Poll: Evolution of consciousness by natural selection
I would like to get a sense of what simultaneous positions people tend to hold about a few different consciousness-related matters and to discuss the results after we collect some data.
For the purposes of the poll, I will define some terms:
Consciousness: First-person subjective experience, not something like alertness and responsiveness to stimuli, not merely a behavioral disposition. If I can feel pain, I am conscious. If there is something it is like to be me, I am conscious. So, in this sense, even a sleeping and dreaming person is conscious. Even someone with locked-in syndrome is conscious.
Epiphenomenalism: Consciousness, though real, and though its form is determined by physical events, has no causal power. It doesn't influence behavior. All causes are physical. A full explanation of behavior can be given by a purely physical, third-person description of the objective situation without any appeal to subjective experience.
For the purposes of the poll, I will define some terms:
Consciousness: First-person subjective experience, not something like alertness and responsiveness to stimuli, not merely a behavioral disposition. If I can feel pain, I am conscious. If there is something it is like to be me, I am conscious. So, in this sense, even a sleeping and dreaming person is conscious. Even someone with locked-in syndrome is conscious.
Epiphenomenalism: Consciousness, though real, and though its form is determined by physical events, has no causal power. It doesn't influence behavior. All causes are physical. A full explanation of behavior can be given by a purely physical, third-person description of the objective situation without any appeal to subjective experience.
Comments (89)
After all the observable physical determinism, the speculative metaphysical reductionism, all the chatter and nonsense, the otherwise unexceptional human brain ends up being a conniving mass of wetware.
(Sigh)
Idealism is compatible with option 4. "Not all" does not exclude "none".
As for IIT, I guess you would say we are conscious and consciousness did not evolve. I am not sure whether IIT proponents would argue that consciousness is epiphenomenal or not. Either it is or it isn't. What third option would there be?
Emergentists could select any of the first four options.
What is your position that doesn't fit any of the options? It seems to me that these five options should cover all positions. There are only four possible combinations of answers for two yes/no questions. I have three yes/no questions, but if you say no to consciousness, the other two questions are pointless. I don't see how there could be any other options.
Consciousness?
If yes:
Causally efficacious?
Evolved?
Mitchell and Webb: Does God Exist?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUbjpwyesk0
Which Im surprised is currently leading.
What about you?
It seems to me like the problem for the eliminitivist comes up in defining what metacognitive is supposed to mean here. For to say, "consciousness is an illusion cast by the processes of thinking about thinking," is not very helpful unless one already has clear idea of what "thinking is," and how to identify itin nature. Further, if we accept computational theories of mind, we'd have to ask when computation becomes thinking, since it seems clear that not all computation is thinking.
Perhaps elimination would be easier if theorists actually backed off "computation," as an explanatory model? The philosophical problems of defining what computation is vis-a-vis physical systems are myriad and daunting.
I like eliminative works for a few reasons. They do a good job cataloging the myriad ways in which "consciousness" is not what it seems to be, to us. Global workspace theories seem like they are on to something. But even if "to explain is to explain away," you still need to adequately explain first.
Where they fail is in being able to tell me why I shouldn't think then that an ant hive experiences consciousness, and more consciousness than the ants that make it up. Or why the FBI isn't more conscious than its individual members. Maybe it's prejudice, but these things don't seem like they should be conscious. And yet, if thinking emerges from really complex, really recursive, computation, markets, etc. seem like prime candidates for consciousness, Keyne's "animal spirits" vindicated.
This problem has made integrated information theory more palatable to me. It might seem to lead us towards panpsychism, but it also explains why you can't just replicate a brain scan with paper towels and get a "consciousness." Down to the very basic level, quantum effects and all, the paper towel brain is simply not a true replica of the brain. It is just a model of the course grained structure of the real brain, but the real brain itself is a very different process.
IDK, do any eliminitivists do IIT? All the one's I've read are CMT guys. IIT seems to attract pancomputationalists and pansemiosis folks, and these ideas, while they have some interesting things to say, seem to leave open the fact that everything is conscious.
1. We are conscious, although what we mean by that term and the reality of consciousness might be quite different (Dennett, Bakker, etc.). It is unclear to me if "higher level" group entities made up of conscious entities can also be, in some ways, conscious.
In support of this unpopular opinion, I would point out that it seems to be the case that distinct "brain areas" can generate experiences in (relative) isolation. This being the case, the idea of "composite consciousness" doesn't seem completely far-fetched. But if consciousness is grounded in "computation" or a more amorphous "information processing," then this seems to leave open the door that the universe itself would possess a form of consciousness.
This seems like it might be a problem (or a perk). But it also doesn't seem equivalent with panpsychism, since information and computation are processes, and so we wouldn't say "fundamental units of stuff have experience," but that experience emerges to the extent that the entire process shows this sort of recursive, "metacognitive" computational structure.
IDK, maybe this is a perk. It would seem to make panENtheism make more sense.
2. Epiphenomenalism is probably false, but it's a hard question to answer definitively. Consciousness seems to play a role in decision making, and it's obvious how a capability for self-reflection would be useful for survival and reproduction.It seems like a mistake to me to presuppose, as epiphenomenalism does, that you can get the same "input/output" behavior without the experiences, that the two are separable. If the two are inseparable, than they are causally inseparable and experience has a causal function.
