A physicalists view of panprotoexperientialism

[Rav]

From Wikipedia:

"Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still [of panpsychism], which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness."

To marry physicalism with panprotoexperientialism would be to define it as the view that one of the fundamental properties of physicality itself is that it is a precursor to phenomenal consciousness. All other physicalists should be with me so far because on the surface I'm actually just saying something really obvious, which is that it is possible for things like cognition and conscious awareness to emerge from physical systems, and all physicalists necessarily already believe that. But the distinction that I am driving at here is one between consciousness and cognition being phenomena that are entirely emergent from elaborate architectures of physicality, and consciousness and cognition being phenomena that emerge from elaborate architectures of physicality where each constituent element is already an elementary quanta of those emergent phenomena. In other words, one could view consciousness and cognition as a far more sophisticated manifestation of what is a fundamental property of physicality.

To further illustrate this subtle difference, one could compare the fundamental nature of a star according to both viewpoints. In a universe where consciousness and cognition are entirely emergent, a star is simply a ball of plasma, but in a universe according to a physicalist who has married his/her position with panprotoexperientialism, a star is a part of a physical universe that is being a star. Note however that I didn't say that the star was 'experiencing' being a star (in the way that we think of such, anyway). It is a collection of matter that is not, as far as we can tell, in a configuration that allows for such. But we are.

"Humans are the stuff of the cosmos examining itself" - Carl Sagan

 

[C C]

Note however that I didn't say that the star was 'experiencing' being a star (in the way that we think of such, anyway). It is a collection of matter that is not, as far as we can tell, in a configuration that allows for such. But we are.

Galen Strawson's realistic materialism is one of the rare instances today of a panexperiential monism classed as physical, if not a neutral monism in disguise. His stance at least partly seems to consist of the assertion that materialism and the experiential character of consciousness didn't become separate until a few centuries ago; and that conclusion of matter being a substance that (normally) lacks any phenomenal manifestation of itself whatsoever was, and still is, speculation or possibility treated as certainty -- which generates issues like Chalmers' hard-problem.

Strawson - "Many take the [mind-body problem] to be the problem of how mental phenomena can be physical phenomena given what we already know about the nature of the physical. But those who think this are already lost. For the fact is that we have no good reason to think that we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea that mental phenomena are physical phenomena.” --from Neutral Monism, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry

Strawson - "Once upon a time, not so long ago, no one thought that there was a mind-body problem. No one thought consciousness was a special mystery and they were right. The sense of difficulty arose only about 400 years ago and for a very specific reason: people began to think they knew what matter was. They thought (very briefly) that matter consisted entirely of grainy particles with various shapes bumping into one another. This was classical contact mechanics, 'the corpuscularian philosophy', and it gave rise to a conundrum. If this is all that matter is, how can it be the basis of or give rise to mind or consciousness? It seemed clear, as Shakespeare observed, that 'when the brains were out, the man would die'.

". . . But how could the wholly material brain be the seat of consciousness? Conclusion: consciousness can't be physical, so we must have immaterial souls. Descartes went that way (albeit with secret doubts). So did many others. The mind-body problem came into existence. Hobbes wasn't bothered, though, in 1651. He didn't see why consciousness couldn't be entirely physical. And that, presumably, is because he didn't make the Great Mistake: he didn't think that the corpuscularian philosophy told us the whole truth about the nature of matter. And he was right. Matter is 'much odder than we thought', as Auden said in 1939, and it's got even odder since."
--from book review of Nicholas Humphrey's Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness

 

[Rav]

Thanks CC. That's made for some good reading so far

 

[Yazata]

"Panprotoexperientialism is a more cautious variation still [of panpsychism], which credits all entities with non-physical properties that are precursors to phenomenal consciousness (or phenomenal consciousness in a latent, undeveloped form) but not with cognition itself, or with conscious awareness."

I don't entirely understand that, but that's ok.

I will say that I have a strongly-felt intuitive skepticism about panpsychism. I think that it rests upon fundamental conceptual errors (like so much of philosophy seems to). That makes philosophy interesting, certainly, but the idea of explaining and resolving all of the errors is above my pay-grade at his point in my life.

