Yes, human experience requires a functioning human, just as canine experience requires a functioning dog, snail experience required a functioning snail, and rock experience requires a functioning rock. — bert1

Do you wish to say all these forms of "Consciousness" (experience, psych, mentality) are to the same form, degree and intensity? or just that they are all of the same metaphysical (ontological) kind?
I am wondering if you see a "combination problem" or not?
I am also wondering if you see some form of "universal consciousness" or "consciousness" separated from physical structure?

Yes, but there is little value in saying things that people can interpret to fit their own view if what you intend to do is disagree with them. But maybe you are a more agreeable person that I am, and maybe you will keep people interested long enough to have a conversation with them that I will miss out on — bert1

But my goal is not to "disagree" with them but to "engage" in a discussion of ideas, an exchange of thoughts. One discussion rarely changes anyone's basic world view but hopefully it stimulates one to explore other ideas. I know the main value of engaging here is the reading I do elsewhere in an attempt to understand the discussions and clarify and defend my views.

Try the evolution of color vision
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/The-evolution-of-color-vision-in-insects.-Briscoe-Chittka/195de55dbf4fa744998682d1542a386f34430ac8

Present your definition of mentality, please. The Stanford article on panpsychism refers frequently to mentality, but I couldn't find a clear definition of the word in that context. Being a math person I prefer an intelligible presentation of basic definitions. — jgill

Well I freely admit language is a problem and language is imprecise. Defining terms like mind, mentality, experience, consciousness are a major problem in philosophy of mind. I don’t claim to have a definition that would satisfy a mathematician or materialist. This is part of the so called “hard problem of consciousness”. We experience directly (all of our thoughts, inquiries and answers start there in the mental)and yet we can’t measure or quantify it and we only infer its presence in other entities.

I am at heart a process philosopher and the world is a becoming, a constant perishing of the past and rebirth of the present and anticipation of the future. For me the world is composed of fleeting space time events, the most basic form of mentality is this incorporation of the events (data) of the past and of the possibilities of the future into the “present”. Whitehead called this aspect of reality “prehension”. In this view a primitive form of non sense, non conscious, experience or anticipation of the future and knowledge (memory) of the past, is built into the universe which is not physical and thus cannot be directly quantified or measured by our senses or our instruments.

Is this what you mean: "self organizing and self sustaining systems in physics, chemistry and biology." ? — jgill

That was in reference to sharply demarcating life from non life. A distinction I think is arbitrary. The “strange attractor” quality of such systems is worthy of philosophy thought and speculation. If you expect the precision of applied and theoretical math in philosophy you are likely to be disappointed. Metaphysics and ontology in particular are speculative.

If you expect the precision of applied and theoretical math in philosophy you are likely to be disappointed. Metaphysics and ontology in particular are speculative. — prothero

I think that is well-stated. The problem is with being itself rather than objectified thing. That is an odd notion for even the most speculative I would imagine. We cannot help but put things in measurable, quantified, or tangible objects-forms.

Another avenue to look at it is that things don't have to be straight ontological fixed things. Rather, we know that there is at least one thing in nature whose process can experience. But experience coming from non-experience is tricky. There must be sub-experiential things going on, that works in degrees rather than a sudden burst (which invokes dualism unnecessarily and mystically unbeknownst and chagrin of the emergentists). Thus in some way processes themselves might be self-informing.

Thus in some way processes themselves might be self-informing. — schopenhauer1

This is where one's view about the most fundamental nature of reality comes into play.
I have that view that all of nature is a process, a becoming (continuous perishing and rebirth) not an enduring being. This speaks of quantum events with duration in spacetime and relationships to other events and to the future and the past; instead of enduring quantum particles with fixed properties interacting in a purely mechanistic and deterministic manner (vacuous actualities).

This ability to incorporate (prehend) elements (data, information) of the past and to incorporate (prehend) possiblities from the future into the present event is a form of "experience" which purely quantitative, empirical, materialist, objective observation cannot measure. It is also the basis for all more integrated unified greater intensity forms of experience (mind, psyche, consciousness).

Shaviro ," perception and feeling are among the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than life being a necessary condition of possibility for sentience."

Thanks for your comments. :smile:

The discussion is as comprehensible and consequential as highly abstract and modern areas of mathematics appear to be to me, and I was a professional.

