A key consideration for me is how much to trust our introspective judgments. It seems like a lot of issues disappear once we accept that they can be as wrong as any other perceptual judgment. It's a view easier to adopt after reading about neurological case studies, what happens when the brain doesn't work right, or works abnormally.
These issues aren't something we can just concentrate and see around. They don't happen because we're not being sufficiently virtuous. They arise because in evolution it was never adaptive for our internal monitoring systems to provide an accurate model of the brain's processing. Introspection doesn't seem fit for that purpose.
Which is why I'm not concerned about the binding problem, or the hard problem of consciousness, or many other issues philosophers wrestle with, and which often lead to dualism, idealism, panpsychism, or other outlooks. There's still a lot to learn about how the brain does things, but accepting introspective fallibility seems to leave the remaining problems scientifically tractable, Chalmers' "easy problems".
Unless of course there's a reason to accept introspective infallibility I've overlooked.
Thanks for that rather skeptical comment, Mike. Dennett is also skeptical of privately accessed qualia on grounds that this access isn’t trustworthy. We lack ways of verifying their properties and settling disagreements about them. He then jumps to the conclusion that we should admit “there simply are no qualia at all.” My reply is that skepticism about memory means that we can’t be sure about anything not immediately present, whether it be private or public. Moreover, such skepticism hardly establishes that things not immediately present don’t exist. To paraphrase Descartes, we can't doubt that we have experiences. So, given that experience exists, the question becomes how it exists relative to minds. My argument is that the clearest, simplest answer is a form of panpsychism.
My views are pretty similar to Dennett's, although I tend to use different language. Dennett denies a particular version of qualia, which most people today in turn deny is the one they mean.
That's the problem with terms like "qualia", "phenomenal consciousness", or "phenomenal properties". It's never clear what someone means by them. Usually it's associated with Nagel's "what it's like" phrase, but it's not clear what that means either. And simply saying "experience" without elaboration seems itself ambiguous. All of which inclines me toward Pete Mandik's Qualia Quietism.
No one denies we have experience in a functional sense, that is in terms of sensory processing, affective reactions, and learning. It's the stronger notion, equivalent to the strong version of qualia, that's problematic. Of course many judge that their experience is that stronger type, but that's exactly the introspective judgment I think we should question.
I will admit if I were ever convinced that introspective judgments can't be doubted, something like panpsychism might be tempting.
I agree that terms like "qualia" and "experience" are often obscure. So, perhaps my point about the need to take qualia seriously can be more clearly made using the example of a headache? A doctor may become impatient with senile patients who don't give clear answers to questions like "Is it becoming more frequent or less?" or "Is it becoming more intense or less? or "Is it throbbing like the headache you complained of last month?" This doctor may even begin to wonder if the senile patients are really having headaches. But when the doctor feels a headache himself, he can hardly deny that he feels the pain. Even if he has problems describing its frequency, intensity, quality, etc. And even if he doesn't check to see which neural or functional concomitants of his headache may have. It's thus hard for the doctor to deny the existence of his headache. The point here is that while the doctor's introspective judgments can be fallible about how frequent or intense his headache is, or whether it's throbbing or steady, there's no doubt that his headache exists.
It's funny you use a headache as an example because I've had one this afternoon. But the question isn't whether or not the headache exists. (Mine sure does, although it's getting better since I ate something.) The question is about what we judge its nature to be.
We can see it as a mental state caused by something wrong, either due to muscle tension, sinus infection, fatigue, hunger, or other issues, an affective state that might incline us toward certain behaviors. Such a state is functional in nature, with causes and effects, and it's not hard to imagine a machine having something equivalent. Our ability to monitor it in third person is limited by current technology, but always improving.
Or we can judge it to be something fundamental, ontologically irreducible, indescribable, unanalyzable, and/or metaphysically private. If we do, then it appears to be an intractable problem, a profound mystery. But my point is that this judgement seems optional, a theoretical assumption, something separate from simply acknowledging the existence of the headache itself.
This is a really interesting read. I need to take some time to read the links more carefully but just a couple of questions.
The problem I have with panpsychism is it seems like a politically correct form of idealism for naturalists. The only objection to idealism you give is it’s controversial because it requires a universal mind aka God.