To marry physicalism with panprotoexperientialism would be to define it as the view that one of the fundamental properties of physicality itself is that it is a precursor to phenomenal consciousness. All other physicalists should be with me so far because on the surface I'm actually just saying something really obvious, which is that it is possible for things like cognition and conscious awareness to emerge from physical systems, and all physicalists necessarily already believe that.

I'm a stout physicalist. (Or at least a thin and wiry 'Obamaesque' physicalist who stands stoutly.) My only quibble is with the idea that 'precurser to phenomenal consciousness' is an actual physical property.

My instinct is to limit the kinds of properties that physical being has to those that physics ascribes to it. Then we can ascribe any number of additional... what should I call them?... quasi-properties... to physical systems that we can derive from their behaviors.

In other words, we might say that one of the properties of the flash memory of my e-reader is that it contains my e-book, but I don't think that we really want to say that 'contains my e-book' is a physical property of fundamental particles in the same way that mass, spin, electric charge and so on presumably are. Instead, we get the 'contains my e-book' from how all the particles, masses and charges are arranged and from what they are doing.

But the distinction that I am driving at here is one between consciousness and cognition being phenomena that are entirely emergent from elaborate architectures of physicality, and consciousness and cognition being phenomena that emerge from elaborate architectures of physicality where each constituent element is already an elementary quanta of those emergent phenomena. In other words, one could view consciousness and cognition as a far more sophisticated manifestation of what is a fundamental property of physicality.

That sounds like the 'double aspect' theory that goes back at least as far as Spinoza. It's basically the idea that being or states (or something) have both physical and mental aspects or qualities. So brain states or whatever it is would appear to have physical aspects when observed 'objectively' from outside, and mental aspects when experienced 'subjectively' from inside. The theory seems to be an attempt to squeeze mind and matter into a monism, without reducing one to the other. Donald Davidson's 'anomalous monism' is a recent variant on this theory.

To further illustrate this subtle difference, one could compare the fundamental nature of a star according to both viewpoints. In a universe where consciousness and cognition are entirely emergent, a star is simply a ball of plasma, but in a universe according to a physicalist who has married his/her position with panprotoexperientialism, a star is a part of a physical universe that is being a star.

You lost me there. Are you suggesting something like the Platonic forms, and the idea that on the panexperientialist theory the particular object out in space is somehow manifesting a concept of 'star-ness'?

Note however that I didn't say that the star was 'experiencing' being a star (in the way that we think of such, anyway). It is a collection of matter that is not, as far as we can tell, in a configuration that allows for such. But we are.

Again, that lost me. It seem to me that on the panexperentialist theory, the being of the star possesses not only its measurable physical properties, but subjective properties as well, the content of 'what it's like' to be a star. I guess that at least in some varieties of panexperienctialism, the star might not have the cognitive ability to be aware that it's aware of being a star or to think about it in any way. Presumably doing that would require a brain. But all of the experiential qualia involved star-experience would already be in there, somewhere, somehow.

That's a pretty outlandish theory in my opinion. I can't really accept it. It violates my basic intuition of how things are and makes me think that maybe Ockham needs another shave.

"Humans are the stuff of the cosmos examining itself" - Carl Sagan

I heartily agree with that. I'd spin it rather differently than the panexperientialists do, though.

 

[Rav]

In other words, we might say that one of the properties of the flash memory of my e-reader is that it contains my e-book, but I don't think that we really want to say that 'contains my e-book' is a physical property of fundamental particles in the same way that mass, spin, electric charge and so on presumably are. Instead, we get the 'contains my e-book' from how all the particles, masses and charges are arranged and from what they are doing.

I wouldn't say that the product of a particular configuration of particles (an e-book) is a property of each of those individual particles either. Similarly, I am not suggesting that cognition and conscious awareness are properties of individual particles.

If conscious awareness is an emergent property of a complex architecture of physicality, consider what would be the most minimally complex structure from which it could be said to emerge. Then reduce that complexity one step further. Does that consciousness suddenly vanish? Or perhaps that is not the correct way to look at it. Perhaps the quality and scope of consciousness is simply related to the quality and scope of the physical architecture, and that rather than there being some arbitrary minimum amount of complexity, it simply scales accordingly. In fact what I am toying with in this thread is that idea that it scales all the way down to the fundamental quanta of the fabric of the universe. I do not mean to go so far as to suggest that consciousness is the ground state of reality, only that the fundamental quanta of the fabric of the universe are also the fundamental quanta of the fabric of consciousness itself, or perhaps that each quanta is a seed for the emergence of an experiential collective.

