Galen Strawson on Panpsychism

 Substack has a good interview with Galen Strawson by J.P Andrew. 

I extract the following-

Just to stave off any potential confusion, your view is not that consciousness itself evolves: You don't think that consciousness can evolve.

We are conscious beings. Sadly, we discover that our fitness landscape features an asteroid which is going to hit us next week. It will wipe out all life on the planet. We didn't use our consciousness to pursue scientific research to a point where we had an effective planetary defence against rogue asteroid. Our consciousness goes extinct. For all we know, this mean that no consciousness remains in the Universe till in a billion years from now, intelligent life emerges on a distant galaxy. Perhaps, its consciousness will be radically different from ours. It won't spend so much time thinking about sex but, instead, will only register such facts or theories as improve its ability to survive on an uncertain cosmic landscape. 

Galen takes a different view. Consciousness just is or isn't. True, the fitness landscape may determine where or when it can exist. But it is not, in itself, determined in any way by anything outside it. 

Oh, that's important. No, no, that's the whole thing: consciousness had to be there already for it ever to come into existence at all.

Is it a Platonic 'form'?  

Put it like this: Evolution needs something to work on.

That something may be 'information'. There may be a law of increasing functional information which applies to inert matter just as much as it does to organic life-forms.  

So, look: We've got these fantastic opposable thumbs to them that are meant to be what made us smart. Well, evolution had something to work on: It had matter and bodies. It couldn’t just make it out of nothing.

Consciousness is either made out of nothing or it is made out of things which aren't conscious or it creates itself. If it makes itself, it is what evolution does for it. If it is made by non-conscious things, perhaps it is evolution, working with those things, which creates it. If it is made out of nothing, it is supernatural in origin.  

Your thought is that if consciousness is there so that natural selection has it as a resource,

In other words, if natural selection is itself conscious or has access to consciousness as a 'resource' 

then it might create agents — because agents are able to solve all sorts of problems. And those agents are going to have a perspective that allows them to solve problems. But you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness.

because evolution by natural selection is itself consciousness.  

Yeah, exactly. That's the key. You can find people throughout history holding the same view — but if you were to ask me, it's not as if I can give an argument for the view that consciousness can’t come from non-consciousness. That is, as it were, a fundamental commitment.

Like the doctrine of the eternity of matter. When I was young, there were still some people who preferred Hoyle-Narlikar's 'steady state' universe to the 'Big Bang' theory.  

If someone just comes along and says, “Well why not?”, I don't know there is an argument you can give against it. But we don't appeal to this notion of radical emergence such as would be the emergence of consciousness from the utterly non-conscious. We don't appeal to that anywhere else in science.

But philosophy isn't science. It may be that no artificial intelligence could ever be truly self-aware like Marvin the Paranoid Android in 'Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy'. Equally, there may be AIs which pass every Turing test we can currently conceive by the end of this decade.  

So, methodological naturalism tells us that we ought not appeal to it.

It also tells us to stick to the Natural Sciences and give Philosophy a miss.  

You could sort of shift the burden of argument; it's almost the burden of embarrassment, as it were: “Why are you so desperately anxious to say that consciousness isn't down there in the fundamental nature of the physical? What is it? Just a great big prejudice, or what? Because you create for yourself an enormous problem.”

A problem avoided by giving Philosophy a miss. On the other hand, Theists may be desperate to show that consciousness must be the gratuitous gift of God. This also means that after death we will be reunited with Mummy and Daddy and Woofy the puppy dog.  

People sometimes object that this all just depends on an intuition; they’ll say that you have this mere intuition that you can't get consciousness from non-consciousness — but (they’ll then say) we can't really trust our intuitions. What do you say to that?

I mean, where did they get the idea that matter is non-conscious?

They got that idea from the fact that scolding your chair, or even threatening to beat it, does not change its behaviour. Mummy told me that chairs aren't conscious. I should quit scolding them and go get a fucking job you fucking cretin.  

There is zero evidence for it, apart from intuition.

I think the evidence for it is that smart peeps don't scold chairs or tables.  

Now you've just triggered me, and I'm going to give you some quotations from some Nobel Prize winners for physics.

Okay, so first of all, Ernest Lawrence — you know, a famous guy — he says, I quote, “The mental and the material are two sides of the same thing.”

Lawrence had a material body. He also had a great mind. Giving him nice things to eat would enable his great mind to come up with useful discoveries. 

Louis de Broglie, you know, another Nobel Prize winner, says, “I regard consciousness and matter as different aspects of one thing.”

But that thing is highly diverse. Some matter has consciousness, most doesn't.  

