The Coherence of Cosmic Minddust?
An Ideal Monism Versus Soulless Dualism
2.0 Chalmers' diagnosis of the failure of consciousness to
supervene logically - and not just naturally - on an
exhaustive specification of the world's microphysical
interactions leads to his most startling and
controversial contention. He argues for a scientifically
respectable sort of dualism. At this point, many
commentators will just mentally switch off, or at least
start preening their hackles. So it's worth stressing
that in Chalmers' hands the doctrine is stripped of any
Cartesian, theological and interactionist implications.
Indeed, on one of his canvassed options, it's at least
weakly epiphenomenalist. At the risk of giving too great
a nod to mob-psychology, something
remarkably similar to epiphenomenalism is probably the
working hypothesis of most practising scientists, even avowed
physicalists.
2.1 As will be seen, however, there is one other candidate
for a unitary monist ontology open to the science-savvy
philosopher with strong nerves and a thick skin. For
Chalmers' honest embrace of what materialists deride as
the ultimate philosophical doomsday scenario stems from
the alleged failure of every conceivable monism to
accommodate the evidence. It's argument could be sound
only if we've got our supervenience base right. If our
conception of the ultimate "low-level" facts is wrong,
then a reductive explanation of human minds is
potentially feasible. The ontological unity of science
can still be salvaged; or even enshrined, according to taste.
This proposal isn't nearly as far-fetched as it sounds. The
historical track-record of science-derived candidates for
ontological primitives is poor. Indeed, on all but purely
and vacuously causal notions of reference, then the
record is dismal; and reference-failure is historically
the norm. True believers in scientific progress can of
course point to ever-greater predictive and explanatory
power, mathematically unified description, aeroplanes that
fly and working video-recorders, etc. Paradigm-enthusiasts, on the other hand, will adopt a less
triumphalist tone. They can't see how to dispense with
descriptivist notions of reference altogether; and having
always been wrong before doesn't entail one is now right.
Paradigm-fanciers tend to scorn the simple-minded
Whiggism and rational reconstructionist fables colouring the text-books. They are far more impressed by the dis-continuities
in our notions of the stuff of the world. What's the
point in getting the formulae right if you fundamentally
don't know what you're talking about?
2.2 At any rate, these days dualism of any kind is not an
option a scientifically well-versed philosopher takes on
lightly. Chalmers is clearly very well-versed. He isn't a
wanton mystery-monger either. Understandably, he doesn't exactly
relish the "dualist" label. It brings too much extraneous
philosophical baggage. Only his intellectual integrity, I
suspect, leads him to use it at all. On the PR front, he
might have done better politically to use a different
tag - perhaps some sort of pan-informationalist monism
with two irreducible attributes - though in fact
that position is only one of his options and perhaps does too great a
violence to language. Anyway, Chalmers generally endorses, rightly I
think, the experimentally well-attested causal closure of
the physical world. Causal closure is normally
interpreted as imposing a brutally effective constraint
on the metaphysical excesses of qualia-freaks and their
allies. It also puts paid to apologists for divine
interventionism; though down here at the research-labs members of the living dead are
disturbingly frequent callers to the doorsteps of Lower Rock Gardens. So Chalmers
first carefully examines all the scientifically-informed
options before tacking his own ontological colours to the
mast.
2.3 The positive theory of consciousness he outlines is
courageously unfashionable. Indeed one fears its public
advocacy may set a professionally dangerous example to
untenured junior academics. The account is non-reductive.
Yet it still aspires to be explanatory. It takes the
guise of a non-Cartesian dualism based schematically on:
- first, principles of structural coherence and
organizational invariance: a sort of non-reductive
functionalism. Systems with the same functional
organization as a conscious system will also be
conscious;
- second, a double-aspect view of information.
Information,"a difference that makes a difference"
is fundamental to the Chalmers cosmos. He extends
Shannon's technical, non-semantic, bit-capacity
definition of information so it embraces both a physical
and an experiential element. Daringly, he suggests that
perhaps wherever there is any form of causal interaction
there is also experience.
2.4 Inevitably these concepts will need to bear an awful lot
of weight. It is a tribute to Chalmers' good-natured
assault on fraying materialist orthodoxy that the range
of conceivable options on the contemporary ideological
agenda has now been widened.
