Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiences — tom111

There is a logical problem here. Attempts to reduce everything not evidently physical to the physical is not an argument for two different kinds of being. The "physical alone" argument is "monist" without qualification.

Consciousness is a passive byproduct, a kind of “ride-along” to the real causal story that takes place in the material world.

Once we grant this setup, we immediately encounter the problem of psychophysical harmony. Why is it that our conscious experiences are so perfectly aligned with our physical and behavioral states? Why does seeing a red apple correspond to the experience of redness rather than the feeling of pain or a random hallucination? Within epiphenomenalism, there is no causal reason for this mapping to be so orderly. The physical world could just as easily have produced any pattern of conscious experiences, or none at all. The fact that our inner experiences match the external world so precisely seems like an extraordinary coincidence if consciousness has no causal role. — tom111

I don’t think there’s any doubt that our consciousness has an active role to play. This is from “Feeling and Knowing” by Antonio Damasio.

…consciousness is an enriched state of mind. The enrichment consists in inserting additional elements of mind within the ongoing mind process. These additional mind elements are largely cut from the same cloth as the rest of the mind—they are imagetic—but thanks to their contents they announce firmly that all the mental contents to which I currently have access belong to me, are my thing, are actually unfolding within my organism. The addition is revelatory. Revealing mental ownership is first and foremost accomplished by feeling. When I experience the mental event we call pain, I can actually localize it to some part of my body. In reality, the feeling occurs in both my mind and my body, and for a good reason. I own both, they are located within the same physiological space, and they can interact with each other. The manifest ownership of mental contents by the integrated organism where they arise is the distinctive trait of a conscious mind.

Perhaps, to rescue dualism, we might turn to interactionist dualism, the idea that mind and matter do interact. Yet this immediately raises another problem: how could such an interaction occur without violating the laws of physics as we understand them? The brain appears to be a closed physical system governed by conservation laws. To allow non-physical causes to influence it would require new physics or a revision of our current understanding of causation, and we have no evidence for either. — tom111

There is no such thing as a closed physical system, so we can dismiss this as a non-issue.

The brain appears to be a closed physical system governed by conservation laws. — tom111

It seems that it's a system designed for the survival of the whole organism, i don't get what you mean by it being "closed".

There is no such thing as a closed physical system, so we can dismiss this as a non-issue. — Metaphysician Undercover

yes, they can't be closed in the sense that they are shut off. To me, the brain is quite open, quite susceptible to influence.

What if neither monism or dualism are true? I agree that between the two, monism makes more sense, but it perhaps seems more reasonable to say that reality consists of many things that only appear to be unified.

What if neither monism or dualism are true? I agree that between the two, monism makes more sense, but it perhaps seems more reasonable to say that reality consists of many things that only appear to be unified. — ProtagoranSocratist

I would agree, neither one is true, but they each offer principles for an approach. And, I think it's very clear that dualism offers better principles, due to it being more consistent with how we experience things.

To begin with, we have a division between past and future. We definitely look at past events in a completely different way from future events, because we need to allow for the capacity of choice. The assumption that we can reduce past and future to being understood by the very same principles (monism) appears to be very mistaken. Maybe some people like to think that past and future are unified as "time", but I haven't seen evidence of that unity.

And, I think it's very clear that dualism offers better principles, due to it being more consistent with how we experience things. — Metaphysician Undercover

yeah from an emotional standpoint, dualism does make a lot of sense (day and night, good and bad, life and death, etc.)

. The assumption that we can reduce past and future to being understood by the very same principles (monism) appears to be very mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

the more amoral or physics related type of monism that exists is the one that the ionian greeks believed in is that the universe is just one thing, for example, that silly exercise in which movement was declared an illusion (look into the earlier Zeno, not the cynic). It's not so silly if you consider everything to be an illusion i suppose, but it's a little hard for me personally to wrap my head around that.

Your comment on principals is a different definition from monism than the one I am used to. My worldview largely does consist partially of an idea that things are perhaps more connected than they appear.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a form of epiphenomenalist dualism, in which there are two distinct kinds of things: physical processes occurring in the brain and an associated array of conscious experiences. On this view, every physical event in the brain produces a corresponding mental event, a subjective experience, but these mental events have no causal influence on the physical. Consciousness is a passive byproduct, a kind of “ride-along” to the real causal story that takes place in the material world. — tom111

You ask us to assume this for the sake of an argument, but the rest of your post proceeds as if this was the only live option, save for "two unsatisfying possibilities." Is this indeed your position, or did I misunderstand you?

