In this thread I will lay out a hybrid philosophy of mind: one that is eliminativist (nothing has a “mind”) in one sense, panpsychist (everything has a “mind“) in another sense, and emergentist (only some things have a “mind”) in another sense.

In a previous thread I have already laid out my physicalist ontology, which straightforwardly rules out the possibility of mental substances, and it is only in that sense that my philosophy of mind is “eliminativist”: nothing has a “mind” if (and only if) by “mind” you mean an associated mental substance separate from the physical substance (such as there is) of its body. But there are other senses of the word “mind”, or “consciousness”, about which I am definitely not eliminativist.

It is useful to distinguish between different things that we might mean by "consciousness" to be clear exactly which of several questions on the topic we wish to address. There is a sense of the word "consciousness" that simply means wakefulness, the opposite of being unconscious or asleep; that sense is not of much philosophical interest. There is another sense of the word that means awareness of something, or knowledge of it; that topic is not directly relevant to philosophy of mind, but rather to epistemology. Of more interest in philosophy of mind are two other sense of the word.

One of them is what Ned Block calls "access consciousness", which is the sense of the word that means self-awareness or self-knowledge, and is the topic of what David Chalmers calls the "easy problem of consciousness"; though I find that topic more substantial, and in a sense harder, and will cover it last. The other of them is what Block calls "phenomenal consciousness", which is the difficult-to-define capacity for experience itself, of any sort, and is the topic of what Chalmers calls the "hard problem of consciousness"; though I find that topic significantly less substantial, and in a sense easier, and will cover it first.

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On Phenomenal Consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness is perhaps best defined in distinction from what it is not. It is not anything to do with any behavioral properties of a thing. If we stipulate the existence of some being, like a computer artificial intelligence, that behaves identically to a human being, but isn't one, some would still ask whether such a being would actually have the thoughts and feelings, the internal experience, that a real human being would have, or whether it would be merely simulating the external behavior of a being with such thoughts and feelings, such as uttering statements claiming that it feels some way or another.

Philosophers such as David Chalmers have raised the question of whether it is conceivable for there to be a being in every way physically identical to a human being, and so identical in all of its external behavior as well, that nevertheless does not have the internal experience that humans supposedly have, a so-called "philosophical zombie". That kind of experience, independent from anything to do with behavior, is what is meant by "phenomenal consciousness".

There are generally three possibilities when it comes to what kinds of beings have phenomenal consciousness in a physicalist ontology: either nothing has it, not even human beings, because the concept is simply confused nonsense (eliminativism); some beings, like humans, have it, but not all beings, because it only arises from certain complex interactions between physical parts (emergentism); or all beings, not just humans but everything down to trees and rocks and electrons, have it (panpsychism). When it comes to phenomenal consciousness like this, I find both eliminativism and emergentism have fatal flaws, leaving only the possibility of panpsychism — but only with regard to this phenomenal consciousness, not access consciousness, where I am an emergentist, as I’ll cover later.

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Against Eliminativism

I am against eliminativism for the simple reason that I am directly aware of my own conscious experience, and whatever the nature of that may be, it seems that any philosophical argument that concludes that I am not actually having any conscious experience must have made some misstep somewhere and at best proven that something else mistakenly called "conscious experience" doesn't exist. But beyond my own personal experience, I find arguments put forth by other philosophers, such as Frank Jackson's "Mary's room" thought experiment, to convincingly defeat eliminativism, though not to defeat physicalism itself as they are intended to do.

In the "Mary's room" thought experiment, we imagine a woman named Mary who has been raised her entire life in a black-and-white room experiencing the world only through a black-and-white TV screen, but who has extensively studied and become an expert on the topic of color. She knows everything there is to know about the frequencies of electromagnetic radiation produced by various physical processes, how those interact with nerves in the eye and create signals that are processed by the brain, even the cultural significances of various colors, but she has never herself actually experienced color. We then imagine Mary leaving her room and seeing the color red for the first time, and in doing so, learning something new, despite supposedly knowing everything there was to know about color already: what the color red looks like.