2.5 Chalmers also treats with admirable respect, however, a
radically conservative family of options for naturalising
consciousness within an ontologically unitary scientific
world-picture. One of the offshoots of this family
consists in a mathematico-physically formalised species
of panpsychism. A naturalistic panpsychism embraces, or
can be construed as embracing, the technical apparatus of
theoretical gr/qc physics in its entirety. There's no
need to start adding unknown fields and forces. There's
no need, and in fact it's grossly unprincipled, to start
messing up the symmetry of the [relativised] Universal
Schrodinger Equation by invoking collapsing wave
functions. Such manoeuvres are unphysical and hopelessly
ad hoc. They are no way to work awkward anomalies of
consciousness back into the plot.
2.6 Within a panpsychist framework, and in current analytic
idiom, everything that exists "supervenes" on the
properties of the world's elemental qualia-stuff. This
elemental what-it's-likeness is the primordial "fire"
whose behaviour the QM field-theoretic etc apparatus
mathematically describes. It's an idea which may take an
intellectually traumatised ex-materialist some getting
use to; but then time heals, or so one is told.
2.7 Unsurprisingly, the traditional keepers of the scientific
canon are unlikely to roll over and surrender its official
interpretation without a fight. Philosophical trespassing
on the physicists' tribal domain has a habit of provoking
disciplinary turf-wars. The philosophers usually lose; or
at least blink first. No one, in any case, is going to
get treated as a fount of oracular wisdom if they find
mending the toaster a major technological challenge. Yet
the historical precedents for decoupling a scientific
formalism from its received ontology are strong. This is
so even (or arguably especially) within the discipline of
physics itself (cf the classical paradigm versus quantum
mechanics etc). It's not as though the property of
insentience were somehow written into, or formally
entailed by anything explicitly represented within, the
canonical formalism. Nor does insentience serve any
unique functional role in biology. What's it good for?
What fresh predictions does the hypothesis lead to? Why
commit oneself to an unverifiable piece of metaphysical
speculation which runs counter to the only piece of
direct knowledge of the world one has? In fact, just so
long as its constituents are functionally well-disposed,
there doesn't seem anything that bits of field-theoretic
what-it's-likeness couldn't do just as well instead.
2.8 Incendiary rubbish? Well, what our descendants conceive
of as "science" may involve a very alien metaphysic to
our own. Certainly, some ideas are too useful not to be
rescued from their ancestors. In particular, the
experimental method and the use of mathematics in
understanding and manipulating the stuff of the world are
too important as techniques of inquiry to be left to the
ideological materialists who currently dominate
the traditional intellectual power-structures. Happily, the
Net is allowing untutored barbarians into the gates of
the scholarly citadel; and the vagaries of keyword info-hunting via manipulable search-engines offer an
unrivalled opportunity to corrupt unindoctrinated
youth.
2.9 At its most Idealistic extreme, a panpsychist approach
assumes that the values of a minimal, intrinsic and
ontologically primitive what-it's-likeness are
exhaustively encoded by the solutions to field-theoretic
equation(s) of the Theory of Everything. The maths says
it all. There's no need to import anything else and graft
it on, or for that matter to spin anything else
irreducible off. We live in a Multiverse where
mathematical literalism works. We're just not much better
than medieval numerologists at deciphering the
significance of the formulae. Like aspirant sorcerers,
too, we know that getting the magical symbols even
slightly wrong can sometimes have catastrophic practical
consequences.
2.10 On a panpsychist account, composite mental states are
shifting coalitions of elemental psychons - though not in
Eccles' original sense of the term. These minimal bits of
what-it's-likeness are scarcely Leibnizian monads either.
And they're certainly not little classically well-behaved
psychic billiard-balls. For rather than forming, as one
might pre-reflectively suppose any such properties ought to,
pointillist aggregates of consciousness - mere psychotic
patterns of discrete subjectivity - organic minds
exemplify instead a fleeting and classically inexplicable
unity.
How come? This is currently an area of active research
and spirited debate. So here's a breathlessly biased,
one-paragraph whistle-stop tour.
