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. 

Galen Strawson wrong on moral responsibility

Some thirty years ago, Galen Strawson advanced the following argument for 

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF MORAL RESPONSIBILITY 

There is an argument, which I will call the Basic Argument, which appears to prove that we cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions.

This is like having a method of cat impersonation which appears to prove that you are the King of Sweden. The appearance is deceptive. Either you are the King of Sweden or you are nothing of the sort. There is an objective verification method of a 'zero knowledge' sort. In other words, when I find out I'm not the King of Sweden- because the Swedish embassy tells me to fuck off- no extra knowledge becomes available to me about the making of cat like noises because even great virtuosity in that field of activity can't alter the brute facts of the case. The same is true of moral responsibility. No argument or cat like noise you advance can alter whether it does or does not arise.  

According to the Basic Argument, it makes no difference whether determinism is true or false. 

It is certainly true that whether or not we are the King of Sweden or whether or not we are morally responsible are questions wholly unconnected to whether determinism is true or false. 

We cannot be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions in either case. The Basic Argument has various expressions in the literature of free will, and its central idea can be quickly conveyed. (1) Nothing can be causa sui - nothing can be the cause of itself.

But a guy- like Napoleon- can crown himself Emperor. One can certainly cause changes in oneself- e.g. by shaving one's head. Why can't we cause ourselves to be or not be morally responsible for something? After all, we can kill ourselves or exit a particular jurisdiction.

(2) In order to be truly morally responsible for one's actions one would have to be causa sui, at least in certain crucial mental respects.

Which is in fact the case. I can take moral responsibility for certain things which are under my control- at least in certain crucial respects. For example, I can think kind thoughts about a person I dislike.  

(3) Therefore nothing can be truly morally responsible.

Or, if we subscribe to hylozoism, everything can be.  

In this paper I want to reconsider the Basic Argument, in the hope that anyone who thinks that we can be truly or ultimately morally responsible for our actions will be prepared to say exactly what is wrong with it.

Terms like 'morality' and 'responsibility' are solutions to coordination games. They are useful to human beings- and some dogs but few cats- but philosophers, sadly, are wholly useless unless they are cats or can make cat like noises of an entertaining or informative type.  

I think that the point that it has to make is obvious, and that it has been underrated in recent discussion of free will - perhaps because it admits of no answer. I suspect that it is obvious in such a way that insisting on it too much is likely to make it seem less obvious than it is, given the innate contrasuggestibility of human beings in general and philosophers in particular. But I am not worried about making it seem less obvious than it is so long as it gets adequate attention. As far as its validity is concerned, it can look after itself. A more cumbersome statement of the Basic Argument goes as follows. (1) Interested in free action, we are particularly interested in actions that are performed for a reason (as opposed to 'reflex' actions or mindlessly habitual actions).

We are not interested in free actions unless they are useful or novel in some enlightening manner.  

(2) When one acts for a reason, what one does is a function of how one is, mentally speaking.

No. There is no functional relationship mathematically speaking because there is no unique element in the codomain which is being mapped on to.  

(It is also a function of one's height, one's strength, one's place and time, and so on. But the mental factors are crucial when moral responsibility is in question.)

 If moral responsibility really is in question then there is no deterministic relationship between successive mental state. 

(3) So if one is to be truly responsible for how one acts, one must be truly responsible for how one is, mentally speaking -at least in certain respects.

That does not follow. I am not responsible for being human. I am responsible for my acts as a human.  

(4) But to be truly responsible for how one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects, one must have brought it about that one is the way one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects.

No. True responsibility may be like the gift of grace or an emergent property or else a predicate which applies by reason of a set of protocols being satisfied.  

And it is not merely that one must have caused oneself to be the way one is, mentally speaking.

It is not possible to cause oneself to be whatever it is feasible for oneself to be, mentally speaking. I am capable of speaking Russian but a Russian speaker would have to teach me how to do so. Similarly, some external agency can cause us to acquire moral responsibility.  

One must have consciously and explicitly chosen to be the way one is, mentally speaking, in certain respects, and one must have succeeded in bringing it about that one is that way.

Why? This is an arbitrary stipulation. If the appeal is to the mathematical notion of a function then the argument fails because there is no functional relationship here whatsoever. 