Great question. I would say that even if we find intermediates of di and tri they will be separate and distinct phenomenal experiences. Eg. Blurry vision is not clear vision. This idea feels very Hume like. I can't put my finger on why though. But I believe it has something to do with the illusion of continuity?

That's interesting. Let's say that's true, that phenomenologically, there is a sharp distinction between dichromatic and trichromatic experience. And let's also assume that these phenomenologies are closely correlated with biological systems. I don't really know the biology of sight at all, but can we find a similarly sharp distinction in the biology with which to correlate the phenomenology? Or can we find borderline cases of the physical biology? — bert1

Yes, there is a sharp division in the biology, to do with how many kinds of cones and how many channels there are in the optic nerve.

Yes, there is a sharp division in the biology, to do with how many kinds of cones and how many channels there are in the optic nerve. — Pfhorrest

Do you have a reference?
Cause I suspect all photoreceptors are the result of mutations in a common ancestor, and that the different spectral sensitivities are the result of such mutations?
.
They would not result in blurry vision only the ability to detect different wavelenghts?

I hope not to derail the more serious discussion in this thread, but I did want to respond to a couple of earlier comments.

I think I am not clear on some kind of definitional matter. The argument for panpsychism is that mentality is a fundamental part of the universe and as such accompanies any material object. So in that respect, even a rock is "conscious".

This is a strange claim, to me at least. Mind you, I am assuming that when people talk of consciousness, they are primarily concerned with what we'd loosely call "experience" - that is, that everyday behaviour is accompanied by what seems to be an internal movie. It seems like "we" are immersed in this experience - we see red, feel warmth, hear middle C. But I am not convinced we have movies in our heads, at least not of the sort that a rock might also experience.

What does the word 'aware' in this sentence mean? It can't mean 'conscious' because you're implying that awareness exists but saying that consciousness does not exist. — bert1

I am suggesting that people think of consciousness as an inner movie and that "they" experience this movie - they are aware of the movie. And this leads them to believe that there actually IS a movie running in their heads. My claim here, along with others, is that people are mistaken to think this. In the matter of panpsychism, if there isn't a movie playing that we can experience, then what would a rock be experiencing? I guess we'd need to better distinguish what our experience is (if it isn't a movie) before we could say whether a rock might have it.

When you say “red isn’t a property of the real world” you engage in what Whitehead would call an “artificial bifurcation of nature”. We are part of nature, our perceptions are part of nature. The division of the world into primary and secondary qualities per Locke is an artificial one that leads us into many of our philosophical difficulties — prothero

I don't think I am positing some kind of division, I am saying that red doesn't exist. It is not a property of the world. At least, not in the everyday sense we think of red, which is to say that we think of it as a property of objects that we perceive. I think that people believe that red is a genuine "thing" that can be described. I am saying it isn't, rather it is information. Perhaps more like a description.

I realise I don't understand the philosophical implications of say computationalism and embodied cognition, for example, but it seems to me that consciousness (for brevity, let's call consciousness qualia so we aren't being confused about physical states of awareness etc) describes physical brain states. I think we can be reasonably confident this is the case because a great many learnings about the brain come from observing how people describe experiences in the presence of various brain dysfunctions.

Consider that when we say something is red, aren't we really describing a physical function of the brain, that being to distinguish between objects on the basis of the wavelengths of light reflected from them? We know that light stimulates the retina, the retina signals the visual processing system, this system makes discriminations on the basis of wavelength and eventually assigns the perceptual experience of what we call colour to consciousness. Damage to parts of this system can render patients still able to discriminate on the basis of wavelength but unable to experience colours, for example.

The critical thing here, as is typically the case with other sensory modes, is that the discrimination is described consciously by reference to a quale, in this case "colour". Behaviourally, patients can in many cases respond to sensory input without a conscious experience of that perception. That suggests, to me at least, that qualia describe computational outcomes within the processing system.

We do not have red experiences when we flutter our eyelids, wave our arms or comb our hair, rather, we have red experiences when the visual processing system computes the wavelengths of light from objects in our field of view.

If qualia are descriptions of brain processes that we use to undertake certain functions/behaviours, they would not seem to me to be actual objects or real entities. The brain makes discriminations about the world based on how it processes the information encoded in spike trains and in turn the outputs from those computations are used to produce useful, functional descriptions about those discriminations. My take on this is that qualia, as we call them, aren't real things, they are descriptions of the internal brain states.

