does it follow that if the problem of qualia were to be resolved in like manner to other physical matters (ie qualia are a describable and measurable physical event), would that undercut the rationale for positing panpsychism? — Graeme M

It wouldn't be describable or measurable. It would only be inferred, like with other people's minds. The hard problem is one of subjectivity, which can' be scientifically measured or described. Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging.

If minds were the function of systems to undertake say logical operations on information, ie to undertake computations, we'd have to conclude that computers do this. And that seems relatively explicable. We could expect that human brains are doing similar computational processes, also explicable. We could conclude that information is ubiquitous, that computations are possible, and that the universe has the property that systems can undertake computations. But isn't that already known, accepted and explained? So panpsychism can't be making that claim. — Graeme M

Right, that's just functionalism. You still need the qualia. An alternative to panpsychism would be to suppose some kinds of information are conscious. That's what Chalmers has suggested. And it's not explained by the functions or kind of information. It's just an additional fact. That's property dualism.

The hard problem is one of subjectivity, which can' be scientifically measured or described. — Marchesk

How can you claim this to be true?

Right, that's just functionalism. You still need the qualia. — Marchesk

So yes, panpsychism aims to explain qualia?

Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging. — Marchesk

This my not be what @Graeme M is getting at, if so I don't want to derail his thread with this, but - how exactly is spreading it out through everything a solution to the problem of it mysteriously emerging?

We certainly haven't reduced the mysteriousness - we've just re-invented the nature of the entire universe with a stuff that previously didn't exist and can't be measured.

We haven't reduced the 'how' questions - we still have the question of how this stuff interacts with matter only now it's interacting with all matter.

I'm not seeing what's improved.

How can you claim this to be true? — Graeme M

There are plenty of arguments for the hard problem. Basically, no amount of objective explanation gets you to subjectivity. They're incompatible.

We certainly haven't reduced the mysteriousness - we've just re-invented the nature of the entire universe with a stuff that previously didn't exist and can't be measured. — Isaac

Sure, but it just becomes another brute fact of existence, along with the existence of QM, Relativity and fundamental properties and fields.

We haven't reduced the 'how' questions - we still have the question of how this stuff interacts with matter only now it's interacting with all matter. — Isaac

Well the matter interacts but it's also conscious. Combine the matter together and you have more consciousness. I'm not a panpsychist, so you'd have to see how they go about explaining combinations.

Sure, but it just becomes another brute fact of existence, along with the existence of QM, Relativity and fundamental properties and fields. — Marchesk

Why couldn't unexplained emergence be a brute fact? Are there some limits/preferences about what can and cannot be a brute fact?

Why couldn't unexplained emergence be a brute fact? Are there some limits/preferences about what can and cannot be a brute fact? — Isaac

No, but I think complex novel things emerging is considered spooky in a way that brute fundamental things are not. The presumption being that emergence is produced by the fundamental building blocks, so how could you get something entirely novel out of that?

Something has to be fundamental because stuff exists. We just don't have an explanation for existence.

There are plenty of arguments for the hard problem. Basically, no amount of objective explanation gets you to subjectivity. They're incompatible. — Marchesk

Well, at the moment perhaps. Isn't it feasible that an explanation may be forthcoming? In any case, if no objective explanation can bridge the gap, how does another non-objective explanation help?

I'm not trying to dismiss panpsychism, I just don't get how it even flies as a serious contender.

No, but I think complex novel things emerging is considered spooky in a way that brute fundamental things are not. — Marchesk

Possibly, but the thing emerging is not complex and novel. The thing emerging is conciousness. The whole point of the hard problem is that conciousness itself is taken to be a familiar, obvious fact (otherwise we'd just be rid of the whole thing). It's the mechanism that's mysterious, and we're quite used to mysterious mechanisms. The whole history of science has been the gradual revelation of previously mysterious mechanisms.

Well, at the moment perhaps. Isn't it feasible that an explanation may be forthcoming? — Graeme M

Only if the arguments for the hard problem are flawed. Which perhaps they are in some subtle way, or are relying on faulty intuition. I guess we'll know if/when an explanation does emerge.

I'm not trying to dismiss panpsychism, I just don't get how it even flies as a serious contender. — Graeme M

Well, if the world contains both physical stuff and consciousness, but there doesn't seem to be a way for the physical stuff to produce consciousness, then an alternative would be that all physical stuff is conscious.

Well, if the world contains both physical stuff and consciousness, but there doesn't seem to be a way for the physical stuff to produce consciousness, then an alternative would be that all physical stuff is conscious. — Marchesk

This depends on the presumption that consciousness is a genuine constituent of the world. Is there the slightest evidence to support the contention that it is?

Is there the slightest evidence to support the contention that it is? — Graeme M

That you have conscious experiences.

Seems a bit dodgy to me!!

