Consciousness 4 — Panpsychist Problems With Consciousness

In the last post, I acknowledged that there may indeed be an impossible problem for studies of consciousness. David Chalmers makes his distinction here between the "easy problems" and the "hard problem", but by renaming them the "hows" and "the ultimate why", it becomes easier to see that Chalmers is really just playing the infinite regression game of why, why, why, why, why..... That is always an impossible loop to get out of, but we can still make efforts towards each new why whenever we find it useful and possible.

Before continuing down that path, however, we have to deal with an objection being raised that it is not in fact possible to study consciousness. This objection is currently being made by a philosopher of consciousness from Durham University in the UK named Philip Goff. If you'll remember from post 2 in this series, Goff is a prominent proponent of panpsychism, which is the idea that psyche (mind) is pan (everywhere). Panpsychism is one of the concepts that physicalists / materialists like Sam and Annaka Harris are increasingly considering as a solution to the problem of how conscious entities arise from seemingly non-conscious materials. They think that maybe consciousness is just a fundamental attribute of the universe. I think we have a lot of investigating to do into our definitions and understanding of consciousness before we can make much sense of that claim, but Philip Goff doesn't think we can even do that. To best understand his point of view, I recommend reading an open exchange of letters ("On the Problem of Consciousness, Panpsychism, and More") which Goff had with the philosopher Massimo Pigliucci. Pigliucci has also been a professor of science in the fields of ecology and evolution, and he has written a book about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience, so he is more than up for the task of debating Goff. Here are the most important points they made:

Philip Goff:

• 1st core issue: the problem of consciousness is radically unlike any other scientific problem. Perhaps the most obvious reason is that consciousness is unobservable. ... What we want a theory of consciousness to explain are the qualities of experience, e.g. the [*redness*] of red experiences. These qualities can only be known about by attending to experience from the 1st-person perspective; they are invisible to 3rd-person observation. This makes the problem of consciousness utterly unique: in every other scientific problem, we are trying to explain the data of 3rd-person observation.
• 2nd core issue: the case against materialism. There is something that needs explaining that can only be known about from the first-person perspective. We know that consciousness exists not from observation and experiment, but from our immediate awareness of our own feelings and experiences. ... If the predicates of neuroscience could convey what it’s like to see red, then a colour-blind neuroscientist would be able to know what it’s like to see red by reading relevant neuroscience.
• 3rd core issue: is panpsychism coherent? Overall, I can’t see any reason to doubt the coherence of the claim that experiential properties are the categorical properties underlying those dispositions.
• 4th core issue: why should we believe panpsychism? Panpsychism, I believe, is the simplest theory able to accommodate both 3rd-person observation and experiment, and the subjective qualities of experience. ... I think physical science alone cannot explain consciousness and hence we must turn to alternative ways of accounting for it.

Responses from Massimo Pigliucci:

• [1st core issue] Are you then discarding a lot of what psychology and cognitive science has done since the demise of behaviourism? Because part of the business of those sciences is to systematically study first-person phenomena, including people’s intentions, motivations, emotions, and so forth. All of which are not directly observable and become data only via self-reporting. That has not been an obstacle to the scientific investigation of those phenomena, which we can even study experimentally, for instance, by inserting electrodes in the brain, or using localized magnetic stimulation and asking the subjects what they feel. Why you think this is an issue at all is beyond my comprehension, frankly. ... A scientific theory of consciousness—if we will have one—will provide a detailed mechanistic understanding of how the human brain generates first-person experience, using people’s self-reports as data. Once we have that, there is nothing above and beyond it that requires further explanation. We would be done.
• [2nd core issue] What you call “knowledge of qualitative experience,” and allege to be beyond scientific reach, I call experience. You are using “knowledge” in a very loose fashion. ... That would be a category mistake: we are talking about explaining the experience, not having it. ... Experiential knowledge is a different beast from theoretical knowledge. Science isn’t going to give you the experience. ... It used to be that people would make the kind of argument you are putting forth to the effect that there was something special, irreducible to materialism, about life. They called it élan vital, vital essence. You are postulating the consciousness equivalent of an élan vital, for which there is no need.
• [3rd core issue] If by coherent you mean logically so, then sure, we agree. But literally an infinite number of models of the world are logically coherent. That doesn’t help at all. ... You seem convinced that analytical metaphysics, the kind of approach developed in ancient Greece and that I would have thought died with Descartes, is still a valuable project. You are not the only one, of course; David Chalmers is another prominent advocate. But this is simply a rabbit hole that leads to an absurd proliferation of “coherent” or—worse yet—simply “conceivable” scenarios that tell us absolutely nothing about how the world actually works.
• [4th core issue] The issue is whether there is empirical reason to consider panpsychism. ... If you think that your theory does not, and cannot, make contact with empirical reality, then you simply don’t have a theory. You have a speculation that can never be tested. ... There is absolutely nothing in modern physics or biology that hints at panpsychism, and you have acknowledged that no empirical evidence could possibly bear on the issue. That acknowledgement, for me, is the endpoint of our discussion. Once data are ruled out as arbiters among theories, those theories become pointless, just another clever intellectual game. ... The path you, Chalmers, and others are attempting to chart has already been tried, centuries ago, and has brought us—as David Hume put it—nothing but sophistry and illusion.

Brief Comments
​I had the good fortune to meet Philip Goff recently when he gave a talk about these ideas to a small, local, Humanist group. He's a nice guy who is impressively well-versed on the literature of materialism and consciousness, but I have to say that his arguments strike me as deeply confused. His latest book for the general reader is titled Galileo's Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. But when I pressed him for how it could possibly be scientific if he also thinks the study of consciousness is empirically impossible, he admitted that was a question his editors asked, and he didn't have a good answer for them other than that we needed to rethink what we mean by science. I'm sorry, but that sounds exactly like pseudoscience, and Massimo did an excellent job of dismissing it.

To me, materialism / physicalism is still a viable primary hypothesis, and scientific investigations may yet find deeply sufficient explanations for consciousness in such a material universe. Goff worries that we can't get 3rd-person reports on consciousness for science, but that's literally true for everything. As a recent article in Scientific American pointed out ("How to Make the Study of Consciousness Scientifically Tractable"), there is no 3rd-person, objective, view from nowhere. "There is always a somewhere, a perspective, a subject." The key is realising that all progress in knowledge comes from "intersubjective confirmation". Naomi Oreskes called this "scientific consensus" in her latest book, Why Trust Science?, which I recently reviewed.

What do you think? Before we go on, are there other fundamental questions you have about studying consciousness? Or have we reached intersubjective confirmation that scientific consensus is possible? Let me know in the comments below.

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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