(5) But one cannot really be said to choose, in a conscious, reasoned, fashion, to be the way one is mentally speaking, in any respect at all, unless one already exists, mentally speaking, already equipped with some principles of choice, 'P1' - preferences, values, pro-attitudes, ideals - in the light of which one chooses how to be.

Why not? We make conscious, reasoned, choices all the time about all sorts of things. True, my decision to be a Russian speaker has not borne fruit but this is also true about most decisions to be anything at all, mentally speaking, including the rather Zen like state of 'being who one is'.  This is because whatever we are in ourselves, mentally speaking, is not specifiable, or indeed knowable, to ourselves- at least not in words. Perhaps there is some mathematical code which represents our consciousness which could be uploaded to some Galactic computer. But that seems a distant prospect. 

(6) But then to be truly responsible, on account of having chosen to be the way one is,

nobody choses to be who one is because one can always imagine some extra skill or mental capacity.  

mentally speaking, in certain respects, one must be truly responsible for one's having the principles of choice P1 in the light of which one chose how to be. (7) But for this to be so one must have chosen P1, in a reasoned, conscious, intentional fashion. (8) But for this, i.e. (7), to be so one must already have had some principles of choice P2, in the light of which one chose P1.  (9) And so on.

The principle of choice can be intensional, have zero knowledge verification and be uncomputable all at the same time.

Here we are setting out on a regress that we cannot stop.

Sure we can, with some variety of Martin Lof type theory. A meta-rule may be self similar to what it governs. There's always a way to remove paradoxes if they actually arise

True self-determination is impossible because it requires the actual completion of an infinite series of choices of principles of choice.

Sez who? The fact is self-determination actually happens just as Achilles actually overtakes the tortoise.  

(10) So true moral responsibility is impossible, because it requires true self-determination, as noted in (3).

This is an arbitrary stipulation. Also, it is obviously foolish. I may make a false self-determination- e.g. I'm the biological father of x- yet discharge a true moral responsibility to x. The thing happens all the time. 

This may seem contrived, but essentially the same argument can be given in a more natural form. (1) It is undeniable that one is the way one is, initially, as a result of heredity and early experience, and it is undeniable that these are things for which one cannot be held to be in any responsible (morally or otherwise).

Fuck off! The thing is eminently deniable. One is the way one is because of oikeiosis. There is a continuum of choices such that selves are not discrete. But all selves associated with an oikos- or indeed a possible oikumene- may be governed by the same principle though what that principle is may not be exactly specifiable save 'at the end of Time'. 

It is a fact that we often feel we are held morally responsible for things which we feel we couldn't help. Was it really my fault that I got drunk at the Xmas party and urinated in the punch bowl? After the first few time I get sacked from my job for this offence, everybody in my community might agree that, yes, it is your fucking fault, you fucking tosspot.

(2) One cannot at any later stage of life hope to accede to true moral responsibility for the way one is by trying to change the way one already is as a result of heredity and previous experience.

Why bother 'trying to change the way one already is' unless one wants to be more morally responsible? Also, nothing is added to the collocation 'moral responsibility' by adding the predicate 'true'.  On the other hand the qualification 'Nazi' as applied to 'moral responsibility' does greatly alter the informative value of the proposition.  

For (3) both the particular way in which one is moved to try to change oneself, and the degree of one's success in one's attempt at change, will be determined by how one already is as a result of heredity and previous experience.

but that determination may be stochastic and under circumstances of radical Knightian uncertainty. Even otherwise, if anything rises into consciousness, it must be the case that it is under-determined in some important respect. Otherwise, sub sub-conscious operation could deal it more quickly.

And (4) any further changes that one can bring about only after one has brought about certain initial changes will in turn be determined, via the initial changes, by heredity and previous experience.

Not if the brain is a parallel processor 

(5) This may not be the whole story, for it may be that some changes in the way one is are traceable not to heredity and experience but to the influence of indeterministic or random factors. But it is absurd to suppose that indeterministic or random factors, for which one is ex hypothes in no way responsible, can in themselves contribute in any way to one's being truly morally responsible for how one is.