Seems a bit dodgy to me!! — Graeme M

For a genuine p-zombie, it would seem that way.

That you have conscious experiences. — Marchesk

You previously said that the thing that emerged was "complex and novel", now you're claiming it's so fundamental and obvious it can't be ignored. Which is it?

ou previously said that the thing that emerged was "complex and novel", now you're claiming it's so fundamental and obvious it can't be ignored. Which is it? — Isaac

It's complex and novel when saying it emerges form the physical. It's fundamental and obvious as someone who is conscious.

Panpsychism is trying to solve the irreducibility of conscious experience by spreading it out through everything so that it's a building block instead of just mysteriously emerging. — Marchesk

:up: :clap:

Also: same response to basically everything else you’ve said in this thread, which were mostly exactly the things I was going to say.

I wrote a couple things in the other thread that might help explain the problem better:

To be clear, most scientific views would not posit a dualism in the world. Everything is physically manifested in some way whether matter/energy and time/space. Thus positing a mind that is emergent from matter, though seemingly appropriate (as emergence is assumed in the physical sphere), would inappropriate as it posits a dualism at some point.

So a sophisticated panpsychist might point out that if a cognitive scientists were to say "At X time, in this part of the brain, there is an "integration" that is happening which causes the emergence of consciosness".. the part about "causing emergence" becomes its own explanatory gap that needs to be explain. What is this emergence of consciousness itself besides that of being correlated with the integration of brain states?

I think this is a misreading of the problem I am suggesting with physicalist answers of causes. So physical events presumably have physical answers, and thus all the answers about gas causing the car to go are legitimate as they are all in the same realm (physical). But here is something different.

You see, it is also how radically different you consider mental states. There is a radical break between matter in various processes and arrangements and observers/internal states/feeling/awareness. To say that one just "pops out" or "emerges" of the former would be to claim to be a dualism whereby a very different realm is occurring- that of experiencing (but only under certain circumstances). So what can you do with this? Well, what happens is you keep pushing the Cartesian Theater back until you realize it was homunculus all the way down.

Simple behaviors of neurono-chemical interactions and physical properties creating states of awareness just seems to beg the question. We already know experience exists. We already know it is associated with neural/biological systems. We don't know how neuro-biological systems themselves are the same as experience.There is a gap there. No gap is present for why gas causes the car to go. More explanations can add detail, but if you were to say gas pouring into a chamber and exploding, etc. IS some sort of feely, awareness thing really.. well that indeed would be an explanatory gap. Now a physical thing is causing this internal state of awareness- a radical different state altogether. T

That is the equivalent of what is being claimed of neuro-biological processes. You see.. physical, chemical, physical chemical physical chemical, more physical chemical physical chemical. WHAM!!! EXPERIENCE!!! Something is not right there.

And then HERE is where someone chimes in and say NO it's the INFORMATION that is experiential :roll:.

Basically what this is amounts to is that science must posit some kind of monistic physicalism (there should not be any "spooky" things "emerging" that is not physical itself). However, experience itself, though completely correlated with physical processes, itself cannot be explained as to how it is one and the same as the physical, other than being correlated with it. It becomes an epiphenomena of magical dualistic "foam" that is called an "illusion" that appears on the scene (which itself cannot be accounted for). This explanatory gap that is committed to "illusion" status or have its premises assumed in the consequent and becomes something of a thorny issue. The only thing the scientist can do, is keep solving the easy problems.

Much of the problem again, comes from the Cartesian Theater problem. At some point, the homunculus comes in the picture.. Some sort of "integration" event where enough physical events bring about mental events. But this is the exact question that is being asked, and thus it becomes begging the question to simply posit "integration" happens and thus consciousness.

To many enthusiasts, panpsychism isn't so much an explanatory theory of consciousness, but an Occam's Razor style argument that non-living systems should be considered to have identical metaphysical properties as living systems, on the basis that there is no falsifiable justification for considering their metaphysical properties to be different.

From this perspective, pan-psychism is in a logical sense very close to if not indistinguishable from eliminative-materialism, the difference being that panpsychism doesn't consider subjects who claim to possess consciousness as being factually false, but as being necessarily and vacuously true in virtue of consciousness being a universal and hence tautological property. From this perpsective, the main difference between panspsychism and eliminative materialism is optimism.

gather from some of the articles I have read this means that any material object has a mind, of sorts at least. — Graeme M

It helps if you can learn to adjust your concept of mind. Systems Philosophy takes the phenomena of complex adaptive systems as fundamental. So what we think of as mental processes in this light are seen in more general terms as features of complex systems, feedback, control, increasing complexity and self-organization, etc. When you familiarize yourself with the theory and the vocabulary, then you can begin to see how material things can participate in what we call consciousness, to the extent that they likewise instantiate these properties or tendencies.

I recommend Laszlo's Introduction to Systems Philosophy, which touches on the issue. Von Bertalanffy also.