2.11 Chalmers, wearing his pan-informationist hat, suggests the unity of consciousness may be explicable by the way types of information is processed (p 309 is tantalisingly brief). On the other hand, the "grainlessness" of DNA-driven
experiential manifolds may just conceivably be explicable by the non-additive
nature of quantum mechanical wave-functions. As Seager
stresses, invoking QM can't generate consciousness
de novo. What it can do is show how the stuff of the
world can be non-additively re-arranged into
phenomenological minds. If this is what the equations are
telling us, then primitive psychons form superpositions
in the quantum mechanical sense. A superposition of
states itself forms a genuinely new state with properties
different from the properties of the mixture. Hence
quantum wholes are not just the sum of their parts and
we're more than a handful of minddust. So William James,
who coined the term, was wrong. Next, co-opting and adapting a
no-collapse interpretation of Hameroff's work for our
purposes, interesting human mental states may be
unwittingly manifesting a macro- or meso-scopic quantum
coherence which orthodoxy assumes they're too
hot to handle. Unitary experience, on this conception,
derives from formally identical panpsychist analogues of
tubulin states of microtubules. The biophysical details
are still somewhat speculative.
2.12 In a less conservative vein, one may predict that in
distant millennia larger and more sustained coherent
states will self-organise into phenomenologically richer,
subtler, vaster, more intense, more self-aware and
unimaginably more interesting virtual worlds than
the cartoonish patterns our minds exemplify at present. No longer
will most of our consciousness get sculpted into
functional analogues of brute insentience - medium-sized
dry objects in the service of selfish DNA. Nor, more
generally, will the different modalities of experience be essentially
geared to modelling the immediate environment of a
genetic host organism in a way which tends to promote its
reproductive success. The next few billion years of
consciousness, however, is a topic which might take us
further afield.
2.13 Of course, the physicists' canonical equations aren't
standardly construed as encoding the interrelationships
of fields of micro-qualia. Transposing the idiom of
physics into talk of e.g. symmetry-transformations of
subjectivity etc, sounds more like a recipe for
schizophrenic word-salad than a plea for scientifically-informed philosophy. At least until figures of
Chalmers' calibre started giving panpsychist conjectures
a respectful if cautiously dissentient hearing, a
willingness to grant the existence of consciousness
anywhere phylogenetically "lower" than about worms [if
perhaps not as high as Daniel Dennett] belonged to the
scientific lunatic-fringe. Many practising scientists
would still be suitably scandalised; and they'd
cheerfully consign the very idea to the madhouse once more. It is so
obviously wrong. If, however, the canonical
mathematics describes a world whose animating fire is
unknown, then there's nothing on current evidence to rule
out the parsimonious hypothesis that the intrinsic nature
of everything is sentience. This property alludes
not to some ethereal wisp of consciousness tacked on to
inert atoms, strings, p-branes, strings, fields etc. Or rather
that's emphatically not the version of panpsychism
canvassed here. The property consists instead in minimal,
self-intimating what-it's-likeness itself.
2.14 This switch in perspective may seem pretty radical. In
other ways it's exceedingly conservative. Today's book of stories just gets
re-translated. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics work just as well with a different sort of stuff. Simple self-replicating patterns within the
primordial field-theoretic what-it's likeness eventually
come to function as structurally invariant analogues of the
Darwinian materialist's genotype/phenotype model. Self-reproducing, information-bearing patterns of quasi-discrete, base-paired micro-sentience have stumbled
across one highly effective way of leaving more copies of
themselves. They don't promote their own inclusive
fitness by throwing up vehicles hosting hippified
minds which go on to commune with Nature in celebration
of cosmic consciousness. On the African savannah, this is
a good way to end up as lunch. Instead, information-bearing patterns of micro-qualia have enhanced their
fitness by coding for vehicles hosting macro-minds. These
minds simulate something different - squalid, harsh and
cruelly adaptive. Our genes include the instructions for, in effect, self-assembling, self-differentiating patterns of
subjectivity. These functionally coalesce into egocentric
- because genes are selfish - but object-ridden virtual
worlds. Such worlds, whether dreamed up while the host
organism sleeps or environmentally-selected after one
wakes, feature simulacra of insentient classical objects.
Intrinsically subjective stuff can simulate something
else altogether. In fact many of the several tens of thousands of genes expressed only in the mind/brain are coding for the substrates of virtual macroscopic worlds. Virtual macroscopic worlds are 'what it's like' to be the mind/brain's topographic maps.
2.15 One tempting cop-out would describe the field-theoretic
ur-stuff as mere proto-consciousness. Like proto-pregnancy, this notion will take a lot to make it work. Moreover, it still leaves the momentous shift from an alleged proto-consciousness to the real thing dangling as an unexplained bolt-from-the-blue.