3. "A full explanation of behavior can be given by a purely physical, third-person description of the objective situation without any appeal to subjective experience." By definition, an explanation of behavior that doesn't include the experiences is not a complete explanation.
4. I am increasingly thinking that saying the world is made up of "physical" versus "mental" stuff is irrelevant distinction. If there is only one substance, then process does all explanatory lifting. Positing some sort of hard line between the physical and the mental seems to be a misstep born of Kantian (crypto)-dualism and positivist misconceptions about what "objectivity" is.
I will allow that some things are "more real" than others, but I think this holds in the sense that Hegel and Plato meant it. Things are more real to the extent that they are less simply effects, i.e. to the degree they are more necessary, self-determining.
I would have voted for the first option:
Quoting petrichor
...except that I see epiphenomenalism as based on simplistic thinking. My view is similar to the view Peter Tse expresses in this abstract. (unfortunately a wall of text)
I guess I don't understand what you're trying to do. I was just curious why you settled on those options.
One thing is consciousness, another one is the self-consciousness. Read a bit more about the topic...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/847760
I am genuinely puzzled about the matter of consciousness and mental causation. I tend to think that it is obvious that I am conscious. I have a hard time with eliminativism or illusionism. I can't imagine how, if there is actually no experience, there could be a situation where it nevertheless seems that there is an experience. Who is fooled? All seeming, it seems to me, presupposes experience and an experiencer.
I also tend to think it's obvious that my consciousness somehow has an effect on my behavior. After all, I talk about it! I even tend to think it is obvious that I have free will. However, when I try to understand and analyze these matters rationally, I find myself confronted with all kinds of interesting and seemingly insoluble problems and puzzles no matter what position I consider.
It seems far easier to disprove free will than to support it rationally or scientifically. But my intuition strongly conflicts with what my reasoning urges me to believe. I often wonder if all the options we humans have thus far imagined are far from the mark. I am not sure we even clearly understand what we are talking about.
I lean toward taking consciousness and free will seriously. However, I am honestly baffled. I think a good dose of epistemic humility is warranted here. I am a dumb primate after all! But I vote, provisionally, for option four. I believe there is something to the claim that I am conscious. And I think that my ability to even think about it means that it somehow influences the evolution of my brain state, and thus isn't epiphenomenal. If epiphenomenalism were true, it seems to me, our talking about it would be inexplicable.
I also tend to think that consciousness, or some kind of proto-consciousness, is as deeply situated in the ontological strata as matter, and exists in some sense prior to biology, and so didn't evolve. Perhaps the subjective and objective are two sides of a coin and arise together as a relation between two parts of reality. Maybe they are not different substances, but rather two aspects of an internal relation in something that itself is prior to relations at all. Neutral monism?
Complex forms of cognition that have adaptive advantage are another matter. Those surely evolved. Perhaps the having of a sense of self, or self-reference, or a self-model is something that evolved. But I have a hard time seeing how basic experientiality, first-person-ness, that there is something it is like to be, could have evolved in a world that prior to such a magical event, was completely objective only and altogether lacking in subjectivity and perspective, a world completely "there" but never "here".
What many people, probably many cognitive scientists included, seem to mean when they use the word consciousness is likely mostly a kind of responsiveness to stimuli, a kind of modeling of world and self, a high level of information integration, a characteristically agentic form of behavior. I don't believe anything like that exists prior to biology. But I take seriously the idea that there there might well be a kind of experiential aspect or interiority to everything. The evolutionary process shaped what was there already. It didn't create anything fundamentally new. I don't find arguments for strong emergence compelling. And I think it is a hard case to make that the first-person perspective is an example of a weakly emergent phenomena. If it is somehow "produced" by arranging otherwise completely "dead" matter in a special way, this is very surprising and seems like a miracle.
Thanks for the link! When I saw that, I recognized Tse's ideas as something I encountered some years ago but forgot about. I'll have read it again soon. Perhaps the answer to my following question is in the linked material. What are your thoughts on the compatibility of epiphenomenalism and the evolution of consciousness by natural selection? It seems obvious, at least on the surface, that if consciousness were not somehow causally efficacious, it couldn't possibly make any difference to behavior, and therefore could not be selected for. Isn't that the basic claim of epiphenomenalism, that consciousness makes no difference to behavior? How then could it be advantageous to an organism?
I have often gotten the impression, which is maybe mistaken, that many in the scientific community basically take this position, that consciousness is real, that everything that happens in the brain is fully accounted for by low-level pre-conscious physical causes (and therefore epiphenomenalism must be true), and yet that consciousness evolved by natural selection. This has always seemed to me to be a problematic combination of incompatible beliefs. It makes me suspect that people haven't thought it all through sufficiently. But maybe I am missing something. Maybe, for one thing, they just don't even have in mind the same thing I do when talking about consciousness.
What do you think? Is epiphenomenalism compatible with the idea that subjectivity evolved?
