A question for panpsychists (and others too)
As a panpsychist I believe that the rarity and privilege of my experiential transformation from typical matter into a human is literally unimaginable. In fact, I think my miraculous existential fortune should be justified by something other than "it just is that way". My question is what you think this justification might possibly be, or why you think "it just is that way" suffices.
Comments (67)
"It's just what happened bro"
Can you prove it? "I don't feel the need to" only shifts the burden of proof to those ignorant. Yet here you are.
Just as a broken clock is right at least twice a day, so is the unexamined life. That is to say, remains in a constant state of such. Thusly, this narrow frame of mind can be called truth to those who know nothing of the sort.
Why? and what then would justify that justification?
There is evidence of evolution, Neanderthals and other human species, so you didn't find your self in human body out of a sudden.
Genetics and modern forensics reveal a lot of information.
I agree. The individual human experience, with its questions, explanations, and willing beliefs, is impossible. Yet it is.
We will never be satisfied with it just is when what we see it just is, is impossible to be. The absurdity of reason in the face of the impossible demands some homecoming, some reunification with it just is that way because the way it just is cannot be, and yet it is.
Accepting the impossible with it just is is ignoring the problem, not resolving it.
What Ive learned is that I must use more than reason to justify reasons. And instead of justifying it, I have to justify myself seeing this paradox. I am a paradox, so if all for me is paradox and unresolvable, it is because of me and not because of it. So I must understand something else besides the rational; take myself out of the picture and keep myself out of the picture, in order to see where I fit in the picture.
I think "that's just what happened" is too abstract statement, because in fact there a ton of stuff behind it.
I assume by "that's just what happened" you imply evolution of life as well as climate change and evolution of cosmos and everything else that contributes to "it's how it is".
So searching for alternative answers is not so simple.
Yet interestingly enough it, finally. encourages you to offer more input to a claim that has been repeatedly confirmed to be "requiring more information" to constitute a solid philosophical inquiry.
So. Here we are. Rationally speaking.
Your post: I subscribe to way of thinking and consider its tenets of proof to be self-evident. As anything opposite would in fact infer me to be as. well, a moron, per se.
*multiple ignored or otherwise inadequately replied to posts* (no further comment)
A finally (adequately) replied to response: : "Somehow" (as if the replier's state of mind is somehow bizarre or unreasonable based on your reply [which is understandable, the ego is real, but understandably... unimportant. It's kind of an obvious unspoken litmus test to determine how far one is as far as philosophical progress]).
So. To simplify. Which I believe is the best course of action to produce a reasonable response. What is the underlying logic or rationale behind what encouraged such a reply?
On this planet, they're not exactly a rarity. And humans are only a fraction of the life forms on this planet. If you consider the size of the galaxy, in which there may be 300,000,000 habitable planets, then the number of other galaxies, all the suns and planets they contain, even if only one in a thousand of the potential life-generating planets actually does, life itself is not all that miraculous. The distances involved make it unlikely for us to meet any others like us, but that would also be true of a perfectly average fly buzzing around your window: it will never meet an equally common fly from Germany.
Quoting Dogbert
You are allowed to infer anything you like from any fact you come across. You exist. You feel special. From there to:
Quoting Dogbert
is a longish leap of the imagination, but you're not alone in taking it. Lost of people find reasons for their feeling of specialness.
There's no real question mate. That is to say you have avoided anything of genuine philosophic value completely.
This is the standard kindergarten response that predicates of rather fortifies the atheistic philosophy or "way or life" ie. religion.
Yes any state of realization of avoidance of that which could be horrible (or awful whether immediately or over generations) is likely, perhaps as you suggest, even mandating of ideological if nor ritualistic recognition. But the critic rightfully questions: "yeah. so what?". That is to say, predicates the positive future of those who dismiss this ideology as a falsehood altogether. Perhaps who end up in a better state of observable quality of life than if not having done so. So what is the response to that?
Generally I think the magnitude of universe should not have an impact of probability of human existence.
What follows for instance is that, the bigger the universe is, there is less and less chance for human existence or existence or life (because it's too small compared to entire universe [or matter]).
Quoting Vera Mont
Agree, I was about to say something similar.
Why? Or why not go back to a flat Earth with a moon and sun circling around it and stars painted on the night sky?
Quoting Dogbert
And none of it could exist without all the matter that isn't alive. So?
Quoting Dogbert
Does the amount of matter have any bearing on the intelligence of life-forms? You're still going on about rarity by through quantity, as if rarity by itself, conferred some special value. Life has no value to non-life, so only an infinitesimal fraction of all the matter in the universe gives a damn whether it exists or not. So small a fraction, in fact, that it approaches zero.
