This Strawson piece just appeared in the NY Times.
It’s a position that I found attractive long ago. FWIW, I preferred Strawson’s father as a philosopher but I give the son some credit for consistently pushing this position for years. (IIRC, correctly, he also has no sympathy for compatibalism, and is an old-fashioned hard determinist.
What do y’all think?
An excerpt:
Every day, it seems, some verifiably intelligent person tells us that we don’t know what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness, they say, is an awesome mystery. It’s the ultimate hard problem. The current Wikipedia entry is typical: Consciousness “is the most mysterious aspect of our lives”; philosophers “have struggled to comprehend the nature of consciousness.”
I find this odd because we know exactly what consciousness is — where by “consciousness” I mean what most people mean in this debate: experience of any kind whatever. It’s the most familiar thing there is, whether it’s experience of emotion, pain, understanding what someone is saying, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting or feeling. It is in fact the only thing in the universe whose ultimate intrinsic nature we can claim to know. It is utterly unmysterious.
(Edited by Neil Rickert, to avoid possible copyright problems).
Two comments:
(1) I think you should have just provided a link to the NYT page, and perhaps have added a comment or two of your own. There are such things as copyright laws. I’m pretty sure that the NYT page is accessible, because I had already read that page and I am not a paid subscriber and my browser is not logged into the NYT site.
(2) I agree with a lot, but not all, of what G Strawson says. In particular, I don’t see a need for panpsychism.
It’s true that we don’t really know what matter is. That’s why I decline to call myself a materialist. So it’s possible that matter has some sort of “experience”. But so what? If my molecules are having experience, how does that explain anything about why I am having experience? Even if panpsychism is true, I don’t see that it explains anything.
Labels aren’t explanations, in my universe.
I would say we have taken a step toward explanation of consciousness when we can replicate it, say in silicon.
I personally doubt this will happen any time soon. I think we know enough to know that this is hard to do.
Neil Rickert,
I actually saw it reproduced elsewhere on the net and copied it from there, but if your’re worried about it, please feel free to delete as much of the OP as you’d like.
In my comment about labels I did not intend to be negative about the article.
I used to call myself a pantheist, and have done so since about age 12. Another term I’ve used is monist.
I don’t think the free will/determinism debate is useful. Among other problems, it assumes the existence of something doing the willing. Something I’ve called the homunculus, the ghost. Some proponents of determinism have used the argument against the concept of criminal responsibility. Which I think is also a problem.
Anyway, It’s a fun thing to think about. Not sure it leads anywhere.
I’ll wait until we hear from the lawyers.
I like and mostly agree with Strawson’s point. However, like others here, I don’t feel like he actually explained anything or added anything to our current knowledge. In principle, Leibniz and others were (and are) right: we don’t know how or why consciousness emerges from physical particle interactions. To say, “I just does” is unsatisfying. To say, “it therefore cannot be simply physical” is unwarranted. The only solution is continued investigation and modeling. One day we’ll figure it out.
I think it’s right enough, in all likelihood, in that consciousness is what “really happens” vs. what we abstract from watching conscious brains. The latter is just the model, consciousness is what’s happening.
But what does it really explain? What part of brain activity is conscious, and why does it seem that much of brain activity is not conscious? That’s why one has to have some idea of what is conscious and what is not. Cellular activity seems not to be conscious, autonomic functions are generally not conscious (or alternatively may be their own separate consciousnesses). Primarily, it appears that information in nerve firings may be conscious, while other information is not. That’s why I think it’s probably electric fields interacting that can be conscious (in our state–I don’t know if other phenomena could be conscious or not), and then it is likely due to enough synchronicity to make a signal stand out, but with enough differences going on in the underlying fields to register that signal in a dynamic way, that actually produces consciousness in such circumstances.
Strawson seems right enough in my view, but does nothing to differentiate between conscious phenomena and unconscious phenomena, which is how it could gain some actual traction as an explanation.