Among other things, I wanted to see if anyone here believes in the evolution of epiphenomenal consciousness. I am curious to hear what thoughts such person might have about how these positions can be compatible, since it doesn't make sense to me. I get the feeling from much popular science-oriented journalism that my poll option one is a common position among academics. But I am not sure if it really is.
The sort of hard materialists that deny consciousness at all seem to escape this problem, at the cost of denying what seems obvious and immediately verifiable, namely that there is experience.
Naturalists in general are usually committed to the full causal closure of the physical, with full reduction usually being assumed to be possible. If someone with such commitments nevertheless believes in consciousness, this would seem to force them to accept epiphenomenalism. And yet talk in such circles is common about how consciousness evolved, how brains "produce" it, and so on. This seems problematic and I am curious about it. I wonder how much they have thought about the compatibility of these positions.
And beyond the problem of the evolution by natural selection of a trait that makes no difference, there is the problem of our talking about it. How does a reference to it come to be present in our behavior? If X contains information about Y, it usually seems necessary that Y has had some kind of causal role in influencing the state of X.
I honestly find myself deeply puzzled about the seeming fact that I am conscious and that I am able to form thoughts about my subjectivity and qualitative experience, and talk about it. And I don't think I am talking nonsense when I claim that I have experience. But it seems like this should be impossible!
Is this directed at me? This comes across as rather hostile. If I am not misreading your tone, why do feel that way?
I am very much aware of the difference between consciousness as I've chosen to define it for the purposes of the poll, and self-consciousness. I defined it explicitly in the way I did specifically because I think many people have in mind some kind of self-representation when they use the word consciousness, or even just a behavioral disposition. I wanted to avoid confusion and the talking past one another that often happens in discussions of consciousness.
Experience is undeniable, yes. But unconscious billiard balls can experience impacts, and unconscious computers can experience changes in state or configuration, analogous to our messier brain shivers.
What is deniable is that a shiver experienced by the brain is ever actually accompanied by a corresponding picture in the brain, or world in the brain.
A couple of things you may be missing. First, evolution is more than natural selection. A neutral trait may go to fixation in a population by genetic drift. If you say that consciousness has no effect on behaviour, it must be selectively neutral.
Second, and I suspect this is the real issue, are emergent properties (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties-emergent/) and your use of `cause'. You can say that fluid dynamics caused a tornado, and that a tornado caused some damage. Or you could say the fluid dynamics caused the damage. People won't mind if you're talking about tornados. I think that many of the scientists you're criticising would say that consciousness is emergent like a tornado.
Right. Brain tissue is metabolically expensive and it doesn't make sense in evolutionary terms that neurology supporting non-causal consciousness would evolve.
That said, I don't think we have any other option than to settle for simplistic intuitions about the causal role of consciousness. Brains are simply much too complex for the minds they instantiate to form a detailed picture of what's going on. So the way consciousness is causal is necessarily different (much more complicated) than our intuitive sense of the causality.
I think psychologist Jon Haidt's image of the rider and the elephant conveys important aspects of the situation we find ourselves in.
Quoting petrichor
Well, to be fair, I'd say that it's not within human capability to think it through *sufficiently*. (Depending of course on what "sufficiently" is taken to mean.) Without substantially better technology than is available now, the best we have is partially informed conjectures.
Even if we had a complete 'schematic' of the brain, what would we do with it? I'm an electrical engineer who has worked with brilliant engineers and scientists, and I know that that sort of complexity is beyond the ability of humans to grasp in a comprehensive way. Of course modern AI is becoming a necessary tool in neuroscientific experiments, but maybe there is a limit to the extent to which we want AI's to understand us better than we understand ourselves?
Maybe not. Why would we rationally want that?
Why would we think wanting is rational? :wink:
I just asked the question in hopes of thinkers thinking about it. I'm more interested in hearing other's thoughts to learn how they might inform my own.
Oh come now that can't be a word.
On a broader point, your current premises of "feeling pain" being different than "responding to stimuli" is lacking in merit. And that's a charitable view at best.
Surely you mean, accessing a former state of non "pain" and thus mentally calculating a situation, act, or moment is "wrong" and needs to be immediately corrected by further action. This is a huge difference between your current premise as-is. This requires both retainable and accessible knowledge of A,) past B.) present and C.) future (that is to say ability to formulate or postulate a future action or state by applying something from either (A) or (B).
When people normally use the word experience when saying something like "billiard balls experience impacts", I don't think they are implying at all that they believe that balls literally have subjective experiences of the impacts. The word is used figuratively, or in a different sense. It is like saying that an electron is "excited". To equate the two senses of experience is a mistake. Do you believe that billiard balls experience impacts in the same sense that football players experience impacts? In other words, do billiard balls feel their impacts? Is there something-it-is-like for them to exchange kinetic energy?
It seems to me that in the case of tornados, these are only different levels of description of the same thing. Or you could say that this is an example of weak emergence. If you look at all the small-scale goings-on, and then zoom out to see the larger happening constituted by the small-scale stuff, it isn't very surprising. You can see how these small things, when put together in this way, add up to this larger thing. And it makes sense practically to talk about it at this higher level, as one big thing. Also, both the high level description of the tornado and low-level description of the movements of molecules are objective/third-person and quantitative.