This assumes that true moral responsibility can't arise save where all the facts of the case are known. But this is possible only 'at the end of time'. Thus, true moral responsibility is unknowable. Hence any assertion about it is essentially arbitrary. I may say 'true moral responsibility only attaches to wholly autonomous acts.' But I may equally say 'true moral responsibility sodomized true humanitarian concern while pretending to help it recover its cell phone which, by an unfortunate turn of events had become lodged in its rectum. ' 

The claim, then, is not that people cannot change the way they are. They can, in certain respects (which tend to be exaggerated by North Americans

especially those with a cell-phone lodged up their rectum 

and underestimated, perhaps, by Europeans).

unless they have a cell-phone lodged up their rectum 

The claim is only that people cannot be supposed to change themselves in such a way as to be or become truly or ultimately morally responsible for the way they are, and hence for their actions.

But that change may occur any way as part of the process of ageing and maturing. Indeed, we don't think very small babies are morally responsible but do think that the middle aged should know better than to insert cell-phones up their bum- more particularly if the cell phone belongs to someone else.

II I have encountered two main reactions to the Basic Argument. On the one hand it convinces almost all the students with whom I have discussed the topic of free will and moral responsibility.

Because those students are as stupid as shit. Also they have stolen your cell phone and have quietly inserted into their bum. 

On the other hand it often tends to be dismissed, in contemporary discussion of free will and moral responsibility, as wrong, or irrelevant, or fatuous, or too rapid, or an expression of metaphysical megalomania.

It is based on ignorance of recent developments in mathematical logic. 

I think that the Basic Argument is certainly valid in showing that we cannot be morally responsible in the way that many suppose. And I think that it is the natural light, not fear, that has convinced the students I have taught that this is so. That is why it seems worthwhile to restate the argument in a slightly different - simpler and looser - version, and to ask again what is wrong with it...  Let me now restate the Basic Argument in very loose - as it were conversational -terms. New forms of words allow for new forms of objection, but they may be helpful none the less. (1) You do what you do, in any situation in which you find yourself, because of the way you are.

No. What you do is affected by exogenous factors. 'Why did you spill my drink?' 'I didn't intend to. That bloke bumped into me and so what I did was accidental.' 

So (2) To be truly morally responsible for what you do you must be truly responsible for the way you are - at least in certain crucial mental respects.

No. The pub may have a convention that the person who spilt the drink must buy a replacement even if someone else had bumped into him. The notion of moral responsibility can solve a coordination game and permit exceptions- e.g.if  the person who spilt the drink is obviously poor while the drunk who bumped into her is a fellow merchant banker who is celebrating the big bonus you have both received. 

Or: (1) What you intentionally do, given the circumstances in which you (believe you) find yourself, flows necessarily from how you are.

There is no necessary connection between how your are (e.g I am suicidal because my wife just left me) and what you do (blow your brains out with the pistol which it turns out has rusted and jammed which is why you end up doing nothing. Then it turns out wifey only left you to go to the supermarket. All's well that ends well.)  

Hence (2) you have to get to have some responsibility for how you are in order to get to have some responsibility for what you intentionally do, given the circumstances in which you (believe you) find yourself.

No. Either you have responsibility for how you are or you don't. Getting it or losing it is irrelevant. Still, your probation officer or psychiatrist may discuss with you ways in which you could learn to act more responsibly. 

Comment. Once again the qualification about 'certain mental respects' is one I will take for granted. Obviously one is not responsible for one's sex,

That may have been true 30 years ago. Now cis-gender people are looked upon with suspicion and hostility on the better sort of campus. 

one's basic body pattern, one's height, and so on. But if one were not responsible for anything about oneself, how one could be responsible for what one did, given the truth of (1)?

By common agreement- which is how language tends to work. I may think of myself as a blonde Californian cheerleader who slays vampires but have to admit I am an elderly South Indian man of a very cowardly and obese type.

This is the fundamental question, and it seems clear that if one is going to be responsible for any aspect of oneself, it had better be some aspect of one's mental nature.

Responsible means 'deemed to be in control of' even if that control is delegated or negligent. The fact is we do have some control over some aspects of our mental nature unless we suffer a mental illness in which case we may be deemed to lack competency and thus not be responsible for our actions.  