Quoting Dogbert
Yes. I believe it to be irrelevant.
But you can still be precious to yourself and set a higher purpose.
Mostly at the end of explanations - in so far as we believe we are close to reaching this level. It's almost never satisfactory, in my experience, but we cannot keep going down a further explanation "down" rabbit-hole.
One must assume there are facts of the matter about many topics. And nature must be some way, rather than some other way. Or if "must' is too strong, then we have to say nature is, currently, this way.
For instance, one of your points/questions is that:
I have literally no idea what I said that could suggest to you in any way that I think this. I don't even know how to construct a sentence that would imply this conclusion. I mean, the idea that "the amount of matter in the universe influences the intelligence of life-forms" is such a confusing, random, and stupid position to take that I'm more baffled you believe someone would hold it.
And this is just one example. I honestly don't know how I'm supposed to express my ideas to you anymore or if it's even worth it.
Only you can decide whether it's worth it to you. As for me, I've heard so many arguments that begin with some version of 'the miracle of being me', I'm a bit jaded on the subject.
How about the question how instead of why?
How is that?
Your final answer still: It just is, so dont ask again.
Quoting Dogbert
All your wordings demonstrate a presumption of being a thing that has somehow won an incredibly low odds lottery and has 'become you'. It's a different wording of the old 'why am I me?' question.
It seems this stems from your stated belief in panpsychism. Maybe if you cannot explain this very valid question that arises from such a view, perhaps you should question the view.
I was never into panpsychism, but I still asked the same 'why am I me' question, getting no satisfactory answer. I had to realize that the question reflected my biases, and was thus the wrong question. Instead of 'why am I me', one could start with "is there an 'I' that got to be me?" Answer: Super low probability except in a anthropocentric view, which panpsychism isn't.
Your current collection of matter is quite (over 99%) different than it was in the past, so how is this different collection of matter the same 'you' that it was back then? I've never really understood the panpsychist viewpoint, so forgive if my question is naive.
"How" would be a scientific question (i.e. to explain empirically) instead of a philosophical question "why" (i.e. to clarify-justify conceptually). For instance, imo, "panpsychism" (i.e. that's just the way woo is (aka "woo-of-the-gaps")) begs a philosophical question about "the cause of consciousness".
Are you asking about the emergence of the sentient from the insentient?
I didn't see this at first but I think you likely are. If so it is a restatement of the 'hard problem' in other words. It's good that you have seen it for yourself. If so 'it just is that way' is highly unsatisfactory. And panpsychism is an alternative, one that I happen to endorse.
What explanatory gain do we gain with panpsychism? If atoms somehow have some sort of subjective life, how does it illuminate the phenomenon of consciousness simply by supposing everything has it? Do quasi-conscious atoms do anything to explain the phenomenon?
This is a good question, as it illustrates, in my view, a mistaken way that philosophers and scientists often think about consciousness. And in a way I agree with you.
Consciousness is not in need of explanation - the mystery is already solved. We know what it is. We know its intrinsic nature, I suggest. There's nothing more to be said about that. What we don't know is how consciousness relates to everything else. That's the difficult bit. Panpsychism (of whatever kind - there are a number of different panpsychist views) is one way to tackle the problem of where to place consciousness in the world. There are a number of options competing with panpsychism, each with its theoretical pros and cons. For my money, panpsychism has the most pros and the least cons.
Panpsychism is not really a theory of consciousness, I don't think. It's a theory of which things are conscious. Non-panpsychists perhaps do need a theory of consciousness itself, because they need to explain how some things are conscious and others not, and maybe in order to do that they need to assume consciousness has some underlying nature we can elaborate in terms of the structure and function of, say, brains, as @apokrisis and @180 Proof and others on this forum believe. Substance dualists (do we have any here?) need to come up with a theory of what consciousness could be such that it interacts with the physical world, without actually being of the physical world.
Does that help? Your question has helped me articulate this.
I get what you mean I think (maybe not), but I'm not sure that's really how language is used. Consider the empirical, scientific enquiry:
"Why does it only rain when there are clouds in the sky?"
We could say "How is it that it only rains when there are clouds" but it's unnatural. I think 'Why' is used in a wide variety of contexts, including scientific, conceptual and teleoplogical.