In the case of consciousness, if all we were confronted with were large-scale behavior, and not with any subjective inner life, I think it could be argued that the two cases are analogous, even though the degree of complexity of human behavior is vastly higher than that of a tornado. But when we find ourselves conscious, not just with complex behavior, having also a first-person perspective and qualitative experiences, and we are told that this simply "emerges" from a special way of arranging bits of matter that in themselves have nothing even remotely like subjectivity, this seems vastly more surprising and harder to see how it could work. I don't think it is analogous at all.
With consciousness, it is like there is a whole other "side" to things. The entity in question is no longer just an object. It is something for itself. In the tornado case, you are going from small objects to a larger object. Pretty straightforward. In the case of consciousness, you are going from small objects to a subject. Not so straightforward.
One is a case of weak emergence, or simply different levels of description, and the other is a case, if of emergence, of strong emergence, which is much harder to justify.
It's so much simpler than that. How can anything that doesn't make any difference make a difference to survival? Obviously, for something to be selected for, it has to make some kind of objective difference. The idea that epiphenomenal consciousness could be selected for is just flat out incoherent.
Imagine that we have two sets of dominoes. One set is a zombie set, and has nothing subjective at all going on. Impacts are not felt. We then also have a second set that has phenomenal properties. There is something it is like for the dominoes themselves to experience the falling and colliding. But imagine that these two sets are objectively identical in all ways. All their physical properties are the same. In other words, the "consciousness" of the dominoes that feel is epiphenomenal. If we didn't know which set was which, how could we find out? There would be no possible way to arrange the dominoes such that their pattern of falling would reveal which set is the set with phenomenal properties.
Now imagine that there are two versions of you, one with epiphenomenal consciousness and one that is a zombie. Since the consciousness makes no difference to behavior, there would be no way to tell which is conscious. And if the two were to talk about consciousness, this talk would have nothing to do with any actual consciousness, as it is clearly independent of it and caused by something other than any actual presence of consciousness.
Clearly, with an epiphenomenon, there is nothing for the evolutionary process to work with.
If you think consciousness (I read subjectivity) is real and is causal, and also that all causes are physical (I read objective), what does this mean? Isn't all the behavior fully accounted for by the low-level, non-conscious physical causes? Doesn't any appeal to any conscious causes amount to overdetermination?
It most certainly is! :smile: I am not sure if you are joking. In case you aren't:EpiphenomenalismQuoting Outlander
One is subjective and the other is objective. Perhaps they are two sides of a coin. Still, they are worth distinguishing.
You could conceivably be incapable of pain and still retract your hand from a hot stove, no?
Scientists like Sean Carroll believe that consciousness is weakly emergent, and you only seem to have an argument from incredulity against them.
https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/19311/1/Consciousness%20and%20Laws%20of%20Physics-full.pdf
In the more mundane of the two senses which you are right to separate, yes. (The sense of "undergo".) Balls and players both.
Are you sure that sense is irrelevant? Couldn't it be the ground of your incredulity here?
Quoting petrichor
That sense removed, aren't we left with
Quoting petrichor
?
At least to my understanding, and forgive me if I'm overexplaining:
The difference here would be that the neuronal processes associated with consciousness are causal, but the actual feeliness of the world is not. That's epiphenomenalism: experience is a real, but an after-affect of the causal network. Else, the feeliness is in some sense causal upon the neuronal processes -- so that what we feel will effect neurons in some capacity that's functionally measurable. So if an experience of a movie then has effects upon the neuronal activity at some later point, rather than the movie encoding itself into the neurons in some "deep"* way and then that pattern re-emerging due to this deeper pattern and thus we have a memory of a movie [s](but the causal pattern is at the level of neurons rather than experience)[/s], then we'd infer epiphenomenalism is not the case with respect to this particular experience-event. But if our experiences are in some way only coming from the neuronal events, and that feeliness never effects neurons, then we'd be epiphenomenalists.
(I should say the reason I think the question unanswerable at this time -- we simply don't know enough about consciousness to even start making headway on its relationship to natural selection. It could very well be a conceptual mistake, which is my favored approach to the problem of consciousness, or even a phenotypic accident that's in no way related to natural selection)
*deep meaning, something other than what we presently measure
Quoting Moliere
Quoting petrichor
I don't see it as a case of the "feeliness" of experience "affecting neurons", but since that would be to espouse dualism, I would rather say the felt quality of experience must be causal (if neuronal processes are) since it too would be a neuronal process. If the felt quality were not present then the neuronal processes would be different and thus different causally. That's why I think epiphenomenalism makes no sense.
The same goes for the p-zombie notion; the idea that our neuronal processes could be exactly as they are when felt experience is present and yet we could nonetheless have no felt experience seems completely absurd to me. Ironically it presupposes dualism, because it imagines the felt quality of experience as something "ghostly" that exists over and above the neuronal processes.
So, all the behavior can indeed "be accounted for by the low-level physical causes", but why should we think that the low-level physical processes should be the same regardless of whether they were associated with consciousness or not? And if the differ, why would they not differ causally?