You lost me there. Are you suggesting something like the Platonic forms, and the idea that on the panexperientialist theory the particular object out in space is somehow manifesting a concept of 'star-ness'?

To be honest, I'm not entirely certain what I am suggesting. It's more that I am trying to point to an idea that I can't quite adequately articulate the details of. I think I see a problem with the idea that something like conscious awareness can be an entirely emergent phenomena; that the right system of physicality can somehow magically give birth to what is seemingly a rich, vast and independent dimension of experience. So I at least tentatively feel that the correct way to resolve this is to do away with the apparent dualism. Physics typically performs a coldly mathematical treatment of reality, so much so that we have physicists who seem convinced that the universe is, fundamentally, a mathematical structure. It is this type of characterization from which the intolerable dualism emerges. At worst we've reduced physicality to an abstract model, and at best we have reduced it to merely a subset of the features it probably really has. So what I am essentially trying to do here is to imagine what the true scope of physicality may be, specifically that we might be able to say that it is more than just something that exists in the cold hard scientific sense, but that it is also the base element of experience, and that when organized into the right interactive architecture can manifest as cognition and conscious awareness.

A star, then, as a collection of matter where such matter is also recognized as a base element of experience, is potentially something more significant than what a more traditional (and perhaps conservative) scientific description might suggest, as indeed is universe itself.

I guess that at least in some varieties of panexperienctialism, the star might not have the cognitive ability to be aware that it's aware of being a star or to think about it in any way. Presumably doing that would require a brain. But all of the experiential qualia involved star-experience would already be in there, somewhere, somehow.

Or also inherent in any other physical phenomenon, or collection of such.

That's a pretty outlandish theory in my opinion. I can't really accept it. It violates my basic intuition of how things are and makes me think that maybe Ockham needs another shave.

Occam would suffice if it wasn't for the fact that I have a problem with the idea that cognition and conscious awareness can emerge from a physical system where each element is not already a quanta of the fabric of such an emergence. If the base elements are merely physical in the more conservative sense, then it's effectively an incantation. Get a bunch of particles to do just the right thing and voila, cognition and conscious awareness magically appear at the site of all the activity.

 

[wynn]

It seems to me that the core issue here seems to be that treating something like conscious awareness as an entirely emergent phenomena
is demoralizing or demeaning somehow.

?

 

[Rav]

It seems to me that the core issue here seems to be that treating something like conscious awareness as an entirely emergent phenomena
is demoralizing or demeaning somehow.

?

It's not that. I would consider consciousness to be a truly fantastic phenomenon regardless of the details that account for it's existence. It's a purely philosophical issue that I'm grappling with, although I will admit that the view that I am trying to outline presents a picture of the universe that is more appealing to me somehow. But I'd still happily abandon it if it ceased to make any kind of sense. The thing is, though, that a lot of different considerations have been leading me in this direction.

 

[Yazata]

I wouldn't say that the product of a particular configuration of particles (an e-book) is a property of each of those individual particles either. Similarly, I am not suggesting that cognition and conscious awareness are properties of individual particles.

The thing is, I'm not convinced that cognition or conscious awareness are properties at all. Certainly not in the same way that mass, charge or spin are properties of physical particles.

I'd call consciousness and cognition 'emergent' in a sense. But having gotten into a very heated argument (which ruined a friendship) about that on another discussion board, I hesitate to even mention it. It's what I think though.

That kind of implies the denial of panpsychism, since I don't see the 'psychism' as being 'pan', as being a quality of all material being or whatever. I'm more inclined to go with some variety of functionalism, loosly conceived. By that, I basically mean the idea that what we call mental states are the product of how the elements of reality behave, as opposed to the idea that mental states are supposedly intrinsic qualities of being itself.

If conscious awareness is an emergent property of a complex architecture of physicality, consider what would be the most minimally complex structure from which it could be said to emerge.