But the attempt to stay within the naturalist paradigm means the combination problem turns out to be just substituting a different word for the hard problem. Instead of the mystery of how does consciousness emerge from physical stuff, we have the mystery of how does physical stuff combine to form human consciousness.
And what we mean by physical stuff is radically different because it has properties of mass, charge and … proto-consciousness.
And it seems to me that last property is arbitrary. What is proto-consciousness other than some kind of free floating qualia? But experience adrift from a subject doesn’t seem coherent to me. And calling it a micro-subject doesn’t seem to help, it’s applying a quantitative division to a qualitative unity.
We replace the mysteriousness of consciousness popping into existence from non-conscious entities, with the mysteriousness of human consciousness popping into existence from electron consciousness. Both rely on a mysterious emergence.
Hello! Are you an idealist too? There's two of us? Don't tell, they'd banish us you know. ;)
"The problem I have with panpsychism is it seems like a politically correct form of idealism for naturalists."
Yeah, I hear you. More often I can't even make sense of the papers I read about panpsychism well enough to even criticize them. When I can, they seem like physicalism couched in a different lingo. I don't appreciate that sort of thing at all.
"But experience adrift from a subject doesn’t seem coherent to me"
I wondered about that too. He does try to avoid the subject combination problem, though, as well as many of your other objections. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how he handles them.
Hello, yes I think idealism is so obviously the right answer I can't understand why it gets so little attention. I'm mostly influenced by Hindu Vedanta.
I need to read those links in a bit more detail and give it some thought. I did like the idea of a field, especially electromagnetic. I've been working on an article about idealism which compared the filter "mechanism" of idealism's solution to the mind body problem by analogy with an electromagnetic field. But I got stuck and lost in the quagmire and couldn't finish it, because the ideas aren't clear in my head. So I need to think about it all a bit more which is why this article really sparked my interest.
I'm not terribly familiar with eastern philosophy or any of the more recent incarnations, though I'm noticing some eastern philosophy videos popping up as suggestions on my YouTube feed. The algorithms must be onto me!
I'm not really sure what I am, but I tend towards idealism mainly because I'm in favor of its objections to materialism, though I find Husserl's more neutral phenomenology promising too. Essentially I think theories of mind should account for experience rather than explain it away.
Good luck straightening out your analogy to the EM field! I hope the paper is useful to you.
Tina, I really like your idea that reductionism fails to take consciousness seriously. I sympathize a lot with idealism's view that reality is purely mental. I try, however, to avoid common criticisms of idealism (see my reply to Prudence's idealism) starting with "I must apologize.". Thanks very much for your three insightful questions too--which I addressed in another posting by you today, Tina.
I must apologize, I didn't follow some of your comments above, Prudence. Instead of trying to answer to them in ways that may not really answer them, what I'd like to do is to assure you is that I’m very sympathetic to idealism, In fact my NP can be seen as a form of idealism, at least in the sense that both treat the nature of reality as purely mental or conscious.
To start with, Western idealism treats reality as fundamentally mental, which reverses RP. The physical world derives from minds or ideas. For example, Berkeley’s (1710) subjective idealism treats the physical world as collections of perceptions in our minds and God’s. So, in seeing the world, we see the face of God. Hegel’s (1857) absolute idealism treats reality as a slumbering spirit that appears as the objective world via perception and as minds via introspection. Its self-awareness and freedom arise dialectically as it reflects on the world, becomes self-aware, and progresses. This culminates in civilization based on liberty but disciplined by rational law. While this monism differs from the theistic dualism above, both give spirit-based accounts of how minds arise. Some versions of idealism could quite conceivably adopt theism’s claim that God made us in his image.
Incidentally, Hegel's idealism above is akin to the Upanisads, which were becoming known in Europe at this time.
Idealism arguably raises problems with its claim that matter and bodies only really exist in the form our perceptions or God’s thoughts. This basically treats bodies (including brains) as figments of minds. But why then do our minds depend so tightly on our bodies? For example, damaging our brains damages our minds. Also, communications between minds depend on bodily activities. Both facts are easily explained if bodies exist apart from minds, produce minds, and transmit signals between minds. But both facts are perplexing if bodies only exist as figments of minds.