What I find bizarre about epiphenomenalism is its assumption that there can be only one "real causal story." Any other causal story is not merely subordinate or approximate (as a reductionist would posit), but altogether false (because if there was anything true about other causal stories, then they would be causal to some extent - and the epiphenomenalist flatly denies that possibility). That just goes against every causal intuition and practice, and I don't understand why we would want to consider this position, even for the sake of an argument.

Once we grant this setup, we immediately encounter the problem of psychophysical harmony. Why is it that our conscious experiences are so perfectly aligned with our physical and behavioral states? — tom111

I don't understand what you mean by this "perfect alignment." What aligns with what? You say, for example:

Why does seeing a red apple correspond to the experience of redness rather than the feeling of pain or a random hallucination?

But seeing a red apple does not correspond to an experience - it is an experience. It cannot be any other experience, on pain of contradiction.

Given the implausibility of perfect psychophysical harmony under dualism, monism seems the only coherent position left. Consciousness is not something added onto the physical world. It is the physical world itself, viewed from the inside. — tom111

Do you think such a "dual-aspect" monism resolves the problem of psycho-physical harmony? I have always thought the problem remains just as acute. Consider that, if behavior is wholly explicable in terms of mechanism, then it doesn't seem that "how phenomenal experience is" can ever be selected for by natural selection. And yet, all the ways in which consciousness seems to be set up as a "user interface" (e.g. Hoffman)—as problematic as that analogy might be—would seem to suggest a causal role for "volitional choice."

More to the point, we seem to be forced to choose between panpsychism or strong emergence. Strong emergence arguably violates the tenants of physicalism on its own, and is arguably rolled out as a hand waving panacea for the ills of materialism, but even leaving that aside, supposing we could explain it, whatever is "strongly emergent" is itself "fundamental" (irreducible). And so it would turn out that we have an irreducible, causally efficacious mental sort of being alongside the mental-less, merely physical. But that's just a restatement of dualism.

Whereas, if we take the panpsychism route, we still need to address psychophysical harmony. Why does a glass or orange juice experience, but not like we do? Why do we experience as individuals, when ten people in a room make up a "physical system?" Why do strokes and drugs alter experience in the way they do when everything, including the molecules of drugs, "experiences?"

Appeals to "complexity" don't work because, aside from being variously defined, a room with two people is more complex than a room with one person, and yet we don't tend to think it contains a single mind, but two. Indeed, the entire physicalist paradigm seems to have a difficulty with unity and multiplicity, in defining how a single bee is a "one." The older idea was to declare that the world was made up of subsistent building blocks (so your idea about form, consciousness being the product of arrangements of building blocks), but this sort of ontology has been critically undermined by advances in physics, and always had explanatory issues (e.g., gravity as a sort of occult force acting at a distance, and inability to explain mind, etc.)

Do you think such a "dual-aspect" monism resolves the problem of psycho-physical harmony? I have always thought the problem remains just as acute. Consider that, if behavior is wholly explicable in terms of mechanism, then it doesn't seem that "how phenomenal experience is" can ever be selected for by natural selection. And yet, all the ways in which consciousness seems to be set up as a "user interface" (e.g. Hoffman)—as problematic as that analogy might be—would seem to suggest a causal role for "volitional choice. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Honestly, I'd agree with this. Any philosophy that distinguishes between matter and mind, would also likely assume some form of mapping between them. Under dual-aspect monism, there is one underlying substance with both an internal, experiential aspect and an external, physical one. Yet it seems highly implausible that the qualities of experience would so precisely mirror a system’s physical and functional organization.

Why should neural activity for detecting 650 nm light feel like red, so well-suited to signalling urgency? Why should the mechanisms of tissue damage produce the feeling of pain, which drives protection? Or why should patterns of motion perception yield the vivid sense of fluid, continuous movement, matching the body’s need to predict trajectories?

