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Consciousness 23 — Summary of My Evolutionary Theory

2/22/2021

44 Comments

 
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Time to look over everything.
I started this series on the 15th of March 2020. Looking back, I thought I had an ambitious plan then, but it turned out it wasn’t nearly enough. After thousands of written words (and probably thousands of pages read), I’m finally ready to present a summary of my current evolutionary theory of consciousness. I’ll start with the background of my metaphysical hypotheses. Then I’ll recount the theories that I like best for the two biggest mysteries for this topic — the hard problem of consciousness and the emergence of life. I’ll note how new forces emerge once life enters the universe. Then, this will put me in a position to state an expansive definition of consciousness that fits with all of those pieces of the puzzle. And finally, I’ll finish with a bit more depth on the details and definitions in the theory so that it’s as clear as I can make it in one essay.
 
I thought I’d be wrapping up this series with this summary, but my research shows that I really ought to have at least one more post after this to go over the traditional objections to a materialist account of consciousness. If my stated theory can answer all of those, then I’ll at least have a case for a coherent (if not correct) theory. On to the summary!
 
Preface — Epistemological and Metaphysical Background
 
According to an evolutionary worldview, the universe is always changing, we cannot see what the future will bring, and one can never get outside of it all to gather objective facts about the true state of the world. Therefore, knowledge cannot be justified, true, belief, as Plato thought. Knowledge can only ever be justified, beliefs, that are currently surviving our best rational tests. Knowledge is always provisional, and there is no bedrock upon which certainty can rest. (For now. Even that fact isn’t known for sure.)
 
To live, we must act. To decide upon actions from this state of fundamental ignorance, we must start with hypotheses and then test them. In evolutionary philosophy, my first tenet is the first hypothesis that is necessary to get us off the ground and running.
 
1. We live in a rational, knowable, physical universe. Effects have natural causes. No supernatural events have ever been unquestionably documented.

Through the eons of the entire age of life, and over all the instances of individual organisms acting within the universe, the ability of life to predict its environment and continue to survive in it has required that the universe must be singular, objective, and knowable. If it were otherwise, life could not make sense of things and survive here. We may never know if that is absolutely true, but so far that knowledge has survived. The objective, physical, natural, material existence of the universe may indeed be an assumption, but as a starting point, it seems to be the strongest knowledge we have. All previously uncovered mysteries have not changed this fact, so rationality dictates that we ought not to abandon it without good cause.
 
Before life emerged, all evidence points to a universe made of matter that interacted according to the fundamental laws of physics and then chemistry. All objects were affected by forces, but there were no subjects, minds, intentions, or consciousness. So, how did we get from physics to chemistry to biology? And how might consciousness suddenly appear during that time?
 
Hypotheses on the Mysteries of Abiogenesis and The Hard Problem
 
First, let’s look at the emergence of life. We may never know for sure how it actually happened. There may never be a way to find conclusive evidence or rule out all but one possibility. But the hypothesis that is a leading contender and makes the most sense to me right now is known as the “RNA World” hypothesis. Nobel Prize winner Jack Szostak’s work on this is explained very simply in a short video called The Origin of Life, and there is a much longer video series on the topic as well. I’ve covered this in more depth in a previous post, but a quick overview is that polymer chains and membranes form spontaneously in the environment and it’s very plausible to see how a simple 2-component system might form that can eat, grow, contain information, replicate, and evolve, simply through thermodynamic, mechanical, and electrical forces. That would kickstart evolution, which means the development of life would be off and running towards the present day. No ridiculous improbabilities are needed, no supernatural forces, and no lightning striking a mud puddle. Just chemistry and mechanical activity.
 
This leads us to a simple explanation for life, which is defined as something that preserves, furthers, or reinforces its existence in the given environment. There are seven traits currently considered to enable this kind of self-prolonged existence: organization, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli, adaptation, homeostasis, and metabolism. We can now see how physics plus chemistry plus natural selection might have led to all of these traits. But what about consciousness?
 
This is basically the hard problem as coined by David Chalmers. We have subjective experience. Evolutionary studies have shown us that there is an unbroken line in the history of life. But water and rocks don’t appear to have anything like consciousness. So, how can inert matter ever evolve into the subjective experience that we humans undoubtedly feel?
 
Chalmers has proposed that subjective experience may be a fundamental property of the universe, like the spin of electromagnetism. I have come to accept that as a likely hypothesis. All matter is affected by the forces of physics and chemistry. But until that matter is organized into a living subject that is capable of responding to those forces in such a way as to remain alive, it makes no sense to talk of non-living matter as ‘feeling’ or ‘experiencing’ those forces. Inert matter has no structure capable of living through subjective activities. Panpsychism claims that minds (psyche) are everywhere, and they don’t need physics and matter to exist. But this raises innumerable difficulties, including an enormous change to one’s metaphysics that supposedly cannot be detected by science. What I hypothesize instead is that the forces of physics are everywhere, and it is a fundamental property of the universe that these forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge. Since the Greek for force is dynami, I would say the universe has pandynamism rather than panpsychism. The psyche only originates and evolves along with life. This psyche expands as the living structures expand their capabilities of sensing and responding to these forces. And the ‘flavor’ of experiences within this psyche are utterly dependent upon the underlying mechanisms of which particles of matter are being subject to which particular forces.
 
(For example, the retch of disgust from accidentally eating something harmful maps almost exactly onto the retch of moral disgust from accidentally witnessing something beyond the pale such as a mutilated dead body. These experiences come from very different sources, and they process very different bits of information, so we might expect them to feel very different, but we know from neuroscience that the brain has duct-taped the feelings of moral disgust onto the existing architecture for gustatory disgust and that is what explains the similar conscious experience. This is another striking bit of support for a materialist understanding of consciousness.)
 
A New Category of Forces Arise
 
So, the theories of the RNA World and pandynamism get us from the inert landscape of the early universe to the rich and vibrant present-day world with biology and subjective experience. Physicalism still holds as a viable hypothesis for the metaphysics of the universe if these theories are correct. And this view makes it clear that something else also emerges with the emergence of life. Given that living things are (to the best we know) merely structures of matter that have come to be organized so as to be self-sustaining and self-replicating, two new categories of things in the world appear which are related to that: 1) things that help life stay alive, and 2) things that harm life from staying alive. That division has no meaning in physics or chemistry, but they are fundamental once biology emerges. Through the trials and errors of natural selection, living systems become sensitive to these positive and negative aspects of the world and they respond accordingly. In science, something exists to the extent that it exerts causal power over other things. Gravity exists because it exerts power over mass. Electricity exists because it exerts power over charged particles. Similarly, the power these categories exert over living things implies they exist too. I call them ‘biological forces’.
 
So, what do these biological forces look like? My conception is that they look like Porters Five Forces from the business world, which maps the competitive and cooperative forces that affect any organization as it tries to stay profitable (aka alive) in its industrial ecosystem. I hypothesize that this framework, taught in MBA curricula around the world, actually works because it is a fractal of the competition and cooperation that all life must navigate in its own ecosystems. These forces can be depicted side by side to make the analogy clear.
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​Therefore, in biology, there are 1) battles for consumption of upstream inputs of energy, material, or prey (a la suppliers); 2) battles for consumption of downstream outputs by mutualists, micro- or macroscopic predators (a la buyers); 3) battles with potentially invasive species (a la threat of entrants); 4) battles with current niche competitors from heterospecifics in other species (a la substitutes); and 5) the balance between competition and cooperation among conspecifics from the same species (a la competitive rivalry).
 
In the great interrelated web of life, any individual or species can play any of these parts depending on how you define the circle around an ecosystem for analysis. We all get eaten at some point. If biological behaviour is determined, it is not by the laws of physics and chemistry, but by the unwritten laws of these biological forces. However, just as the complexity in the system makes Porter’s Five Forces seemingly impossible to calculate with precision, this is even more true for anyone hoping to calculate outcomes from biological forces. Still, we can illustrate them and discuss their relative strengths to aid in analysis and understanding of life and its choices. This brings us to a place where we can now propose a new definition for consciousness.
 
An Evolutionary Theory of Consciousness
 
In my (sorta) brief history of the definitions of consciousness, I noted that previous attempts stretch all the way from consciousness being something as small as “the private, ineffable, special feeling that only we rational humans have when we think about our thinking,” right on down to it being “a fundamental force of the universe that gives proto-feelings to an electron of what it’s like to be that electron.” That’s why the Wikipedia entry on consciousness notes:
 
“The level of disagreement about the meaning of the word indicates that it either means different things to different people, or else it encompasses a variety of distinct meanings with no simple element in common.”
 
I believe the shape of a proper answer comes from Dan Dennett’s 2016 paper “Darwin and the Overdue Demise of Essentialism,” where he said:

“We should quell our desire to draw lines. We can live with the quite unshocking and unmysterious fact that there were all these gradual changes that accumu­lated over many millions of years. … The demand for essences with sharp boundaries blinds thinkers to the prospect of gradualist theories of complex phenomena, such as life, intentions, natural selection itself, moral responsibility, and consciousness.”

Indeed. But based on the story of abiogenesis outlined above, I think that a natural joint to carve a philosophical place for consciousness is in the biological realm. The emergence of life is sufficiently hazy and fuzzy in its origin so as to cast doubt on any overly specific claim that one particular molecular structure came together and suddenly turned consciousness on like a light switch. But no one needs to find such a grain of sand that turned a pile into a heap. We’re looking for a gradualist theory of the complex phenomena of consciousness, and its development along with life fits that bill.
 
This binding of consciousness to life also fits the etymological root of the word. The English word ‘conscious’ originally derived from the Latin conscius where con meant ‘together’ and scio meant ‘to know’. According to this literal interpretation, to be conscious would be ‘to know’, which requires a knower. And to ‘know together’, this conscious thing would need to know at least two things. Do sub-atomic particles feeling fundamental forces meet these criteria? No. Do elements from the periodic table feeling intermolecular forces meet these criteria? Also no. Do living things feeling biological forces meet these criteria? Yes. Once chemistry makes the jump to biology, the resulting proto-life forms have a defined self and they begin to compete for resources with other potential entrants, substitutes, or conspecifics in order to self-replicate and survive. They react to the world as if they know what they are and what they need. Thus:
 
Consciousness, according to this evolutionary theory, is an infinitesimally growing ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival. These forces and needs can vary from the immediate present to infinite timelines and affect anything from the smallest individual to the broadest concerns (both real and imagined) for all of life.
 
Such a definition accords with our intuitions to exclude non-living matter from consciousness studies. Rocks and water just don’t respond to any threats to their existence. But all living things do. And in an incredibly wide and diverse manner. In order to map the contours of such a broad definition, I spent several posts conducting a Tinbergen analysis of the functions, mechanisms, ontogeny, and phylogeny of consciousness, which is the standard procedure in evolutionary studies for coming to know all of the elements of any biological phenomenon. That massive review resulted in the following four charts:
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For more details on each of these charts, read the individual posts where they were developed, which altogether give a full picture of the various aspects of consciousness. The first tier in this hierarchy — 1) Origin of Life — has already been discussed above. The remaining tiers are:
 
2) Affect: This is the valence, tone, or mood that is capable of distinguishing differences between good stimuli as opposed to bad ones, which results in responses of graduated arousal and intensity. Mark Solms calls this the primary experience and purpose of consciousness. He asks, rhetorically, how can affective arousal (i.e., the arousal of feeling) go on without any inner feel? It cannot. This accords with my theory of pandynamism, where such feelings are felt subjectively as soon as subjects appear and are affected by biological forces. At first, these affects will generate what we think of as instinctual unconscious reactions. These can involve any or all of Jaak Panksepp’s seven basic emotions (in capital letters to denote a distinction between them and their common usage): SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE LUST, PANIC, CARE, and PLAY. Later, once many more structures have evolved, these affects can be registered, and eventually named, in conscious awareness.
 
3) Intention: This development in consciousness marks the ability of one reaction to interrupt or override others within an organism. From the perspective of an outside observer, choices appear to be made and there is a narrative sequence to life. Like affect, this can take place unconsciously within humans, so presumably it can in other forms of life as well, but it does empirically exist in very simple life using cognitive abilities such as memory, pattern recognition, and learning. Much later in evolutionary history, this can also be accessed and rationally considered in order to create extremely complex and far-ranging intentions.
 
