I never intended to write about consciousness, the so-called "hard problem". But I do want to explain why I think it's not a hard problem at all. Explaining and understanding what an idea or thought or meaning is -- that's really hard. Consciousness, no, not hard. And here I am having written at length, much too much about something that I believe is easy.
The short story in six points: 1) panpsychism seems silly and childish, but every other explanation for consciousness fails miserably, while this silly little child not only stands, but has a lot of good support. Good for you little guy! 2) Bertrand Russell, channeling Kant no doubt, remarked somewhere that the sciences can only observe or measure the outward properties, behaviors and interactions, including our measuring instruments, not the things from within. Panpsychism is just the view that there is something within that we can't observe because it is passive -- it doesn't interact with measurements. 3) But we can observe it in ourselves because we are the inside of us. 4) The only reason to assume that organisms alone have such internality is if you hold the view that complexity of central coordination alone generates qualia. This seems to me desperate hand-waving. There's no evidence that emergence would transmute to qualia. The compexity-emergence argument is a god-of-the-gaps argument and like the god-of-the-gaps, is not worth considering -- it's unscientific. Organisms might coordinate the internal being into a central internality, but that does not preclude the many other internalities within each organism. 5) Qualia must be passive. I admit that this raises a lot of puzzles. Passivity is what is meant by logical "internality". It doesn't interact with phenomena. Again, it's Kantian; it's noumenal being. It doesn't impact or provide information to any sensor outside itself. This passivity implies that it play no role in decision-making processes or behavior-generating processes. Split brain studies and neurological experiments support this: our awareness seems to be post hoc and we justify or provide a story to ourselves after some internal process of decision-making has already happened. (See the post on the unconcsious mind is rational, the conscious mind is not.) There's a puzzle here too: who perceives the passive qualia such that it responds to it? Looks like an infinite regress puzzle. But take a look at the post on how to get the homunculus out of the mind. It might have the solution. 6) the way to test panpsychism is simply to manipulate the micro state types (waves, their frequencies and amplitudes, particles and their properties and accelerations and such) and see which ones influence qualia and how, when we have the technology to do this, either with humans or AI-human mergers, or even with other animals. It's not impossible, and will likely happen, if our species last long enough.
Before beginning I want to be clear that cognition or understanding, including self-reflexive cognition or self-identity do not constitute consiousness or feelings or sensations, known in the literature as "qualia". I'm talking about consciousness as sensations or qualia. These have been central to the discussion of consciousness at least since Wittgenstein's private language argument in which he used the sensation of pain to show that even a clear and strong sensation can't be verified with logical positivist evidentiary means. You can't know whether you're in pain because you can't get into someone else's head to compare your sensation with theirs. So how do you know that what you feel is pain if you can't compare it with any standard? Sensations are in a black box with respect to direct evidence. You can look at pain behaviors, but they could be faked or could be caused by different feelings.
Cognition has been less central to the discussion of consciousness, maybe because sensations are more obviously incorrigible. Semantists, certainly at least since Frege, have found means to denote and describe thoughts or cognitions. But qualia? How does sweetness taste? Like sugar. What does sugar taste like? Well, sweet. Try harder. Sweetness tastes kinda happy. Happy? That's how it tastes? It's like we're in a Klein bottle of sensations with no way out.
Personally, I don't find qualia to be a hard question, but thoughts -- cognition -- very elusive (see the posts on information faster than light and where is the mind and what's a thought). The literature has this the other way around -- qualia are the "hard problem", cognition more tractable. This post is not going to be about cognition, nor about selfhood, which is merely a simple and common reflexive form of cognition. This post will be about consciousness as qualia only, the so-called hard problem.
In this post I want to a) defend panpsychism -- it's silly and childish, but no other solution on offer works at all. That includes emergence, functionalism, eliminativism, all stripes of behaviorism, and popular misconceptions like reflexivity or selfhood or identity which belong to a different and vastly easier phenomenon. Panpsychism, silly as it is, actually can work and so is better than any other solution, and it's actually a good solution, skirts the "hard" problem and even suggests an empirical research program. IOW, it's silly but super. And b) I want to describe and explain an empirical research program for panpsychism and why the advocates of the hardness of the hard problem miss the boat.
The hard issue goes like this: the problem is hard because qualia can't be reduced to physical objects or interactions between objects. They are not physical, so they can't participate in any causal chain of physical phenomena. If they are not amenable to any physical account, where could they come from and what can they do in the world or do even in the mind? Qualia or consciousness for this same reason can't be the construction of emergent physical properties or the development of evolution. It just has no role in the physical.