Glen Davidson
Skinner had what to me is a satisfying explanation fo the unconscious. He said simply that we have no receptors for some bodily functions, and cannot observe or control them. The lack of ability to observe does not make them magic.
We have cyborged some of these hidden operations, and when we can observe them, we can learn to control them. Prosthetics controlled by brain waves, for example.
I certainly agree with Strawson that consciousness is “unmysterious” in the sens that we all have an intimate first-person acquaintance with it. But that doesn’t really address the underlying concern, which is how to reconcile our first-person perspective on the world with our third-person causal explanations of processes in the world.
I also balked at this: physics “tells us a great many facts about the mathematically describable structure of physical reality, facts that it expresses with numbers and equations (e = mc2, the inverse-square law of gravitational attraction, the periodic table and so on) and that we can use to build amazing devices. True, but it doesn’t tell us anything at all about the intrinsic nature of the stuff that fleshes out this structure.”
I wonder if the right conclusion to draw from physics is that there simply is no such thing as “intrinsic nature of stuff” — that the very idea of “intrinsic nature of stuff” itself belongs to phenomenology, not to metaphysics (insofar as we can make a distinction there).
The philosophers who doubt that we really know what conscious experience is are either like Chalmers who, coming from physicalist background, are startled by the discovery that consciousness is not physical or they are those who think it’s somehow virtuous to claim lack of knowledge.
Actually, the problem arises if and when you accept that consciousness is wholly a matter of physical goings-on. Because this cannot be accepted by the definition of “physical”.
On the other hand, we can very well understand why consciousness cannot be wholly a matter of physical goings-on. There’s plenty of physical goings-on in the world that is not conscious. Unless you posit a universal omnipresent mind, but what remains of your monist physicalism when you posit such a thing?
Let’s suppose we don’t know enough about matter to have a good reason to think that consciousness can’t be physical. Do we know enough about matter to have a good reason to think that consciousness can be physical? Arguments from ignorance never seemed particularly convincing to me.
What would that be?
The definition of “physical”? The sum total of phenomena studied by physics. Something like that.
And that would be?
I’d be interested in evidence that consciousness could be non-physical.
Somehow a lot of words get written, but that evidence is never forthcoming.
Glen Davison
E$rick, it would seem to me that you have a circular definition of physical, such that physical means that which cannot account for consciousness.
I don’t think you will find a decent physicist who would exclude consciousness as a physical phenomenon.
Evidence? Let me guess – exclusively physical empirical evidence. None of that logical proof by definitions and concepts, right? You will only be happy when the non-physical consciousness is put in your hand so you can see it with your own eyes.
Yes, some evidence would be nice.
You just have none.
Glen Davidson
Have you found a decent physicist who has something to say about consciousness? Such as how he is studying it in his lab or so. Off the top of my head, Krauss seems to get closest to such claims, but I’m sure we both agree he is not decent.
We might start by asking for an example of a consciousness not associated with a physical brain. Or one not affected by trauma to the brain.
Physicists don’t typically study consciousness. The closest I can think of is Penrose, who is decent, if not correct.
His musings are purely in the realm of the physical.
Eric, just show me an example of a non-physical consciousness.
Or not affected by drugs, lack of O2 (a kind of trauma, I supppose, but one intimately involved with metabolism), by G forces, sleep, and anaesthetics (drugs, but a particular kind).
Yes, it might actually be rather nice if consciousness wasn’t dependent upon a rather delicate structure housed in our skulls, but it never really works out that way (NDEs apparently not being a demonstrable exception).
Glen Davidson
Some might dispute that.
Regardless, he at least seems to think so, hence I agree in principle.
Glen Davidson
You could at least say how it was determined it is non-physical.
So, you found one, but you don’t like him (because he happens to explicitly recognize that physics does not get around to addressing consciousness, just as I said). So be it.