Max Planck: “Consciousness is fundamental in the matter derivative from consciousness.”

Sadly no such fundamental particle has been found. 

Okay. So, weirdly, it's the philosophers who've gone truly crazy, in my view, but physicists are not with them on that. I mean, some of them probably are, but they’re much more sensible.

Physicists get things wrong but shut the fuck up when a crucial experiment confirms this is the case. In Philosophy you can always find some way to keep a question open. Stupidity and Obstinacy and ipse dixit argumentation are helpful in this regard.  

Since you're citing all these people from the past: Is panpsychism, as you understand it, a new view? Did you just come up with this in the 1990s?

Of course not. I mean, I'm not good on the history but there's a book by David Scribino called Panpsychism In the West which basically is just an amazing compilation of quotations, showing how persistent the idea is.

It is as persistent as the idea that my chair fucking hates me. That's why it makes farting noises when I sit down on it. The carpet and the curtains are in on the conspiracy. That is why a bad smell emanates every time my chair makes a farting noise. 

Russell is on the verge of it, though he's never going to say it outright…From his famous 1912 book, The Problems of Philosophy: “Common-sense leaves us completely in the dark as to the true intrinsic nature of physical objects,

because sensible people do not commonly gas on about the intrinsic nature of things. They may say 'your chair is very naughty. It keeps farting and emitting a bad smell. Perhaps, it would be best if you went and sat on the toilet till your chair repents its misdeeds.'  

and if there were good reason to regard them as mental, we could not legitimately reject this opinion merely because it strikes us as  strange that the truth about physical objects must be strange.”

We aren't interested in the truth about physical objects. All we ask is that some of them prove useful to us.  

Okay, more Russell fifteen years later — 1927: “We know nothing but the intrinsic quality of the physical world,

nonsense! Perhaps 'but' should read 'about'

and therefore we do not know whether it is or is not very different from that percept; percepts are mental occurrences.”

I think the correct quotation is 

'As to intrinsic character, we do not know enough about it in the physical world to have a right to say that it is very different from that of percepts.'

And here's another one I particularly like (still 1927): “If there is any intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is intrinsically quite unlike that of percepts, this is a reason for supposing that there is not this complete unlikeness.”

Cats are quite unlike the percept that there is a cat over there. You come closer and see it is just the picture of a cat. 

And, of course, there is a huge intellectual difficulty in supposing that the physical world is quite unlike that of mental goings-on: It's called the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

It is the same difficulty as that of supposing the physical world is a hologram and only minds are real. This is the Hard Problem of Matter. The Hard Problem of my penis, on the other hand was that I'd get erections in Swahili class.   

I would say that thoughtful commonsense supports panpsychism.

Consciousness uses up resources to sustain itself. Why would it exist in places where it could not 'pay for itself'?  

I’m not saying there aren't problems with the theory. I'm sure you're going to mention one later. But it's the natural view.


Does panpsychism have anything to say about the potential for AI to be conscious?

I don't think for a moment that any current or foreseeable future machine could be conscious, and I obviously would resist the idea that something is conscious just in case it behaves in a sufficiently complex way. But I certainly wouldn't rule it out a priori. I just don't know.

Indeed. The thing is, we can envisage an AI devoting resources to get and maintain consciousness because the thing would pay for itself. Thus, if consciousness can arise from things which lack it, then sooner or later a conscious AI is a certainty.  

We've got to touch on the one perennial objection to panpsychism: The Combination Problem. How do you get a single, unified subject-of-experience if that subject-of-experience is composed of countless little conscious bits?

Combining organisms to create a super-organism is feasible. Consider the slime mould. Single celled amoebae can combine into plasmodia which can move around and can form spore releasing bodies like fungi. They can even be kept as pets. 

To flesh that out further: My brain is made up of about 100 billion neurons, and each of those neurons is composed of yet smaller conscious bits. All of those little conscious bits somehow, together, produce me — and I experience myself as a single subject-of-experience. How could that be the case, on panpsychism?

Perhaps neurons can be disaggregated and recombined. It is one thing to say that we may be able to create and combine organic molecules till we are able to produce a nice pussy cat. It is quite another to say every atom in the universe is a cat.  

I mean the objection was put famously by William James in his 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology — and yet even in that book he basically thinks that panpsychism must be right.

It is one thing to say every atom potentially could be part of an organism but quite another to say that it has consciousness. 

But yeah, the idea is you can't sum subjects; individual little blips or blobs of consciousness can't be fused into a single large conscious subject of the thought that you are.