Sure, but in light of the metabolic cost of useless brain tissue we have reason to understand that carrying around superfluous brain should be actively selected against. More energy efficient zombies should outcompete members of a population which need to consume more to feed epiphenomenally conscious brain tissue that only monitors what is going on in the brain but produces no output.
Yeah, I can appreciate such possibilities, but I can imagine a lot of dangers humanity is woefully unprepared to understand.
Such as ? The prospective rewards seem to me more than worth the un/foreseeable risks.
"For options three and four, "not all causes are physical" can be also be taken as "epiphenomenalism is not true"."
is still dualistic.
In the first definition, you say about consciousness that it is "not merely a behavioral disposition".
In the second definition, you say about consciousness that "it doesn't influence behavior".
Aren't these two in conflict?
Now, behavior is --among other things-- the response or combination of responses to internal and external stimuli.
Aren't these stimuli perceived by me when and because I am conscious? Isn't therefore my behavior in this case based and shaped by my consciousness? And isn't the statement that consciousness "doesn't influence behavior" wrong?
Consciousness is essentially a state and ability to perceive internal and external stimuli. And behavior is a response to these stimuli.
But because these stimuli also include thoughts and other internal stimuli, behavior is also affected by the subconscious, in a more or less automatic way, i.e., by elements that usually we are not aware (conscious) of. In short, our behavior is affected by both the conscious and the subconscious parts of the our mind.
It seems that now all the discrepancies and conflicts I described above are resolved. Doesn't it?
In defining concepts, it is always best to think of what they are and mean essentially.
Quoting petrichor
Isn't thinking, reasoning and other purely mental faculties, which are non-physical in nature, also causes? Don't they also affect behavior?
No. Consciousness is partly shaped by physical events, but partly determined by metaphysical (mental) interactions. For example : a motivated physical sperm is obviously alive, but typically shows minimal signs of consciousness : its movement seems to be directed mostly by external forces in the womb, which guide its thrashing toward the uterus, where it accidentally bumps into the oosphere. And its penetration into the egg is controlled primarily by the cell-wall of the ovum. But once the twain have become one, a transformation occurs : motion & control (energy & organization) are combined into a cybernetic organism : input > output > feedback > modified output. Internal & external energy/information are integrated into a teleological system, with a mind/purpose of its own, so to speak.
After that organic system is expelled into the cold cruel world, it becomes an independent operator. At first, the baby is mostly a passive object pushed & pulled by external forces. But it gradually learns to impose its Will, its Purpose, on the outside world. And eventually, that Willpower becomes a goal-directed force-to-be-reckoned-with : e.g. Elon Musk. Few would deny that Musk is a conscious being, and that he has an indomitable Will, focused on whatever mission is currently in his Mind : e.g. rocket to mars. So, the pertinent question here is whether a rocket to mars would happen naturally, or would be the physical expression of a conscious mental map of space-faring humanity, with the ability to escape the effects of its own mis-management of its inherited habitat.
If you think subjective Consciousness is powerless to influence the behavior of other minds, and of mindless matter, don't get between Musk and his mission. :smile:
The Causal Efficacy of Consciousness :
Mental causation is vitally important to the integrated information theory (IIT), which says consciousness exists since it is causally efficacious. . . . . The causal efficacy of consciousness is vital to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. IIT opposes eliminativist and illusionist views that deny the ontological existence of consciousness, claiming to the contrary that consciousness is a real feature of the natural world
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7517407/
The two most popular options in this poll accept that Consciousness (C) is an immaterial causal phenomenon, but differ on how it came to be whatever it is : natural selection or other (divine ensoulment?). One option A> views Sentience as an emergent feature of the gradually developing world, while the other B> seems to assume that it is an otherworldly (unnatural) introduction into an otherwise natural process. So, A> is fairly conventional secular philosophy, while B> is closer to religious theology. Is that a fair assessment?
Both A & B seem to reject the definition of Conscious awareness as an Epiphenomenon*1. Which denies that it is an important primary feature of reality, being instead a useless incidental side effect or illusion. The definition below mentions that C remains, after all these years, a peculiar product of unknown etiology --- not observed, but experienced. So part of the problem with discussing C philosophically, is the mystery of its insubstantial existence in a material world.
Epiphenomenalism dismisses the non-physical connection between Being & Knowing as a minor metaphysical quibble, instead of an important physical phenomenon, such as causal Gravity*2 --- also an immaterial mystery, a century after Einstein's definition of Gravity as, not a physical force but metaphysical Geometry. Is that a fair assessment?
So, what have we learned here? That C is a "hard" problem because is is so empty & incorporeal & ethereal? Or that it falls into the crack between Real & Ideal, between Physics & Metaphysics, between Science & Religion? :smile:
*1. An epiphenomenon is a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon. The word has two senses: one that connotes known causation and one that connotes absence of causation or reservation of judgment about it. ___Wikipedia
*2. Arrow of Causality and Quantum Gravity :
Causality, rather than the arrow of time, may be a more natural discriminant between the past and the future in quantum theories. ___American Physical Society
https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.171601
Clarification: so you are a substance dualist?
If not, what non-trivially distinguishes "physical events" from "metaphysical interactions"?