I think that at the low end, conscious awareness kind of disappears into causality. That's because cauality is what it's basically built out of. Establishing a line that distinguishes causality on one side from conscious awareness on the other is going to be pretty arbitrary, depending on how we choose to define 'consciousness'. Is a thermostat conscious? What about a flatworm or a clam?

Then reduce that complexity one step further. Does that consciousness suddenly vanish?

We observe something like that with animals, as we move down the phylogenetic tree towards simpler and simpler biological organisms.

What seems to happen is that apart from man, animals quickly lose the ability to communicate linguistically and perhaps to think in abstractions. Presumably simpler animals gradually lose the ability to model, think about and ultimately to even be aware of themselves, their ideas, feelings and internal states. Simpler animals seem less and less able to make fine observations and distinctions regarding their environment, and their repertoire of behaviors becomes more and more constrained and stereotyped. Learning ability declines and we observe less and less behavioral adaptation and improvisation.

So if we pick some point on the phylogenetic tree, then move to one step lower (assuming that 'steps' and 'points' make sense) we are going to end up with a simpler version of what we had. If we keep making that move down the tree, we are eventually going to end up with protozoa, single-celled organisms. I think that most of us would agree that these can more accurately be called biological machines than sentient beings like ourselves.

The thing is, in our progress down the tree, we've never encountered any gaping consciousness/causality chasm that some philosophers apparently expect to find. The way I'd characterize it is that we've just encountered simpler and simpler causal systems and functions.

I'm going to temporarily stop here, but I'll be back very soon to continue. (Perhaps surprisingly, thinking is kind of tiring, and you give me a lot to think about.) It's fun talking to you.

 

[wynn]

The thing is, I'm not convinced that cognition or conscious awareness are properties at all. Certainly not in the same way that mass, charge or spin are properties of physical particles.

I'd call consciousness and cognition 'emergent' in a sense. But having gotten into a very heated argument (which ruined a friendship) about that on another discussion board, I hesitate to even mention it. It's what I think though.

If this issue is relevant enough that a friendship can be ruined over it, then there may be more to it.

That kind of implies the denial of panpsychism, since I don't see the 'psychism' as being 'pan', as being a quality of all material being or whatever. I'm more inclined to go with some variety of functionalism, loosly conceived. By that, I basically mean the idea that what we call mental states are the product of how the elements of reality behave, as opposed to the idea that mental states are supposedly intrinsic qualities of being itself.

That way, you're basically saying to the persons you're talking to:

You (at least the "you" who you think you are) are the product of how the elements of reality behave.

I do not think this is a nice thing to say to anyone.


That kind of thinking might be allright for a Buddhist, but for other people it usually implies plain old nihilism. It's an affront.

 

[wynn]

It's not that. I would consider consciousness to be a truly fantastic phenomenon regardless of the details that account for it's existence. It's a purely philosophical issue that I'm grappling with, although I will admit that the view that I am trying to outline presents a picture of the universe that is more appealing to me somehow. But I'd still happily abandon it if it ceased to make any kind of sense. The thing is, though, that a lot of different considerations have been leading me in this direction.

Humans are moral and social beings.
We cannot simply write off concerns over something being demoralizing or alienating, and try to favor an abstract philosophical explanation which may be elegant, but imply a demoralizing or alienating state of affairs.

 

[Rav]

Humans are moral and social beings.
We cannot simply write off concerns over something being demoralizing or alienating, and try to favor an abstract philosophical explanation which may be elegant, but imply a demoralizing or alienating state of affairs.

I think it's situational. In a context where a person has agreed to engage in philosophical debate among free thinkers, they have to be prepared to encounter views or characterizations that they may find repugnant. On the other hand, there are typically certain philosophical ideas that I refrain from expressing in the company of certain sorts of people in more normal social settings, either because they are potentially offensive, might make people uncomfortable, or could perhaps even be damaging somehow.

 

[wynn]

Sure, but we here are people too.

More importantly, my comment about humans being moral and social beings was not meant as merely situational, but as constitutional, a matter of "who we really are."

Physicalists reduce us humans in one way or another, relativizing and downplaying our moral and social dimensions. And yet it is precisely those dimensions that make us seek knowledge to begin with, and it is those dimensions that make knowledge useful and applicable. So we must not ignore them.