We don't know that. The day may come when two brains can be fused together such that a new identity is created.

I think it must happen, but I don't know how. The picture of all the little bits isn't really right. We have to operate with a field theoretic conception of the nature of the physical, as in relativistic Quantum Field Theory.

If we do so, we blur the notion of consciousness. It is no longer what is inside one brain. It is what a bunch of brains, pursuing a common purpose, do. The Judiciary or the Army or the Scientific Establishment can be thought of as a 'super-consciousness'.  

Now maybe there's a worry from the opposite direction: How do we get individuated subjects on this field picture, where it seems like the natural view might be that the universe is one big mind. But you and I experience ourselves as individuated subjects within that larger field. So, how does that work?

In the same way that we have selfish impulses which we nevertheless suppress- at least some of us do which is the reason we haven't gone extinct as a species. 

Yeah, well, again I’m not saying any of it is easy!

The Vimalkirti gives us a 'field theory' of Buddhas in the same way that the Avatamsaka sutra gives us a monadology. Either way, you can have panpsychism but at the price of Occassionalism or Nihilism- i.e. either god is the only efficient cause or nothing truly exists- not even Time or Space. 

However, there's some sense in which there is one single thing, the universe — and this is what I call Thing Monism. It's not Stuff Monism, or Substance Monism, that says there's only one fundamental kind of stuff. Instead, it’s the view that there's ultimately only one thing, and I think that's probably the right thing to say about the universe.

This is like the 'slingshot' by which all true statements stand for the same thing.  

I would have partly to appeal to evolution. Things have evolved that move around, and have to survive in an environment, and consciousness has been wholly driven by that. I would quote Orgel's Second Rule: It says, “Evolution is cleverer than you are”.

The law of increasing functional information does not anthropomorphize physical or biological processes. It is part and parcel of a shift away from matter or energy towards information. This appears to be useful.  

There shouldn't be any more problem about how there can be these seemingly isolated consciousnesses like yours and mine than there is about how there can be seemingly isolated things like tables and chairs and human beings. So, something along those lines.

Would a child brought up by wolves have consciousness? Yes. But it may not be able to acquire a language. But it's non verbal communication skills may be very good.  I suppose one might say that I lack a certain type of consciousness- e.g. social tact or the ability to recognize that I am an insufferable bore- which most other people have. On the other hand, I have a unique consciousness of my own great beauty and wit. 

Let me say again that it's not as if I know exactly what to say — and, in fact, I don't hold out any hope for, as it were, an interesting science flowing from this position. I don't think there's much that can be done. I just think that there are extremely powerful general metaphysical, philosophical reasons for thinking that panpsychism is, to paraphrase the economists, the least worst metaphysical view.

Belief in God is better because that way we can hope to be reunited with Mummy & Daddy & Woofy the dog.  

Do you have any other things we didn't get to on panpsychism?

I just think it's very important to stress the point that it really was a commonplace a hundred years ago that physics tells us nothing about the intrinsic nature of the physical.

A thousand years ago, it may have been commonplace to hold that Scripture tells us everything that can be known.  

That just got lost in analytic philosophy after the 1960s,

The subject had already turned to shit and had become adversely selective of imbecility. 

so from then on everybody seems to think they can know for sure that the physical is in no way conscious in its basic nature, and so we went backwards.

There were mavericks- like Rupert Sheldrake- with 'woo woo' theories like 'morphic resonance'.  

We went seriously backwards. And we haven't yet fully recovered.

What do you think the future holds? Do you think things are getting better in this respect?

I have no idea. I mean, we live in a world with sort of daily proof of monstrous irrationality and people believing anything as long as others in their gang believe it, in the way that Kahneman describes. And I find that profoundly sad and depressing.

Would humanity gain anything if a bunch of academics say 'Panpsychism rules!' rather than 'Panpsychism drools!' ? 

So, who knows. I hope that we'll make some progress in getting back to the commonplace of a hundred years ago.

A discipline where Professors think making progress involves going backward is in deep trouble. 

It seems to me that maybe the conversation has opened up a little bit in the last 10-20 years?

Indeed. The Universe might be a computer simulation or something yet more rich and strange.  

Very much so. And, funnily enough, I suppose about 15 years ago when one of my students, Philip Goff, was applying for jobs, he would write to me asking, “Should I say on my application that I'm sympathetic to panpsychism?” And the view was you better not say that because you will not be taken seriously. I think we’ve moved on from there.

Goff says- 'The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience.' But, equally they may have incredibly complex 14 dimensional forms of experience. If the latter hypothesis leads to cool new tech, we will happily embrace it.