This thought experiment was originally put forth to argue that there is something non-physical involved in the experience of color that Mary could not have learned about by studying the physical science of color, and I don't think it succeeds at all in establishing that, but I do think that it conclusively establishes that there is a difference between knowing, in a third-person fashion, how physical systems behave in various circumstances, and knowing, in the first person, what it's like to be such a physical system in such circumstances. In essence, I think it succeeds merely in showing that we are not philosophical zombies.

A more visceral analogous thought experiment I like to think of is that no amount of studying the physics, biology, psychology, or sociology of sex will ever suffice to answer the question "what's it like to have sex?" Actually doing it yourself is the only way to have that first-person experience; at best, that third-person knowledge of the way things behave can be instrumentally useful to recreating a first-person experience. But even then, you have to actually subject yourself to the experience to experience it, and that experience that can only be known in the first person is all that's meant by phenomenal consciousness.

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Against Emergentism

I am also against emergentism, regarding phenomenal consciousness at least, on the grounds that it must draw some arbitrary line somewhere, the line between things that are held to be entirely without anything at all like phenomenal consciousness and things that suddenly have it in full, and thus violates my previously established position against fideism. There are two different senses of "emergentism" sometimes distinguished from each other.

One of them, the kind I am not against, is called "weak" emergentism. That merely holds that there are useful aggregate properties to speak of at some larger scales, that ignore irrelevant details at smaller scales; but it doesn't hold than anything genuinely new starts to happen when the larger-scale systems are constructed out of smaller parts. An example of this is temperature, which is a (weakly) emergent property of the motion of molecules in a substance: if you modeled the motion of all the molecules in a substance, you would end up modeling something that exhibited temperature for free, and if that was the scale you were interested in, you could usefully model just that aggregate property of temperature instead and ignore the details of the motion of individual molecules. I have no objection to such "weak" emergentism.

On the other hand, "strong" emergentism holds some wholes to be truly greater than the sums of their parts, and thus that when certain things are arranged in certain ways, wholly new properties apply to the whole that are not mere aggregates or composites of the properties of the parts. Specifically, as regards philosophy of mind, it holds that when physical objects are arranged into the right relations with each other, wholly new mental properties apply to the composite object they create, mental properties that cannot be decomposed into aggregates of the physical properties of the physical objects that went into making the composite object that has these new mental properties.

I do agree with what I think is the intended thrust of the general emergentist position, that consciousness as we ordinarily speak of it is something that just comes about when physical things are arranged in the right way. But I think that consciousness as we ordinarily speak of it is access consciousness, to be addressed later, and that access consciousness is a purely functional, basically mechanistic property that is built up out of, or weakly emerges from, the ordinary physical properties of the physical things that compose an access-conscious being. I think nothing wholly new emerges out of nothing like magic when physical things are arranged in the right way, only abstractions away from the lower-level, smaller-sccale physical properties that ignore the many details that are irrelevant on a higher level or larger scale.

So when it comes to phenomenal consciousness, either it is wholly absent from the most fundamental building blocks of physical things and so is still absent from anything built out of them, including humans — which I've already rejected above — or else it is present at least in humans, as concluded above, and so at least some precursor of it must be present in the stuff out of which humans are built, and the stuff out of which that stuff is built, and so on so that at least something prototypical of phenomenal consciousness as humans experience it is already present in everything, to serve as the building blocks of more advanced kinds of phenomenal consciousness like humans experience.

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Panpsychism

That latter position is a kind of panpsychism, more specifically the narrower position called pan-proto-experientialism. Panpsychism most broadly defined says that everything has a mind, whatever "mind" may be taken to mean. Pan-experientialism is a form of panpsychism that says everything is at least the subject of mental experience, without making any broader claims about everything having higher mental functions like sentience, intelligence, or sapience. Pan-proto-experientialism is a subform of that, in turn, that says that everything at least has something prototypical of mental experience as we mean it regarding human consciousness, without making any broader claims to the depth or richness of that experience. That is the position that I hold.