I take it that (1) is incontrovertible, and that it is (2) that must be resisted. For if (1) and (2)) are conceded the case seems lost, because the full argument runs as follows. (1) You do what you do because of the way you are. So (2) To be truly morally responsible for what you do you must be truly responsible for the way are - at least in certain crucial mental respects.  But (3) You cannot be truly responsible for the way you are, so you cannot be truly responsible for what you do. Why can't you be truly responsible for the way you are? Because (4) To be truly responsible for the way you are, you must have intentionally brought it about that you are the way you are, and this is impossible. Why is it impossible? Well, suppose it is not. Suppose that (5) You have somehow intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are, and that you have brought this about in such a way that you can now be said to be truly responsible for being the way you are now. For this to be true (6) You must already have had a certain nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are as you now are. But then (7) For it to be true you and you alone are truly responsible for how you now are, you must be truly responsible for having had the nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are. So (8) You must have intentionally brought it about that you had that nature N, in which case you must have existed already with a prior nature in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you had the nature N in the light of which you intentionally brought it about that you are the way you now are ... 

This argument can be applied to itself. It is impossible to make an argument re. the impossibility of moral responsibility because there is an infinite regress. However, a type theory can always impose a solution. This may be arbitrary but it is useful and language is nothing but pragmatics.  

Here one is setting off on the regress. Nothing can be causa sui in the required way.

Anything can be by arbitrary stipulation. But if determinism is true, only arbitrary stipulations can be made. There is no access to category theoretical 'naturality'.

In practice, we do say things like 'the guy had a moral responsibility not to get drunk before driving his car. Thus, though he had passed out when he caused the accident, he is still morally responsible for the death of the pedestrian.' 

Even if such causal 'aseity' is allowed to belong unintelligibly to God, it cannot be plausibly be supposed to be possessed by ordinary finite human beings.

Save if God has so willed. 

"The causa sui is the best selfcontradiction that has been conceived so far", as Nietzsche remarked in 1886: it is a sort of rape and perversion of logic. But the extravagant pride of man has managed to entangle itself profoundly and frightfully with just this nonsense. The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and, with more than Baron Miinchhausen's audacity, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness ... (Beyond Good and Evil, ? 21).

Once again, by imposing a Type theory, no contradiction obtains. Good enough 'univalent foundations' can always be found for any deontic logic.  

Dennett vs Strawson- a tale of two turtles

Daniel Dennett responds to an attack by Strawson by affirming-

 of course, consciousness exists; it just isn’t what most people think it is,

Most people think consciousness is where thoughts arise. To say 'so and so thought of this' is to say so and so was conscious and this thought arose in his consciousness. 

Let us suppose I am accused of negligence in accepting a bad cheque. The Branch Manager says 'Didn't you think it odd that the Queen of England was buying cheap brandy and rolling tobacco in the middle of the afternoon on a Match Day in Fulham?'

'Yes,' is my reply, 'I did think it odd. As proof, I ask you to zoom in on my raised eyebrows which are clearly visible on the cc tv footage. This shows I was conscious of what I was doing and that the thought did cross my mind that the hairy gentleman might not be our beloved Sovereign. Nevertheless, I proceeded with the transaction because Coutts don't just hand out chequebooks to anybody you know. Indeed, in matters such as this, they honour the cheque and are grateful for the vendor's discretion. You know, our M.D could have got a gong out of this. It is just very unfortunate that Prince Phillip, seeking to show solidarity with New Commonwealth immigrants like myself, raised the customer's skirts to, as he said, indulge in 'a bit of brown'. Still, he'd probably been watching 'The Crown' on Netflix, so allowances should be made.'

The word 'Consciousness' exists because it is a solution to a coordination problem. Most people are aware that they are bound by incomplete contracts and thus may be required to show they were or weren't conscious of certain things or events and that certain thoughts had or hadn't crossed their mind.

The fact that most people need to use the word Consciousness is because most people have to do useful things. Philosophers don't need to use the word because they don't do useful things.
If they choose to use the word they reveal their stupidity more quickly than absolutely necessary. However, because the Academy is Credentialised and because there is a Global Market in gobshittery, this unnecessary revelation can be personally profitable though socially inutile.

In particular, it helps keep long exploded research programs alive as 'availability cascades' trundling over Gadarene cliffs in perpetuity.


Dennett rightly ridicules Strawson 

citing Bertrand Russell as his authority, (and asserting) that “we know something fundamental about the essential nature of conscious experience just in having it.”