4) Prediction: Once intentions exist (either one’s own or the intentions of others), the next development in consciousness is to take them into account by predicting how intentions will interact with the world. Organisms no longer just respond to the present by building up memories of the past; they begin to guess the future too. This appears to happen only in animals with brains that have neuroplasticity and can learn from experience. It also would seem that predictions about the intentions of others are particularly vital, which would explain why neurons and brains appear to have emerged during the Cambrian explosion due to the onset of predation. The success or failure of one’s predictions about their predators or prey would have been a powerful driver for change in any arms race occurring in this new dimension of consciousness. Surprise and uncertainty would be a bad emotion for any prediction, which would eventually help to hone the development of feelings of precision to extremely high levels.
 
5) Awareness: The next level of consciousness comes in now that structures have evolved to trigger affective emotions in the present (level 2), evaluate the past to make complex choices (level 3), and predict further and further into the future what the actions of the self and others may result in (level 4). The interaction and comparison of these three phenomena allows for the dawning of awareness of a self that is different from others. The richness of this distinction grows with the number of sensations that are able to be evaluated against one another within more and more sophisticated models of elements of the world. Studies have shown that conscious awareness is indeed necessary for some types of learning that give organisms additional plasticity to respond to new and novel stimuli in their environment, thus cementing the evolutionary advantage of gaining and retaining this ability.
 
6) Abstraction: The final level of consciousness in this hierarchy comes when models of reality go beyond mere direct representation and begin to use symbolic representations to evoke, communicate, and manipulate thoughts and feelings about the world. While nonhuman animals have displayed rudimentary or latent abilities for abstraction, the emergence and development of this capability in humans has been of such enormous import that it is considered the latest of the major transitions of evolution. Symbols, art, and language have driven the cultural evolution of memes, writing, mathematics, philosophy, and science that make up all of the powerful products of human culture. The causes for the emergence of this type of consciousness are mysteriously shrouded in the history of one species at the moment, but there is no denying the power, for good or for ill, that this has enabled. May our fuller grasping of the biological forces that affect the consciousness of all of life motivate us to realize what good is and bring it into fruition.
 
Related Definitions
 
To wrap up this discussion, and to help avoid some confusion, here are a few definitions of common terms in consciousness studies which sometimes differ between technical and folk usages. Where such differences exist, I have chosen a definition that best fits with my concept of consciousness as outlined above.
 
Accessible: This adjective is used to refer to the contents of consciousness that humans are able to recall and report upon. It is contrasted against the unconscious and inaccessible contents that may still drive behavior.
 
Attention: According to Michael Graziano and his attention schema theory, attention is the basic ability of a nervous system to focus on a few things at a time and process them deeply. Some forms of attention go back possibly all the way to the beginnings of nervous systems. Graziano thinks attention comes in very early in evolution, and over time it becomes more and more complex. There’s central attention, sensory attention, more cognitive kinds of attention, and they emerge gradually over this sweep of history from about half a billion years ago up to the present. Global Workspace Theory says attention is achieved by attending to signals as they become stronger and stronger compared to other signals. At some point, the signals become so strong that they reach a state called ‘ignition’ when they can then influence wide networks around the brain. Once that occurs, we humans can talk about that signal, we can move toward it, and we can remember it later.
 
Bottom-up vs. Top-down: In neuroscience, these terms describe specific directions of information processing. Sensory input is typically considered bottom-up, while higher cognitive processes, which have more information from other sources, are considered top-down. A bottom-up process is characterized by an absence of higher-level direction, whereas a top-down process is driven by other cognition, such as from goals or targets. In reality, there is a multi-directional feedback loop among these systems, and any talk of top-down control should not be meant to signify a homunculus in the brain, a designer from on high, or a skyhook that acts independently from all other causes.
 
Cognition: Pamela Lyon lists 13 functional abilities of cognition that help organisms adapt to their environment. I have found that these are distributed throughout my hierarchy of consciousness and they have developed in a logical fashion that is also supported by empirical evidence from evolutionary history. These are: (1) sense perception — ability to recognize existentially salient features of the external or internal milieu; (2) affect — valence, attraction, repulsion, neutrality / indifference (hedonic response); (3) discrimination — ability to determine that a state of affairs affords an existential opportunity or presents a challenge, requiring a change in internal state of behavior; (4) motivation — teleonomic striving; implicit goals arising from existential conditions; (5) attention — awareness, orienting response; ability to selectively attend to aspects of the external and/or internal milieu; (6) memory — retention of information about a state of affairs for a non-zero period; (7) pattern recognition — intentionality, directedness towards an object; (8) learning — experience-modulated behavior change; (9) communication — mechanism for initiating purposive interaction with conspecifics (or non-conspecific others) to fulfill an existentially salient goal; (10) anticipation — behavioral change based on experience-based expectancy (i.e. if X is happening, then Y should happen), possibly evolved across generations, and which is implicit to the agent’s functioning; (11) problem solving — decision making, behavior selection in circumstances with multiple, potentially conflicting parameters and varying degrees of uncertainty; (12) error detection — normativity, behavioral correction, value assignment based on motivational state; and (13) self-reference— mechanisms for distinguishing “self” or “like self” from “non-self” or “not like self”.
 
Communication: This is described as, “an act of interchanging ideas, information, or messages, via words or signs, which are understood to both parties. Every living thing communicates in some way. Fish jump, sometimes for sheer joy. Birds sing their cadences to communicate a variety of purposes. Dogs bark, cats meow, cows moo, and horses whinny. These noises, or other interactions, communicate or transfer information of some kind. Communication is, at its core, a two-way activity, consisting of seven major elements: sender, message, encoding, channel, receiver, decoding, and feedback.” Note that this is distinct from language. See the definition of language below for comparison.
 
Conscious vs. Unconscious: These terms are generally used more like medical descriptions, corresponding to awake and aware (conscious) vs. asleep or unresponsive (unconscious). They can both be described using various scales of physical attributes (cf. the Glasgow Coma Scale) and both fit within my hierarchy of consciousness as being more or less able to sense and respond to the needs of remaining alive. (Note that I generally stay away from Freud’s usage of the unconscious mind as it is a mixed bag of insight and imagination that would take a lot of patience to unpack.)
 
Emotions vs. Feelings: In my previous writings on emotion, I noted that this is a complex psychophysiological experience where an individual's state of mind interacts with biochemical (internal) and environmental (external) influences. Emotions can be seen as mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain's activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures, and postures. An influential theory of emotion is that of Lazarus: emotion is a disturbance that occurs in the following order: 1) cognitive appraisal—the individual assesses the event cognitively, which cues the emotion; 2) physiological changes—the cognitive reaction starts biological changes such as increased heart rate or pituitary adrenal response; 3) action—the individual feels the emotion and chooses how to react. Lazarus stressed that the quality and intensity of emotions are controlled through cognitive processes. I think these descriptions cover the broad evolutionary emergence and growth of affective feeling from the most basic valence in organisms even simpler than bacteria all the way to the sophisticated naming and therapeutic modification of human moods. Antonio Damasio tries to separate emotions from feelings, saying emotions are chemical reactions, while feelings are the conscious experience of emotions. This is overly confusing and unnecessary to me, and apparently Damasio is not always consistent with this usage either. If you consciously feel an emotion, you feel affect (level 2 in my hierarchy) and you have awareness (level 5 in my hierarchy). I find that easier to understand.
 
Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs: When I define consciousness as the ability to sense and respond to any or all biological forces in order to meet the needs of survival, these are the needs that I am talking about. For full details, see my article about Replacing Maslow with an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs, but here are some important points to consider. There are many ways that the ultimate question of survival can be determined, and life has been slowly learning to sense and understand these over billions of years. For example, there are so many things that can kill you, your genes, your kin, or your species, and they can all do so in the immediate, medium, or very long term. Living organisms that can sense and respond to more and more of these threats are the ones that will last and emerge over time. Such organisms will sense many, many needs to meet all of the threats (and exploit all of the opportunities) in its environment. Each living organism’s unique genetic, environmental, and evolutionary histories are constantly leading to changes in the relative strengths of these needs, but at no point does something outside of the physical realm enter into the equation. All of these needs can be described through physical properties, even if the magnitude of their felt force cannot yet be calculated. The ever-growing list of threats and opportunities is why the needs of life are ever-growing too. The psychologist Abraham Maslow studied these for individual humans and produced his famous Hierarchy of Needs. I have generalized these and adapted them to apply to all of life, thereby producing something I call an Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs. Starting at the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid, we see that the ‘physiological’ needs of the human are merely the brute ingredients necessary for ‘existence’ that any form of life might have. In order for that existence to survive through time, the second-level needs for ‘safety and security’ can be understood as promoting ‘durability’ in living things. The third-tier requirements for ‘love and belonging’ are necessary outcomes from the unavoidable ‘interactions’ that take place in our deeply interconnected biome of Earth. The ‘self-esteem’ needs of individuals could be seen merely as ways for organisms to carve out a useful ‘identity’ within the chaos of competition and cooperation that characterizes the struggle for survival. And finally, the ‘self-actualization’ that Maslow struggled to define could be seen as the end, goal, or purpose that an individual takes on so that they may (consciously or unconsciously) have an ultimate arbiter for the choices that have to be made during their lifetime. This is something Aristotle called ‘telos’. Taken as a whole, these are the needs that life must evolve to become more and more conscious of if it is to survive over longer and longer spans of time.
 
Evolutionary Epistemology Mechanisms: As part of Donald Campbell’s work defining the field of evolutionary epistemology, he settled on a 10-step outline that showed the broad categories of mechanisms that biological life has used to gain knowledge. I have found that these fit well within my hierarchy and in the same order along with my map of the phylogenetic history of consciousness (see chart above). These EEMs start with the earliest origins of life where problems were solved over generations through mere genetic variance alone, without any aids from motion or the formation of memories. That earliest slow accrual of genetic knowledge eventually led, according to Campbell, to the other mechanisms: movement, habit, instinct, visually-supported decisions, memory-supported decisions, observational learning from social interactions, language, cultural transmissions, and finally, scientific accumulations of knowledge.
 
Exteroception vs. Interoception: Exteroception is any form of sensation that results from stimuli located outside the body and is detected by exteroceptors, including vision, hearing, touch or pressure, heat, cold, pain, smell, and taste. Interoception is any form of sensation arising from stimulation of interoceptors and conveying information about the state of the internal organs and tissues, blood pressure, and the fluid, salt, and sugar levels in the blood.
 
Intentionality vs. Intentional Stance: Intentionality is a technical term in philosophy that was introduced by Franz Brentano in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It should not be confused with the ordinary meaning of the word intention. While an intention is just an internal aim or goal, intentionality refers to mental directedness towards objects, as if the mind were a bow whose arrows could be properly aimed at different targets. It is also sometimes referred to as aboutness. On the other hand, the intentional stance has been defined by Daniel Dennett as an understanding that others' actions are goal-directed and arise from particular beliefs or desires. It is intentionality aimed at subjects. The understanding of others' intentions is a critical precursor to understanding other minds. Since the seminal (1978) paper by primatologists David Premack and Guy Woodruff entitled “Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?”, much empirical research has been devoted to the question of whether non-human primates can ascribe psychological states with intentionality to others. Call and Tomasello concluded in 2008 that chimpanzees understand others in terms of a perception-goal psychology, as opposed to a full-fledged, human-like belief-desire psychology. This is an interesting distinction in the way that minds may work.
 
Involuntary vs. Voluntary: In biology, involuntary control refers to bodily activity “not 
under the control of the will of an individual.” These involuntary responses by muscles, glands, etc., occur automatically when required; many such responses, such as gland secretion, heartbeat, and peristalsis, are controlled by the autonomic nervous system and effected by involuntary muscle. Voluntary muscles, by contrast, are under our conscious control so we can move these muscles when we want to. These are the muscles we use to make all the movements needed in physical activity. Note that these two physiological terms are not concerned with the question of free will and whether ‘conscious control’ is ultimately under our control or not. (That is another large topic in metaphysics for another time.)
 
Language: This is defined as “a distinctly human activity that aids in the transmission of feelings and thoughts from one person to another. It is how we express what we think or feel—through sounds and/or symbols (spoken or written words), signs, posture, and gestures that convey a certain meaning. The purpose of language is making sense of complex and abstract thought. Whereas communication is an experience, language is a tool.” Language allows for much greater scale and scope in cognition. It increases our ability to make sense of the world compared to working memory alone. It vastly enlarges the recognition of patterns in the world. And language enables deep and precise exploration of the self and the world around us. The power of language is perhaps best displayed by Hellen Keller who did not always have it. She said, “Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness. (…) Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”
 
Mind: The mind is “the set of faculties including cognitive aspects such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgement, language and memory, as well as noncognitive aspects such as emotion and instinct. Under the scientific physicalist interpretation, the mind is produced at least in part by the brain. The primary competitors to the physicalist interpretations of the mind are idealism, substance dualism, types of property dualism, eliminative materialism, and anomalous monism. There is a lengthy tradition in philosophy, religion, psychology, and cognitive science about what constitutes a mind and what are its distinguishing properties.” In this series, I have done my best to describe and defend a physicalist interpretation of all of these aspects of mind.
 