My NP agrees with idealism in treating reality as purely mental, at the same time it tries to avoid idealism’s problems above. For example, while idealism treats bodies as figments of minds and doesn’t explain why minds depend on brains, in NP, bodies aren’t figments of minds—minds are the hidden reality of certain bodies.
I hope these comments shed some light on the relationship between our two views, Prudence. Thanks again for your interest.
Thanks for your comments, sorry I’m unclear, I’ve been trying to clarify some ideas about idealism but I’m out of my depth.
This is why your article caught my interest. I was trying to clarify an idea like your EM field, but in reverse.
Instead of the panpsychist view of particles of consciousness which combine to form the subject as a field, I picture it as the idealist view of a unified field of consciousness which “refracts” to form individual subjects.
Each subject isn’t a particle, but rather density deformations of the unified consciousness field. This retains the unitary nature of consciousness and avoids any combination problems.
Two ways I picture this, the first is something like those rubber sheets used to show how the mass of celestial bodies deforms the field of space time.
But a more accurate image is light refraction, because consciousness is an inherently dynamic phenomena like light.
Think of a pencil placed in a glass of water, the appearance shifts because light slows down as it passes through denser substances. Each body/brain is like that, a density variation of the field of consciousness.
A slowing of consciousness is a stupor, an ignorance, or a limiting of the field of awareness to particular parameters. Those parameters are the body/senses/brain.
And so each subject is the field of universal consciousness deforming to give a particular first person view of the rest of the universal field (ie the external world).
Don’t worry about responding if this reads like gooblegook lol, or is of no interest to you. I enjoyed reading your ideas.
I'm intrigued by your idea of density., Prudence, if I grasp it correctly I make use of something like it in explaining how consciousness at microlevels combines via strong, dense electromagnetic fields to form overall minds. Without strong fields (with dense energy flow) all consciousness would be atomized at micro levels--without any overall minds at higher levels. Dense fields right along neural circuits produce the mind's unified consciousness, but this density weakens in the weak fields between our different brains, so consciousness is unified only in brains, not between brains.
Yes, the ideas rhyme somehow, but I’m at a loss to understand the details of both the philosophy and the physics.
The difference as I see it is this idea of “consciousness at micro levels” is vulnerable to the combination problem. In correlating micro consciousness to neurons or some physical particle like thing, a subject will have to emerge from the lower levels.
I also think the idea of “micro-level” consciousness is problematic, because consciousness is a subject, a unitary point of view. And we can’t combine subjects to get one other subject.
So you can either create that one subject by combining particles of free floating qualia, or by “tying a knot” in an already unitary substance. The knot is an increase in density, a warping of the universal consciousness field.
The physics of light refraction is explained by light waves interacting with the background EM field. The increase in density is an interaction of the wave frequencies of the light ray and the background field.
I’m most comfortable speaking in theological language and this would translate to - the free will of the soul (the light ray) refracts or deforms (deviates from) the will of God (the background EM field or universal conscious field.) But replace God with “non-local field of consciousness” and it’s still the same idea.
And that interaction of the soul and God is the Hindu idea of “maya”, the illusion of the material world. The view from underwater is an illusion, a deformation of reality.
Prudence, I found an article that ties Western electromagnetic-field approaches to minds into the ancient Hindu/Vedic tradition of an all-encompassing field of pure consciousness construed as a universal Self called Atman or Brahman. The article is written by Susan Pockett, a respected theorist in the former (Western tradition). It can be found at: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Field_theories_of_consciousness/Field_theories_of_global_consciousness
Also, you wonder above how my own field approach, NP, could escape the combination problem. I explicitly explain how the combination problem can be avoided in the section entitled "The Mind’s Subject" of my paper "A simple, testable mind-body solution." This paper can be downloaded from the list of my papers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones
Hope these two short passages above are helpful, Prudence.