Granted, consciousness manifestly varies in intensity as
well as mode. Searing pain is sharper than a barely-noticeable ache. Yet even on the otherwise-fruitful dimmer-switch model,
there's all the difference in the world between complete
insentience - an interesting if shamelessly ungrounded
hypothesis which yields no testable predictions - and
the world's putative first micro-tickle. The 'proto-' escape-route can't magic away a radical discontinuity between sentience of any texture at all and its hypothesised absence.
2.16 The point can be expressed a little more forcefully. On
the evidence disclosed by one notable if organisationally
atypical part of the world - the part whose noumenal
essence one exemplifies rather than conjectures on
at one remove - then "matter" is indescribably
weirder than any simple-minded physicalist checklist of
its attributes would allow. Michael Lockwood, I think,
has done most to put across this point to philosophers;
though he disavows panpsychism. Most radically, mass-energy self-intimatingly is - rather than
adventitiously has - irreducibly first-personal,
subjective and indexical properties. Taken as an empirically-grounded generalisation to the properties of the rest of
the world, such a leap is admittedly dizzyingly
implausible to products of a conventional scientific
training. If one discounts all psychological
queasiness as irrelevant, however, then there's no
substantive ground for thinking pure panpsychism is
improbable. The question is open. Insentience
needs arguing for; not thoughtlessly presupposing. In
frustration, panpsychism's over-scientised debunkers
usually rely on knee-jerk ridicule rather than
rationality to carry their case. "You can't be
serious!" one may be told, as though bien
pensant earnestness were a sure-fire recipe for truth.
Strictly speaking, though, it is the posit of
insentience elsewhere in the world which
constitutes the recklessly speculative, counter-inductive, and perhaps semantically unnaturalisable
metaphysics.
2.17 This isn't to say one can't, on the face of it, conceive
of places elsewhere - and moments elsewhen - which lack
ontologically idealistic status completely. For
naturalistic panpsychism entails the existence of
pervasive fields etc of a sort of what-it's-likeness
which is presumably so minimal in its phenomenal texture
- at least in high-entropy and low-energy regimes - that
one can almost imagine subtracting it altogether. This
mental process of subtraction apparently leaves fields of
insentient who-knows-whatness in its place. Such
exercises of the imagination don't entail Absolute
Insentience is really feasible; nor perhaps even that it
is - who knows - strictly intelligible. The
intuitions which follow are unlikely to be searchingly
challenged, however, because they still smell right to
the twentieth-century scientific-mind.
2.18 Naturally, for certain human purposes, the structure and ascribed function of our constituent cosmic mind-dust is
more important than its particular minimal phenomenal
character. It is functionally irrelevant in our
classificatory scheme if the more-or-less discrete
constituents comprising, for instance, a digital computer
consist in any sort of rudimentary consciousness. If they
do, such silicon etc consciousness presumably amounts in
any case to a mere aggregate of quasi-punctate and
mutually unaware wisps of what-it's-likeness. This stands in
contrast to the massive parallelism supporting organic
wetware's (warm and quantum-coherent?) experiential
manifolds.
2.19 Yet this functional irrelevance doesn't entail that an
intrinsic phenomenal character is absent in digital
computers. If it were demonstrably absent, then
the case for dualism would actually be strengthened.
Instead, the boringly minimal phenomenal character which
a silicon etc computer's micro-constituents may instantiate
simply doesn't bear on their functional role in a
particular computer program. A given program - as we
would interest-relatively construe it - will be
implemented on stuff which is interesting to us precisely
insofar as it's systematically interpretable as doing
something radically different from inertly subsisting as
a minimal psychic dross - or indeed subsisting as the
insentient mass-energy we might more normally assume.
2.20 Or at least that's one particular panpsychist
perspective. Chalmers, by contrast, suspects sentience
itself and all its values arises in the
information-bearing and substrate-independent role of
innumerable micro-functional states. The Conscious
Mind adapts and extends the notion of information in
Shannon's technical, extrinsic and relational sense so
that it correlates with intrinsic phenomenal
consciousness - perhaps as a brute psychophysical
principle or natural law. In this double-aspect scheme,
information is a sort of tertium quid realised
throughout the physical and phenomenal world. The internal aspects of information states are phenomenal. The external aspects are physical. "...Or as a slogan: Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside." (p305)
2.21 Chalmers stresses repeatedly that his positive proposals
are tentative. It's not that the McGinn and the new
mysterians are necessarily wrong. They insist, as does Chalmers, that mind is a wholly
natural phenomenon, yet they argue that The World-Knot may never
be unravelled or dissolved by any strands of its own
parts because they are constitutionally incapable
of it. It's just that mysterianism doesn't - any more
than global scepticism - represent a very fruitful
strategy for finding out anything. At the very least,
Chalmers' proposals are an example of the sort of
conceptual revolution which a failure to vindicate the
ontological unity of the world in either of its two
traditional categories might precipitate.