Qualia vs. Something-it-is-like vs. Subjective Experience: The term qualia derives from the Latin adjective qualis meaning “of what sort” or “of what kind” in a specific instance, such as “what it is like to taste a specific apple, this particular apple now.” There are many definitions of qualia, but one of the simpler and broader definitions is: “The 'what it is like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc.” This ‘what it is like’ is also a reference to Thomas Nagel’s paper What is it Like to Be a Bat? in which Nagel famously asserts that “an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” In other words, it is the experience of being a subject, hence the other term for this phenomenon as subjective experience. The supposed ineffableness of qualia, the purported inability to describe “the redness” of a rose, is completely effable within the evolutionary theory of consciousness presented above. The hard problem of why the experience happens at all is assumed just to be a fundamental property of the universe, which arises in subjects once they evolve the structure to sense and respond to stimuli. After that, the “redness” is completely described by the Tinbergen analysis which shows the adaptive functions of seeing red, the mechanisms involved in sensing wavelengths of light in the red spectrum, the general phylogenetic history of how sensing red has evolved in our species, and the specific ontogenetic history of personal experience that the individual has had with different intensities of redness during their life. What else is left to explain?
 
Conclusion
 
For thousands of years of human history, including several hundred after the scientific revolution, the existence and diversity of life was a mystery because evolution and the processes of natural selection were unknown. Once Darwin gathered the evidence to make his case for the theory of evolution, much of that mystery evaporated and any hazy fog that obscured what life is all about has been slowly evaporating with more and more scientific exploration. Within such research, consciousness has remained behind a stubborn patch of murkiness, even after several decades of dedicated consciousness studies. Perhaps this has remained so because of the invisibility of biological forces (like the proverbial water surrounding a fish). Or perhaps it was because consciousness as a fundamental part of the physical universe (like gravity or electromagnetism) just hasn’t been accepted or explained via a hypothesis like pandynamism. Or perhaps consciousness just hasn’t been properly illuminated by a comprehensive analysis using Tinbergen’s framework for all biological phenomena. Now that I have gone through all three of these additions, however, perhaps the view of consciousness might finally become a bit clearer.
 
What do you think? Does this theory of consciousness make sense to you? What questions has it left unanswered? In my next post, I will check these ideas against the traditional objections to physicalist conceptions of consciousness, but please share your own in the comments below so I might consider them as well.


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Previous Posts in This Series:
Consciousness 1 — Introduction to the Series
Consciousness 2 — The Illusory Self and a Fundamental Mystery
Consciousness 3 — The Hard Problem
Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness
Consciousness 5 — Is It Just An Illusion?
Consciousness 6 — Introducing an Evolutionary Perspective
Consciousness 7 — More On Evolution
Consciousness 8 — Neurophilosophy
Consciousness 9 — Global Neuronal Workspace Theory
Consciousness 10 — Mind + Self
Consciousness 11 — Neurobiological Naturalism
Consciousness 12 — The Deep History of Ourselves
Consciousness 13 — (Rethinking) The Attention Schema
Consciousness 14 — Integrated Information Theory
Consciousness 15 — What is a Theory?
Consciousness 16 — A (sorta) Brief History of Its Definitions
Consciousness 17 — From Physics to Chemistry to Biology
Consciousness 18 — Tinbergen's Four Questions
Consciousness 19 — The Functions of Consciousness
Consciousness 20 — The Mechanisms of Consciousness
Consciousness 21 — Development Over a Lifetime (Ontogeny)
Consciousness 22 — Our Shared History (Phylogeny)
44 Comments
SelfAwarePatterns link
2/22/2021 11:09:32 pm

Hi Ed,
Obviously I'm on board with using a hierarchy to approach this. Consciousness is a complex phenomenon, and a hierarchy acknowledges that. It's such a complex phenomenon, that many different hierarchies can be used, and many of them can be right from different perspectives. (I also like Jonathan Birch's dimensions model.)

I actually think one of the pitfalls in consciousness studies is the search for some simple explanation. The adamant insistence that there must be such an explanation leads to issues like what Eric Schwitzgebel calls the "nesting problem", and can easily lead to someone sliding into panpsychic waters.

My own acid test is to ask people who posit a simple answer: if a machine has what you just described, would you consider it conscious? If the answer is no, then you're not done yet. (I personally have no objection to machine consciousness, but it's striking how often people with simple answers do object to it.)

Your model of consciousness is more liberal than my intuitive sense of that word, but since I think consciousness is largely in the eye of the beholder, about one system recognizing another *like us*, with all the ambiguity that implies, I can't say you're wrong.

I will opine that I think language like "something it is like" has led the field down all kinds of unproductive paths. It's made from the perspective of a system at the top of these hierarchies, but applied to other systems lower on the hierarchy, without acknowledging that the very meaning of that phrase for us is tangled up with our own capabilities.

So overall I think you're in the right neighborhood. That's about the best any of us can hope for at this point. But I don't see consciousness as any kind of metaphysical problem. I don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness. There are just the "easy" problems that will gradually be solve by scientific and philosophical elbow grease.

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James of Seattle link
2/23/2021 07:56:04 pm

I wonder if it’s time for coining new terminology. We (almost?) all recognize that there is a wide spectrum of views on what consciousness is, similar to the vagueness associated with what “life” is. We call the study of life biology. What should we call the study of Consciousness? Consciology? I would have gone with psychology, but that’s taken.

I ask because Mike’s “eye of the beholder” view seems to be a symptom of people focusing on different aspects of the phenomenon. Ed’s focus seems broader, and might be called systems consciology, or possibly developmental consciology. My own focus is more ontological, and might be called psychular consciology (compare: molecular biology).

Whatcha think?

*

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SelfAwarePatterns link
2/23/2021 08:49:18 pm

The terminology is interesting, because its evolution is revealing. Consider that the root of "psychology" is the Greek word "psyche". From ancient texts, it is generally translated as "soul", indicating that psychology was meant to be the study of the soul. And most of the ancient writing we take today to be about consciousness was actually about the soul. In other words, psychology arguably started as the study of consciousness, which is really the study of the soul. (Remember that the idea of the unconscious is pretty recent.)

The etymology of "psyche" is itself revealing, since it seems to come from a word for breath or breathing, the thing that, to the ancients, seemed to separate animals from everything else. BTW, the etymology of "animal" is the Latin "anima", which is their word for soul. And as Ed noted in the post, the word "consciousness" comes from knowing.

All of which seems to say, if we established a field of Consciology, it might not be about consciousness for very long. Consider that a field distinct from psychology already exists in philosophy: phenomenology.

Philosopher Eric link
2/23/2021 02:03:27 pm

Mike,
It’s interesting to me that you admire Schwitzgebel’s nesting observations regarding many popular consciousness proposals today. Like Searle’s Chinese room and my own thumb pain thought experiment, I figured that you must have major problems with it. I’ve even mentioned them all to you as reason for a naturalist to demand substrate based qualia rather than the popular generic information processing alone premise. I wonder if you interpret this thought experiment differently than I do?

(For anyone unfamiliar with it, professor S. observes that many popular consciousness theories suggest that various sub parts of an organism should thus be conscious, maybe the gut for example, as well as organizations that it functions under, such as the United States itself. To escape such implications a theorist could get specific, as McFadden’s cemi field theory does (which I support), or at least propose that something specific exists under the presented framework that’s still in need of discovery. In an attempt to escape such implications supporters of Integrated Information Theory instead actively included an anti nesting principle, the implications of which the professor is also able to lampoon. He discussed some of this in his November 12, 2020 post. https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-nesting-problem-for-theories-of.html?m=0)

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SelfAwarePatterns link
2/23/2021 04:33:26 pm

Eric,
As you know, I have a pretty low opinion of Searle's Chinese room thought "experiment". I put it in the same category as Nagel's "something it is like." I can't see how Eric S's observation provides any credence to it or any of its derivatives.

I think the main lesson of the nesting problem is that consciousness is a complex phenomenon, one that can't be solved by any simple statement like, "Consciousness is X", substituting whatever your favorite thing is for X (including electromagnetic fields or integrated information). Any such statement will be as underdetermined as ones like, "Pokémon Go is electrons moving", "Pokémon Go is computer code", or "Life is chemistry."

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Philosopher Eric link
2/24/2021 08:17:56 am

That makes sense Mike. I can see how you’d support Schwitzgebel’s nesting observations if they’re merely set up to imply that consciousness is complex and not appropriate for simple forms of reduction. And perhaps he does mean this somewhat, though to me it also seems clear that he’s critical of these popular modern theories, or like Searle, showing that they imply various funky things which their authors don’t intend.

There are a couple of issues I have with Searle’s Chinese room. The first is that it depends upon a program based computer that can pass the Turing test for extended periods of time, essentially like an educated human might. Searle never believed that such a machine was possible, and I think rightly so. Then beyond this presumed impossibility there are different ways that people may interpret his “understand” term. Does my computer not “understand” how to put the letters that I type on my screen? Since it does exactly that one might be inclined to say that it thus “understands” how to do this, though of course Searle meant something deeper.

Schwitzgebel however avoids the Turing test and disputable terms such as “understand”. He gets into the details of these information processing and integration theories to note that from a given example more than just brains should be conscious, such as certain non brain body parts and even whole societies. (Apparently Tononi was so disturbed by this observation that he wrote in an anti nesting stipulation where only the entity with the greatest phi would be conscious. Of course Schwitzgebel then simply observed that with a large and complex enough election there should be more social phi than any individual’s, and so people should lose their consciousness to become parts of a massive consciousness!

Searle and Schwitzgebel each criticize the same perceived fault in such theories, though I consider myself to do so more explicitly. Apparently these theories imply that if the right information on paper were properly converted into another set of information on paper, then something here would experience what we know of as “a whacked thumb”! I consider this simple observation to get to the essence of the problem, or that information processing in itself should achieve nothing without instantiation mechanisms in a natural world.

Consider “gravity”. Perhaps a hierarchy of it could have been helpful before Newton. Regardless we don’t need such a tool today since science provides us with an effective model of it. Still we should never fully grasp what causes gravity to exist. Schwitzgebel says the same about consciousness. Observe that if science were to empirically determine that subjective experience occurs by means of certain types of radiation produced by the brain, this circumstance should always be wondrous to us, and without any funky thought experiment implications like the ones I’ve mentioned.

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Ed Gibney link
2/24/2021 10:14:18 am

Thanks guys. Here are some quick responses.

—> issues like what Eric Schwitzgebel calls the "nesting problem"

I'll be addressing this in my next post responding to traditional objections.

—> if a machine has what you just described, would you consider it conscious?

Conscious is the wrong word here, which is why I added it to my list of relevant definitions. That kind of awake and aware experience comes much later in the development of consciousness and really shouldn't be thought to occur on its own as a hollow shell without the rest. I think it would be awfully hard to build a machine with the fundamental level of affect to actually feel its way through the world, but if you can, then sure, that machine would be on its way with consciousness.

—> Your model of consciousness is more liberal than my intuitive sense of that word,

My model is modelling all of the aspects of consciousness. I call that comprehensive rather than liberal. It's like including a list of ingredients with a recipe, except in this case, because it's an evolutionary phenomenon, the first ingredients are a small step towards the final thing.

—> I think language like "something it is like" has led the field down all kinds of unproductive paths.

This is somewhat true, but it doesn't have to be. We only fall down with this line of thinking when we think "what it is like *for me* to be a bat", but of course that's not what Nagel intended.

—> I don't see consciousness as any kind of metaphysical problem. I don't think there is a hard problem of consciousness.

I disagree. Chalmers was right that it's something fundamentally different than what is currently in the laws of physics which underly a metaphysics of physicalism. The challenge is to get it in there somehow, or change up the metaphysics position. I believe we can "get it in there" as I described with pandynamism, but that's just a theory that works logically but might be untestable because we can't get into another structure to test it.

—> there is a wide spectrum of views on what consciousness is, similar to the vagueness associated with what “life” is.

That's right. And life has a set of criteria that we can recognise as being built up along evolutionary lines. There isn't a step that turns the heap into a pile, but we have to accept the world is smooth like that. My tiers of consciousness are built with this in mind.

