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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| This is probably the last bit about panpsychism I'll be linking. For now. Maybe. But let's turn this into a Merit Badge Mini-Contest. See below. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-consciousness-pervade-the-univer... Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe? Philosopher Philip Goff answers questions about “panpsychism” I have to wonder about a journal called "Scientific" anything posting stuff about something that's intrinsically unscientific. But okay - it's a hypothesis, of sorts, and might turn out to be testable at some point. Also, I should note that I don't buy it. I've gone into some reasons before, and I'll go into more reasons below, but people keep talking about it so I figure it's a good thing to know what they're talking about. If, indeed, they know what they're talking about. One of science’s most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from? Look, I'm well aware that this stuff is way above my pay grade, but that's not going to stop me from commenting on it. Just know that everyone involved, including me (especially me) might be way off about all of this. What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but is instead a quality inherent to all matter? What if a unicorn took a shit in my back yard? It is a theory known as “panpsychism,” and Goff guides readers through the history of the idea, answers common objections (such as “That’s just crazy!”) and explains why he believes panpsychism represents the best path forward. It's not a "theory." That much I know. Not in the scientific sense. Oh, sure, maybe in the colloquial sense of the word, as in "conspiracy theory." But in science, a theory is a system -- it's testable, falsifiable, and makes predictions. Honestly, SA should know better. Here's the important part so I can get it out of the way: Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism? In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. There's a lot more in the actual article, but that's the elevator pitch. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe. Yeah... I'm not at all on board with the idea that it's "coherent." There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside. No argument there. But I'm not sure that "everything has some form of consciousness" as a solution is anything more than hand-waving or wishful thinking. But in my new book, I argue that the problem of consciousness results from the way we designed science at the start of the scientific revolution. Yeah, yeah, I know. Guy's plugging his book. I've said this before and I'll say it again: I'm not going to slap anyone for trying to shill their book. This is a writing site, after all. Lots of us want to sell our books, at least in theory (in the colloquial sense of the word). The article goes on to explain how consciousness is necessarily outside the domain of science, because it's inherently qualitative and not quantitative. So I ask myself again: what does this philosophical discussion have to do with actual science? The starting point of the panpsychist is that physical science doesn’t actually tell us what matter is. That's fair enough, depending on what the actual definition of "is" is, to paraphrase a certain former president. Current understanding, as far as I'm aware, is that matter is a complex wave function that describes the probable positions of what we know as "subatomic particles," but that doesn't really explain much. But so goes the history of scientific discovery: we find that matter is made of atoms, and that the atoms are made of protons, neutrons and electrons, and the former two are made of quarks, and... well, that's as far as we get with matter before you have to start thinking of it as energy. Point is, each of these "discoveries" just kicks the can of "what 'is' it" down the road. Physics tells us absolutely nothing about what philosophers like to call the intrinsic nature of matter: what matter is, in and of itself. I'm... not sure that's entirely accurate, but it may be a question of semantics. But many of our best scientific theories are wildly counter to common sense, too—for example, Albert Einstein’s theory that time slows down when you travel very fast or Charles Darwin’s theory that our ancestors were apes. Okay, I'm going to nip that shit right in the bud, right now. Those discoveries were made by observation and mathematics, and confirmed by observation and mathematics. They're systematic descriptions of processes; in other words, they do deserve the word "theory" in the scientific sense. They make declarations, yes, but they also make predictions that can, and have been, tested. Here's the important part, though: yeah, relativity and evolution both went against the grain of what was accepted at the time, but just because something goes against the grain doesn't mean it's true. This "but other theories that seemed outrageous turned out to be true, so my pet insight must be true too" is utter hogwash. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment but by being conscious. I'll grant that much, anyway. "I am conscious" (a variant of Descartes' famous proclamation) might very well be the only true thing one can say. The difficulty is that it's not clear if it's true when someone else says it. We each, individually, only know it for ourselves. This observation can easily lead one down the rabbit hole of solipsism, though. Bottom line, for me: this looks an awful lot like animism, the spiritual belief that all things -- that rock, this tree, the stream over there, whatever -- has a spirit. That's nothing new; as I understand it, there's evidence that this was a common belief in prehistoric societies. So in that sense, panpsychism packages what may be the oldest human belief in modern terms and couches it in scientific language. But it is not, in itself, science. As philosophy goes, though, I suppose it's just as interesting as any other idea. Here's my take, for whatever it's worth: Early life would have had to have some recognition of its environment, perhaps to find food or to avoid becoming food. It wouldn't "think" in those terms, of course, or at all, but, at base, it would need some way of distinguishing food from not-food, or it wouldn't survive very long and be able to pass along its genetic information. As evolution progressed, this sense broadened and branched out, eventually becoming sight, smell, taste, touch, etc., and along the way it would need a way to coordinate all of the sensory information -- and this is what we know as consciousness. As this article points out, consciousness exists on some sort of continuum, or spectrum, even plants have some version of it, for example trees sensing when winter's around the corner and taking appropriate action. But the thing is, non-life has no need for that. A rock (probably) just is. It doesn't act or react; it's simply subject to the forces around it such as wind or water. So, no, consciousness isn't needed to explain what happens to rocks or even water, but it is needed for that which we define as "alive." But again, that's just my purely amateur observation. I could be wrong, and I'm willing to entertain alternatives (provided, of course, they fit observations). Therefore, one simple question for today's contest:  Merit Badge Mini-Contest What is consciousness? You can be scientific, funny, philosophical, whatever. I'm just interested in seeing what people come up with. The answer I like best gets its author a Merit Badge (I'll pick one I think is appropriate) tomorrow. Deadline is midnight tonight, WDC time. |
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