Bertrand Russell, no doubt channeling Kant, pointed out somewhere that science measures only outward behaviors, not the thing as it is in itself, from within the thing. Russell's observation seems to imply that such intrinsically interior properties that cannot be directly observed as behaviors, must be passive if they are physically present. They could be detected, but only indirectly in the way that Bell's theorem allows us to detect indirectly spooky action at a distance by measuring spin behavior aggregates.
The panpsychic solution is simply that everything physical is imbued with a passive property of quale. "Passive" is essential. Consciousness is just there internally, along with the other familiar external properties that account for physical causal interactions.
Though passive and even inert, they might be tied to dynamic processes, but as passive riders. It could be simple at the micro level like a wave length or a particle traveling through the Higgs field or increasing or decreasing according to amplitudes or inhering in whatever else is happening at the micro level. We already use anthropomorphic language to express those dynamic events: the excitation of a particle. There could be many types depending on the micro state, and a property of every "thing" at the micro level, or it could be a property of only one type like amplitudes only. And for more complex hierarchical structures like organisms, it can be a complex emergent organization of passive qualia like human emotional responses.
It doesn't cause the emotions, it just "responds" passively, sort of like an observer. The emotions are physical -- the current view is that emotions are little more than a physical dimension of arousal on a scale from zero to intense, plus cognitive values on a scale of favorable and desirable to the unfavorable and to be avoided positive, along with the cognitive objects of these moods. So love is favorable arousal directed at some cognized object be it Helen of Troy, Antinous, Narcissus or a bag of potato chips or a pint of Ben & Jerry's. The qualia accompany -- passively -- those emotions that we respond to as good or bad, painful or pleasurable etc. These emotions are just these physical responses, each tied to a passive quale.
Where do these qualia come from? Well, as always, natural selection found these qualia ever present and used them for its purpose. Remember that natural selection is redundant, or more perspicuously, intensively supportive. We're not only selected to like food a lot, but to feel hunger to ensure that we eat to survive. We are not just driven by love to reproduce, the sex drive is additionally supported with lust. The instinct to fight or flee is supported with the the passive moods of qualia, just to be sure. If qualia are always there in everything, it would be odd that natural selection wouldn't avail itself of such a tool. The genomes of the phenotypes that didn't align their qualia with their survival, didn't survive, leaving only the qualia-aligned genomes.
But does everything at the micro level have these qualia, these passive senses? Do quarks have them? Do waves? All waves? Every frequency? Are there thresholds? That's a research program. And the way you study them -- when the technology is available -- is by constructing robots or testing with animals to see which basic elements can be suppressed or eliminated without changing the emotional responses. Now, this will not result in perfect results or proofs, only correlations and counterfactual support from experiment. The means of suppression could interfere with the responses directly. But this is a research direction. It's empirical and relevant to the question of which basic elements are or are not involved in qualia.
Finally, the reason the hard problem seems hard, I'd suggest, is that science, and philosophy too, has always been focused on a dynamic ontology. That's the point of Bertrand Russell's insight that science observes only the external properties of things. Measurement is external. It's either measuring the dimensions of its object, or measuring behaviors or interactions. It isn't directly measuring the in-itself. It's all observing -- from the outside perspective or with a tool outside the object. If qualia are passive properties of the in-itself, then it won't be amenable to direct measurement. The tools will have to be indirect, like observing the behaviors of animals or robots when the elements are manipulated. Why robots? Unlike animals, they can respond verbally. Getting them to be honest about their experiences -- the alignment problem -- that's another matter. Gotta solve that one first, otherwise stick with the dogs and chimps.
The above was all introduction. Here's the original post:
Most of my life I've thought that panpsychism -- the view that everything including rocks and atoms, parts of the body, Schödinger's Cat's tail, photosynthesizing cells, all have some consciousness to them however primitive, some feel along with their physical being -- is silly and childish. I still think it's childish. But looking at the utter and obvious failure of every other explanation for consciousness or qualia (the senses that we perceive) I no longer think panpsychism is wrong. It's the only theory, childish as it is, that's still standing after you've debunked all the others. And that's a good reason to take it seriously. And a better reason is that once you embrace it, all the consciousness phenomena and puzzles fall in place. Not so silly. And it even suggests a research program to test out the elements of qualia or consciousness in higher animals like us. So it's not only serious it's also productive, scientifically.