2.22 I still think Chalmers is too quick to dismiss the chances
of straight scientific monism. Perhaps pill-popping
panpsychist Everettistas aren't best qualified to sound a
note of caution; however, I wouldn't seek to dissuade them. In clinging to a conservatively-conceived ontological unity of the world, the modern panpsychist
will still want to exploit the substrate-neutral language
of functionalism and the information-theoretic paradigm
as a useful heuristic tool. The framework offers a very useful
conceptual handle on what's going on. What he
doesn't do is reify information. God is not a computer
programmer - though the different values of His primitives
can sometimes take on an information-like role. A
research project which aims to explore how primal
"concrete" properties, objects or events can in varying
degree simulate the existence and quasi-autonomous
behaviour of successive functional virtual levels of what
would otherwise be radically alien abstract objects is
more promising, I think, than a strategy coming from the
opposite direction. The rival "Olympian" strategy
presupposes the existence of (in one sense) "high-level"
abstract objects. It then has to deal how they can be
realised or instantiated in, or supervene on, or
at least related to, concreta. I don't see how it can be
done.
2.23 Likewise, and in a similar spirit of wholesome
opportunism, the panpsychist helps himself to the formal
apparatus of physical theory. He simply discards, in the
manner of the late luminiferous ether or early quasi-classical models of a miniature atomic solar system, the
morass of sordid mental images with which we
paradoxically associate materialistic ontology. Often
unavowed, these little pictures of what the stuff of the
world must consist in are in fact - if purest
mathematico-physical panpsychism is the case - an
excrescence which we mentally glue onto the field-theoretic formalism. The pictures themselves derive both
from our genetically predisposed model of macroscopic
"perception" - fundamentally the Sellars' 'Manifest Image'
of the world bequeathed from our childhood - and an ill-conceived faith that contemporary physics yields us
knowledge of essences as well as relations.
2.24 Needless to say, the twin bugbears of a scientised
panpsychism or an ontologically hybrid property-dualism
are not the only reality-models competing for our
allegiance. Yet they're the only two candidates
for authentic bedrock I'll consider here. Why does The Conscious Mind decline neat
panpsychism as a monist option?
2.25 Chalmers affirms that the role played by simplicity in
scientific explanation "cannot be overstated".
(p216). He is also a materialist, or at least a
physicalist, by temperament. He disavows any mystical or
religious leanings; not enough soul-stirring entheogens,
perhaps. Nevertheless, he finds that sheer intellectual
honesty compels him to argue for a scientifically
domesticated brand of dualism. This is because, after
painstakingly evaluating the explanatory options
canvassed by all of today's acknowledged philosophico-scientific heavyweights, he finds that "almost
everything in the world can be reductively explained; but
consciousness may be an exception"(xv).
2.26 Consciousness, Chalmers argues, is a fundamental property
of the Cosmos. There isn't anything more primitive in
terms of which it can be explained. It nonetheless (and
there is some tension here, IMO) "arises" from, or
occurs "in virtue of" (p243) physical matter. Just as a
matter of brute empirical fact, the physical and
explanatory basis of our phenomenal judgements is,
apparently, also the physical basis of qualia themselves.
A first-personal aspect, Chalmers contends, is
unaccountably emergent from the [notionally] third-person-understandable substrate - every minute and in a
womb near you.
2.27 At this point, one can't stop oneself asking how, why,
when, and in what form does momentous spark of
subjectivity first occur if everything had been ticking
along quite fine without it? [but see next] Why does universal
insentience break down and spin off [or a-causally begin
to correlate or co-vary with] a junior, intimately
linked, but nonetheless irreducible partner? For what
reason do physical systems with the same abstract
organisation "...give rise to the same kind of
conscious experience, no matter what they are made
of"? If psychophysical laws exist, we will surely
want to know why they exist. This urge to
understand the connection is likely to nag us whether or
not the question is (post-)humanly answerable.