Most people don't know anything fundamental or essential about anything whether they have the thing or not. It is pointless to have any such 'knowledge'. Nothing is added to the sequence of assertions- 'that is my hat- I'd know it anywhere. Take it off you hat thief" by stipulating that the hat is 'essentially' or 'fundamentally' mine- indeed, the use of such words indicates that I myself think my claim to be weak in law or otherwise defeasible. On the other hand, adding the word 'fucking' increases the imperative force of the utterance.

How strange it would be for us to know something “fundamental” about the “essential nature” of a phenomenon simply by undergoing it!

It would be very strange if a sensible person underwent any rite of passage without feeling or at least trying to feel some fundamental or essential change had occurred. Indeed, ontologically dysphoric beliefs or codes of conduct can scarcely dam up and release capacitance diversity in any other way.

No doubt, the thing can be gamed. What is meant to be a costly and inward signal may degenerate into cheap talk. Thus I may claim to have experienced some profound change when the Swami laid his hands upon me. This is because I don't want to be chucked out of the Ashram and handed over to the police, but, rather, wish to have another crack at embezzling funds. My conversion is hypocrisy merely.

 Suppose a poor woman has just won the lottery. She may say 'well, I suppose this is how it feels to be rich!' You may say, 'she is lying- or deluding herself. She can't have been fundamentally changed in so short a period, nor is it the case that she has suddenly gained some chrematistic epiphany regarding the 'essential nature' of wealth.' Still, it is true that the lottery winner has a feeling of economic freedom, a manumission from the law of scarcity, and this is certainly an aspect of such 'qualia' as we associate with the possession of wealth.

No doubt, there is no fundamental or essential aspect to anything- least of all anything phenomenological- but that is irrelevant when we are looking at focal solutions to coordination games.

Philosophy- though a discoordination game with respect to anything useful- is no exception to this rule. It is noteworthy that though Dennett's criticism of Stawson is condign, yet he proceeds to make exactly the same mistake-

We can know something important, something that cannot be ignored, while still being in the dark about the “essential nature” of a phenomenon.

Yes, because Schelling focality needn't be tractable- it can be a black-box or a particular type of hand-waving.

Some cancer sufferers think they know something fundamental about their cancer just because it is theirs; but while they no doubt know something about how it seems to them, this is not the kind of knowledge of “something fundamental” to pit against empirical research. 

Why not? An empirical researcher could contract the very illness he studies. Why should his presentation to himself differ from that to a co-worker who has come to assist him? It seems there can only be a qualitative difference here which is of an essentially juristic kind and thus has a 'buck-stopping' mechanism. In other words, 'fundamental' is endogenously defined for this epistemic system.
That these systems are mutable doesn't matter. They belong to a larger class of systems whose terminus ad quem is the extinction of our species. From the Post Res perspective they are all equally fundamental.

Perhaps Dennett thinks essences are available to 'empirical research' because...urm... empirical research is unlike experience. It has magical properties. It opens the door to 'fundamental' things and immutable 'essences'.

I offer a rival theory, which actually tackles the question of how we are able to have “direct acquaintance” with the contents (not the properties) of our experiences. To oversimplify, the beliefs you arrive at “directly”—without effort or noticeable analysis—about your experience of the world neither need nor permit any further process of introspection to enable you to tell yourself, or others, what it is like to be you at the moment.

If human beings evolved by natural selection, they ought not to have any mechanism for this sort of 'direct acquaintance' unless there was some bottleneck during which humans had to coordinate their activities in the manner of social insects and then some other bottleneck such that this mechanism was suppressed, or became a spandrel, for all purpose's save that of confirming Dennett's theory.

Dennett isn't really offering a rival theory. He is proffering what he thinks is a new 'black-box' or more cogent type of 'hand-waving'. If Dennett could really explain 'how we have direct acquaintance with the contents of our experiences' his work would be very valuable to the Judiciary and the Intelligence Services and so forth. Google or Microsoft would be racing each other to build such a machine and fluctuations in their share price would capture expectations regarding the feasibility of the project.