One day, when I was little, maybe 7 or 8 years old, I was thinking about consciousness, what is it and why do I have it, where does it come from, and what other things have it. My dog must have it, I thought, since he acts like he's aware when he's awake, and seems to make decisions for himself. He seems to like some things and others not. What about insects? They seem to be aware too, but could their awareness be similar to mine? They are so different from us in so many ways. What about plants? They don't even have brains, but they are alive and can grow and die. They don't make central decisions for themselves, but their parts do respond to what's happening to them -- sunlight and water matter to them -- and they integrate their responses within themselves. Could they have some kind of awareness? And what about rocks and bricks? Well, they aren't alive, if you hit them they don't respond, they'll just break. But there is something that keeps them together. Could there be some very rudimentary awareness deep down maybe where their atoms meet? That would be so cool. Then everything would have this awareness deep down and living beings would then have two awarenesses at least, and maybe many many more. Like my dog would have his dog awareness but also the atoms of his tail and even each hair of his tail would have its own awareness and that awareness would even survive my dog's! Everything in the universe would have many, many awarenesses, so many!
Well, no, I thought. Probably not. Rocks just don't qualify, they don't have the right kind of behavior, they don't make decisions. I didn't at the age of 7 or 8 have the words for it but I recognized that rocks and bricks don't have the integrity of self-organization to have awareness. You have to have a brain -- a central organizer of perceptions. It's not enough to receive or absorb light waves or heat. Something central to the organism has got to interpret those waves and somehow that central interpretation is awareness. So, no, rocks don't have it.
That was my 7 or 8 year old conclusion. It would be cool if rocks were aware, but the idea that they are is stupid. Only a stupid child who doesn't think about what makes awareness aware would believe that rocks could have it. And I'm not that stupid child.
One day, when I'd grown up, I heard about panspychism. I thought, typical hippie, New Age childishness. These are the people who talk to their trees because they don't know that language is a symbol system that only has meaning within a speech community and trees are not anglophonic trees and russophonic trees and francophonic trees. If these New Age hippies would only just think!
So when I listen to New Age panpsychists, I recoil. I'm inclined to believe they live in a world of wishfull thinking or non thinking. They trivialize everything into a world of hippie possibilities, flowers everywhere. You can cure all ailments from asthma to cancer with positive thinking, manifesting and meditation. They have no understanding of how anything works, but they've got an answer to it all, the same answer to everything. The depth of ignorance appalls me. And they trivialize consciousness too. It's a puzzle that has eluded smart, thinking people for millennia. It's even been called "The Hard Problem". It's not flowers and "we are all one".
That's what I thought for many years, decades, really. And like most non hippie thinkers, I was dissatisfied with every attempted explanation for consciousness. I think that's one of the most characteristic features of consciousness. No one is ever satisfied with any of the answers on offer, and I strongly suspect that even those who offer them aren't satisfied either. I most appreciated Jerry Fodor, smartest philosopher and cleverest talker I ever met and a ground-breaking analyst of mind: we just don't have the scientific or maybe even the cognitive tools, he said, to understand or explain consciousness now.
And that's how I became a panpsychic.
It's childish, it's primitive, it's stupid. But it's the only option standing once all the others have failed, and once you entertain it seriously, the pieces of the puzzle all fit together, so much so that I wonder that it is not obvious to us all. One reason it's not obvious might be that we are fixed in a world of cause and effect, ignoring the possibility that some properties of "things" or phenomena -- more accurately, some noumena, things in themselves -- can be entirely passive, don't participate in the cause-effect chain of phenomena.
It's hard even for me to conceive of a passive property that isn't part of the dynamic phenomenal world. But it's not impossible, and it had better be possible, because it makes sense of not only what conscious is but what it does or doesn't do, and even how it can be tested.
Sean Carroll complains that panpsychism is just hand-waving. He prefers the emergence explanation, the complexity of which he dismisses with a hand wave. "We don't understand it now, but eventually [insert hand wave here] we'll understand how it emerges from complexity". As if complexity will magically produce qualia because...it's so complex, it's too complex to understand which makes it mysterious and out of mystery comes -- with a hand-wave -- consciousness like a rabbit out of a hat! The reasoning behind the waving hand seems to be that emergent phenomena can disobey reductionist physical laws and produce wholes that are qualitatively distinct from their parts, adding the intuition that the complexity the human mind is sooooooo complex that it feels like qualia. But where does the feel of it come from? You can't break that circular reasoning with a hand wave. Emergence is just another failed explanation. It's like folks who grasp onto the uncertainty principle as an explanation for free will. Uncertainty tells you something about predictability, but nothing about free will (see the post on free will is an oxymoron in case you're interested). Human consciousness will no doubt be emergent, but its emergence will not explain qualia's existence, only its particular human form.
Have I persuaded you that consciousness is not a hard problem?