I’m curious: for those who think (heh!) that consciousness is not physical, what do you think it is and what relationship does it have with the brain?
Strawson claims that it’s the physical, not consciousness, that is truly mysterious. (Barbara Montero made this same point in her 1999 article, “The Body Problem”.) I think there is something right here, but not quite where Strawson wants to locate it.
Every case of consciousness with which we acquainted is an embodied consciousness. Non-embodied or disembodied consciousness is neither observed, nor posited on a sufficiently explanatory basis, nor logically proven. This makes it tempting to think that consciousness must be something physical, and that if something is physical, then there must be some explanation couched in the language of actual or future physics.
I think that this temptation should be avoided. From the embodiment of consciousness, we don’t get to the conclusion that consciousness must be physical — not without some additional suppressed premises. The chief premise and the one that I find most problematic is the assumption that biology is reducible to physics. Apart from the confidence of the Unity of Science thesis, we have no good reasons to believe this is true.
A further problem with “the physical” itself, and one that Strawson does not mention, is that we do not have single comprehensive theory of fundamental physics. We have three — general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics — and they are not compatible.
In the absence of a single comprehensive theory of fundamental physics, we are not entitled to say that we know what “the physical” is. And in the absence of actually worked-out “reduction” of organisms to physical systems, we’re not entitled to say that biology is reducible to physics. So even if consciousness is always biological, that does not mean that consciousness must be physical.
Yes, isn’t that strange. It’s dependent on the physical in all aspects where we can test, it isn’t found divorced from the physical (problematic to demonstrate in most cases, but disembodied consciousness could be self-reported and shown to have knowledge that the body couldn’t perceive), and is highly affected by physical substances. Why would we think it’s physical?
This is where it gets annoying for some philosophy to get into matters that are so much better dealt with by science. Yes, we know that consciousness could be an aspect of God or some such thing. It could involve magic, spectral substances, or what-not. Who cares? We go with the evidence in science. We have a lot of evidence of consciousness being dependent on the physical (an interpretation, but one much like other inferences), none for it being dependent on spectral substances or Penrose and Hameroff’s magic QM, and we’ll go with the evidence that it is physical (which is more a catch-all of what is in evidence anyway) so long as that’s what the evidence shows. Come up with something else with compelling evidence, and fine, I’ll listen.
Yes, the usual tacit premises. Problem of induction. We can live with that.
We have great evidence that it’s true, namely that bodies apparently obey thermodynamics and the rest of physics, and a host of explained causation. That we haven’t exhaustively shown it to be the case for every last piece and aspect of physiology may be important to you, but it is not to science.
They are not wholly compatible. They are in fact highly compatible in many aspects, there just are some areas in which incompatibilities arise. That’s hugely different from what you wrote.
So? We wouldn’t anyway. Our physics is the map, not the reality. “The physical” is basically the empirical, to our minds.
Why are you dealing in absolutes? No one is saying that biology has been proven to be reducible to physics, while the apparent fact that it is reducible to physics appears to be a heuristic without a meaningful competitor. If it matters to you that there is some lingering doubt or what-not, fine, but that’s implicit to most of us and it doesn’t trouble us.
Good grief, just because physics isn’t an absolute fact through and through doesn’t mean that we can’t contingently conclude that biology is dependent upon physics? We’ve had conclude/assume that biology is ultimately physics in all useful research thus far (at least any consistent interpretation has had to), and we have no reason to think that consciousness is an exception–and we also have a lot of good circumstantial evidence that it is not.
Glen Davidson
No, he says the same thing as the OP, that our understanding of physics is limited.
He even has images of the structures he thinks are involved. And his mechanism — entanglement — may sound hokey to some, but it is a measurable physical phenomenon.
That’s really to point of the OP, that physics is incomplete.
If you want Tinkerbell to live, show me a consciousness not associated with a physical brain. Otherwise the fairy buys the farm.
What does that even mean.