I very much appreciate all that you're trying to accomplish with this bold theory, especially since other panpsychist theories I've come across on the internet seem to me to be nothing more than physicalism in disguise. I agree that they preserve the problem they're trying to overcome while adding another level of mystery. You seem to be taking seriously the first person POV of experience (which I also take as the foundation to knowledge, a la Strawson) and attempting to reconcile that to the third person POV of scientific inquiry. Not an easy task, that's for sure! Kudos to you for taking such a fair-minded approach. I do have some questions for you, of course. :)
My first question concerns consciousness as a hidden nature. You say in your mind-body solution paper that "pure panpsychism treats everything purely as consciousness" and then you go on to explain why this shouldn't affect scientific inquiry, since physicists don't describe things in terms of their intrinsic nature, but merely in terms of their effects or function. Then: "In NP's metaphysical approach, we're directly aware of our own conscious thoughts and feelings. Yet we're indirectly aware of the external world through (for example) reflected light, instruments, and sense organs. The world is thus hidden, and its real nature is up for grabs. So, for all we know, consciousness may be the real, underlying nature of the world beyond how it appears to our senses and instruments."
My question is, why should experiential stuff be "hidden" behind things like neurons and brains and EM fields if consciousness is ALL there is? Shouldn't neurons and brains BE consciousness-stuff too?
Second question (might be the same as above): How would you respond to someone who wonders why there is no observational evidence of consciousness in brains or EM fields? Should micro-experiences relate back to experience as it's experienced?
Third question: Do you anticipate combining your third-person approach in which consciousness is atomically conceived (in a manner similar to scientific thinking) with a more holistic, first-person phenomenological approach?
Thanks again for letting me post your intriguing theory. I feel like you've saved me from having to read a bunch of hooey and have explained some of the things that have eluded me concerning the more recent discussion of mind body problem.
Thanks for these three very clear questions, Tina. Here are my replies:
1. In NP, everything is consciousness, but only in the neural EM field does this consciousness unify to form a mind. So, I’m directly aware of my unified mind, but I’m not directly aware of other minds because the field is too weak between brains. Other minds are in this sense hidden. The only way I can find out about other minds is indirectly through my perceptual system, and this only shows me people's brains, not their minds.
2. That’s very difficult for reductive physicalists to answer. But nonreductive physicalists don’t try to reduce minds to brains—they’re property dualists—so they can readily explain why we can’t observe conscious images in visual systems. They have other problems instead. Nor does my NP reduce minds to brains—and it explains why we can’t see minds in brains (see 1 above). The reason NP locates minds in brains is because of, for example, the extensive linking neural impairments to mental impairments.
3. As I see it, NP reconciles fits phenomenology and physics together. The brain’s EM field unifies consciousness to form the mind, and phenomenology describes this unified consciousness. But I believe that the mental dynamics described by phenomenology transcends the neural dynamics described by physics. My choice of what ice cream tastes best is made by my consciousness not by neural networks.
PS, sorry I was so slow responding to all the great questions by your followers--I was finishing up my first draft of the T&G review paper last night and today.
Thanks, Mostyn. I think I see what you're saying. It's all a bit hard to wrap my mind around—to me it's like idealism turned inside out.
I keep coming up with questions! (This one relates to the novel I'm working on. I'm fishing for the weirdest but at least remotely plausible ideas surrounding mind).
1. You mentioned an interesting case about conjoined twins who perceived what the other was perceiving, though I think their shared perceptions were limited...can't find the example now. Would it be possible, according to your theory, to merge minds so that they overlapped completely? Or would one mind simply be destroyed as they merged, given that there would no longer be two unities, but one? Or would they merge to create a whole new person?
2. Also, assuming in your theory mind melding is possible (to some degree), do you think it would be possible to develop some sort of technology to make that happen? What kind of technology would that be? Feel free to speculate wildly.
3. This is sort of a stupid question, but I'll go ahead and ask it. Is there an atomic experience of, say, the smell of poo? Or is that the result of a cacophony (as it were) of smells? But then what about the scent of a rose? Or is that reducible to components that we can't experience by themselves?
Your next mind-body novel sounds ever more intriguing, Tina!
That’s an interesting way of describing my NP theory—idealism turned inside out. If reductive physicalism is mainly criticized for not taking minds seriously, idealism is mainly criticized for not taking matter/brains seriously. NP attempts to take both seriously by explaining how minds could be the real nature of brains beyond their perceptual appearances.
