know that they do interact, and that's enough. It forbids us no explanatory power in explaining the observables, but says that when we get to things we cannot observe, science fails us. It will be very interesting indeed to see, as we probe on ever larger and smaller scales, if our understanding of science ever really changes, snaps and breaks into something new, or if we simply keep quantifying things with every greater accuracy and precision. Personally I'm hoping for the former.