 

[Gustav]

perhaps another thread, signal? :shrug:

 

[Rav]

Physicalists reduce us humans in one way or another, relativizing and downplaying our moral and social dimensions. And yet it is precisely those dimensions that make us seek knowledge to begin with, and it is those dimensions that make knowledge useful and applicable. So we must not ignore them.

One of the implications that should have emerged from my ramblings thus far is that physicalism is not necessarily incompatible with the idea that there is much more to the universe than meets the eye. In fact that's actually a given, since no real physicalist could deny that our picture of reality is horribly incomplete. In fact I am obviously a physicalist myself, yet here I am talking about how much more significant I think the universe must be than the mathematics we use to model it, or even the sum of all the knowledge we've thus far amassed regarding it.

Outside of the context of discussions like this one, I regularly embrace all the richness and wonder of everything it means to be a thinking and feeling human being. In fact the truth is I find philosophical exploration such as that which I have engaged in here an ultimately enriching experience. Although such inquiry might sometimes seem coldly scientific and heartlessly rational, for me it is ultimately a manifestation of a passion to understand more about the wonder of existence and indeed the nature of my presence within it.

I would hazard a guess that Yazata feels more or less the same way.

By the way, did you hear about what happened to Descartes? He was sitting at a bar one night about to finish his drink, when the bartender asked him if he would like another. "I think not", he replied, and vanished into thin air.

 

[Yazata]

Perhaps the quality and scope of consciousness is simply related to the quality and scope of the physical architecture, and that rather than there being some arbitrary minimum amount of complexity, it simply scales accordingly.

I don't think of it in terms of scale exactly, though that's probably part of it.

Maybe it's more a matter of what's actually happening when we are conscious of something or when we think about something. If I am aware that I'm seeing what I call 'red', my optical apparatus is being stimulated by light. Some part of my visual cortex is receiving spatial configuration information, details about the light wavelengths and so on. The associative functions are identifying this real-time experience with memories of previous experiences of the same type, assigning a word from my language to it, and so on. And there's a little understood self-referential thing happening too, where I'm not only aware of red light, I'm simultaneously aware of the fact that I'm seeing red, a very different thing. I'm not just processing the visual information, I'm simultaneously processing information about processing the information.

That kind of stuff probably isn't just a matter of simple neural numbers, it's more likely a product of information processing structure and organization. But a lot of this brain-science stuff is well above my pay-grade, since I'm not really up to speed on things like neural network theory.

In fact what I am toying with in this thread is that idea that it scales all the way down to the fundamental quanta of the fabric of the universe.

It's possible, I guess.

I do not mean to go so far as to suggest that consciousness is the ground state of reality, only that the fundamental quanta of the fabric of the universe are also the fundamental quanta of the fabric of consciousness itself, or perhaps that each quanta is a seed for the emergence of an experiential collective.

In what way?

My line of thinking ultimately reduces consciousness to causality, I guess, and all the fundamental components of physics are subject to causality. All of reality seems to take part in fundamentally the same kind of processes that give rise to conscious awareness in human beings like ourselves (and probably in functionally analogous systems). What's happening with us humans might only be one elaboration (out of how many different ones we have no way of knowing) illustrating what the universe is capable of as its complexity evolves like a fractal.

So maybe I'm agreeing with you in that respect. Unfortunately, I sense that what I'm agreeing with isn't exactly what you are getting at.

I think that lots of panpsychists adopt the position because of a basic gut-level intuition that they possess. In a word, they can't imagine how a quale like the experience of red can possibly arise from the stuff of physics, from masses, charges, motions and similar things that, so they insist, aren't colored at all. It just seems intuitively obvious to them that qualia can't be reduced like that. So if this kind of philosopher doesn't want to be a mind-body dualist, then he or she seems naturally propelled into some variety of panpsychism in which natural objects are held to possess not only physical but also mental properties.

To be honest, I'm not entirely certain what I am suggesting. It's more that I am trying to point to an idea that I can't quite adequately articulate the details of.

You aren't alone. Most of my philosophical thoughts are exactly like that, which is why I call them "works-in-progress". I'm always tinkering with them and trying to express them better, if only to myself. I think that probably just about every philosopher feels that way, even the biggest names.