But in saying that everything has phenomenal consciousness, I'm not really saying very much of substance. It's a bit akin to how in quantum mechanics, one physical system can be said to "observe" another physical system and in doing so collapse the "observed" system from a state of probabilistic superposition into a definite classical state, but that doesn't really imply anything substantial about the "observer"; it doesn't require something like a human being to do the observation, it just requires any kind of object to interact with the other object. I would even go so far as to say that that quantum-mechanical "observation" can reasonably be equated with the kind of "experience" that I hold to constitute phenomenal consciousness, for as elaborated in my previous thread on the web of reality, I hold experience to be but one perspective on what is really more fundamental, interaction, and likewise quantum mechanical "observation" really just means "interaction".

I'm only really saying that in addition to there being the third-person experience of observing a thing as an object of experience, there is also the first-person experience of being that thing as the subject of experience — because we each know first-hand that there is such a first-person experience of what it's like to be ourselves, which is different from the third-person experiences we have of each other — but that first-person experience needn't amount to much if the thing having the experience is so simple as a rock or atom or electron.

This panpsychism about phenomenal consciousness is not in any way meant to contradict the physicalism I espoused earlier. I think there are only physical things, and that physical things consist only of their empirical properties, which are actually just functional dispositions to interact with observers (who are just other physical things) in particular ways. A subject's phenomenal experience of an object is, on my account, the same event as that object's behavior upon the subject, and the web of such events is what reality is made out of, with the nodes in that web being the objects of reality, each defined by its function in that web of interactions, how it observably behaves in response to what it experiences, or in other words what it does in response to what is done to it.

My only trivial point of agreement with philosophers like Jackson, who fashion themselves to be against physicalism, could be summed up as simply agreeing that we are not philosophical zombies. By definition philosophical zombies could not be discerned from non-zombies from the third person, as only in the first person can one know that oneself is not a philosophical zombie; and the only trivial thing I think Jackson proves is that there is such a first-person experience that we have, the likes of which philosophical zombies would not have, and that, by the rejection of emergentism, everything else must also have.

I don't think philosophical zombies are actually possible or even coherent, but then I also don't think supernatural things are possible or even coherent, so I don't think the predicates "is natural" or "is not a philosophical zombie" really communicate much of interest — they are complete trivialisms when properly understood. (Supernatural beings and philosophical zombies are ontologically quite similar on my account, as for something to be supernatural would be for it to have no observable behavior, and for something to be a philosophical zombie would be for it to have no phenomenal experience. Both of those are just different perspectives on the thing in question being completely cut off from the web of interactions that is reality, and therefore unreal.)

So only in an extremely trivial and useless sense does everything thus "have a mind", inasmuch as everything is subject to the behavior of other things and so has an experience of them. But "minds" in a more useful and robust sense are particular types of complex self-interacting objects, and therefore as subjects have an experience that is heavily of themselves as much as it is of the rest of the world. Everything has awareness of some sort, in that it reacts to things that are done to it — otherwise they would not appear to exist at all, and so not be real at all on my empirical realist account of ontology — but only some things have self-awareness, and that is what the rest of this post will discuss.

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On Access Consciousness

I hold the experience that a thing has to be a product of that thing's function, just as it's behavior is also a product of function. The mere having of first-person experience is not really anything of note: it is the nature of that experience, as a consequence of the function of the thing having it, that may or may not be worth considering "conscious" in the ordinary sense that we use that word, which I hold, as mentioned above, to be what philosophers call access consciousness.