If so, how do you solve 'the interaction problem' and account for the apparent violation of the physical substance's Conservation Laws (i.e. causal closure)?
# Substance Dualist? :
No. I'm a Substance Monist. But my hypothetical ultimate substance (EFA) violates your immanentist exclusionary rule.
Although both Matter & Mind are immanent, the Primary Origin of all post-big-bang secondary substances is presumed to be pre-BB. Does Immanentism allow for an eternal "Multiverse", or "Big Bounce" scenarios, powered by endless Energy and controlled by beginingless Laws? If not, then the immanent deity must be self-existent & self-contained, and the BB must be a scientific myth.
In my thesis, the universal substance is EnFormAction : the generic power to transform --- physical Energy being just one instance. Similar to Plato's universal FORM, it transforms from formless immaterial Potential into all Actual material & mental forms in the world : Energy, Matter & Mind. Of course, like Energy, you can't find EFA under a microscope. You can "see" it only via rational inference. It requires imagination. Does Immanentism have a place for metaphysical Imagination?
For example, just as the Big Bang was inferred by tracing current matter/energy patterns backward to a mathematical origin point, +/-14 billion years in the past. My thesis tracks current incarnations of EnFormAction (things & ideas) pointing back toward the original pre-space-time power-source that Plato called FORM. Obviously, that's not a Real thing ; merely an Ideal concept equivalent to an infinite pool of Potential. You also won't find this Aristotelian Substance in science books. If you do ever find it, it will exist only metaphorically in your immaterial mind (ideal), within a material vessel (real).
Note 1 --- I made up a name for my metaphysical force --- EnFormAction --- because immaterial "Energy" has too much Materialistic baggage, and immaterial Spirit has too many Religious impedimenta.
Note 2 --- Your Immanentism seems to be generally similar to my PanEnDeism, except that, like Spinoza's deus sive natura, it assumes that the universe is eternal. In which case, the Big Bang theory must be a scientific myth with no basis in fact. {see image below}
Note 3a --- Immanentism : the belief that the Deity indwells and operates directly within the universe or nature.
Note 3b --- Big Bang - Wikipedia :
One of the common misconceptions about the Big Bang model is that it fully explains the origin of the universe. However, the Big Bang model does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused, but rather it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state.
# Physical vs Metaphysical :
One traditional distinction between Physical and Metaphysical is that Physical Objects are Real (known via the senses) and Metaphysical Concepts are Ideal (known via reason). Therefore, Physical Events are those that are Perceived, and Metaphysical Interactions are Conceived. Does that categorization sound "trivial" to you?
Since our animal senses are inherent in human bodies, we seldom have a need to argue about whether we are seeing something Real. But since our Concepts are abstractions from reality, they are always moot, and fodder for philosophy. The waves of light entering our eyes are physical & real (quanta), but the mental image & feeling of color is metaphysical & ideal (qualia).
Meta-physics includes the properties, and qualities, and functions that make a thing what it is (essence). Matter is just the clay from which a thing is made (malleable stuff). Meta-physics is the design (form, purpose); physics is the product (shape, action). The act of creation brings an ideal design into actual existence. The design concept is the formal cause of the thing designed.
# The Interaction Problem :
Since Descartes' Dualism drew a do-not-cross line between physical Matter and metaphysical Mind, some have argued that such an impassible barrier prevents those separate domains from interacting. It would also prevent Mind from having any causal effect on Matter. Ironically, that wall-of-separation is just as impassible as the one between Church & State. I have references on Information Causation, if you are interested.
I don't share Descartes' substance dualism. Instead, my thesis postulates that both Mind and Matter are secondary & local instances of an Aristotelian primary & universal Substance (Essence or Genus). That's because my thesis is based on the polymorphic substance now known in physics as shape-shifting Information (energy - matter - mind). I call the Prime Substance EnFormAction : the power to transform (physical Energy being the most familiar causal form).
Since Quantum Physics combined with Information Theory to transform the Certainty & Determinism of classical mechanical Physics into the Uncertainty & Probability of 21st century science, we are now faced with the philosophical consequences of Einstein's Relativity. Hence, the mind of the observer is now a player in the physics game. And mental/mathematical Information can be converted into Energy & Matter, and vice-versa.
My thesis and blog go into extensive detail to describe the steps & stages between Universal Primary Progenitor Substance and its plethora of evolved secondary forms : e.g. Energy ; Matter ; Mind.
For more of my subjective observations and technical references on this topic see the thread on Dualism and Interactionism https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussi ... ent/846487
Spinoza's PanDeism vs Gnomon's PanEnDeism (thanks to
PS___ Early-on, I assumed that your antipathy to my ideas was due to a perceived Materialism vs Spiritualism posture. But now that you have given me another label (Immanentism) I see that the opposing postures are more like Natural vs Supernatural. But my BothAnd position is somewhere in between : both Immanent/Materialistic and Transcendent/Idealistic. Due to our similar-but-different worldviews, our associated vocabularies make communication difficult. So, I don't expect all this literal non-sense verbiage to be convincing. :smile:
Okay, again I ask
Quoting 180 Proof
So you are a (non-Cartesian :roll:) substance dualist after all, Gnomon, as you distinguish between "act of creation" and "creation" (or "design" and "designed" ... "immaterial" and "material")
Quoting Gnomon
... in effect, invoking Aristotle's (down-to-earth version of Platonic duality) 'teleological hylomorphism'. How latter-day Scholastic (i.e. :sparkle:-of-the-gaps) of you ...