Evolution wouldn't waste resources on hard-wiring a mechanism of the Dennett sort in us because it would have placed us more at the mercy of parasites or predators because if they can capture such an input directly, they can quickly spoof it.
Thus robustness militates for no such mechanism. Aggregation must always be by non-deterministic means.
In any case, what would be the point of having direct acquaintance with the milkman provided he leaves the milk bottles by the door in time for breakfast?
Dennett thinks I need to tell myself, or others, what it is like to be me at this moment. This may be true if I were Marcel Proust but not otherwise.
Why would Evolution bother to give us 'direct acquaintance' for so paltry and inutile a purpose? The thing has no survival value. It corresponds to no known evolutionary bottleneck. There are important reasons to do with inclusive fitness why the opposite of this mechanism- i.e. one whereby others can help you redact the contents of your experience so you come to 'know' something impossible about yourself- might be hardwired in our species.

While we can know many things about the contents of our conscious experience, we have no privileged insight into how this is possible, and we have no immunity to error on this score.

If Knowledge is Justified True Belief, then what I know is directly linked to my theory of how it comes about. This could be a conventional 'black box' or it might involve a socially permissible type of 'hand-waving', but a knowledge claim must always fall back on something like this. Consider what happened when I took a bad cheque while working in the off-license. I justified my belief that the cheque would be honoured by hinting at a possible causal mechanism- viz. that some sexual shenanigans in the Palace had led to a questionable character getting hold of the Queen's cheque book. In the circumstances, it would be reasonable to suppose the cheque would be honoured.

To say 'I know x' is to invite the question 'But how is x possible?' You shrug your shoulders and say 'Dunno, and then gesture at the conventional 'black box' or indulge in the required 'hand-waving'. This is enough to show that you admitted the relevant event to your epistemic base after exercising due care. Obviously, the level of care would vary. But even the expert ultimately has to rely upon an approved black-box or modish type of hand-waving.

There’s a difficult empirical question of how a person’s brain exploits its currently active information to modulate any verbal or non-verbal behavior (or emotional state or memory), and this question is not answered, but only hidden from view, by Strawson’s pontification: “When it comes to conscious experience, there’s a rock-bottom sense in which we’re fully acquainted with it just in having it.” Sheer bluster, even if many distinguished philosophers have made similar declarations.

So Strawson is using a black-box Dennett thinks is out of date. But Dennett too is relying on a black box which appears to me to be equally out of date because it features words like 'exploits' and 'currently active information' and distinguishes between verbal & non-verbal and so on.

'Distinguished philosopher' is an oxymoron. As for bluster- it is what pots accuse kettles of.

Strawson uses another misrepresentation to attempt a reductio ad absurdum:
'One of the strangest things the Deniers say is that although it seems that there is conscious experience, there isn’t really any conscious experience: the seeming is, in fact, an illusion. The trouble with this is that any such illusion is already and necessarily an actual instance of the thing said to be an illusion.'
No, we Deniers do not say this. We say that there isn’t any conscious experience in the sense that Strawson insists upon. We say consciousness seems (to many who reflect upon the point) to involve being “directly acquainted,” as Strawson puts it, with some fundamental properties (“qualia”), but this is an illusion, a philosopher’s illusion. So, unless Strawson has something like papal infallibility, which I doubt, this illusion is not “necessarily” an actual instance of his kind of consciousness. 

So there you have it. One guy says if there's milk in the fridge we are directly acquainted with the cow and the other says no, we are directly acquainted with the milkman though we have never set eyes on him which is lucky for our wives because our sons looks a little too like him.

In the end, Strawson reveals his agenda:
'This is the Great Silliness. We must hope that it doesn’t spread outside the academy, or convince some future information technologist or roboticist who has great power over our lives.'
Strawson apparently thinks that unless his view about consciousness is vindicated, we stand in danger of abandoning our morality, ignoring suffering, depersonalizing people. Christians have had similar worries about the imminent collapse of society if people abandon the concept of an immortal soul. And in the sixteenth century, Philipp Melanchthon urged that some “Christian prince” should suppress Copernicus’s theory that the earth went around the sun, fearing the dire consequences if this truth leaked out. We can handle the truth, Galen. We don’t need your kind of mind to preserve the meaning of our lives. 

Strawson is, it is true, a silly man. Science guys don't give a shit about psilosophy. Nobody does. The subject only exists to be laughed at and to erode public confidence in Academia's Credentialist Ponzi Scheme.
Dennett too is silly. The fucker thinks he is Copernicus though, truth be told, it is the world which revolves around his own ego.