The mapping again seems extremely convenient, no matter how we frame the dividing line between mental and physical. Whether we consider them as separate substances, separate aspects of a single substance, or whatever, psychophysical harmony still makes things extremely unlikely. Again, I think the only way out of this is to accept some form of mental causation (hopefully without violating physics). If we have two aspects or substances influencing one another, evolution would have to take into account both (either directly or indirectly). If they were passively riding alongside one another a la dual aspect monism, we would surely just need an extremely convenient mapping to see the sort of matching between functional organisations and contents of conscious experience.

I also tend to think the strong emergence hypothesis falls into the same trap. We have a very similar setup: two distinct entities of some kind (physical and mental), one arising from the other, a highly convenient mapping needed, etc. What you said about strong emergence I've never really considered before to be fair. You're right, it does collapse into a sort of dualism.

Given these issues with psychophysical harmony, I struggle to think of an alternative other than some form of monism.

Indeed, the entire physicalist paradigm seems to have a difficulty with unity and multiplicity, in defining how a single bee is a "one." The older idea was to declare that the world was made up of subsistent building blocks (so your idea about form, consciousness being the product of arrangements of building blocks), but this sort of ontology has been critically undermined by advances in physics, and always had explanatory issues (e.g., gravity as a sort of occult force acting at a distance, and inability to explain mind, etc.) — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's true. I suppose physics is seemingly gradually moving away from "building block" models to more continuum models (eg quantum field theory). This is something I need to think more on

. . . The second is monism, which holds that mind and matter are not two separate kinds of things at all, but rather that consciousness is a particular organization or pattern within the physical, not something over and above it. — tom111

Is there any reason why we couldn't equally well say, "The physical is a particular organization within consciousness, not something over and above [or beneath] it"? Monism is describable either way, it seems to me, without requiring giving explanatory priority to a physical substrate.

If you're a monist, you might have inputs on this.

That's true. I suppose physics is seemingly gradually moving away from "building block" models to more continuum models (eg quantum field theory). This is something I need to think more on — tom111

Yes, a new, popular way of looking at things is of seeing the universe as a sort of (quantum) computer. A veritable whose who list of eminent physicists have embraced this view to some degree, Tegmark, Davies, Vedral, Landauer, Lloyd, Wheeler, etc. However, what exactly this means can vary considerably, because there are a great deal of open questions in the philosophy of information. Some still say information is a sort of subjective illusion projected over mere mechanism (more popular in biology), others say it is "emergent" from matter and energy, and still others say that matter and energy are emergent from information. The last also breaks down in different ways, from "It From Bit" participatory universes (Wheeler) to ontic structural realism where the universe just is a mathematical object (Tegmark).

This opens up new pathways. In a certain sense, while computation can be decomposed into simpler Turing Machines, it is not reducible into building blocks. Different is different. This sort of goes along with arguments in process metaphysics that a process metaphysics does not require any sort of emergence at all (instead, we just have the nesting of processes).

IMO though, Bickard's appeal to process metaphysics is a bit too sanguine. It isn't a silver bullet. Process metaphysics tends towards a sort of universal monoprocess, and so it just ends up sliding towards another pole of the Problem of the One and the Many if we aren't careful, but more to the point, it still leaves mind fairly mysterious, just not contradictory perhaps. Terrance Deacon has some interesting stuff to say on this too (quoted here). His open-source paper on biosemiotics is pretty good on this topic and its relation to information theory (so big in physics) now too.

The problem is that, while these new views open up new paths that the old "building block" metaphysics foreclosed on, they lead in a vast plurality of directions. What it means for a physical system to be "computing" any particular computation is an extremely fraught question, and arguably any system of enough complexity can be said to be computing any program below a certain Kolmogov complexity. Add on to this the "subjective" element of information (or something like Jaynes' argument that entropy is itself in a sense subjective) and there are loads of possible interpretations here.