—> What should we call the study of Consciousness? Consciology?

The field uses "consciousness studies" and I'm fine with that.

—> Ed’s focus seems broader, and might be called systems consciology, or possibly developmental consciology.

I think it is just the evolutionary view of consciousness, which is the same as the biological view. If you want to study artificial consciousness, you are studying artificial life, which is living, which makes it biology, just a new kind.

—> My own focus is more ontological, and might be called psychular consciology (compare: molecular biology).

I think you are looking at the mechanisms of consciousness, which is just one of Tinbergen's four questions. That's great, but it's just a piece of the pie.

—> consciousness is a complex phenomenon, one that can't be solved by any simple statement like, "Consciousness is X", substituting whatever your favorite thing is for X (including electromagnetic fields or integrated information). Any such statement will be as underdetermined as ones like, "Pokémon Go is electrons moving", "Pokémon Go is computer code", or "Life is chemistry."

That's exactly right. It's why biologists use a Tinbergen analysis to understand all of the aspects of a biological phenomenon. That's why I've done this with consciousness.

—> That makes sense Mike. I can see how...

...this is not Mike's blog so you shouldn't follow him around and pester him here like it's your own private chat room without contributing anything to the content here? No, I guess you didn't see that.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
2/24/2021 03:09:13 pm

Hey Ed,
Sorry, not sure where my head was when I made the "liberal" comment. In retrospect, it's similar to the remarks people hit me with assuming I was asserting the lowest layer in my own hierarchy was conscious. You're doing the same thing I was doing. So I totally withdraw that remark.

I actually don't think it would be that hard to put the reflex portion of affect into machines. Arguably that's what our machines, including the one I'm typing this on, already have. What's far more difficult is the felt part of affect, and that comes down to what we mean by "felt".

I think Nagel's choice of wording obfuscated what he intended, in a manner where many people thought he said something precise and profound. The fact that a literal dissection of the phrase "like something" is seen as an invalid move by its proponents shows that it's code for something else. The question is, what?

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Ed Gibney link
2/24/2021 03:33:51 pm

Great. Happy to not be misconstrued too badly. : )

So, the affect in machines, in order to be felt throughout, would have to mimic (in my opinion) something like the fact that I just heard that other than our fingernails and hair, we will scream if any other part of our bodies are cut. There's a embodied integrity that goes all the way down in us because it was built that way from the bottom up. Machines aren't like that, and I think that matters. But that may just be a matter of degree that requires a lot of effort and resources to overcome. I don't think it's impossible. Nor do I think ours is the only flavour of consciousness that matters.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
2/24/2021 04:06:50 pm

Not being misconstrued too badly is about as good as it gets in internet discourse. :-)

Screaming seems easy. A programmer can make your phone scream under certain circumstances, such as receiving a civic emergency alert. Having it relate what that means to a world and self model, evaluate whether it should inhibit or allow the screaming, or learn things from it, is a different matter.

We're also unlikely to make a system where something like the scream impulse keeps getting triggered and has to keep getting overridden, in such a manner that significant system resources are being expended. That's not a technological limitation so much as not necessarily practical in a designed system.

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Ed GIbney link
2/24/2021 04:17:08 pm

It's not the scream that I thought was hard. Or the ability to modulate the screaming based on the environment. What I thought was hard was that every cell in a body is "wired up" this way, whereas the plastic and metal in a machine just will not be. There is indescribable depth there then, which I just wonder about being very important.

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Philosopher Eric link
2/24/2021 05:03:31 pm

My apologies Ed. I certainly don’t mean to follow people around and pester them. I found it interesting that Mike brought up nestings however so I went with my interests.

There are a few things which have dissuaded me from contributing more in this series. The first is a dispute that we began with many years ago. As an “evolutionary X” citizen I perceive your community to reduce things back to “life based value” in the end. My own position on value instead puts qualia at the top of the list so I’d rather not step on your toes about that. Then secondly there’s your more recent devotion to hierarchy. While potentially helpful today, ultimately I believe that science needs a single agreed upon definition for consciousness, so I’d rather that hierarchies not get in the way of potential progress here. Then thirdly of course your posts are long and thick.

Your reply has renewed my interest however, particularly your clarification of Nagel and assertion that there should be some sort of hard problem of consciousness for science to potentially make progress on. In your coming clarification of Schwitzgebel’s nesting problem, does your theory suggest that information processing / integration alone creates qualia, and thus leaves your theory susceptible to such implications? Or do you avoid them by asserting that your theory doesn’t get into whatever brain mechanisms create phenomenal experience? I somehow doubt that you’re proposing a physics based answer, as McFadden does. And if you do remain agnostic here, at some point I’d hope for you to offer some thoughts on McFadden’s or other such proposals.

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SelfAwarePatterns link
2/24/2021 06:23:19 pm

Ed,
I think I see where you're coming from now. Every cell has its own sensorium and motorium, with its own survival circuitry at the protein and molecular level. Life is a molecular enterprise, one built from the ground up. Our technology, even when it works at nanoscales, is generally top down.

My "liberal" remark, now that I'm thinking about it, was probably influenced by your conception of "affect". If we equate it with survival circuitry, then your view makes sense. If we equate it with conscious feeling then most of that cellular and molecular action seems well below that level. It sounds like we do agree that it's below the level of awareness, although it has effects on awareness.

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Ed Gibney link
2/25/2021 10:27:47 am

Mike,

—> If we equate it with conscious feeling then most of that cellular and molecular action seems well below that level. It sounds like we do agree that it's below the level of awareness, although it has effects on awareness.

That's exactly right. It's an early and vital component of what some people think consciousness "is" when they are really talking about conscious awareness. Then they get into trouble when they want to just turn that on without starting from step 1 of the recipe.

Eric,

Sorry if my posts are too thick for you. Consciousness is just not a thin subject and you're wasting time to treat it as such. If you accept the tree of life with multitudes of development, then you ought to treat consciousness the same way.

I'll answer the rest (or not) with my next post.

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" Evolution Theory" link
11/17/2022 10:11:56 am

For getting full details about Theory of Evolution click on given link.
https://www.alifyar.com/Darwin-nay-evoluation-irtqaa-ka-nazriya-kesay-banaya-ussay-kesay=khyaal-aya

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Ed Gibney link
11/17/2022 10:36:37 am

Thank you for stopping by. This link is to a page in Urdu about Charles Darwin that provides a very short and simplified story of his life, work, and ideas. I do not recommend it to anyone, but I will leave this comment up for now in case anyone from that part of the world gets something out of it.

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Eric Damboise
12/20/2023 07:05:29 am

I was listening to this video of Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviewing David Finkelstein, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FwTty3jtz4 and he mentioned that he feels that processes are more fundamental than objects. He mentioned that quantum theory suggests that an object ontology can be replaced by a sort of “process ontology”, but that this is kind of a contradiction of terms in terms of doing vs. being. He then states at about 2:15 in the video that he hasn’t been able to find a good word to replace ontology except possibly “dynamics”.

This immediately made me think of the name “pandynamism” you used above. A minute or so later in the video, David mentions that he prefers to think of things as being “actual” instead of “real” because of the prefix “act”. He said that he got this from Alfred Whitehead.

I then looked up Whitehead’s Wikipedia page and found this: “[Whitehead] also argued that the most basic elements of reality can all be regarded as experiential, indeed that everything is constituted by its experience. He used the term "experience" very broadly so that even inanimate processes such as electron collisions are said to manifest some degree of experience.” This seems to align with what you mentioned in this post about Chalmers proposing that subjective experience possibly being a fundamental property of the universe, like the spin of an electron. You probably mentioned Whitehead somewhere here in your study of consciousness, but I haven’t read enough to know.

Anyway, using EO Wilson’s language in the paper we just discussed, this is all feeling quite aligned in my “oracle”! haha. What are your impressions of Whitehead’s process ontology, or as Finkelstein would like to call it, “dynamics”?

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Ed Gibney link
12/24/2023 03:48:35 pm

Great questions again, Eric! I did not talk about Whitehead in this consciousness series at all, but I think I came across his work for. the first time while writing this. It might have been Philip Goff who I first heard talk about Whitehead's "process philosophy" and I thought it sounded so promising. Evolution is clearly a process rather than a thing so much of evolutionary philosophy is shaped by the processes that things undergo.

(In that sense, I wouldn't put process as *more fundamental* than things because without things there would be nothing to go through a process. But honestly, they go hand in hand because in this universe that appears to move and change through time there is no such thing as a thing that does not undergo processes.)

But alas, when I looked up Whitehead I remember finding a lot of his work mystical, esoteric, and just not modern enough to be useful. Honestly that's just what I remember about my impression of him when I researched him. I'd have to dig through that again to say more. (This is both a strength and a flaw in the way my brain works. I tend to quickly discard things that aren't useful to me. That makes me less of a rigorous and comprehensive academic and more of a problem-solving engineer paring things down.)

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Eric Damboise
12/27/2023 11:20:09 am

Yeah, I definitely currently have the same intuition as you about objects and processes going hand in hand. I think I would have to gain a better intuition for quantum physics to get a better understanding of what Finkelstein meant by the following that he said in the video starting at 0:52: “The simplest way I have of understanding this new logic [of quantum physics] is that you really turn your attention away from objects towards processes. They become more fundamental than the objects. We used to think of processes as things one object does to another, but no. Objects are defined by the processes that are carried out on them…simply because quantum theory is almost entirely a language of processes.”
On Whitehead, his Wikipedia article agrees with you from this quote: “This is not to say that Whitehead's thought was widely accepted or even well understood. His philosophical work is generally considered to be among the most difficult to understand in all of the Western canon.[24] Even professional philosophers struggled to follow Whitehead's writings.”. It makes me wonder what gems might be obscured in his works by this inaccessibility.
I might have an opposite method to you of sorts, where I try to soak up tons of different things with a lower frequency of discarding things in the hopes that, like an LLM trained on more and more data, more connections can be made. One definite weakness of this method is that there is just way too much to soak up for one person for this to be really efficient at making tons of connections. It seems that AI might have arrived just in time to assist very effectively here.

Eric Damboise
1/3/2024 01:41:22 pm

The following is copied from another location, as it’s now more appropriate to discuss this here:

Me:
In terms of what you mentioned about asking why, why, why until we can go no further back than “to avoid pain”, I’ve kind of been trying to go back even further than that recently in a way that is very related to the EO Wilson article we are reading for this week where he discusses “anti-disciplines”. I recently reread this summary of all the consciousness research you did a couple/few years and this time around I got really excited by your formulation of pandynamism as quoted: “What I hypothesize instead is that the forces of physics are everywhere, and it is a fundamental property of the universe that these forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge. Since the Greek for force is dynami, I would say the universe has pandynamism rather than panpsychism.” On my endless list of things to do, I’ve always wanted to revisit the standard model of particle physics and try to get my understanding closer to the frontier of this field. This most recent time reading your consciousness summary really motivated me to finally tackle that, and I have been. I agree with Chalmer's speculation as you described here: "Chalmers has proposed that subjective experience may be a fundamental property of the universe, like the spin of electromagnetism." This is like the “anti-discipline” of particle physics in conjunction with our biology (i.e. neuroscience) and could lead to further informing the speculation of pandynamism such that the first inklings of “affect” in simple organisms (i.e. when subjects emerge) could continue to be taken back even further to (very speculative) a sort of “discrete quantity of affect” in (for example) the interactions between positive and negative electric charges in quarks, electrons, and other particles.

Ed:
That's cool you are more interested in pandynamism! I really like thinking of the antidiscipline here. The way I have thought of this is that it doesn't extend below living organisms to any "discrete quantity of affect" because there is no *structure* there that can register these changes in forces. The affect may only be felt when a structure changes and then returns to its prior structure. That's more or less what defines living vs. non-living structures — that ability to maintain itself. Breaking rocks apart or pushing quarks around won't elicit that kind of physical phenomenon and therefore (I hypothesize) that kind of affect. This is how I explain the difference in consciousness between living and non-living matter without descending into panpsychism. I think there's a natural break in the structures of living vs. non-living things. One might have to really dive into molecular biology to pinpoint these differences though. What's really the difference between single-celled organisms and, say, sugar molecules? This is what I'm thinking about anyway. Pandynamism is certainly very speculative at this point.