So what we think of a as — Pantagruel

then you can begin to see how immaterial things can participate in what we call consciousness — Pantagruel

:up: Thanks!

To many enthusiasts, panpsychism isn't so much an explanatory theory of consciousness, but an Occam's Razor style argument that non-living systems should be considered to have identical metaphysical properties as living systems, on the basis that there is no falsifiable justification for considering their metaphysical properties to be different. — sime

:100: :up: :clap:

It [panpsychism] “explains” why my socks and bubblegum are conscious, even though no one thought they were, but it doesn’t explain why the human brain is conscious the way the human brain is conscious, which is what we actually want to know. — Zelebg

It [panpsychism] “explains” why my socks and bubblegum are conscious, even though no one thought they were, but it doesn’t explain why the human brain is conscious the way the human brain is conscious, which is what we actually want to know. — Zelebg

Ordinary functionalism explains what is different between human brains and your socks. All that’s left after that “easy problem” is some mysterious metaphysical having of a first person perspective at all, beyond just the third person behavioral differences. Panpsychism simply says that that is not a special thing that mysteriously arises only in human brains somehow; instead it’s a trivial thing that’s everywhere always, and only those functional differences actually make any difference.

So, it still comes back to qualia though doesn't it? P-Zombies are used to make this distinction about qualia-laden systems, but presuming we actually could have a P-Zombie, would we be inclined to posit anything about the P-Zombie that needs to be explained by panpsychism that cannot already be explained by existing theory?

When you familiarize yourself with the theory and the vocabulary, then you can begin to see how material things can participate in what we call consciousness, to the extent that they likewise instantiate these properties or tendencies. — Pantagruel

OK, but isn't that just saying what we already know and why there is a problem? Brains are material things that engage in complex processes, so this statement boils down to saying that consciousness is the same as complex system properties. Is anyone convinced by that? Isn't this just claiming that Chalmers' easy problems explain the hard problem?

Ordinary functionalism explains what is different between human brains and your socks. All that’s left after that “easy problem” is some mysterious metaphysical having of a first person perspective at all, beyond just the third person behavioral differences. Panpsychism simply says that that is not a special thing that mysteriously arises only in human brains somehow; instead it’s a trivial thing that’s everywhere always, and only those functional differences actually make any difference. — Pfhorrest

I think there is something different between the claims of panpsychism and functionalism, though? OK, so "consciousness" is a common feature of the universe which attends appropriate systems/objects and that could be so (functionalism), but that's different from saying that all systems/objects can be conscious (panpsychism). Consider computations. These are genuine processes that have some kind of causal efficacy, Chalmers would say that a system undertakes a computation when the causal structure of the system mirrors the formal structure of the computation. Whether this is strictly true or not, it does note that a computation has to map to certain physical attributes that are not present in all systems or objects. So computations are a feature of the universe that are always available but only some systems/objects can perform them. We aren't then tempted to say that all objects, eg socks, can undertake computations.

It still seems to me that panpsychism aims to eliminate the hard problem by substituting for that state of affairs which gave rise to that problem a state of affairs an order of magnitude more resistant to explanation. I think maybe sime puts it best:

From this perpsective, the main difference between panspsychism and eliminative materialism is optimism. — sime

So, it still comes back to qualia though doesn't it? P-Zombies are used to make this distinction about qualia-laden systems, but presuming we actually could have a P-Zombie, would we be inclined to posit anything about the P-Zombie that needs to be explained by panpsychism that cannot already be explained by existing theory? — Graeme M

Try imagining something. Remember an event that happened. Feel sad. Feel joy. These are things that are mental states. P-Zombies presumably don't do that but somehow act as they do.

I think there is something different between the claims of panpsychism and functionalism, though? — Graeme M

Functionalism only addresses the easy problem of access consciousness. Critics then ask “but what about the hard problem of phenomenal consciousness?” Panpsychists reply “that’s a trivial general feature of everything, nothing special in need of explanation.” Critics then ask “So my sock is conscious just like I am?” And we reply “no, not just like, but your sock is functionally different from you too. That difference is an easy problem, already answered by functionalism.”

OK, but isn't that just saying what we already know and why there is a problem? Brains are material things that engage in complex processes, so this statement boils down to saying that consciousness is the same as complex system properties. Is anyone convinced by that? Isn't this just claiming that Chalmers' easy problems explain the hard problem? — Graeme M

No, it is quite another thing. As said, you would need to be sufficiently versed in the vocabulary and concepts of Systems Philosophy to be able to grasp what is being presented. Laszlo very specifically addresses it, in the introduction I think. It is a compelling description.

Panpsychism simply says that [...] — Pfhorrest

No, I think it has already also required,

some mysterious metaphysical having of a first person perspective — Pfhorrest

but doesn't seem keen to admit it.