For me, I think this brings me back to the most obvious source of unity and multiplicity. We are ourselves and no one else. We are a unity, although as Plato's psychology suggests, we can be more or less unified. So, we need to explain how there are beings (plural). I think this might be possible in a process context by speaking in terms of systems that are more or less self-determining, unity and multiplicity being contrary opposites (of degree; like dark and light) not contradictory opposites. I am particularly fond of how Aristotle takes Plato's spot on psychological insights and broadens them into a full on metaphysical and physical principle. The problem is that, while many people in contemporary analytic thought are drawn to Aristotle on this issue, ethics, etc., they almost always use a deflated Aristotle who is penned in by the aesthetic commitments of our era. This is a shame, because I think a promising way to approach the Hard Problem is to flip the picture, and look at things from the top down, such that "matter" emerges from form, which is inherently intelligible (and here, Neoplatonic extensions of Aristotle, or even Hegel are more helpful than "Aristotle the naturalist").

On that point, I like David Bentley Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods quite a bit, or C.S. Peirce's Agapism. But I think that, in general, "naturalism" is a sort of theology stemming from the older natura pura, and by that I mean just that it is more of a "world view," both aesthetic and epistemic; sort of what Charles Taylor means by a "closed world system." It's a sort of built in preference for the mechanistic, which I think you can see in the way people will find Max Tegmark's ontology, where the universe is just a mathematical object, and that all such objects (and so pretty much all imaginable timelines) truly exist, to be plausible, but will find a much less expansive ontology where mind (intentionality and intelligibility) are fundemental to be totally implausible, because it is "anthropomorphic" or even "mystical" (used pejoratively). You can also see this in how people want to "escape mechanism" but then are only willing to stray as far as a reductionist formalism that ends up being very similar.

I don't think "empirical facts" help to decide this sort of issue much. It's closer to a religion. People generally stick to what they were raised with, or they "convert." The issue is as much aesthetic as anything else. And unfortunately, the Hard Problem and psychophysical harmony are the sorts of issues where such a starting "frame" become essential to even framing the problem, making everything very hazy.

Yet it seems highly implausible that the qualities of experience would so precisely mirror a system’s physical and functional organization.

Why should neural activity for detecting 650 nm light feel like red, so well-suited to signalling urgency? Why should the mechanisms of tissue damage produce the feeling of pain, which drives protection? Or why should patterns of motion perception yield the vivid sense of fluid, continuous movement, matching the body’s need to predict trajectories? — tom111

Since the OP won't answer my question, can anyone else explain what he is talking about? @Count Timothy von Icarus? What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," which asks why there should be any subjective experience at all, but in a way, it's almost in direct contradiction to it. The whole premise of the "hard problem" is that subjective experience is purportedly of a different nature than physical and functional organization, and thus the two are entirely incommensurate. So, in what sense can one mirror/align/match the other?

Apologies, slowly replying to comments. So what I mean is, to say that an experience “mirrors” or “matches” physical and functional organization means that the patterns and relationships in the brain are reflected directly in the patterns of conscious experience. For example, neurons that respond to different wavelengths of light correspond to the experience of different colors, with longer wavelengths producing the experience of red and shorter wavelengths producing blue. Neurons tuned to high or low frequencies correspond to the conscious perception of high or low sounds. Even spatial relationships, such as objects being above or beside each other, are mirrored in the way we experience them visually. The qualitative differences in experience are systematically structured according to the underlying physical organization.

This mapping could be entirely random, and indeed more likely not to so perfectly match up with the functional role of particular physical states of the brain. The firing of C-fibres, for example, which occurs when pain is inflicted on a person, corresponds qualitatively to a negative feeling, the actual qualia we call "pain". Yet, it just so happens to perfectly match a particular qualia that feels subjectively negative, instead of something entirely irrelevant. It could have corresponded to any feeling: to the colour green, to pleasure, even. This is the problem of psychophysical harmony, which is known but not often discussed within philosophy of mind (at least from my experience). There are probably better explanations out there, but hopefully you get the picture.

So this is all a massive coincidence - that the physical states of the brain so often line up with completely sensical qualia, when the mapping could have been anything. Or, there is a reason for this mapping being so seemingly convenient (the qualia has some sort of causal impact), or we reject the idea of there being a physical, a mental, and mapping between them entirely - ie some form of monism. Note, if we go with the second option of qualia having causal impact yet being a separate entity from the physical, this inevitably violates physics.