Of course. Why wouldn't it?
This is why I can't have a philosophical dialog with you. I take your questions seriously, and provide long detailed answers. But you respond only with scorn, casting disrespectful aspersions on the intelligence & integrity of the questioner. That's an evasive Trump-like political counter-attack, not a Socratic dialogue. :cool:
PS___ Apparently your singular alternative to my Substance Monism, is to arbitrarily conflate an immaterial "act of creation" (verb) with its material product : the "creation" (noun). By contrast, my Ultimate substance is both the Power to Act (adverb) and the Potential for created things (adjective). They are attributes known by philosophical reasoning (e.g. Plato & Aristotle), not observed Forces & Objects of physics.
If that were so, then you would have given "detailed answers" instead of just more of your usual run-on gibberish. The fact is, Gnomon, you're intellectually allergic to direct questions put to your idiosyncratic confusions and never give "detailed answers" to them, such as
[quote=180 Proof]https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/709894
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/718369
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/742056[/quote]
C'mon, Gnomon, rectify this failing on your part by giving succinct, direct answers to my questions either in my previous post and/or in these old posts linked above (or show that the questions are invalid in someway/s).
We are conscious, all causes are physical, and consciousness is an emergent property of complex biological systems.
The thing is, saying consciousness evolved by natural selection says almost nothing about it - everything else evolved by natural selection, ok, now what? We should attempt to give some account as to why it exists, what does it do and so on.
Quoting petrichor
This is something I don't understand. If you see something which you find morally reprehensible or if you are playing baseball or whatever, how doesn't consciousness play a role in how you react or how you hit the ball?
We are conscious, epiphenomenalism is NOT true, all causes are physical, and consciousness evolved by natural .
I don't like the conflation of physical causality with epiphenomenalism
OK. As usual, my unconventional & idiosyncratic answers are "invalid" from your authoritarian perspective. So, tell me what answers --- to your three questions --- you want to hear, and I'll feed them back to you, to see If I understand them. Parrots are succinct, because they simply repeat what they hear from others. Novel ideas require more verbiage to demonstrate the "difference that makes a difference".
Typically your evasive answers are so brusque, cryptic & "succinct" that they are enigmatic to my simple mind. There's an old saying : "if you can't dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS". So the question here is "who's zooming who?" :joke:
Who's Zoomin' Who?
Song by Aretha Franklin
[i]You thought I'd be naive and tame
(You met your match)
But I beat you at your own game, oh
Take another look and tell me, baby . . .
Guess you believed the world
Played by your rules
The fish jumped off the hook, didn't I, baby?
(Who's zooming who?)[/i]
One of the issues with functionalism in phil of mind, though, is that 'functions' can potentially be ascribed all over the place, not just to the products of genetic evolution. The biologist McShea writes about that in terms of naturalistic goal-directedness even.
Yeah, I don't think functionalism is very coherent, it sounds somewhat contrived or forced, as if we are able to determine that nature "built" this organism "for" this exact thing. A single organ can have multiple functions, so which is the main one? That's a subject for debate.
On the other hand, I don't have a proposal to determine how to proceed, other than doing experiments and figuring out what things something does, and this is broad.
Why does that make it not analogous? Tornadoes are composed of things that don't have the properties of tornadoes. Consciousness is composed of things that don't have the properties of consciousness. It seems... still analogous.
Consciousness has to *happen* somehow - whether it's physical or something else - and it seems almost obvious to me that, however it happens, the things that facilitate it happening aren't conscious.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/09/08/consciousness-and-downward-causation/
This take is the hidden option from the poll: physicalism is true, we are conscious, epiphenomenalism is NOT true, consciousness evolved.
I was using "we" to loosely mean "people".
From what I gleaned from a Google search, eyes first appeared 500-600 million years ago. Now, you claim that consciousness evolved. But there is no agreement among scientists when consciousness first appeared. So, if scientists don't know when consciousness first appeared, how can they/you be sure it is a product of evolution?
If a scientist has no idea when X first appeared in creatures, I'm going to be leery if he then claims that X is certainly a product of evolution. Do you see my point? Not knowing when X appeared implies a lack of understanding about X, which tarnishes any other claims about X.
The plurality of the scientific establishment is justifiably pretty certain that humans evolved. Either life was conscious from the beginning, or consciousness came into the picture later in the evolutionary process. Most people, I think, believe the latter (some believe the former, and I'm sure there are some very intriguing arguments for that). If it came later, then either its a consequence of evolved features, or it just appeared by magic. I don't think it's magic.
Isn't there another option besides "magic"? Is it possible consciousness appeared when a certain amount of information processing in brains was present? In that case, if consciousness just happens when a certain amount of information is processed, would you really say it's a "product of evolution"? Also, if all matter is conscious (panpsychism), it also wouldn't make sense to say consciousness is a product of evolution.
