(Contd. from the previous post)
Panpsychism
One way to acknowledge the gravity of the problem of consciousness while respecting the advances of physical science is to adopt panpsychism — the view that some form of consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of nature.
Bertrand Russel held that science was restricted to revealing the structure of the world but not its intrinsic nature. The structure requires something non-structural in order to make the transition from mere abstraction to concrete existence the core of subjectivity common to all consciousness. Russellian Monism holds that consciousness, in its most basic form of bare subjectivity, is the intrinsic nature which ‘grounds’ or makes concrete the system of relationally defined structure discerned by physics. By and large, we have no access to this level of reality except for a limited acquaintance with it in our own experience. According to modern proponents (Michael Lockwood, 1989, p. 159), consciousness provides a kind of “window” on to our brains’ thereby revealing some of the intrinsic qualities of the states and processes which go to make up the material world. If we grant that in consciousness we catch a glimpse of the intrinsic bedrock of the world, we would expect that the fundamental psychic feature will be coupled to some fundamental physical feature and will thus be more or less spread out across the entire universe.
This view is distinct from idealism. Panpsychism denies that consciousness exhausts fundamental reality. Physical objects are not sequences, or potential sequences, of experiences. They have a mind-independent reality. Stars, galaxies and planets did really exist before any consciousness which could experience them came into being. According to some panpsychists, however, (Timothy Sprigge for example, 2010, pp. 209-11) only a form of holistic absolute idealism could accommodate the genuine relatedness of conscious beings within a single universe.
Critics charge that panpsychism is absurd because it claims that rocks are conscious beings. It is questioned that the simple physical entities of the world exhibit no sign of possessing consciousness.
Panpsychist quips that the above charge is somewhat like the claim that since the electric charge is a fundamental feature of the world everything must be charged and have more or less the same charge. Although the fundamental entities which physics posits as the constituents of familiar composites (electrons, quarks) are electrically charged, the composites themselves generally lack charge. Similarly in regards to consciousness, according to the panpsychist, most entities, and all the ordinary objects we encounter in our experience, are not fundamental but are composite. Furthermore, panpsychist asks, what empirical evidence exists that individual electrons gravitate? There is absolutely no detectable trace of a gravitational field. Why expect the elementary units of consciousness to give signs of consciousness discernible to us?
The panpsychist assigns to fundamental entities a low-level or ‘weak’ consciousness, a form of unimaginable simplicity and self-opacity. Panpsychism does not ascribe consciousness as we know it to everything. And the panpsychist holds that the relation between the ‘elementary units’ of consciousness and more complex forms is not identity. The panpsychist argues (William Kingdon Clifford 1886, p. 26) that complex consciousness exists, and since we cannot suppose that so enormous a jump from one creature to another should have occurred at any point in the process of evolution as the introduction of a fact entirely different and absolutely separate from the physical fact, consciousness must be presumed to exist at the fundamental level of reality.
The second charge against panpsychism is ‘vacuity’— that the panpsychist is only saying that matter possesses an indefinable something which ‘grounds’ consciousness, a claim shared with orthodox physicalism. This is countered easily since panpsychism, unlike physicalism, envisages an intrinsic phenomenal consciousness.
Emergentism
Since panpsychism introduces an elementary form of bare subjectivity, which is associated with elementary physical entities, and since it wants to allow for a distinction between conscious and non-conscious composites, panpsychism faces the challenge of explicating how ‘mental chemistry’ works, or is even possible, a problem known as the ‘combination’ problem. This provides a motivation to examine forms of emergentism.
In very broad terms, a property of X is emergent if none of X’s constituents possesses it. Liquidity is an emergent feature of water; neither oxygen nor hydrogen atoms (let alone their constituent quarks and electrons) have the property of being liquid.
The idea of ‘mental chemistry’ as an explicit system describing the emergence of complex states of consciousness goes back to John Stuart Mill. The essence of this form of emergence is that it denies that the emergent properties of X are determined solely by the properties of X’s constituents and the laws which govern their interactions. That is, in order for the emergent property to appear, there must be ‘extra’ laws of nature which specifically govern ontological emergence. This form of emergentism is known as ‘radical emergence’.
The success of quantum mechanics in explaining the so-called emergent chemical properties makes it unlikely that the radical emergentism of the type proposed by John Stuart Mill exists at all. Furthermore, conservation laws militate against radical emergence. If a radically emergent property is to be causally efficacious it will have to in some way alter the motion of physical matter. This requires some flux of energy which would appear to come from nowhere and thus prima facie violate the conservation of energy.
However, if consciousness cannot be exhaustively characterized in purely structural terms, then there exists a real metaphysical barrier between it and what physics can describe. The panpsychist thus sees basic consciousness or bare subjectivity as ontologically fundamental in its own right. The combination problem for panpsychism is to explain, or even make plausible, how complex consciousness can conservatively emerge from the postulated simpler forms.
The dilemma is that the emergence of consciousness from the purely structural features outlined in physics would, however, be a very strange form of radical emergence, of doubtful coherence insofar as it holds that intrinsics emerge from the relational. On the other hand, if consciousness is, already in play (as the panpsychists hold) then we can hope for an account of mental chemistry which appeals to a more plausible conservative emergence, the general existence of which everyone should accept. But this approach leads to the combination problem, which needs solving.
One solution is that consciousness is ‘constitutive’ in the sense that the elements of basic consciousness are synchronically present in the resultant state of a complex consciousness, in some way blended or ‘added’ (Coleman 2012, Roelofs 2014). Our experience of the unity of consciousness hints that diverse simpler conscious states can unite into a more complex form in an intelligible way. The second approach sees mental chemistry as a kind of ‘fusion’ of the elementary states into a new resultant in which the original states are eliminated (Mørch 2014, Seager 2016). Proponents of this solution refer to analogies of the classical black hole and quantum entanglement in which new systems irreducible to their parts are formed.
Yet another approach is ‘cosmopsychism’ — the fundamental entity is the entire world regarded as metaphysically primary. The problem, in this case, is of de-combining cosmic consciousness into individual minds of the sort we are introspectively familiar with (Goff ming; Miller 2017).
The third option of radical emergentism, as envisaged by John Stuart Mill, still remains open.
Those of a standard physicalist persuasion will hold out hope for a conservative emergentist account of consciousness based solely upon the structural features of the world as revealed by fundamental physics. However, our growing knowledge of the brain and its intimate connections to states of consciousness gives no indication of a theoretical apparatus which makes subjective consciousness an intelligible product of basic physical processes.
Notes From: William Seager, “Radical Wing of Consciousness Studies”.
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