Me:
Yes, “affect” was a poor word choice on my part. I see now that using “affect” here was similar to if we had been discussing single celled organisms and I had called the quarks/electrons/etc. that make up these organisms “discrete quantities of single celled organisms”. The better word choice here would have been something more along the lines of “discrete quantities of matter” or “discrete quantities of quantum processes” or some other suitable word(s). Instead of “affect”, I think a better word for the idea I was trying to convey might have been more like “discrete quantity of consciousness”, or “discrete quantity of pandynamism”, etc. So, just as single celled organisms can be said to emerge structurally from more fundamental particles of matter (speaking in object philosophy language instead of process philosophy language for now), affect levels of consciousness seen in the first lifeforms can be said to emerge from more fundamental “discrete quantities of pandynamism” that we might hypothesize to be (for example) properties of the interactions between various Standard Model particles. So in this hypothesis, it’s not that breaking a rock apart wouldn’t cause some sort of complex pandynamic configuration to emerge, but to call that configuration “affect” would be like calling a rock a “single celled organism”. Does this align with how you explain the difference in consciousness between living and non-living matter?

Ed:
Sounds very close. I wouldn't go below living organisms with it, though, into having "discrete quantity of consciousness”, or “discrete quantity of pandynamism”, etc. I currently think of consciousness as only arising with the movements in the structures (processes??) of living things. Absent t

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Eric Damboise
1/3/2024 01:41:58 pm

Ed:
Sounds very close. I wouldn't go below living organisms with it, though, into having "discrete quantity of consciousness”, or “discrete quantity of pandynamism”, etc. I currently think of consciousness as only arising with the movements in the structures (processes??) of living things. Absent that structure, there just aren't any discrete quantities of anything. Hmm, let's see....this triggers a new thought for me. Maybe we can consider the way "a wall" arises in a building when the components of the building are put together. After that is done, we can speak of "wall-ness" or maybe even "wall vibration-ness". But there is no such thing as "wall-ness" or "wall vibration-ness" in the bricks or boards before they become part of a wall. You push on a brick and nothing happens. You push on a wall of bricks and they may "want" to return to a wall. If this "wall-ness" actually caused feelings to arise in a house when the structure was altered and returned to, then that might be like how I see "consciousness" as this kind of higher level emergence in the biological realm that just doesn't exist in the lower realms. Why does consciousness arise for biological structures but not for wall structures? Who knows! : ) Maybe these are just not the same kinds of structures. Maybe pandynamism only affects certain types of structures and not others. Or it's markedly different depending on the material of the structures, and only one type produces motivating feelings of affect. Maybe silicon structures have totally different responses to pandynamism than carbon structures. This is awfully speculative now. I'm just spinning "retrodictive" stories that sorta explain the evidence we see in the universe. I might need alternate universes to test its predictive power. (Which I don't have at the moment.)

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Eric Damboise
1/3/2024 02:03:59 pm

Just a clarification first.

-> “…then that might be like how I see ‘consciousness’ as this kind of higher level emergence in the biological realm that just doesn't exist in the lower realms.”

Would you say that this is a form of strong emergence or weak emergence?

Ed Gibney link
1/3/2024 03:12:14 pm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence#Strong_and_weak_emergence

Biology, life, and therefore consciousness (as I've defined it) are strongly emergent from the chemical and physical building blocks. This quote from the wiki article above says why:

"Crucial in these simulations is that the interacting members retain their independence. If not, a new entity is formed with new, emergent properties: this is called strong emergence, which it is argued cannot be simulated, analysed or reduced."

Chemical building blocks never had independence before they became a part of a living system. After life arises, however, the evolution from there is weakly emergent.

Have I fallen into your trap?? : )))

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Eric Damboise
1/4/2024 09:22:30 am

Haha, no trap. All that's happened is that my level of confusion has increased. :) Up to this point I have been somewhat loosely operating on the assumption that strong emergence isn't really a thing. Today I've found a bunch of other things on strong and weak emergence I want to process before replying.

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Eric Damboise
1/14/2024 02:44:14 pm

Ok, here’s a first attempt at trying to communicate these thoughts!


--> “Chemical building blocks never had independence before they became a part of a living system.”

Hmm, I’m not sure what is meant here by independence in terms of chemical building blocks (or even independence in general as defined in the Wikipedia article). I read Chalmers’ paper on emergence https://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf, and his definitions for strong and weak emergence have more meaning for me:

Strong Emergence – Truths concerning strongly emergent phenomenon are not deducible even in principle from truths in the low-level domain.

Weak Emergence – Truths concerning weakly emergent phenomenon are unexpected but deducible in principle from truths in the low-level domain.

A few other quotes from this paper seem pertinent to me as well (I’ll number them so I can refer to them later if I need to):

1. “Weak emergence is the notion of emergence that is most common in recent scientific discussions of emergence, and is the notion that is typically invoked by proponents of emergence in complex systems theory.” – Page 1-2

2. “As just defined, cases of strong emergence will likely also be cases of weak emergence (although this depends on just how ‘unexpected’ is understood). But cases of weak emergence need not be cases of strong emergence.” – Page 2

3. “Strong emergence has much more radical consequences than weak emergence. If there are phenomena that are strongly emergent with respect to the domain of physics, then our conception of nature needs to be expanded to accommodate them. That is, if there are phenomena whose existence is not deducible from the facts about the exact distribution of particles and fields throughout space and time (along with the laws of physics), then this suggests that new fundamental laws of nature are needed to explain these phenomena.” – Page 2

4. “So if we want to use emergence to draw conclusions about the structure of nature at the most fundamental level, it is not weak emergence but strong emergence that is relevant.” – Page 3

5. “Strong emergence, if it exists, can be used to reject the physicalist picture of the world as fundamentally incomplete. By contrast, weak emergence can be used to support the physicalist picture of the world, by showing how all sorts of phenomena that might seem novel and irreducible at first sight can nevertheless be grounded in underlying simple laws.” – Page 3

My takeaway from these quotes is that strong emergence is only a notion that is valid at the most fundamental levels of the universe (if there is such a thing as a most fundamental level). One thing that physics seems to suggest is that at the most fundamental level, discrete entities are all identical to each other. Whether or not this is just an assumption that is arrived at because we can’t resolve any fine grained details at these fundamental levels that would allow us to determine otherwise remains to be seen. For now, this seems to be empirically well accepted.


--> “Sounds very close. I wouldn't go below living organisms with it, though, into having "discrete quantity of consciousness”, or “discrete quantity of pandynamism”, etc.”

Might this be a case of “atoms are the most fundamental units of nature”… and then later on, “protons are the most fundamental units of nature, not atoms”… and then later on “protons and neutrons are comprised of quarks”?


--> “I currently think of consciousness as only arising with the movements in the structures (processes??) of living things. Absent that structure, there just aren't any discrete quantities of anything.”

If consciousness is only emergent from the structures of living things, might this imply that the structure of the very first lifeform that emerged into existence is the most fundamental structure with regards to consciousness as well? Might THAT imply that in order for consciousness to arise alongside the emergence of life on other planets, all of these very first lifeforms would have to have identical structures? Or might the observation in physics of strong emergence at a fundamental level appearing as identical discrete units not apply everywhere in the universe?

I don’t currently see a problem with there being discrete units of consciousness (that are all identical in nature) found at more fundamental levels such as in the interactions between the most fundamental particles of nature. I’m not saying that these most fundamental units of consciousness have properties that are anything like the properties of affect or intention, etc. But it would allow for affect (which can be very diverse in all its forms despite it being a hypothetical earliest form of the emergence

Eric Damboise
1/14/2024 02:47:54 pm

...of consciousness as seen in living organisms) to be weakly emergent upon something more fundamental. In fact, this seems more in line with a physicalist worldview to me as noted in Chalmers’ quote #5.

One final observation, I see your wall analogy as being weakly emergent, not strongly emergent.

Ed Gibney link
1/15/2024 11:45:52 am

--> Hmm, I’m not sure what is meant here by independence in terms of chemical building blocks.

I mean that chemical building blocks don't act for their own sake in the way that living organisms do. Chemical building blocks, on their own, are just subject to the forces that act on them. To preempt some objections, I'm not claiming living organisms are an uncaused cause and have actions that arise from nothing. Living organisms are subjected to forces acting upon them, but they become the location of their own set of actions that sense and respond to these other forces. Chemical building blocks have no such iterative, recursive ability to act upon actions.

--> I read Chalmers’ paper on emergence

Very good! I saw that too but didn't want to give you too much homework to read about emergence. I like the 5 points you pulled from his paper.

--> One thing that physics seems to suggest is that at the most fundamental level, discrete entities are all identical to each other.

Just to clarify, I'm sure you mean up quarks are all the same as up quarks, not that they are identical to charm quarks.

--> Might this be a case of “atoms are the most fundamental units of nature”… and then ...

No, because something fundamentally new occurs with living organisms when they themselves react to forces in a self-sustaining way. That's not a behavior that continues to go down and down. And since we don't seem to see consciousness going down and down, I'm surmising that is where the feelings of consciousness (starting with affect) arise — with the distortions and repairs of the structure of life. (I will say again this is the most speculative and actually the least interesting (to me) part of my work on consciousness. I'm just following some logical conclusions to try and fit a theory around the empirical data. You're pushing me to get more exact with it, which is good, but I'm not completely sold on this. I'm just trying to convey how I'm currently theorizing about this stuff. Maybe your pointed questions will force me to abandon pandynamism as something different than panpsychism.)

--> If consciousness is only emergent from the structures of living things, might this imply that the structure of the very first lifeform that emerged into existence is the most fundamental structure with regards to consciousness as well?

Yes, although the different theories about the emergence of life aren't sure what those first chemical building blocks and structures were. Nor do they suddenly produce (BANG!) one structure that is undeniably life whereas all other structures were not life before that. So, I guess I'm saying the origins of consciousness are exactly has hazy and grey as the origins of life. There are areas below this where life and consciousness don't make any sense and areas above this zone where they clearly do make sense. Right around the beginnings of life is where we aren't sure and so neither am I.

--> Might THAT imply that in order for consciousness to arise alongside the emergence of life on other planets, all of these very first lifeforms would have to have identical structures?

No, it could be contingent and just random that our carbon-based lifeforms evolved this structure here first. The fact that no other lifeforms have evolved alongside us is surprising and points to the fact that maybe this substrate and structure IS a necessary part of the story of consciousness. But until we find or create consciousness elsewhere I wouldn't claim things have to be identical to what is here.

--> I’m not saying that these most fundamental units of consciousness have properties that are anything like the properties of affect or intention, etc.

Ah, well then you'd need to define what you are talking about for me to agree that they are there. I'm saying clearly that consciousness IS the feeling of life acting to stay alive. I think that's what we mean when we say *that thing* is conscious / sentient / alive or not. It is capable of responding to its environment to remain a discrete and continuing entity. Below that I just don't know what we would be talking about or why.

--> But it would allow for affect (which can be very diverse in all its forms despite it being a hypothetical earliest form of the emergence of consciousness as seen in living organisms) to be weakly emergent upon something more fundamental.

I think Mark Solms' conception of affect at its earliest stage is just "that is good for me" vs. "that is bad for me" aka what we now call pleasure vs. pain. I don't know how divergent that was at its beginning. I don't think it was. Are you saying that became diverse later? I would agree with that.

Either way, I don't think it would be possible to predict the actions of life if you were only living in the world of pre-life. That situation is in fact non-sensical as I made clear with that sentence ("living in the world of pre-life"). So, I think that has

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Ed Gibney link
1/15/2024 11:47:13 am

... So, I think that has to be a situation of strong emergence. I have jokingly surmised that maybe silicon-based lifeforms have a weird sense of affect that drives them to love and act towards self-destruction. Maybe their feelings of pain are attractive to them. Maybe that's why life hasn't arisen in that substrate. Those are wild speculations, but I think it's an example of how the actions of carbon-based life were NOT predictable from the substrate alone. Who could have known that carbon life would act to remain alive? There was no one to know this or expect this kind of thing in the universe.

--> In fact, this seems more in line with a physicalist worldview to me as noted in Chalmers’ quote #5.

I'm not saying this rejects physicalism. I'm saying this expands physicalism. Physics as we know it is incomplete because it doesn't explain the phenomenon of some forms of matter acting to stay alive using the feelings we all feel. Either way — either adding in affect when living structures sense them or adding in some "more fundamental unit of consciousness" — you are adding something to the current physicalist picture of the world. That's Chalmers whole project I believe, and it's one he says Dan Dennett doesn't get or acknowledge and I kind of think he's right. (Although I haven't read Bacteria to Bach and Back yet.)

--> One final observation, I see your wall analogy as being weakly emergent, not strongly emergent.