Yes, that's exactly what I would say. If our information processing capabilities increased because of evolution, and consciousness is a consequence of that, that's exactly what I would say.
Even if there's no survival benefit to consciousness and natural selection doesn't apply? Maybe so. What about if panpsychism is true? An electron's consciousness would not be a product of evolution, so why would a brain's consciousness be a product of evolution?
But if our information processing capabilities increased because of evolution, it's probably because there were survival benefits.
maybe then consciousness is just what it is like to be these patterns, structures, invariances. not the fundamental physics ones specifically.. patterns, symmetries, invariances exist at all scales in nature, from small to large. seems to me my consciousness, my perceptions must be higher order structure, invariances, patterns, correlation, whatever you want to call them, in the brain.
Interesting conversation. I've been looking for just such a discussion. Care if I join? More questions than anything, really... for now.
On the other hand, human existence presents the appearance of a concordance of improbabilities. In which case, perhaps it is the validation of an unlikely hypothesis.
If panpsychism is the answer, then consciousness didn't evolve. Things evolve with greater or lesser consciousness, depending on how the matter is arranged.
The reason the arrangement of matter is important to consciousness may be along the lines of IIT. The way it's arranged in a rock, there's not much information processing, so not much consciousness. More information processing in bacteria > worms > bats > humans. A thermostat? What about AI? Maybe there is a degree of consciousness. But they don't process as many kinds of information as we do, even if they can process the kind they do much better than we can. We have a whole lot of different kinds of information processing all the time. Our brain is always working on our biological functions; different kinds of unconscious information; different kinds of conscious information... Maybe the variety is important.
This could be why we can't say when consciousness first appeared. It would also help with the question of what possesses consciousness and what doesn't.
Of course!
By the time you've explained how "fundamental local consciousness" can integrate all of those non local sources of information and information processing, you probably can explain consciousness itself without even needing to rely on "fundamental local consciousness".
And even panpsychism doesn't have an obvious answer, any more than physically emergent consciousness, to how we experience the qualia of colour, for example. Panpsychism seems like a lazy shortcut to consciousness to me, for those reasons, rather than a full answer. It's the other side of the coin to "we're conscious because of a god-given soul" - another lazy shortcut.
That, of course, doesn't mean it's not TRUE. It just seems a little too convenient. Take this extremely complex thing that nobody quite understands and just declare it fundamental. But still, it could be the case.
I don't see where panpsychism implies anything specific beyond that consciousness is a primordial feature of reality. I don't think it really coincides with what is traditionally conceived of as soul. Collective consciousness, perhaps.
Primordial features of reality, as far as we know, all have a kind of locality to them. They aren't aware of the macroscopic "objects" we would perceive them to be a part of. An iron atom doesn't know if it's part of a hammer or part of a human - it just does things iron atoms do, no matter what it's a part of. That's what I mean when I say panpsychic consciousness implies a kind of locality. If consciousness is fundamental, then you still have all the explanatory work of figuring out how this fundamental consciousness becomes macroscopically aware, macroscopically integrated with a macroscopic brain.
I accept that panpsychism might be the case - I'm agnostic about it, only slightly betting against it. I want to see real evidence that it's the case before I change course, because it doesn't have as much explanatory power at the moment as many of its proponents might like.
This is all non-sequitur to me. Laws in the early universe were expressed stochastically. I'd hardly describe that as conforming to locality. The opposite.
Our priors are too distant, I think, for you to understand my intuitions or for me to understand yours. That's fine.
What would that evidence look like? How do we go about verifying something like panpsychism? It's not possible to "get outside" our own minds. We can infer the existence of other consciousnesses, but we can never prove they exist. I think this is at the heart of the mind-body problem. Scientific approaches won't do the job.
I do know that many experts in relevant fields take the concept of the fundamentalness of consciousness seriously, but at the current moment it's not apparently the most liked take by relevant experts. Consciousness is hard, and for now, "I don't know" is kinda the best we got, with a little sprinkle of "but it might work like this" on top.
...in brains...
That was left out. The biological machinery evolved. That's too important to neglect. Certain brain structures (and other biological systems) evolved and as a direct result of having them, some creatures became capable of drawing correlations, associations, and/or connections between different things... and hence, simple cognition emerged.
Where does it all start? <-----that seems to be the underlying sentiment/question. Evolution of biological structures was/is and will continue to be a slow process. What sort of thing can consciousness be, such that it is capable of emerging and subsequently evolving over time given enough mutation and happenstance into the sort of extremely complex metacognitive endeavors we humans find ourselves engaged in?
I think that consciousness is a biproduct of meaningful thought and belief. Or, perhaps, is equivalent to meaningful thought and belief.
Evidence to disprove a theory that claims everything is conscious? I think that the standard for what counts as something being conscious takes center stage in such a debate.
We could start by examining obvious cases where we would agree that the candidate under consideration is conscious. Remove individual particulars and gather relevant common denominators.
On my view, it's all about meaningful thought and belief. If some thing or other is capable of thought and belief then they are conscious.
Requires consciousness be something that it is possible for an electron to have. What ground/justification is there for holding such a belief?