I agree. :up:
For instance, Spinoza's double-aspect parallelism dissolves Descartes' "MBP substance duality": mind describes (degrees of) voluntarily behaving and body describes involuntarily behaving. "Consciousness" (i.e. mind) is not an entity, but how we predicate a class of actions that we cannot account for mechanistically. Besides not explaining, or making sense of, anything, this is why I find "panpsychism" conceptually incoherent as psyche-of-the-gaps appeal to ignorance woo-woo. :sparkle:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-aspect_theory
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychophysical_parallelism
'How X becomes Y?' is a request for cause/s that can be answered by the inquirer herself by '(under specified conditions, we can observe that) Z causes X to become Y'. However, to ask 'why X becomes Y?' is a request by the inquirer of the motives of another who is the only one who can answer 'Z was the motive (for me) to cause X to become Y'. In clear, ordinary usage, how pertains to causes or correlations (re: bodies) and why pertains to motives, or justifications (re: minds).
That's because it's a rephrasing of the 'why' question. The 'how' question is more practical.
"How are rain and clouds related?" "How do clouds affect rain?"
My post doesn't say anything that other replies here haven't said in other ways.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet-about-consciousness-has-finally-been-settled/
I predict more scientists losing more bets to philosophers. Ditch the whole "matter" thing entirely. There is no matter. It's all mental stuff.
"Mind" is not a thing; it's merely what some very rare, complex material systems do.
Stuff is just stuff and very rare bits of stuff happen to be aware that they are just stuff like all the other unaware stuff.
Consciousness is its own explanation. It's nothing other than itself. If we assume that consciousness is a natural phenomenon like, say, a whirlpool or something, then we have a mystery to solve, we naturally seek for an explanation, just as we would for a whirlpool. I just don't think any such explanation is to be had, and it's not needed anyway. Once the definition of consciousness is grasped, there is nothing more to explain. With regard to consciousness, definition and theory are one. The question of its relationship to everything else remains though.
This piece, one of the worst written I've read all year, does not support your text around it. On the contrary even.
Because consciousness is embodied in matter,(our brains) which questions its own existence must be duly given not just a definition but an explanation. One such explanation is panpsychism as hinted at by the first post here.
Yet such an explanation seems raise more questions than answers and not just from the biological perspective of why there even is life in the universe at all. Matter could have easily stayed dormant and inanimate and have not given rise to mind or consciousness, life etc at all. So it is of course a big mystery.
Our vision and cognition although not special per se are special in comparison to this non-life which in the face of it could have persisted in the universe but it didnt as here we are asking these types of questions.
Your whirlpool analogy is quite relevant if such phenomena was rare and non-ubiquitous in the universe and so meriting a scientific explanation.
So then lets suppose one second we didnt have consciousness or life at all in the universe but only this whirlpool phenomena.
The whirlpools would still be special compared to the stationary matter in the universe but it would be just natural phenomena which laws of physics could account and explain.
Asking where whirlpools and consciousness came from appears to be the same question but it is not for no whirlpool could question where it came from but only consciousness.
But theres more to consciousness being special than the above. Its why didnt the universe stay inanimate to begin with, no big bang just matter floating around doing nothing. This must merit special philosophical and scientific attention.
I have no way of knowing if that's what's going on, but it doesn't seem incoherent or contradictory. Just unknowable. The materialistic explanations for consciousness, otoh, are completely bonkers, at least imo.
Could it? I'm not sure matter can do anything at all without consciousness. It seems to me that consciousness might be uniquely causal.
I think we are so used to explaining one thing in terms of something else, it is really hard to recognise that this isn't needed with consciousness. Understanding the concept is enough to fully understand what it is.
I can't imagine he is ever going to stop trying to figure out what those features are. Newton could not figure out what gravity is. He only figured out what it does. Einstein kept at the mystery, and figured out its intrinsic nature.
There's a contradiction in my own post. I said I wasn't sure if it was uniquely causal or not, then I said understanding the concept of consciousness is enough to understand its nature. I'll go with the latter I think. The causal and the experiential are separate concepts, even if they are both equally irreducible to anything else.
That's interesting. Isn't the situation almost the converse with consciousness? We know what it is, but we don't know what it does. Consider epiphenominalism. That's exactly the view that consciousness doesn't do anything. It's not causal. By epiphenominalists agree that consciousness is that by which such-and-such has experiences.
@Patterner Yes, but electric charge is something out there that we come to know about. Consciousness is not like that, it's in here, not out there. We know about consciousness because consciousness is itself knowing, we know that we know, and we know the nature of knowing by being a knower. Electric charge is not the same concept as knowing, so knowing about knowing doesn't reveal the nature of electric charge. We are a system of electric charge as well perhaps, but as electric charge is not the same thing as knowing, the electric charge does not immediately reveal its own intrinsic nature to us as knowers. Does this make any sense? I'm sure other philosophers have had this thought before and probably expressed it much better than I have. I think Goff might have done, I'll look it up.