If we do not have the required computational processes happening, it seems hard to imagine a description might be produced. Descriptions are not ubiquitous in the universe and are almost certainly agent specific, but the critical point would be that without the agent and its computations, a description does not occur. Descriptions are information, information is ubiquitous, describing agents are not. Rocks do not undertake those kinds of computations, at least not so far as I know.

So my objection to panpsychism is that I think people are mistaking the descriptive capacity of appropriate systems for actual physical entities. If red were a genuine physical property of the universe, then it seems possible other material objects could also experience red. If on the other hand red is a description that is a consequence of a particular physical state in an agent, then it is agent specific and has no broader availability. Or existence. It might be true that red objects reflect light at particular wavelengths, but it is hard to state that for certain. The only thing we can state for certain would seem to be the resulting brain state in an agent. Providing that our agent reliably discriminates between red and green, for example, we can be confident that the agent's description is functionally identical to our own. We could, I suppose, agree to call that red. But red itself isn't in there.

Do rocks compute information about internal states and reliably respond to those computations? I didn't think so, but maybe they do? If all material objects undertake such computations and reliably act upon those, then perhaps consciousness is ubiquitous. My guess is that it isn't.

So my objection to panpsychism is that I think people are mistaking the descriptive capacity of appropriate systems for actual physical entities. — Graeme M

I can't speak for other panpsychists, but I don't think experiences, or qualia, are objects, so as far as that is concerned I agree with you. I think it makes much more sense to say that the content of experience is determined by processes and functions, possibly computations, I don't know. But I don't think any of these things can simply be identified with consciousness. For me, an experience happens when a conscious system undergoes a change.

As I think about it, the concept of qualia stands for the phenomenal character of experience, whether we are talking mental objects or their properties. I mean, if a mental object did not have phenomenal character I don't believe we'd consider it conscious (eg thoughts). So I intend by qualia any mental object and its properties that we apprehend.

Should qualia on that definition be regarded as consciousness? I'd have thought so (again, so long as we aren't just talking about the physical state of being responsive to stimuli). After all, isn't it the phenomenal character of consciousness with which we are concerned in panpsychism? Or have I misunderstood the claim?

Should qualia on that definition be regarded as consciousness? — Graeme M

I don't think so, no. Consciousness is an essential prerequisite for an experience. If I'm conscious, it means I'm capable of experience. Exactly what I experience is not yet determined merely by the fact of my being conscious. What I experience are the qualia, and these change. We can't identify consciousness and qualia because qualia change and consciousness doesn't. We are conscious of one thing, then another, then another. The content changes, the consciousness doesn't. This seems really obvious to me but it seems other people's intuitions on this are quite different to mine, so much so that it is hard to have a conversation and know we are talking about the same ideas. Consciousness is that property by virtue of which I am able to have experiences. Consciousness is that which all qualia and experiences have in common, by virtue of which they have a felt character.

I don't know if a dictionary will help, but it might. Lets take a look at the first two senses of 'consciousness' on dictionary.com:

1) the state of being conscious; awareness of one's own existence, sensations, thoughts, surroundings, etc.

2) the thoughts and feelings, collectively, of an individual or of an aggregate of people: — dictionary.com

When I'm talking about consciousness, I mean sense 1, and this is what I believe most panpsychists and people like Chalmers who go on about the hard problem mean. The focus of definition 1 is on the awareness, not what one is aware of. There is a list of categories of content, but only to indicate that is the kind of thing that one's awareness is often aware of.

It is possible to talk about consciousness in sense 2, we refer to someone's consciousness as the totality of the contents of their conscious mind. In this definition, the focus is on the content of awareness, not on the awareness of content.

There's other senses as well, like the awake/unconscious distinction. Some like Banno think that covers the concept adequately. I just don't think it is the sense that most philosophers of mind use. I think philosophers typically are using 'consciousness' in sense 1 or 2.

Does that help at all?