There is no such thing as a physics that is complete and self-consistent. that’s why the physical is mysterious.
The question is not, what is the Truth; the question is, what is the most effective method of acquiring reliable knowledge.
The only things I’ve ever seen along those lines are in Descartes and Kripke. Kripke focuses on the “could’ there and uses conceivability as his test for possibility. Descartes had said quite similar things–along the lines of
I can doubt that X is F
I can’t doubt that X is G
Therefore, (by Leibniz Law) G isn’t identical to F.
OH MAN! I so want that on a t-shirt!
We all know someone who does study consciousness. She pays for this site.
Why do you say thermodynamics is incompatible with the other two?
Ninety-five percent of everything that is measurable and known to exist by physicists is missing, so to speak. Like Obi-Wan’s Force, it surrounds us and has measurable influence, but is invisible.
I kind of lose patience with woo-meisters who think there is a better way than science for exploring existence.
The usual panpsychist argument is that it is physical (or natural if you prefer to keep physics out of your biology). It’s just our science is incomplete because it does not include an accounting of the panpsychic properties of matter/energy (or quantum fields or whatever is your preferred description of the natural world.)
Some say these panpsychic properties are intrinsic to all matter.
Others say that pansychic properties are strongly emergent only from the right configuration of matter, ie Integrated Information Theory.
I confess, I really don’t understand the connection. Can you elaborate on Kripke’s/Descartes’ assessment?
Well that depends on what you mean by evidence. And what you mean by non-physical.
If you accept philosophical arguments, the standard three are variants of
– The Knowledge Argument (Mary the Color Scientist),
– Philosophical zombies, and the
– Explanatory Gap.
The OP can be read as an example of the gap argument. Kripke’s argument, noted by Walt, can be regarded as trading on the same conceivably=metaphysical possibility premise that P-Zombies uses.
If you prefer your evidence to have a more sciencey flavor (if not substance), try IIT.
I wasn’t limiting my question to panpsychism (although I realize it’s the OP subject). I’m just curious what other folks think it could be.
I really can’t even come up with a reasonable concept outside the physical. The association of consciousness with specific brain activity and, more importantly, biology and chemistry, vastly limit any other possible arrangements. But here’s the kicker for me – if one can come up with some other concept for the basis of consciousness, one must be able to explain how it interacts with the brain such that there’s no impact on known physics (such as the Dirac Equation.) I’ve never seen anyone even try.
Theists toss out the term “soul” like it’s a given no brainer for instance, but even ignoring that such a concept can’t be located in any meaningful sense, nobody seems to be able to come up with two critical characteristics: 1) what does this “soul” actually do either separate from or in addition to the body as a whole or just the brain and 2) how does it (or, in what sense does it) interact with the brain? In other words, assuming this “soul” is not physical in any sense, how does it move atoms around? If it doesn’t, what does it do and what difference does it make? Because, if the “soul” can’t move atoms around, there’s no way it can have any effect on anything either in my body or anything my body is interacting with. Similarly, if it can’t move atoms around, there’s no way it can gain anything from anything my body does.
As an aside, I think Strawson’s description of consciousness is wrong. He says:
Consciousness, as far as I understand it and can describe it, is:
the awareness of experience and the awareness that we experience things
I do not agree that it is all experience. There are plenty of things I’ve experienced that I was not conscious of (thank god!). For example, I know I’ve experienced a number of surgeries, but thankfully I had very limited (if any) awareness of any of them. I was unconscious during those experiences – for good reason.
My personal view here: Matter is not conscious and cannot be conscious. Rather, it is processes that are conscious. In this case, we are particularly concerned with biological processes.
Configuration is also the difference between living and not living. Accumulating configuration is what evolution does and what learning does. There is no change in the quantity of information, only in the configuration.
That seems like a bit of a truism.
There is, I think, a difference between a calculator adding numbers and a person adding numbers. Pretty tricky defining the process.