It would be helpful, yes. To be fair, some attempts have been made, and the most plausible are all functionalist reductions. But as functionalist reductions, they are open to the objection "Why can't that function happen without consciousness?" Which is just another way to notice that consciousness is not a function.
Quoting RogueAI
It doesn't have to, but it would be philosophically satisfying if it did. And it really doesn't have to - science has got on well without the concept of consciousness doing any heavy lifting for quite a while.
Quoting RogueAII agree. The materialistic explanations amount to "It just happens." Why are certain physical things and processes, which would take place without consciousness, nevertheless, accompanied by consciousness? They just are. Adding more physical processes to the mix, making the system more physically complex, doesn't suggest an answer for how physical becomes conscious.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11245-018-9594-9
From the abstract:
"Revelation is roughly the thesis that we have introspective access to the essential nature of our conscious states. This thesis is appealed to in arguments against physicalism. Little attention has been given to the problem that Revelation is a source of pressure in the direction of epiphenomenalism, as introspection does not seem to reveal our conscious states as being essentially causal."
According to the Advaita, as I understand it, it is only a matter of speculation for the ignorant (in which I include myself of course). As for whether the material world is of a different nature to mind, that assumes you can make an object out of mind and then compare it to the world. I see the point as being, rather, that even the experience of cold, hard reality - falling on concrete for instance - is still something that occurs within experience. Its not as if theres the material on one side and the experience on another, the reality is the experience of falling, the sensation of hardness, the pain of impact. Within which the objective and subjective elements are poles of experience, neither of which can be experienced in the absence of the other.
For the same kind of reason that a ball rolls down an incline.
But I don't go through life like a ball rolling down an incline. None of us do. We don't behave like that. To say the p-zombie does the same things as us because it's an elaborate pachinko game is to already admit we're talking about something fundamentally different than us. That's not how we work.
Suppose I'm acting in a play. My line is "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" Then I run off stage. Now suppose in a parallel world I've taken a drug that is making me paranoid. I'm hallucinating. I think a priest is trying to kill me. I run into the backstage of some theater, wander out on stage at a pivotal moment and say "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?" and run off stage. To the observers, both me and parallel world me did the same thing. But are we going to say we behaved in the same way? No. In one case I'm acting, in the other case, I'm freaking out. Wouldn't you agree?
There are more sophisticated, less crudely mechanistic accounts, like those involving top-down causation by emergent characteristics of whole systems. Is that any more plausible?
No, the behaviour is the same, no? Behaviour is public.
EDIT: for the avoidance of doubt, I agree with you. I'm arguing the opposite, I forgot why.
Yeah, I know. I play Devil's Advocate a lot too. B.F. Skinner thought that behavior is public. That's not too popular these days. I don't know how it ever caught on. But what can I say, other than I think it's loony. It's so obvious to me that my feelings cause my behavior. It's axiomatic to me. It's like trying to prove a=a when someone is trying to argue a can sometimes be b.
Why can't both feelings and behaviour, in parallel, be caused by brain activity?
I'm not rejecting intuition as a bad reason, I'm just wondering if you have any other reasons?
EDIT: and just to be clear, feelings and behaviour being caused in parallel by brain states is not physicalism, it is a kind of dualism. Epiphenomenalism is a dualist position of some kind.
Quoting SpaceDweller
I say we flip this discussion on its head and, instead of postulating that life, human beings and consciousness evolved from non-living matter, we instead say:
All matter and energy in the universe started out as fully evolved life and for the past 15 billion years, it has gradually devolved (or shifted) into the proportions we now see which is a much higher percentage of the universe consisting of non-living stuff, and a much lower percentage of the universe consisting of living stuff. And therefore, we can cease being amazed at there being so much of the latter in the universe and such a paucity of the former.
This approach seems to be consistent with the 2nd law of thermodynamics. A system of energy, if left alone, tends toward greater disorganization and more entropy. The evolution of life, on the other hand, with all its macromolecules (eg, proteins), complex biological processes (eg, mitosis), etc., would suggest an increase in organization and less entropy.
Looking at the universe in this way may make more sense. Of course, the wonder of life being here at all can still be a perplexing. In suggesting that we turn the telescope around and look into the other end, I have not solved the riddle of Why Life?, but rather looked at it from another perspective. Maybe the answer is to just put down the telescope or, as Wittgenstein wrote, throw away the ladder [after climbing up]. :cool:
If you start with some fairly implausible premises, yes. God exploded and bits of his body have been decaying ever since. Nice.
I like your theistic (deistic?) spin on my thought experiment! :up:
It's not really an original idea. I just scaled it up to fit your hypothesis.