I think I see a problem with the idea that something like conscious awareness can be an entirely emergent phenomena; that the right system of physicality can somehow magically give birth to what is seemingly a rich, vast and independent dimension of experience.

That's a widespread view in the philosophy of mind. Thomas Nagel famously expressed it in his 'What it's like to be a Bat' paper back in 1974, in which he argued that the physicalist and functionalist theories ignore precisely what needs to be explained, namely how it is that it feels, looks or smells like something to be in a functional state. You're in very good company.

It's not true, of course, that the physicalists and functionalists have ignored that. But the complaint does highlight the fact that they haven't accounted for the phenomenal nature of subjective experience in a way that satisfies everyone.

(If either of us could clarify our half-baked ideas, explain and justify them clearly and persuasively, and if we published them in the journals and presented them at the conferences, we'd be famous ...among philosophers at least. Of course, that's the hard part.)

Once again, more later...

 

[Rav]

Once again, more later...

I appreciate your input . I shall wait until you are finished before I respond, but feel free to take your time. This seems to be my new favourite topic, but there's no particular hurry.

 

[wynn]

Outside of the context of discussions like this one, I regularly embrace all the richness and wonder of everything it means to be a thinking and feeling human being. In fact the truth is I find philosophical exploration such as that which I have engaged in here an ultimately enriching experience. Although such inquiry might sometimes seem coldly scientific and heartlessly rational, for me it is ultimately a manifestation of a passion to understand more about the wonder of existence and indeed the nature of my presence within it.

I haven't gotten my ideas across clearly enough, I think. But I do think I am on to something!

 

[Captain Kremmen]

There are two choices. Either:

A. We, as conscious beings, are the chance outcome of a random universe.

or

B. The universe must generate conscious life.

If you want to choose A, then either:
1. Yes, we are an incredibly unlikely outcome but here we are, or
2. This universe is one of many.

If you want to choose B, then either:
1. The universe was created by a God, or
2. The universe requires eventual consciousness in order to begin.


I came here originally to find out what kind of thread could have such a pretentious title, but the content of the thread is better than I expected.

 

[Pineal]

One of the implications that should have emerged from my ramblings thus far is that physicalism is not necessarily incompatible with the idea that there is much more to the universe than meets the eye.

Though then one wonders why physicalists cling to a term that has no meaning. What is considered physical is now a set that includes things that are hardly physical by the terms original meanings. So we have a set that now includes things like fields and massless particles, and by most physicalists admissions there will be future additions to this set and we do not know what their qualities will be like. The word really means - determined to exist via experimentation following processes accepted in scientific methodology.

But the term continues to get used as if it was a metaphysical term - iow revealing something about substance.

 

[wellwisher]

Thepanprotoexperientialism view is a projection of unconscious processes that are inside each of us. Aspects of ourself are not fully conscious, these will shine or project outward, like a movie overlay onto reality, to help make it conscious. If one is not aware of this, we attribute the movie overlay as a property of the object.

Let me give an example, a diamond has value because human give it value. They even set a price inflated beyond its availability.. The value is subjective and is inside us based on cultural conditioning. But since this is unconscious, it projects into the objects so it is more than it appears.

Cultural objects of importance have the most value to a given culture. The outsider may not see a rough work of art the same way, but to the culture of origin it is almost magical and very valuable. Its power, life, consciousness is based on the strength of the unconscious projection. The ancient called it idol worship since the power in not in the object. You sort of map the inner world by mapping the outer world, via the projection. In that respect this can be useful if you use inference.

Years ago I did research to go to the source of this unconscious projection so I could better differentiate the phenomena. This results were very enlightening and often were different than existing theory in psychology. The reason was existing theory uses mostly second hand data with a degree of projection. I was using first hand data to remove the projection.

As an analogy, is there a diffence between eating chocolate and having someone describe to you what it is like to eat chocolate? The second person who eats the chocolate touches reality directly, while the person with second hand accounts will project into this indirect data to fill in the blanks.

In the sciences of the mind, we attempt to be objective so we think we need to sit on the sidelines and observe, as someone tells them what chocolate tastes like. This data and some projection becomes the basis for theory. I ate the chocolate. Better data means better science. Inferring inside from outside is safer but if you are young and strong direct is better.

The unconscious mind is an awesome frontier.