2.28 Perhaps, as Chalmers suggests, we may eventually learn
that these questions are idle or ill-posed. The linkage
may constitute a fundamental law, or perhaps a meta-law,
of nature: systematic psychophysical correlations are
something we must just learn to accept. On this sort of account, psycho-physical laws have always existed. But until physical systems evolved that satisfied the relevant antecedent conditions, there could be no consciousness either (p171). Yet if Chalmers is right, then Nature's core
principles might actually be messier and less
simple, or at least their theoretical elegance more
heavily disguised, than the regulative unifying ideology
of theoretical physics would have us suppose.
2.29 Hidden simplicity and symmetry, however, have been two of
the most fertile clues which physics has given us - or so
we imagine - as to the underlying principles on which the
world works. Arguably, they shouldn't be surrendered without
putting up a more desperate fight. Moreover the concepts
which Chalmers cites as the sorts of physical primitive
which we must just take as read - for explanation must
allegedly come to a stop somewhere - are in fact the
topic of hard if inconclusive investigation even now:
mass, via some variant of the proposed Higgs-mechanism;
electric charge as a manifestation of extra compactified
"Kaluza-Klein" dimensions; and space-time itself, as
a derived property in a post-classical successor to
general relativity.
2.30 This isn't remotely to deny there are still too many
ostensibly arbitrary and ill-understood values of (what
are currently treated as) basic physical parameters.
These we have just to "put in by hand". Their
arbitrariness must still count as provisional. We've no
need, or not yet at any rate, to elevate our ignorance
itself into a meta-scientific principle. Perhaps we'll
theorise that broken symmetries are manifested
differently elsewhere in other inflated domains of the
Multiverse as an expression of some still dimly-imagined
universal symmetry. Perhaps the answer will be something
else again. Yet one needs to know a great deal about
anything to be confident it is inexplicable; and if one
doesn't, one can't.
2.31 It is worth contrasting the dualist and panpsychist
options here a bit further. Chalmers advocates a research program which seeks to
discover what will ideally be a simple set of psychophysical principles. His
conceptual framework amounts to a sort of non-reductive
functionalism. Within it, we would seek to correlate the
multitudinous flavours of consciousness with a presumably
equally multitudinous cast of functions. The explanatory
gulf between the physical and the phenomenal is to be
remedied by a series of functionalist bridging-laws.
2.32 One of the troubles with functions, however, is that they
tend to be discernible only as comparatively "high-level", interest-relative constructs. They're not
arbitrary, admittedly. Yet they are convention-bound and hard to individuate. Presumably some do, and
some don't, 'give rise to' sentience. Yet there's nothing
conventional about sentience, as distinct from our
ascriptive practices in recognising and classifying
it. On a dualist analysis, even if a complete set of
psychophysical bridging principles were to be
established, there would seem an almost irresistible
compulsion to ask how, let alone why, consciousness can
"arise" from matter and energy [Is there any
principled reason why it can't, say, "fall out",
"levitate", "capsize"? The implausibility
argument against panpsychism cuts both ways; though aggressive
materialism surely deserves to be the primary target]
"Arising" and its spatial kith and kin is a
recurrent metaphor in almost all discussions of
consciousness. Materialists, epiphenomenalists and
scientific property-dualists alike rely on it heavily.
Yet it is a creaky, unilluminating and deeply suspect
turn of speech. Both it and its motley retinue of
relatives need to be painstakingly pulled apart - and
perhaps discarded. For their use encourages something
easy to repudiate, but hard to prevent, namely the habit
of imagining some sort of diaphanous ectoplasm wafting up
or hovering around gooey grey brainy wetware - even
though one knows, and freely avows, that such a picture
is hopelessly ill-conceived. Naturally, no one in
polite society is arguing that this picture is actually
correct. Yet a little introspection suggests that
one's thinking 'about' consciousness is steeped in a submerged
imagery of all sorts of dubious philosophical goings-on.
Some of them one would rather not talk about - and for quite understandable reasons.