I don't think I am positing some kind of division, I am saying that red doesn't exist. It is not a property of the world. At least, not in the everyday sense we think of red, which is to say that we think of it as a property of objects that we perceive. — Graeme M

I understand the notion. Apples are not “red” when not being perceived by a “subject” with an “appropriate” sensory system.
Apples are not “red” in the dark. Apples are not “red” when blue light shines on them, when they are not ripe, etc. Language is imprecise; it is predicated on our experience. Red is the result of a perceptual process. Wavelengths are the result of a different process. We are part of nature. Our perceptions are part of nature. Nature is a process. You are saying this kind of process (atomic emission for example) is real and exists and that kind of process (perception of red) is not real and “doesn’t exist”. This is why Whitehead calls this kind of distinction “an artificial bifurcation of nature”. It is why some philosophers argue against the notion of primary and secondary qualities or properties.

but it seems to me that consciousness (for brevity, let's call consciousness qualia so we aren't being confused about physical states of awareness etc.) describes physical brain state — Graeme M

Bert1 (I think) would make a distinction between qualia (content) and consciousness (awareness of content) but I don’t make that distinction (he can elaborate). For me consciousness depends on experience not vice versa (deprived of input consciousness deteriorates). Consciousness (self-aware, self-reflective) is a high level of integrated unified form of experience which is in my view relatively rare in nature. You seem to wish to make the brain state and the experience (identical) thereby eliminating the need for any further discussion or explanation (eliminative materialism or physicalism). I do not claim that human experience can be had without a human brain (there is a one to one correspondence). I just claim that the scientific, material, physical, quantitative descriptions of brain states do not complete, adequately or satisfactorily describe the entire “process” of experience. Much like describing your travels (no matter how complete) to someone else is no substitute for them taking the trip. The experiential component of nature is more that can be described in purely mechanistic deterministic or materialist quantitative terms. The content of human experience and thought is more that can be described with language.

Behaviorally, patients can in many cases respond to sensory input without a conscious experience of that perception. That suggests, to me at least, that qualia describe computational outcomes within the processing system — Graeme M

Most mental processing, indeed a lot of creative output and problem solving, memory retrieval does not occur in our conscious awareness. (Examples are those solutions that appear in the morning, those answers that pop into our head after we stopped asking the question). “Consciousness” is just the tip of the iceberg of mental activity (purposeful, intelligent) that takes place in the human brain. Training is what we do to teach ourselves to accomplish tasks without conscious effort or reflection (sports, musicians, military).

My take on this is that qualia, as we call them, aren't real things, they are descriptions of the internal brain states. — Graeme M

Qualia are the result of perceptual process but all properties of nature are the result of process and relationship. So the distinction between qualia and properties is artificial (bifurcation of nature).

without the agent and its computations, a description does not occur. Descriptions are information, information is ubiquitous, describing agents are not. Rocks do not undertake those kinds of computations, at least not so far as I know. — Graeme M

I am not an advocate of “rocks are conscious”. Rocks are simple aggregates. Rocks lack the complex integrated structure that would give any kind of unified integrated experience. You will have to address Bert1 on that subject.
The ultimate constituents of “rocks” space-time quantum events are active agents (processes) which may possess a primitive non conscious form of experience regarding continuity, the past and the future, relations (inputs and outputs) to the larger nature from which they arise and depend upon. I do not believe in inert, independent entities or objects with inherent fixed properties, it is all process, events and relationships all the way down (it gets into various interpretations of quantum mechanics).

If red were a genuine physical property of the universe, then it seems possible other material objects could also experience red — Graeme M

Other materials have different interactions, relationships and processes related to that wavelength.

Do rocks compute information about internal states and reliably respond to those computations? — Graeme M

No, not rocks as composites or aggregates.

After all, isn't it the phenomenal character of consciousness with which we are concerned in panpsychism? Or have I misunderstood the claim? — Graeme M

Only certain forms and only when you have a certain definition of consciousness. There are many forms of panpsychism (I have one and Bert1 has another, but there are many other versions). The basic notion is that some form of mind, experience, mentality, psyche or “conscious quality” is ubiquitous in nature (to the core) and that physical monisms, and dualisms are mistaken ontologies that give rise to the “hard problem of consciousness”.

I don't think so, no. Consciousness is an essential prerequisite for an experience. If I'm conscious, it means I'm capable of experience. — bert1

For me, an experience happens when a conscious system undergoes a change. — bert1

I think that experience, perception and feeling (prehension) precede (are a requirement for) life and the higher form of mentality that we call “consciousness”. Most of nature is “non or unconscious experience” but I concede you are not alone (or even a minority) in your view.

Shaviro ," perception and feeling are among the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than life being a necessary condition of possibility for sentience."