It depends on what properties you see the wall as having. I was making a hypothetical case that if "wall vibrations" gave a wall some kind of "wall consciousness" or "wall affect about being a wall" then that would be a case of strong emergence that you could not have predicted from just knowing what bricks and mortar or wood and nails are. Since we don't think that kind of consciousness actually arises in walls, then we don't think that kind of strong emergence happens. That was the story I was trying to tell with my analogy; not that walls actually do have strongly emergent properties.

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Eric Damboise
2/1/2024 01:02:01 pm

--> “Living organisms are subjected to forces acting upon them, but they become the location of their own set of actions that sense and respond to these other forces. Chemical building blocks have no such iterative, recursive ability to act upon actions.”

I think I see what you are saying. Let me see if I can put it in my own words for you to confirm. When chemical building blocks are in isolation, or aren’t bound together in the configurations that are described by life, the sum total of all of their interactions don’t create emergent behaviors that are able to act upon actions. But in the configurations that ARE described by life, the emergent behaviors of all of these building blocks are actions upon other actions? If so, I agree with this, but I still think that this can be considered weak emergence. More on this down below.


--> “Just to clarify, I'm sure you mean up quarks are all the same as up quarks, not that they are identical to charm quarks.”

Absolutely. Maybe brevity here didn’t serve the intended purpose.


--> “No, because something fundamentally new occurs with living organisms when they themselves react to forces in a self-sustaining way. That's not a behavior that continues to go down and down.”
--> “Those are wild speculations, but I think it's an example of how the actions of carbon-based life were NOT predictable from the substrate alone. Who could have known that carbon life would act to remain alive? There was no one to know this or expect this kind of thing in the universe.”

I’m thinking of the word “fundamental” in terms of not being reducible to anything more fundamental. And while these emergent behaviors from all the particles in the configurations that DO describe life wouldn’t have been predictable by any known mechanism before life emerged (and don’t seem like they will ever be completely predictable without access to all the information contained in the entire system), theoretically we should be able to create in hindsight (with the little information we are able to acquire from these systems) relatively predictive models of how the behaviors of life emerge from the more fundamental particles that make up the configurations of life. For example, Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell beautifully describes models for this at varying degrees of metaphor using their wonderful animation style in this video that I could watch over and over. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYPFenJQciw And because we empirically observe that living systems are made up of more fundamental particles each with their own behaviors, that seems to me to imply that the emergent behaviors of life aren’t fundamental, but instead are weakly emergent upon more fundamental behaviors. These emergent behaviors are just very difficult to explain in terms of their more fundamental particle behaviors given the little information we’ve been able to collect and the incomplete models we’ll likely always have. Weak emergence, to me, doesn’t imply that behaviors continue down and down. It just implies that emergent behaviors are able to be explained by the more fundamental (and thus different) behaviors.


--> “There are areas below this where life and consciousness don't make any sense and areas above this zone where they clearly do make sense.”
--> “But until we find or create consciousness elsewhere I wouldn't claim things have to be identical to what is here.”

Would we be in agreement that nucleobases are in the area below where it makes sense to be considered living? What do you think the observation that uracil in RNA is replaced by thymine in DNA seems to imply about the possibility that there are other possible configurations for the structures of life elsewhere in the universe? To me, the notion that different configurations for the building blocks of life are possible starts to imply that there isn’t anything fundamental at the origins of life.

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Eric Damboise
2/1/2024 01:02:39 pm

--> “Ah, well then you'd need to define what you are talking about for me to agree that they are there. I'm saying clearly that consciousness IS the feeling of life acting to stay alive. I think that's what we mean when we say *that thing* is conscious / sentient / alive or not. It is capable of responding to its environment to remain a discrete and continuing entity. Below that I just don't know what we would be talking about or why.”
--> “Either way — either adding in affect when living structures sense them or adding in some "more fundamental unit of consciousness" — you are adding something to the current physicalist picture of the world.”

First off, I think I probably have to define what I am referring to here. I’m talking about what you labeled in your summary article post above as “Subjective Experience (qualia)”, and not the other ideas around affect, intention, prediction, awareness, abstraction. I see these latter parts of consciousness as behaviors that are currently within the explanatory abilities of known physics. In other words, I see them as weakly emerging from the fundamental laws of physics and the fundamental physical behaviors of the standard model particles. But these subjective experiences, on the other hand, seem unable to be explained by any known descriptions of physics. And so, yes, I think we do need to add something new to the current physicalist picture of the world. And since these subjective experiences seem so well partnered with the empirically observable physical processes inside of us, it seems plausible to speculate that there is something linking these fundamental physical processes with the subjective experience properties. And so, I feel comfortable with the speculation that as we learn more about the complex orchestration of interactions of all the fundamental particles that make up living systems, we might also find the fundamental levels of subjective experience linked in some currently unexplained way to these interactions as well.

Put another way, we can currently trace pretty well the causal pathway of photons travelling from food and entering the eye all the way to the visual cortex and beyond. If we analyze these interactions, step by step like dominoes falling, at the fundamental levels of standard model particles and the fundamental forces mediating the progression through the steps, we can form the story of affect, intention, prediction, awareness and abstraction from (as Kurzgesagt put it) the words and letters of these more fundamental levels. But we have no words and letters for the subjective experience of seeing the food, the feeling the hunger, etc. And so might we speculate that the fundamentals of subjective experience match up with the fundamentals of the currently known physical laws?

As for why we would want to speculate down at this level, well speculation is just plain old fun (and since I’m resending this post because it didn’t post last time, I’ll add for other readers of this that the first 3-4 minutes of this video also say it well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLaTU-t1CQM)! :)

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Ed Gibney link
2/2/2024 12:26:22 pm

--> Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell

This threw me because of the 780+ day streak I have in Duolingo. I've never seen this YouTube channel before (great video though!) but did you know that "Kurzgesagt" is a German word? Basically it means "Shortly Said" which is a more literal translation of "In a Nutshell". So, when I saw you use "Kurzgesagt in a Nutshell" I thought "Why is he being redundant?" : ))) Now I get it!

--> And because we empirically observe that living systems are made up of more fundamental particles each with their own behaviors, that seems to me to imply that the emergent behaviors of life aren’t fundamental, but instead are weakly emergent upon more fundamental behaviors.
--> Weak emergence, to me, doesn’t imply that behaviors continue down and down. It just implies that emergent behaviors are able to be explained by the more fundamental (and thus different) behaviors.


This depends on what we really mean by "strong" and "weak" emergence I suppose, but I'm not an expert on that. I read Chalmers' paper about it, though, which started with this definition:

"We can say that a high-level phenomenon is strongly emergent with respect to a low-level domain when the high-level phenomenon arises from the low-level domain, but truths concerning that phenomenon are not *deducible* even in principle from truths in the low-level domain."

I think "deducible" is important here. You seem to be saying life is weakly emergent because its activities are *explainable" by all the properties of the parts it has. In hindsight, that appears to be right. But to deduce the actions of life from the materials of non-life doesn't seem possible to me. A whole new type of actions were introduced into the world when life arose, which you could only deduce once you had seen them in action. Yes, these were performed using chemical and physical processes (e.g. proteins and electromagnetism) but I don't know how Darwinian activities would have been deducible for some non-life but not other non-life.

I'm not sure why this distinction matters too much though. Do you see it as a barrier to panpsychism if I want to call this strongly emergent? If life is only weakly emergent can you claim proto-consciousness for electrons? I just don't see that as helpful, so I'm not so willing to fight for life to be a case of weak emergence.

--> Would we be in agreement that nucleobases are in the area below where it makes sense to be considered living?

Yes. The wiki entry for "Life" gives a nice list of 7 things that are generally considered part of living organisms. I see shades of gray where things like viruses may contain some but not all of these, but nucleobases contain none so are clearly non-life if floating around on their own.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Descriptive

--> What do you think the observation that uracil in RNA is replaced by thymine in DNA seems to imply about the possibility that there are other possible configurations for the structures of life elsewhere in the universe? To me, the notion that different configurations for the building blocks of life are possible starts to imply that there isn’t anything fundamental at the origins of life.

Maybe Tinbergen's 4 questions helps shed light on this. The 7 items I cited above are related to the functions question of Tinbergen. The different chemical building blocks that perform these functions relate t the mechanism Tinbergen question. I don't see it as a problem to think of other mechanisms as possibly performing these functions. It still makes he functions something strongly new in the universe. Perhaps you have a different definition of "fundamental" in mind, though, from your physics background being much deeper than mine.

Maybe we could say that the *potential* for living behavior exists in nucleobases and below because of pandynamism, but it is never *actuated* or *expressed* until the right structures are in place. Does that help at all?

--> I’m talking about what you labeled in your summary article post above as “Subjective Experience (qualia)”, and not the other ideas around affect, intention, prediction, awareness, abstraction.

Hmm. But I think subjective experience IS these things. I don't know what it would be prior to these.

--> I see these latter parts of consciousness as behaviors that are currently within the explanatory abilities of known physics.

Okay so maybe you are saying the behaviors that show evidence of affect, intention, prediction, awareness, and abstraction are all explainable but the qualia is not? As in, you accept the possibility that philosophical zombies could exist and so we need to explain *that something extra* beside affect, intention, prediction, awareness, abstraction?

--> In other words, I see them as weakly emerging from the fundamental laws of physics and the fundamental physical behaviors of the standard model particles.

We're back to the definition of weak

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Ed Gibney link
2/2/2024 12:27:30 pm

We're back to the definition of weak vs. strong here but I will agree that all the most basic mechanisms of life obey the standard model of particles responding to fundamental forces. The emergence (strong or weak) is the way this eventually and collectively fulfills the functions of staying alive.

--> And so, yes, I think we do need to add something new to the current physicalist picture of the world.

Good. Good. We're on the same page.

--> it seems plausible to speculate that there is something linking these fundamental physical processes with the subjective experience properties.

Still good.

--> I feel comfortable with the speculation that as we learn more about the complex orchestration of interactions of all the fundamental particles that make up living systems, we might also find the fundamental levels of subjective experience linked in some currently unexplained way to these interactions as well.

I mean, maybe??? I'm always up for the possibility of newly explained things. But I still think consciousness just IS all about sensing and responding to the universe in order to stay alive, so I don't see how it could ever by discovered or made sense of at any lower levels. We don't look for evidence of economics in organs. That only appears in social interactions. Does that mean economics is strongly or weakly emergent with the emergence of social life? Maybe. You wouldn't say the existence of economics is somehow fundamentally in the building blocks of organs would you? Or maybe you would. Maybe economics is *deducible* from the interactions of supply and demand of biological material. I dunno. I'm not convinced of the use in moving economics to that level or of moving subjective experience to non-subjects. Sounds a bit like metaphysical speculation.

---> And so might we speculate that the fundamentals of subjective experience match up with the fundamentals of the currently known physical laws?

I think I'd go back to the potential for this but not the actuality. Is "melting" just fundamentally in every Hydrogen atom just because H2O does melt in certain environments? Is "affect" just fundamentally in every quark because my quarks feel affect? Maybe this goes back to your definition of fundamental.

--> As for why we would want to speculate down at this level, well speculation is just plain old fun

There I'd add a caveat. Speculation is only fun to me if it has the possibility of leading somewhere. I hope this did!

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Jeffrey LaPorte link
2/21/2024 03:24:02 pm

I enjoyed reading your article Eric, I must admit it is all very interesting, but I don't believe I am able to grasp everything you shared. I did have a thought while reading though. Like with quantum physics, consciousness has that property of being seen by the observers in different ways different perspectives. Somewhat like "truth" at least that was my intuition. I believe consciousness does evolve, as life evolves and that there is perhaps universal consciousness that could be guiding evolution. I suppose this could be one more aspect of God's mind, whatever that is. Much love brother.

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Eric Damboise
2/22/2024 03:26:48 pm

Hi Jeff! I just replied to your comment on Hylo where you mentioned that you realized that Ed was the author of this instead of myself. But I also wanted to clarify that here.

I too am still slowly processing what Ed wrote here, and am also in an ongoing dialogue about the subjective aspect of consciousness (whatever that is) with Ed. My next installment in that conversation is still being worked on. You can read that discussion in the comments just above yours here if that interests you.

Yes, there are many mysteries still when it comes to consciousness, and if you decide to read the discussion I am having with Ed, you'll see one of the aspects of consciousness that is ripe for speculation. I appreciate your perspective on this and am sure that we will learn to find common ground between our perspectives as we work on developing common ground discourse techniques together in our group. Thanks for taking a look at Ed's work here!