Galen Strawson's reply:

Philosophers use the word “zombie” as a technical term: “a philosopher’s zombie,” Daniel Dennett writes in Consciousness Explained (1991), “is behaviorally indistinguishable from a normal human being, but is not conscious.”

Behaviourally indistinguishable you say? Cool. We'll try having babies with it. If we can and those babies do well and their babies do well- then, zombies are behaviourally indistinguishable from humans. So what? At some point in our evolutionary history some similar mating must have occurred.
This isn't a thought experiment. It's a story our ex-wives tell about us.

The zombie may, for example, be a piece of brilliant machinery with flesh-like covering that looks and acts like a human being, although “there is nothing it is like to be a zombie; it just seems that way to observers.”

So observers think there is something it is like to be a zombie. It has its own equivalent of oxytocin or adrenalin and so on. If observers, believing zombie have qualia generated by such internal secretions, go on to define a 'zombie conatus' which determines the zombie's fitness landscape, then being a zombie will depend on developing more and more robust black-boxes so as to display this conatus.

Suppose the zombie's inclusive fitness depends on sometimes confirming this theory and sometimes acting quite differently- i.e. acting as though it has this zombie-like inner life when earning its keep doing zombie tasks, but then acting like a human during an emergency and thus endearing itself to the masters of its destiny. If the zombie is 'a brilliant piece of machinery' and if it survives and has descendants then it will feature a black box corresponding to 'feeling like a zombie' alternating with 'feeling for the fellow zombie or non-zombie associate'' in a manner which, for the human observer. cashes out as, if not 'human', then 'human companionable'. The analogy here is with dogs- but, of course, though we breed dogs, dogs can't breed us. Zombies, being behaviourally indistinguishable from us, may not appear to be in an analogous position. Sadly, this is not the case unless they can get us preggers and vice versa.

Women, African Americans and many other groups have written about what DuBois called the 'double consciousness' strategy and Dennett would be familiar with these ideas which feature in films and novels I was familiar with as a teenager. Since the word 'zombie' itself arises out of the hideous legacy of trans-Atlantic slavery. Dennett & Strawson are displaying staggering 'White privilege' in appropriating the term. The 'zombie' availability cascade in academic philosophy, is one of brain-dead Masters cannibalising the brains of their students.

Like the zombie, the 'nigger' or 'female' was not considered to feel 'real' pain or to have genuine consciousness. Truth be told, though having a human shape- the thing had no soul.

Plainly, the zombie is not conscious in the standard, rich, “qualia”-involving sense of “conscious” that I stress and that Dennett rejects. It doesn’t feel pain when its arm is shot off, any more than the Arnold Schwarzenegger character does in the 1984 film The Terminator. 

Strong A.I, as a research program, was dead in the water by the early Seventies. Qualia were thought vital to grow, or train, self-learning neural networks.
In stressful situations, some qualia might be suppressed in humans or anything else which arose by a simulated evolutionary process.

“Are zombies possible?” Dennett asks. “They’re not just possible, they’re actual. We’re all zombies.” Here, his view seems plain. In the book, he adds a footnote—“It would be an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty to quote this assertion out of context!”—so I hope that I have given sufficient context. But let me provide more (all the quotations in what follows are from Dennett, from various books and papers).

Dennett's Zombies are incompossible with a Universe where humans are the smartest beings on the planet. No thought experiment can depend on their existence because if such a being were encountered we'd be facing a much much bigger problem that would require all our thinking capacity. At that point all the philosophers would be rudely turfed out of the Universities and every smart youngster (such as Dennett himself must have been) would be drafted into the A.I equivalent of the Manhattan Project.

The Ancients thought of God as impassable- i.e. not suffering pain or sorrow or any other 'human' qualia. Certainly, on the evidence of Homer or the Gita etc. Gods could appear as human beings. Some Religious traditions take literally the statement 'Ye are as Gods!'. If you just concentrate hard enough, you will see you aren't a human being at all but rather a God who has forgotten his own power. Not only can you cure your cancer, you can fly off to Jupiter with the hot chick at the deli counter in Waitrose.

How is this Theistic argument different from Dennett's? Strawson, sadly, doesn't say. He is fixated on the notion that this silly argument originated in the twentieth century and that it is sillier- not identical- with religious theories.