The very nature of reality as process (continuous creative becoming) past, present and future (durational events in space and time) requires a primitive form of perception (relations to the larger whole), feeling (habit or a lure for certain outcomes). This is working panpsychism from the foundations of reality up. The other approach is (I think therefore I am, consciousness exists) and working your way out (other humans) and down (other forms of life and existents). If one does not believe mind is ubiquitous in nature where does it stop, and where and how did it start?

Consciousness is an essential prerequisite for an experience. If I'm conscious, it means I'm capable of experience. Exactly what I experience is not yet determined merely by the fact of my being conscious. What I experience are the qualia, and these change. We can't identify consciousness and qualia because qualia change and consciousness doesn't. — bert1

I think I can see what you are getting at, though it seems a bit circular. Consciousness is the state of being aware, you seem to be saying, but do you also require that being "aware" means that your consciousness has a content in the qualia sense? If so then one isn't conscious until one experiences qualia (in the sense I defined qualia earlier, that is what you call "content"). I feel that there is evidence one can be aware without experience of that awareness, for example the case of colour discrimination in the absense of colour experience I described earlier. There are also other cases that show that people can attend to and even respond to stimuli at greater than chance without a shred of awareness of the stimuli.

Nonetheless, even granting that consciousness is an enabling state, how would we determine that other material objects have this enabling state? Isn't the hallmark of the consciousness we are seeking the existence of the content of consciousness for which so far we seem not to have a strong explanation? Help me here, I'm not quite grasping the application of the concept.

Panpsychism appears to be a sort of response to the hard problem - that is, that qualia exist without physical explanation. So long as an organism is functional and responding to stimuli, we would consider that creature to be conscious. We'd say it is in a conscious state, but we aren't bound to believe that it also has qualia. In the case of other material objects, we not only don't have evidence for qualia, we don't even have evidence for them being conscious.

I think language again obscures my meaning (perhaps I am not able to explain myself well enough). Yes, I agree that perceiving red is a natural process, so I am not denying the process of perception. What I am saying is that there is nothing "red" about red. As a description of a state of our perceptual system it exists but redness as a quality/property doesn't exist. If we could isolate some particular brain state that reliably conforms to claims of red experiences, I am saying that is all there is to be explained. THAT is red.

I am not really following your argument for bifurcation of nature. It isn't a bifurcation to say that brainstate A corresponds to claims of redness, is it? If I were to say that I assign the value A to claims of redness and B to claims of greenness for the sake of succinctness, do A and B now emerge as genuine properties of the world? They are in the sense that A and B are placeholders (rather like a variable in a program), but they might as well be C and D. A and B don't hold any strong claim to being genuine properties of the world, they are descriptions (placeholders for the states they describe). Consider that IF we were really able to inform each other what red looks like to us, we might even find that none of us have the exact same experience. This is, I propose, because the qualitative aspect of red isn't fixed - red is not the thing itself. The experience of red stands in for a physical state of the brain.

It doesn't matter at all what red looks like to you, as long as you reliably respond to an object's reflected wavelengths the same as I do. I'd stand on an even stronger formulation and say that red doesn't look like anything at all, but that's a bit harder to explain. A Martian who reliably reports some distinctive quality for the wavelengths I refer to as red is having a red experience, even if he calls it "Mnng", because all there can be is the appropriate discrimination. If he fails to discriminate red from a shade of grey, we could infer perhaps that he cannot have colour vision (physically, his perceptual system isn't able to make that discrimination).

Returning to panpsychism, I am still not able to discern what the claim is. I mean, I know panpsychists are saying that mentality is a fundamental property of the universe, but if we aren't talking qualia then what are we talking about?

The basic notion is that some form of mind, experience, mentality, psyche or “conscious quality” is ubiquitous in nature (to the core) and that physical monisms, and dualisms are mistaken ontologies that give rise to the “hard problem of consciousness”. — prothero

As you noted, much of our mental processing goes on outside of conscious awareness. Something the same could be said for a computer. There is a pretty strong similarity between the operations of a digital computer and a human brain. If there is no consciousness of such events, then there is nothing especially noteworthy there. Computers manipulate data and produce consclusions. We know what physical properties are necessary for that, even single cells do this. These are clearly physical operations of a particular kind - anywhere we find systems doing this, we can say computations are occurring.