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Ed Gibney link
2/23/2024 03:37:17 pm

Thanks guys!

Keep at it, Jeff. Conversation on Hylo with people like Eric will do wonders for sussing out definitions and common ground.

Eric, I heard a new podcast about Panpsychism last night that you might like. Philip Goff is on it but the other two philosophers have some interesting things to say too. It touches on some of the things we've been talking about lately in terms of "consciousness all the way down" and what it "might be like to be an electron". I, like one of the philosophers on the show (Tim Crane), am unpersuaded by Goff et al that panpsychism is the way to go, but there are some new avenues here that are interesting to think about.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vl96

Eric Damboise
2/27/2024 10:26:47 am

Thanks Ed! I'll check this out. I've already watched a couple of debate-type videos between Phillip Goff and Sean Carroll, and am integrating things from those in my next reply. I also saw John Messerly's post on Sabine Hossenfelder's book when I went to see the philosopher jokes you linked to. That was quite pertinent to our conversation and a lot of my worldview comes from watching many of Sabine's videos on YouTube. So, still lots to say for me about this, despite it still being all speculation. :)

Eric Damboise
3/25/2024 01:39:45 pm

Ok! I’ve finally completed this installment of our discussion! Here goes.


--> “This depends on what we really mean by "strong" and "weak" emergence I suppose…”

Sabine Hossenfelder has a great 5 minute video on this that makes complete sense to me and is how I am thinking about all of this. <<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJE6-VTdbjw >> The end of the video really summarizes it well, but the video is so short that watching the entire thing is ideal.


--> “But to deduce the actions of life from the materials of non-life doesn’t seem possible to me.”

I think I agree, but it depends on what you mean by “deduce”. Is deducing accomplished by some process like the use of an algorithm, or are you also considering deducing to be just waiting for a system to “go through the motions”? I’m wondering if the notion of “undecidability” << https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecidable_problem >> plays a role here in processes like Conway’s Game of Life << https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life >> where it seems to have been proven that no algorithms can ever definitively calculate the emergence of a future pattern from a previous pattern for some systems. But undecidable systems like Conway’s Game of Life are still considered weak emergence because you can just run through the simulation and wait to see the result. All the steps between time A and time B are explained by the laws of nature (in this case, the rules of Conway’s game), but it’s too complex to reduce that process down to an algorithm that can quickly predict future outcomes faster than the time it takes for the outcome to naturally happen in the first place. That need to wait for complex systems to just go through the motions to see the results is why I think that hindsight for something like the emergence of life is necessary. So, I still think that “explainable” (using the laws of nature) is more important to focus on than “deducible” (using algorithms or some other calculating process).


--> “I'm not sure why this distinction matters too much though. Do you see it as a barrier to panpsychism if I want to call this strongly emergent? If life is only weakly emergent can you claim proto-consciousness for electrons? I just don't see that as helpful, so I'm not so willing to fight for life to be a case of weak emergence.”

The wording of this is confusing to me. I’m not sure that I am claiming panpsychism. I don’t think that I am claiming that minds are everywhere (if that’s what panpsychism is claiming), just as I wouldn’t claim that because a brain is comprised of and supervenes on standard model particles, those individual particles are brains or proto-brains and thus brains must be everywhere. I’m just saying that all matter and interactions of matter supervene on fundamental particles and the laws of nature that govern their interactions, and so why wouldn’t everything in existence (including subjective experience) supervene on the most fundamental levels of nature?

Also, maybe the notion of type of emergence doesn’t matter. We can still ask, for the case of strong emergence, strongly emergent from what? Life still supervenes on fundamental particles, and so shouldn’t consciousness. But then, we have to ask, what property of fundamental particles describes or explains subjective experience? All I am saying is that none of the currently known properties seem to explain it because they all explain how particles interact and move around in the universe.

And I wouldn’t say that I am claiming that electrons have proto-consciousness. A more accurate description of my speculation is that the subjective aspect of consciousness (qualia) supervenes on the interactions BETWEEN standard model particles, not on properties OF standard model particles. More on this at the end of this installment.

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Eric Damboise
3/25/2024 01:40:24 pm

--> “Perhaps you have a different definition of "fundamental" in mind, though, from your physics background being much deeper than mine.”

Yes, that’s exactly it. I see physics as the current (but likely not final) fundamental description of the universe that everything else (chemistry, biology, and higher) supervenes on. And so, living organisms supervene on chemical building blocks, which supervene on standard model particles. That’s why I wouldn’t call life fundamental because all living organisms are comprised of more fundamental parts. I linked to a video of Sean Carroll talking with Philip Goff and Keith Frankish down in the part where I discuss philosophical zombies. In that video (starting at 24:35), Sean talks about what he means by “supervene”.


--> “Maybe we could say that the *potential* for living behavior exists in nucleobases and below because of pandynamism, but it is never *actuated* or *expressed* until the right structures are in place.”

Exactly!


--> “Okay so maybe you are saying the behaviors that show evidence of affect, intention, prediction, awareness, and abstraction are all explainable but the qualia is not? As in, you accept the possibility that philosophical zombies could exist and so we need to explain *that something extra* beside affect, intention, prediction, awareness, abstraction?”

Yes, I see physical behaviors as explainable by the current laws of physics because these laws describe how particles interact with each other and cause each other to move around in the universe. And so, the behaviors that we can empirically measure supervene on the laws of physics. Qualia don’t seem to me to be able to be explained by the current laws of physics. Nothing I know about the emergence of qualia seems to be explained by momentum, or energy, or motion, or forces, etc.. For example, I have no idea how I would use Newton’s F = ma law, or Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetism, etc. to describe how qualia could possibly emerge from any currently known properties of standard model particles. But I DO have an idea how I could use other physics equations to describe the interactions of particles in the neural networks in our brains that contribute to forming memories within the structure of these networks. So, in summary: using physics to describe the structure and formation of memories…yes. Using physics to describe the qualia of “remembering” memories…no idea.

And I’m not saying that I think that philosophical zombies are possible, just as I wouldn’t say that frictionless objects are possible. But, a very successful technique (if done humbly) in physics at helping us describe our world is the technique of isolating variables (such as friction) so as to simplify the system. Basically, the word for this is reductionism. We can imagine a frictionless block sliding along a floor, and in fact can even reduce friction of real objects quite a bit to confirm the behaviors we would predict from the frictionless thought experiment. Maybe you did net force problems in a physics class back in your youth where you broke forces into x and y components, or thought about how a block would move if it didn’t have gravity acting on it, etc. To me, this shows that properties in our universe are separable and additive. And so, imagining a philosophical zombie is, to me, just an example of isolating a variable. The observations that 1) qualia are personal, and 2) processes such as sleep/anesthesia can reduce or eliminate qualia by blocking signals from entering certain parts of the brain, seem to lend credence to the notion that qualia are isolatable variables. But maybe I’m thinking about this incorrectly???

Even though I align with Sean Carroll in terms of physicalism and everything he says about physics, etc. in this video: << https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcCEZzNCNBI >>, he discusses philosophical zombies starting at 33:19. I didn’t find his dismissal of the philosophical zombie argument convincing. He’s using the idea that “…everything else would be the same in a world of philosophical zombies, including their lying description of the qualia that they don’t actually have, and so what’s the point of using a philosophical zombie argument?”. But in the way that I described philosophical zombies in the previous paragraph, there WOULD be a difference (just like there is a difference in a frictionless block sliding along a surface compared to a sliding block with friction). And so, a philosophical zombie aligned with the way I described it wouldn’t describe qualia that is doesn’t have. But there are countless processes that happen in my body that I don’t experience qualia for. If those living processes required for me to stay alive can happen without qualia experi

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Eric Damboise
3/25/2024 01:42:12 pm

If those living processes required for me to stay alive can happen without qualia experiences of them, it seems natural to bring that observation into the realm of the philosophical zombie thought experiment where all living processes happen without qualia. And again, at this point I come back to the idea that I can’t think of how any of the currently known laws of physics are able to calculate and describe qualia in any manner, and I’ve never seen any derivation of this online anywhere.


--> “But I still think consciousness just IS all about sensing and responding to the universe in order to stay alive, so I don't see how it could ever by discovered or made sense of at any lower levels. We don't look for evidence of economics in organs. That only appears in social interactions. Does that mean economics is strongly or weakly emergent with the emergence of social life? Maybe.”

Starting at 21:11 in Sean Carroll video, he talks about this, and as a fellow physicalist, I agree with him. In talking about this, he says in particular at 23:43, “…everything that goes on when we talk about geology or biology or psychology can be talked about without compromise in the language of particles and fields in the deeper level. There's no new ingredients that need to be added to understand geology starting from particle physics. Of course we can't derive it. It's just way too complicated…..”

So, from a physics point of view, I would say that economics is weakly emergent from particle physics. The only reason we don’t look for evidence of economics in organs is because it’s too complicated to analyze that level of detail. Otherwise, we would absolutely want to look at that level of detail so as to accurately predict economics far into the future.


--> “There I'd add a caveat. Speculation is only fun to me if it has the possibility of leading somewhere. I hope this did!”

I’m not sure if this speculation leads anywhere. I hope that speculations like this are fertilizer for the future growth of a scientific theory. But I’m not even sure if my current speculation that qualia supervene on the interactions BETWEEN standard model particles can ever be empirically verified. It seems that empiricism depends on the causal effects on particles AFTER interactions between particles have taken place, not on the interactions BETWEEN particles themselves. Maybe way down at this low level, hidden in the interactions between particles, is where the “hard problem” finds its source??? Until then, I await the laws of physics that actually can describe qualia. But, as John Messerly summarized for Sabine Hossenfelder’s Existential Physics book, “[Sabine] begins by admitting that science doesn’t have, and almost certainly never will have, all the answers to life’s biggest questions.” So maybe physics will never be able to answer the Hard Problem.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
4/8/2024 04:00:16 pm

Hey Eric! Good to hear your thoughts again as always. Here goes my reply.

--> Sabine Hossenfelder has a great 5 minute video on this

I actually found her video to be confused about something. At one point she says the cat emerging from the mosaic picture might be strong emergence because it is made by intelligent design, But then she later says strong emergence only happens when the constituent parts of a phenomenon don't obey the fundamental laws of physics. The cat picture doesn't fit this much stricter definition of strong emergence. I think she's gone too far with "strong" there. I believe philosophers mean "strong" to be something more like how the cat picture can't be *derived ahead of time* from the properties of the pieces. So, sorry, but I guess it still depends on our definitions of strong and weak. But I agree with you that if we take Sabine's stronger definition of strong emergence as "nothing in the constituent parts violates the laws the physics" (roughly speaking, I didn't type it verbatim), then nothing we have seen in the universe is a case of strong emergence like that. Although, I'm not sure the subjective feeling of what it is like to be me is exactly in the fundamental laws yet, although all of my behaviours could be made sense of from the constituent parts all acting towards a goal.

--> it depends on what you mean by “deduce”

Let's start with google's first definition: "arrive at (a fact or a conclusion) by reasoning; draw as a logical conclusion". Also, as a philosopher, deduction is a very certain path of reasoning. In these cases, we can *start* with facts or propositions and *immediately* deduce the results and conclusion. This is opposed to "induction" which is "the inference of a general law from particular instances". That works backwards. I don't think we could have deduced life from non-life. But we can make inductive rules now that we've seen it in action and there are no violations of the fundamental physics of the universe.

--> I’m wondering if the notion of “undecidability” plays a role here

Interesting! Maybe, although that's not what I had in mind. That seems like a pretty technical reason to disqualify some deductions in some cases.

--> I still think that “explainable” (using the laws of nature) is more important to focus on than “deducible”

I agree with that! I'm not too fussed about claiming something is really and truly strongly or weakly emergent. I think we went down this rabbit hole because you asked me a question about it and this is interesting but I don't see it as vital.

--> just as I wouldn’t claim that because a brain is comprised of and supervenes on standard model particles, those individual particles are brains or proto-brains and thus brains must be everywhere.

I love this argument! Panpsychism literally means "mind everywhere" so I think they have made the mistake you are pointing out here. Or at least that's one interpretation of the many panpsychisms.

--> I’m just saying that all matter and interactions of matter supervene on fundamental particles and the laws of nature that govern their interactions, and so why wouldn’t everything in existence (including subjective experience) supervene on the most fundamental levels of nature?

I'm wondering if there is something in the fundamental laws of nature that says living systems will act to achieve a goal. There's something that enters into the necessary explanations of the world once epistemology / knowledge enters into the world. Maybe it's all just down to Markov blankets and homeostasis, though, which actually explains the actions of "things that want to achieve a goal." I could believe that.