2.33 More function-troubles now rear their head. In living organisms, neo-Darwinism has taught
us how to cash out the appearance of purpose-built
design as mere causally-contrived simulation honed by the
processes of natural selection. So when, precisely, do
the simulations progressively wrought by low-level causal
interactions need to be supplemented by an irreducible
ontology of qualia-generating functions - rather than
simply lend themselves more easily to quasi-functional
description? Do the functions do any causal work
independently of the substrates in which they are (in
tainted top-downspeak) realised? and if so, how? Why do
functions generate their own, wholly non-conventional
phenomenology? Why don't some functions, evidently,
generate their own distinctive phenomenology (group minds
etc)? Can't the playing out of crass causal processes
allow simulations which just get better and better?
2.34 Worse still, innumerable states of consciousness
haven't been harnessed into playing any particular
functional, behavioural, information-playing role at
all. They are no less real. The astonishing modes of
sentience inducible by DMT, for instance, are
intellectually fascinating beyond belief. Yet their
interest doesn't lie in their non-existent - and indeed
not even counterfeit - functional role in our
informational economy - though conceivably, millennia
hence, they might play a quasi-informational role somewhere
else. Their interest certainly doesn't lie in their
(in)fidelity in tracking or causally co-varying (etc) with
the mind-independent environment in genetic fitness-enhancing ways. If any
sort of functionalist story is to be told here, it is at
present totally obscure.
2.35 Further still, there are problems with what might seem
even archetypal candidates for non-reductive functional
correlates. This is because a mode of experience can
sometimes get decoupled from any quasi-functional role
which it does normally more-or-less play. The pain of some
malignant cancers, for instance, is as nasty and
intensely conscious as you can get. Yet it isn't
functional to anything; and, tragically, it doesn't cease
hurting.
2.36 Selection pressure, it should freely be acknowledged,
has predisposed, moulded and selected our composite
manifolds of sentience in such a way as they assume their
present guise. It hasn't, and couldn't, create the
primitive elements of the psycho-chemical architecture on
which natural selection gets to work. So by contrast with
a naturalised dualist strategy, a panpsychist research-program is ontologically simpler, cleaner and more
theoretically elegant. It's not tied to ill-individuated
and interest-relative functions for its elemental
ontology. Thus it's also in principle - and here an air of paradox
derives merely from an unfortunate equivocation - more
objective.
2.37 In what sense? Well, for example, I can't put into words
many elements of the experiential manifold (mind/virtual
world) which I now instantiate. Yet - on the perspective under discussion - its constituent textures are precisely encoded by, and
homomorphic with, the formalism which would more
normally be taken to describe the states of my brain.
These equations are, fundamentally, those of quantum
mechanics. And just as we can determine what would
normally be physically interpreted as the magnetic moment
of the electron, for instance, to an accuracy of one part
in hundreds of millions, likewise the texture of
experience (I'm betting) is precisely encoded with such astonishing
accuracy too. Alas the sort of intellectual travelogue found here belies the austere exactitude of the coding I'm talking about.
2.38 A more convenient approximation of the correct formalism
might take the guise of the connection and activation
evolution equations of the panpsychist analogue of the
neural nets I exemplify. Either way, a formalism
which embodies an amazingly efficient algorithmic
compression of all the values of sentience is ready to hand. This is, potentially, our cognitive good
fortune. The scenario couldn't have happened the other
way round: a touchy-feely ontology wouldn't have helped
in discovering, say, the laws of electromagnetism. Au
contraire. We owe the hieroglyphics of sentience to
the formal successes of traditional materialism. Finding
the psychophysical Rosetta stone is another matter.
2.39 Of course, unless and until we do work out how to
decode it, then laying claim to prior ownership of an
accurate formalism rings hollow. It's all very well being
told that naturalistic panpsychism is potentially more precise and
objective than any functionalist dualism because the
exact values of its qualia could be, in principle - if
only we knew how to do it - exactly "read off" the QM
formalism which exhaustively describes their changes. For
all the practical good it does, one might as well be
told the key to the cosmos lies in an structural
generalisation of "abracadabra". Yet whereas
a scientised panpsychism ties the values of qualia to the
presumptive mathematically-expressible nature of the
world - itself a form of structural invariance between
currently rival physical and phenomenal conceptual
schemes - the interest-relativity of functionalist idiom
means the connection between the maths and the textures
of consciousness on such a scheme would be far more subtle and
elusive. Tying maths, physics and consciousness together
by positing that contemporary science is really about the
mathematical structures of sentience is far more elegant
and intellectually satisfying; on my current chemical regimen, at any rate.
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