“The idea that there is something like a ‘phenomenal field’ of ‘phenomenal properties’ in addition to the informational/functional properties accommodated by my theory” of consciousness “is shown to be a multi-faceted illusion, an artifact of bad theorizing,” he wrote in a 1993 essay, “Précis of Consciousness Explained,” in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research .Here, Dennett is clear about what he doesn’t mean by “consciousness.” We see how he can say, in his reply to me, that “of course, consciousness exists.” He can say this because the zombie is conscious in his terms: it has all the “informational/functional” properties of a human being; it is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human being.
“Let me confirm [Frank] Jackson’s surmise that I am his behaviorist; I unhesitatingly endorse the claim that ‘necessarily, if two organisms are behaviorally exactly alike, they are psychologically exactly alike,’” he writes in another paper that year in the same journal, “The Message is: There is no Medium.” Once again, Dennett holds that a zombie is as conscious as we are, although “there is nothing it is like to be a zombie.” A zombie isn’t conscious at all, in the ordinary sense of the word, but it’s fully conscious in Dennett’s sense of the word, given its “informational/functional properties.”
The same goes for us, according to Dennett. We’re not conscious at all, in the ordinary sense of the word: “We’re all zombies.” He confirms this view in a 2013 podcast. We find in nature “any number of varieties of stupendous organization and sensitivity and discrimination… The idea that, in addition to all of those, there’s this extra special something—subjectivity—what distinguishes us from the zombie—that’s an illusion.”
Consider standard philosophical examples of “qualia”—intense pain, orgasm, visual experience of Times Square at midnight. In Consciousness Explained, Dennett allows that it really seems to us that we have such qualia, but insists that it doesn’t follow that we really have them. I argued that this is a false move, because to seem to have qualia is necessarily already to have qualia, and Dennett moved, in his 2007 paper “Heterophenomenology reconsidered,” published in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, to the view that there aren’t even any real seemings: “There are no real seemings… judgments are about the qualia of experiences in the same way novels are about their characters. Rabbit Angstrom [in John Updike’s novels] sure seems like a real person, but he isn’t… If materialism is true, there are no real seemings.”
“When I squint just right,” Dennett writes in his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, “it does sort of seem that consciousness must be something in addition to all the things it does for us and to us, some kind of special private glow or here-I-am-ness that would be absent in any robot. But I’ve learned not to credit the hunch. I think it is a flat-out mistake.”
This is “eliminativism” about consciousness, denial of the existence of consciousness. Dennett is not alone. He’s backed up by a good number of present-day philosophers, including recently Keith Frankish, Jay Garfield, and Mark Siderits, as well as psychologists like Stanislas Dehaene. The fundamental mistake they make is to think that there is anything, either in physics or in any other part of science, or indeed in Buddhism (Garfield and Siderits both study Buddhist philosophy), that gives us any good reason to deny the existence of (real) consciousness.
“Sometimes philosophers clutch an insupportable hypothesis to their bosoms and run headlong over the cliff edge,” Dennett writes in a 1995 essay, “The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies: Commentary on Moody, Flanagan, and Polger,” in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. “Then, like cartoon characters, they hang there in midair, until they notice what they have done and gravity takes over.” I agree with Dennett about this, and about much else (including Darwin and religion), but here, his image in incomplete. The trouble with philosophers is that gravity doesn’t take over. They continue to cycle in midair, legs a-blur.

Dennett might seemed to have been one up on Strawson because of Occam's razor but the sad fact is neither are Wiley Coyotes gone off a cliff edge. They are two stupid turtles stranded on their backs, madly waving their stumpy little legs, because they think they are racing each other for some great prize.

The truth is something no one doesn't know. The notion of Consciousness is linked to the notion of Conscientiousness. It is linked to our meta-preference to be more altruistic and less myopic. Thus it exists for us as a mental faculty about which we have different 'black box' theories depending on what type of exercise is required of us at any given moment in our moral and spiritual development or education.

Strawson and Dennett pretended otherwise to pose as Smart and make a living as Savants. Good luck to them! There is a Globalised market for not just Credentialist shite but books by Credentialised shites which can bring the joy of enstoopidification to even the humblest seeker after canned Mock Turtle Wisdom.