I noticed that you switched from saying "fundamental particles and the laws of nature" to saying "fundamental levels of nature". Are these different things to you? I'm not sure subjective experience (Chalmer's Hard Problem) has been included in the first term but he's trying to get it into the second term.

--> But then, we have to ask, what property of fundamental particles describes or explains subjective experience? All I am saying is that none of the currently known properties seem to explain it because they all explain how particles interact and move around in the universe.

Exactly.

--> A more accurate description of my speculation is that the subjective aspect of consciousness (qualia) supervenes on the interactions BETWEEN standard model particles, not on properties OF standard model particles.

I agree that's a good guess right now.

--> Nothing I know about the emergence of qualia seems to be explained by momentum, or energy, or motion, or forces, etc..

I agree with that for sure.

--> And I’m not saying that I think that philosophical zombies are possible, just as I wouldn’t say that frictionless objects are possible.

This is an interesting analogy. I sure did lots of frictionl

Reply
Ed Gibney link
4/8/2024 04:01:04 pm

This is an interesting analogy. I sure did lots of frictionless calculations during my engineering degree. But I would like to add in Dan Dennett's paper "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies". That does a really excellent job of showing how absurd that idea is.

--> And so, imagining a philosophical zombie is, to me, just an example of isolating a variable.

Sorta. But Dennett is saying that variable doesn't exist in isolation. Whereas Chalmers wants to say the *possibility* of zombies means that the variable does exist.

--> The observations that 1) qualia are personal, and 2) processes such as sleep/anesthesia can reduce or eliminate qualia by blocking signals from entering certain parts of the brain, seem to lend credence to the notion that qualia are isolatable variables.

Ah, so the appearance and disappearance of qualia does happen as you say. I think the question is more could you explain ALL behaviors without it. You can only explain SOME (most, actually) behaviors without it. And if you can't explain ALL behaviors without it, then philsoohpcial zombies aren't possible.

--> If those living processes required for me to stay alive can happen without qualia experiences of them, it seems natural to bring that observation into the realm of the philosophical zombie thought experiment where all living processes happen without qualia.

It seems natural, but there's a big difference between 0.05 usage of qualia and absolutely 0 usage of qualia. And Chalmer's usage of p.Zombies to knock down physicalism doesn't get over that hurdle.

--> There's no new ingredients that need to be added to understand geology starting from particle physics. Of course we can't derive it.

That's one way of defining "strong" emergence.

--> I would say that economics is weakly emergent from particle physics.

But I understand your usage of this term as weakly emergent because it is *explainable* from the lower levels after that fact.

--> I’m not even sure if my current speculation that qualia supervene on the interactions BETWEEN standard model particles can ever be empirically verified.

You mean we can't stop the universe from moving to see if that would do it? : ))))

--> So maybe physics will never be able to answer the Hard Problem.

In my blog post about Chalmers, I called this the infinite why question. He can just keep asking "why does quail happen then?" So yes, I don't think we can *solve* this problem. We can just describe it as it manifests itself in the universe. I think that's what I tried to do with my hierarchy of consciousness.

Reply
Eric Damboise
5/21/2024 06:29:55 am

Ok, my next installment is finally here! I’m really enjoying where this conversation has gone and how we seem to have converged onto largely common ground. Because what I have been describing a only just a speculative story about where subjective experience might find its roots, or at least a deeper level of roots, I’m happy just to hear that you agree that this speculation is a good guess for now. I’ll address the few remaining pertinent points from your last response (in particular zombies and Dennett’s argument against them) and we’ll see if those motivate you towards more discussion, or if this brings this conversation to a nice conclusion for the time being.

--> “I actually found [Sabine’s] video to be confused about something. At one point she says the cat emerging from the mosaic picture might be strong emergence because it is made by intelligent design”

Yeah, I got the impression that she was just trying to use the cat picture as an analogy to try to illustrate what strong emergence might look like --IF-- it actually existed (which seems doomed to fall flat if she feels that strong emergence doesn’t actually exist because of the stricter definition of strong emergence that she believes in).


--> “Interesting! Maybe, although that's not what I had in mind. That seems like a pretty technical reason to disqualify some deductions in some cases.”

Haha, yeah. Another rabbit hole for another day. ;)


--> “I agree with that! I'm not too fussed about claiming something is really and truly strongly or weakly emergent.”

Awesome!

--> “I love this argument! Panpsychism literally means "mind everywhere" so I think they have made the mistake you are pointing out here. ”

Yay!


--> “I'm wondering if there is something in the fundamental laws of nature that says living systems will act to achieve a goal. There's something that enters into the necessary explanations of the world once epistemology / knowledge enters into the world. Maybe it's all just down to Markov blankets and homeostasis, though, which actually explains the actions of "things that want to achieve a goal." I could believe that.”

I like where you are going with this, and my current intuition causes me to think that there IS something in the fundamental laws of nature that says something about goals. Alternate words that come to mind for Markov blankets and homeostasis are: “Markov blanket <--> particle interactions”, and “homeostasis <--> state (or a snapshot of a state at any moment in time)”. From there, I see the laws of nature as describing the particle interactions, or how the nodes in a Markov blanket will behave. And I see goals as particular states of the nodes at any time, with homeostasis being a particular state that tends to keep a configuration of nodes stable (i.e. alive, for living systems) over time.

So, at a biological (living systems) level, a goal might be considered to be a state where the configuration of particles making up the living system allow that living system to remain stable (alive). And at the chemistry level, a “goal” might be considered to be a state where the configuration of carbon dioxide and water is reached when the “behavior” of methane and oxygen interacting with each other takes place: CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O. At the physics level, a “goal” might be that a proton configuration state is reached when the “behavior” of three quarks interacting with each other takes place.


--> “I noticed that you switched from saying "fundamental particles and the laws of nature" to saying "fundamental levels of nature". Are these different things to you? I'm not sure subjective experience (Chalmer's Hard Problem) has been included in the first term but he's trying to get it into the second term.”

I’m loosely breaking up the universe into the levels of physics, chemistry, and biology. There could be countless other ways to reduce the universe into parts. This one seems pretty useful for many purposes, including the purposes of the discussion we are having. In particular, this progression of levels seems to illustrate an arrow of emergence in complexity. So, when I say “fundamental particles and the laws of nature”, I am primarily focused on the physics level of this reductionism. I’m finding it useful to think of physics as a more “fundamental level of nature” than chemistry or biology.


--> “ ‘--> But then, we have to ask, what property of fundamental particles describes or explains subjective experience? All I am saying is that none of the currently known properties seem to explain it because they all explain how particles interact and move around in the universe.’

Exactly.”


Yay! Your agreement here i

Reply
Eric Damboise
5/21/2024 06:31:19 am

Yay! Your agreement here is particularly gratifying to me because this is really the only reason I currently have to feel the need to speculate about this at all.


--> “I agree that's a good guess right now.”

Awesome!


--> “This is an interesting analogy. I sure did lots of frictionless calculations during my engineering degree. But I would like to add in Dan Dennett's paper "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies". That does a really excellent job of showing how absurd that idea is.”

After reading most of Dennett’s paper you mentioned here, I feel the same way about zombies as I do about panpsychism. Just like I don’t think that I am claiming panpsychism, I don’t think, after all, that I am describing a philosophical zombie as Todd Moody seems to have done in his essay (which I haven’t read) based on Dennett’s description of Moody’s thought experiment. The following quote from Dennett’s article seems to be his fundamental argument against Moody’s definition of zombies: “Again and again in Moody's essay, he imagines scenarios to which he is not entitled. If, ex hypothesi, zombies are behaviourally indistinguishable from us normal folk, then they are really behaviourally indistinguishable!”

Using the friction problem as an analogy to the zombie argument, to me it seems that Moody might be envisioning that a frictionless “zombie” block would be behaviorally indistinguishable from a regular block that is influenced by friction. And Dennett’s argument against that would be, “No! if a frictionless “zombie” block is behaviorally indistinguishable from a regular block that is influenced by friction, then it really is behaviorally indistinguishable and also must be influenced by friction.”

Am I understanding Dennett’s objections to the zombie argument? If so, then I agree with Dennett and I don’t think that Moody is using reductionism appropriately. If you remove either friction or subjective experience from a system, the system will behave differently.


--> “Sorta. But Dennett is saying that variable doesn't exist in isolation. ”

Is he actually claiming that, or is he just debating against an ineffective attempt (the zombie argument) to reduce subjective experience into a part? If he IS saying that subjective experience isn’t an isolatable variable, then I assume this to mean he thinks that the current laws of physics are able to explain subjective experience. I’m not sure I can be on board with that without a more convincing argument. I think you and I are on the same page here, based on your previous agreement: “ ‘--> Nothing I know about the emergence of qualia seems to be explained by momentum, or energy, or motion, or forces, etc..’

I agree with that for sure.”



--> “Ah, so the appearance and disappearance of qualia does happen as you say. I think the question is more could you explain ALL behaviors without it. You can only explain SOME (most, actually) behaviors without it. And if you can't explain ALL behaviors without it, then philosophical zombies aren't possible.”

I think we are on the same page here. I don’t feel, after all, as though I am trying to validate philosophical zombies. I think I am trying to validate isolation of variables, which the zombie argument seems to be failing at. When one isolates a variable, they have to take into account how that removed variable changes the system. By claiming that the system doesn’t change when a variable is removed, as the zombie argument seems to do, the argument being made seems to run counter to how nature actually works. I feel that I have argued effectively for subjective experience being an isolatable variable, and your previous agreement (that I’ll copy and paste again to minimize confusion about what I am referring to) seems to show that: “ ‘--> Nothing I know about the emergence of qualia seems to be explained by momentum, or energy, or motion, or forces, etc..’

I agree with that for sure.”



--> “You mean we can't stop the universe from moving to see if that would do it? : ))))”

Haha


--> “In my blog post about Chalmers, I called this the infinite why question. He can just keep asking "why does quail happen then?" So yes, I don't think we can *solve* this problem. We can just describe it as it manifests itself in the universe. I think that's what I tried to do with my hierarchy of consciousness.”

Well said! I agree.

Reply
Ed Gibney link
7/3/2024 12:49:05 pm

Hey Eric! Thanks for these latest messages. I'm back from a trip abroad and able to focus on it now. Here goes some quick thoughts:

--> I’m happy just to hear that you agree that this speculation is a good guess for now.

Yep!

--> So, at a biological (living systems) level, a goal might be... And at the chemistry level, a “goal” might be... At the physics level, a “goal” might be...

It sounds like "goal" is being transformed from something intentional to just a stable end state. Something that fits the tautology that "what survives will be what survives". I think in the abstract, your description does describe the universe we live in. Some might look at this and say your use of "goals" in this way implies that intentions and goals are illusions. Others might say that the intentional stance matters to those of us inside this universe who can't see the end states that will survive and must therefore act towards something with intention. Illusion or not. But that's a "free will" vs. "free will worth wanting" debate that we don't need to expand on here.

--> I’m finding it useful to think of physics as a more “fundamental level of nature” than chemistry or biology.

Got it. Me too.

--> I don’t think, after all, that I am describing a philosophical zombie as Todd Moody seems to have done

Phew! Dennett convinced me that was a mistake too.

--> Am I understanding Dennett’s objections to the zombie argument? If so, then I agree with Dennett and I don’t think that Moody is using reductionism appropriately. If you remove either friction or subjective experience from a system, the system will behave differently.

Yep. It sounds to me like you've got his points about this.

--> -> “Sorta. But Dennett is saying that variable doesn't exist in isolation. ” Is he actually claiming that, or is he just debating against an ineffective attempt (the zombie argument) to reduce subjective experience into a part?

I think Dennett might have actually said that not only doesn't that variable exist in isolation, he would say it doesn't exist. At least not in the way that regular folk notions or zombie arguers would put it.

--> I assume this to mean he thinks that the current laws of physics are able to explain subjective experience.

I think he thought that was coming. I think he thought that once consciousness studies completed their mapping of subjective experiences then the so-called hard-problem question would fall away. I'm personally not convinced of that and I think you and I are on the right track here of figuring out how to incorporate it into the fundamental laws of the universe.

--> I feel that I have argued effectively for subjective experience being an isolatable variable, and your previous agreement...seems to show that

Yep! Well done, Eric, for working through this with me. It's deep and complicated and you've managed to follow my thoughts or clarify what wasn't clear. I feel understood and in fellow agreement. I need to go write this up for journals soon!

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