Hope that makes sense

Edit: this might be a good channel to introduce the issue, explains much better than I can

Good channel for this sort of thing

What does it mean for an experience to "mirror" or "match" physical and functional organization? This seems to be somewhat similar to Chalmers' "hard problem of consciousness," — SophistiCat

I was going to say the same thing. I first heard this phrase "psychophysical harmony" on his podcast (which was good but seems to have stopped running) and I just didn't have any inuition about why this is an issue or that there is something to be explained about why pain feeling is linked to certain behavioral responses or stuff like that. The idea that your pain could feel any other way such that it is some how mis-matching functional responses doesn't even really make sense to me because it seems to me that the perception of something as pleasent is inherently entangled with functional responses or dispositions unless you perhaps you have some kind of brain damage. There doesn't seem to be anything additional in this issue beyond just the general hard problem of consciousness, imo.

To be fair, I see where you’re coming from. It does seem intuitive that if we swapped the feelings of pain and pleasure, the system could simply relearn the new mappings. We would come to treat what now feels like pain as good, and pleasure as bad, and carry on functioning. The same could be said for hunger or any other drive. If the sensation of hunger were replaced with happiness, we would just learn that happiness means it is time to eat. At first glance, it seems like the exact qualitative nature of the feelings does not really matter, only how they are functionally connected.

But that misses the deeper point. Why is there a functional connection at all? Why is there any systematic association between certain types of feeling and certain functions in the first place. When I am hungry, a particular feeling arises that I reliably identify with needing food. But why does that association exist at all? Why is there a link between a specific pattern of neural activity and a specific type of conscious feeling, one that consistently fits the body’s needs?

It seems more likely that we should get random noise or something unrelated, than a specific feeling which can be consciously worked out to be a particular sign of, needing food for example, and then leading to thoughts such as "Okay, maybe I should eat now".

The mapping between subjective character and functional role is not logically necessary. Why does consciousness map onto physical and behavioural organisation in such an orderly, adaptive way, instead of being random or disconnected?

Why does a particular pattern of neural activity reliably give rise to a specific qualitative feeling that tracks a bodily need or environmental feature? Why not random noise, or a qualia that has nothing to do with the organism’s functioning?

More generally, why should conscious experience be in any way sensibly lined up with what's going on in the external world? Why would there be a whole process of consciously assosiating X feeling with Y situation, followed by Z action taken, followed by thought A, confirming we took appropriate action or not?

You might be right, but part of me thinks the problem goes deeper. I need to think more on this

But why does that association exist at all? Why is there a link between a specific pattern of neural activity and a specific type of conscious feeling, one that consistently fits the body’s needs? — tom111

I understand this, but it seems like this question is nothing above the hard problem of consciousness - why do we have experiences, "period". Personally, the issue of psychophysical harmony then has little content beyond the basic issue of subjective experience.

Why does consciousness map onto physical and behavioural organisation in such an orderly, adaptive way, instead of being random or disconnected? — tom111

To me, it wouldn't make sense otherwise. If experiences are purportedly about things, connected to a "law-"ful physical universe, then how could they appear random or disconnected, it seems undermining. It seems to me that if experiences were hypothetically not "lined up" to the world, whatever that means, you wouldn't beable to sensically perceive this.

As kind of my own devil's advocate (because I am not sure I would actually seriously entertain this issue or way of framing things full-stop), rather than saying that experiences are somehow coincidentally "lined-up", it feels more sensical to me to say that the irreducibility of subjective qualia renders them arbitrary, and it is in fact the functional aspects which make them seem coincidentally "lined-up", when really they are arbitrary. I don't see how you can make a clean divide between experiences and functional aspects because all the observable consequences of my experiences on myself, all my attempts to understand them, involve inherently a functional aspect that renders them sensical (e.g. like how reporting on one's own experience is clearly part of the functional realm of our own behaviors).

Apologies, slowly replying to comments. — tom111

No problem, and thank you for your response (I am not usually so impatient...). I have listened to some of Emerson's podcasts before, even though I am not sympathetic to panpsychism (not all of them are about panpsychism). This one does clarify the question somewhat. He is apparently referring to this recent paper by Cutter and Crummett: Psychophysical Harmony: A New Argument for Theism. The paper has a fairly detailed section on the concept of psychophysical harmony, which apparently has a bit of a pedigree in panpsychist literature. I will have a closer look and reply later (if I have anything worth saying).