When it comes to access consciousness, I hold a view called functionalism, which holds that a mental state is not strictly identical to any particular physical state, but rather to the functional role that a physical state holds in the physical system of which it is a part. Mental states are therefore multiply-realizable: different physical systems can instantiate the same functionality, and therefore the same mental states. For instance, if it is possible in principle (as I hold it to be) to build an artificially intelligent computer, that computer could be built using semiconductors, or vacuum tubes, or pneumatic or hydraulic valves, or any other physical substrate of switching signals down different paths, and so long as it still maps the same inputs into it to the same outputs, it still instantiates the same function, and so will still have the same mental states no matter whether they are instantiated in voltages in electric current flowing through wires, pressures in water flowing through pipes, or anything else.

I call this combination of panpsychism about phenomenal consciousness and functionalism about access consciousness "functionalist panpsychism".

As already detailed in my previous thread, I hold that the function of an object, the mapping of the inputs it experiences to the behaviors it outputs, defines every kind of object, not just minds as we ordinarily mean that word. Inasmuch as being a subject of phenomenal experience might make something worth calling "a mind", we might thus considered everything to be "a mind", which is why this position can be considered a form of panpsychism. But in ordinary usage, something being a mind means more than just being some kind of prototypical subject of phenomenal experience, or instantiating any old function or another. It means instantiating some specific kinds of functions that we recognize as mental.

Defining exactly what those functions are in full detail is more the work of psychology (mapping the functions of naturally evolved minds) and computer science (developing functions for artificially created minds) than it is the proper domain of philosophy, but for the rest of this post I will outline a brief sketch of the kinds of functions that I think are important to qualify something as a mind, in the ordinary sense by which we would say that a human definitely has a mind, and a dog probably has a mind, but a tree probably does not, and a rock definitely does not.

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On Sensations and Perceptions



The first of these important functions, which I call "sentience", is to differentiate experiences toward the construction of two separate models, one of them a model of the world as it is, and the other a model of the world as it ought to be. These differentiate aspects of an experience, which, as outlined in my thread on the web of reality, is an interaction between oneself and the world, into those that inform about about the world, including what kind of things are most suited to it, which form the sensitive aspect of the experience; and those that inform about oneself, and what kind of world would be most suited to oneself, which form is the appetitive aspect of the experience.

From these two models we then derive the output behavior from a comparison of the two, so as to attempt to make the world that is into the world that ought to be. This is in distinction from the simpler function of most primitive objects, where experiences directly provoke behaviors in a much simpler stimulus-response mechanism, and no experience is merely indicative of the nature of the world, but all are directly imperative on the next behavior of the object.

Those experiences that are channelled into the model of the world as it ought to be I call "appetites", and I will discuss more on them, their interpretations into desires, and the reflection upon desires to arrive at intentions, in a later thread.

Meanwhile, those experiences that are channelled into the model of the world as it is I call "sensations". Sensations are the raw, uninterpreted experiences, like the seeing of a color, or the hearing of a pitch. When those sensations are then interpreted, pattens in them detected, identified as abstractions, that can then be related to each other symbolically, analytically, that is part of the function that I call "intelligence" (the other part of intelligence handling the equivalent process with appetites), and those interpreted, abstracted sensations output by intelligence are what I call "perceptions", or "intuitions".

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On Beliefs



None of this is yet sufficient to call something a mind in our ordinary sense of the word. For that, we need all of the above plus also another function, a reflexive function that turns that sentient intelligence back upon the being in question itself, and forms perceptions and desires about its own process of interpreting experiences, and then acts upon itself to critique and judge itself and then filter the conclusions it has come to, accepting or rejecting them as either soundly concluded or not. That reflexive function in general I call "sapience", and the aspect of it concerned with critiquing and judging and filtering perceptions I call "consciousness" proper.

(I see the concepts of "id", "ego", and "superego" as put forward by Sigmund Freud arising out of this reflexive judgement as well, with the third-person view of oneself that one is casting judgement upon being the "id", the third-person view of oneself casting judgement down on one being the "superego", and the first-person view of oneself, being judged by the superego while in turn judging the id, being the "ego"; an illusory tripartite self, as though in a mental hall of mirrors).

And the output of that function — an experience taken as indicative, interpreted into a perception, and accepted by sapient reflection — is what I call a "belief".