So that can't be what panpsychists are getting at. Is it? In a sense, if it IS that then I might kind of agree, because as I said earlier, information is ubiquitous. So if the capacity for agents to make use of information is panpsychism, then I'd be on board with that. In other words, information is a property of the universe that the right sorts of agents can utilise. But that is hardly a startling conclusion, so again, it doesn't seem to be what panpsychists are thinking. And it certainly isn't tackling the problem of dualism as far as I can see because it says nothing about qualia, only that the universe is such that computing systems can compute...

I'm not sure how much Integrated Information Theory has been mentioned here, but it is a panpsychism supporting scientific theory regarding consciousness. It absolutely postulates that information, its complexity and, well, integration are responsible for consciousness, or more succinctly consciousness is a result of such complexity and integration in a system. It is fascinating in that you can have embedded consciousness systems within systems (though I believe that the most complex and integrated one "wins over' the others in an all or nothing game.

I don't know very much about IIT, though what little I do know of it didn't lead me to think it promoted panpsychism. As you say, I believe the theory claims to model information integration mathematically in order to predict what systems might be conscious (I guess on the basis that consciousness is enabled by complex bi-directional and integrated information flows). But that still depends on some kind of computational system (the idea being that complex feed-forward/feedback circuits enables complex computations) so I am not sure how panpsychism could be implied by IIT? I guess I am still not clear on just what panpsychism really says. I had a quick skim of a couple of definitions but they seem to be sketchy, talking only of mentality and thought and "minds", whatever those things are.

Well, I think it refers to the idea that even a rock has some sort of information integration, even if tiny. Say the way atoms are arranged maybe. But Tononi, the theory's founder explicitly supports panpsychism. IIT does say that inanimate objects may have a 'phi' that's larger than 0 and thus a small amount of consciousness. Panpsychism, I think is saying consciousness is a fundamental part of reality, much like energy or information. IIT supposedly brings evidence to this effect. but I would have to go back and refresh my memory on the specifics of both panpsychism and IIT at this point.

I don't know very much about IIT, though what little I do know of it didn't lead me to think it promoted panpsychism. As you say, I believe the theory claims to model information integration mathematically in order to predict what systems might be conscious (I guess on the basis that consciousness is enabled by complex bi-directional and integrated information flows). But that still depends on some kind of computational system (the idea being that complex feed-forward/feedback circuits enables complex computations) so I am not sure how panpsychism could be implied by IIT? I guess I am still not clear on just what panpsychism really says. I had a quick skim of a couple of definitions but they seem to be sketchy, talking only of mentality and thought and "minds", whatever those things are. — Graeme M

The problem is the "arising" of consciousness from non-consciousness. What is "this" that is "there" that was not there before? If you say "consciousness!", then how is this not a dualism of sorts?

I am going to refer you to two fairly famous papers on the issue which may help
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
https://www.newdualism.org/papers/G.Strawson/strawson_on_panpsychism.pdf
The most elementary units of nature were originally conceived to be inert, passive, entities (objects with fixed properties) moved about by external,eternal, mechanistic and deterministic laws of nature.

Given this conception of the building blocks of the universe it was hard to see how "consciousness", awareness, perception, experience, mentality, psyche (use whatever word you want) could come about as the result of any combination of such objects.

The default positions were "consciousness" somehow mysteriously emerged and the non experiential become experiential (emergence) or that mind and matter were two separate but interacting substances (dualism).

Modern physics which thinks of the fundamental units of nature as quantum events (concentrations of energy) with duration occurring within the field of space-time (quantum field theory) gives us a much different picture of the fundamental units of nature (hence physicalism is the preferred term over materialism). Modern physics I would say thinks of the fundamental units of nature as active, energetic, units with properties which are determined by their relationship or interactions to the larger universe.
There is also a relationship to the events of the past (memory) and the possibilities of the future (lure or anticipation). These relationships are much more akin to experience and this is a form of panpsychism.

In modern physics at the quantum level we can predict the results of experiments (in a non deterministic, stochastic probability way) but we really can't explain them in any purely mechanistic deterministic way as the action of inert, independent, passive entities..

I am basically asserting that the relationship of the events of nature which have duration and their relationship to the past and the future is a form of experience (non conscious and non physical (unable to be eternally observed or empirically measured) is the basis of all higher forms of experience, mind and consciousness.