An analytic philosopher should be good at taking things apart. We have several fundamental theories of physics, so we can take each theory in turn and see whether it detects consciousness. Take the concept of physicality in terms of general relativity and try that way, then quantum mechanics and thermodynamics and try those.
Detecting consciousness resembles detecting design in ID theory. ID is a theory that purports to detect design. On logical grounds it’s impossible. And, sure enough, on scientific grounds the theory has not had much success.
The analogy between ID and those who demand that consciousness is physical is really good, because the same way as IDists yell “Obvious design!” and you can indeed “detect design” in various degrees throughout nature, you can also observe consciousness in various degrees, leading to the impression that it could be physical.
But this cannot be, on logical grounds. Matter is by definition inert and behaves absolutely deterministically. Consciousness isn’t and doesn’t. If such-and-such physical phenomenon or process, say a brainwave, were identical to either consciousness, a thought or a memory, then it would follow straightforwardly that brain surgeons are mind-readers. Since we have neuroscientists who do brain surgery as we speak, we must have reports of them doing mind-reading as we speak. They should know the patient’s thoughts better than the patient, because the surgeon can see the brain “directly”, the patient doesn’t. But instead, phrenology has been judged a pseudoscience as we speak.
For me, logical grounds are sufficient. Those who are unhappy with logic, good luck in your continuing pursuit of detecting consciousness. Give back phrenology its honorable name.
Still, it’s a good question how consciousness and brain are related, because they strongly seem to be. I say that they are related indirectly. The skin is not directly related to the sense of touch and the eye is not directly related to the sense of vision, because if they were, you would need only the skin to have a sense of touch and merely the eye to have a sense of vision, but in fact you need nerves connecting the organs to the brain and you need the entire chain of the organs to be alive – this is how the particular organ by itself is only indirect or peripheral to the corresponding sense-function. I say that it’s the same with the brain. The brain is just a peripheral organ to that which animates and enlivens it and uses it for mental activity and cogitation.
I’m making things easy for you. You don’t need to detect consciousness physically and photograph it to disprove me. Logical refutation will be enough.
I actually find panpsychism to be very attractive. I would guess that it and pantheism are probably the default starting point for humanity.
I would hold to some form of these positions myself if it weren’t for
……………..wait for it …………………
revelation
peace
In a nutshell, Descartes argues:
I can doubt that my body exists.
But I can’t doubt that I exist.
Therefore (by Leibniz’ Law) I am not my body.
Kripke makes basically the same argument, but does so in terms of conceivability, C-fibers, and pain.
As you expect, I would take issue with the analogy.
It’s quite right to say that a sense organ — the skin, the eyes, etc. — takes on a cognitive function only by virtue of being integrated into a whole system that actively organizes the information being generated by the sense-receptors, correlates that with other sources of information, prepares and executes motor outputs, and compares the information generated by those outputs with the information being relayed through sensory channels.
That part of what you said (though you didn’t put it exactly that way) is perfectly fine.
Where I balk is at the suggestion that the brain is itself just another sensory organ, like the skin or eyes, that stands in need of some further cognitive agent. It is as if the brain itself isn’t enough but needs another brain, just as the skin needs the brain.
And that’s the move that does not make sense to me. If the brain can do all the work of functionally integrating information across multiple sensory receptors and motor responses, then why does there need to be some additional cognitive agent in the picture at all? What explanatory work is this homunculus doing? Why can’t the living organism itself just be the cognitive agent?
You start with “on logical grounds”. But the rest of that paragraph reads like the biggest pile of horse manure that I have read all day.
But I did laugh, so I’ll give it a humor award.
The big issue is they decided we don’t have a soul. What conscience is was never a issue in the bible or the ancient or Christian world. jUst a immaterial soul in contact with our body and so senses of the world.
Its not a mystery.
walto:
And of course Plantinga’s argument which we discussed at length here:
An astonishingly lame argument from Alvin Plantinga