(1) Your first question is a penetrating one about whether conjoined twins might merge their minds entirely in my theory. I note in the Russellian monism paper that Tatiana and Krista Hogan have partially interconnected brain circuits that enable them to (for example) see through each other’s eyes, while not being able to access each other’ minds fully. This aligns with NP, which says that the mind resides in electrical activities along interconnected brain circuits. So, to address your question—minds would fully merge in such twins only when their brain circuits fully interconnect.
You also ask what would happen to the the twins minds (their persons, selfs, wills) if they merge. Various scenarios seem possible depending on how the brains circuits (including their decision-making circuits) interconnect. There could two different selves making their own decisions (but aware of each other’s perceptions, emotions, and feelings). Or one self could be wired to be dominant in decision making. Or one self could be eliminated. The possibilities might include entities such as corporate minds containing hierarchies of lesser minds with varying degrees of mutual awareness between them.
(2) What would this mind-melding technology look like? We’d have to start by mapping in detail how circuitries normally affect mental operations (much of this is still unknown). Then we’d have to explore experimentally how altering these connections would affect mental operations. As the paragraph above suggests, this would be highly complex. But a further consideration is that (as I mentioned to you yesterday) NP attributes emergent causal powers to conscious minds, for example, in thinking about emotions and actions. These mental powers transcend the causal powers that neuroscience attributes to neural circuits.
(3) Finally, you ask how overall sensory qualia arise from atomic-level sensory qualia. This is addressed best in one of my papers now under review. It focuses on visual images. Simply put, the three different primary colors arise in the three different color detectors in visual systems. The electrical connections between them unite them into an overall pictorial form. Some circuits blend the primary colors into myriad secondary colors. This gets complicated, but it’s testable. So, my answer is that simple sensory colors, odors, etc. combine via electrical circuitries to form more complex colors, odors, etc.
Oops! Sorry Neal--a penultimate draft of the paper (A simple, testable mind-body solution?) can be found at https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones. I'd paste it here but I'm afraid it wouldn't get through to you. Incidentally, I've finished the first draft of that review of T&G. Perhaps I could send it to you to check before I send it to a journal? Tina said you like WWII--so do I! Hard for us baby boomers not to have it etched into our souls, I guess.
I won't be able to follow the technical scientific aspects of the paper, but I look forward to the metaphysics. And sure, feel free to send me your first draft of your review. Thanks so much for writing it!
I'm more than happy to write the T&G review, Neal--I'm genuinely interested in it. My review of T&G tries to tie its ideas about thought and language into my own. Concerning my mind-body paper, my main reason for posting it is just to see if it's clear to a general audience, in other words, where I confuse readers. I aspire to write clearly like you and Tina do so well.
By the way, aside from the science part, which I wouldn't expect you to bring to my level as that would require many, many pages, I think your explanation of the metaphysics is quite clear. Any confusion on my part comes from trying to conceptualize things in a way I'm not used to, but I think you've explained your view succinctly. I also appreciated your summary of various theories of mind and their problems (the section of your paper I've posted here) as the introduction to your theory. I think that helps orient readers to what it is you're trying to accomplish, even if they're already familiar with the various positions. I actually think your paper is clearer than Strawson's. He gets fairly rhetorical—which is amusing and refreshing when so much of academic philosophy is so dry—but of course all that fun with language can come at the price of clarity.
Thanks for those comments, Tina. In the book I'm writing on mind-body, I take more time to explain the science in clear, simple terms. I'm glad to hear you say the accounts of other theories is readable, and the metaphysics is succinct and clearer than Strawson's. I can also appreciate what you say about it being unusual and hard to wrap one's head around.
It’s nice to meet you. When Tina told me that she was excited about presenting a guest with a consciousness theory, I was happy to hear it. And mainly because of the likelihood that I could then reduce that person’s theory back to “magic” (by which I mean contrast it with “worldly” proposals). Of course I did promise to nevertheless be nice, though this way there’d be the potential to present something which seems more plausible. Aside from panpsychism however, your post didn’t leave me much to object with. So I figured that I’d write something up regarding how I’d further dismiss what you dismiss, my reservations about panpsychism, and maybe even open up the potential for consciousness to exist electromagnetically. Looking through the comments however I saw some vague references to EMF consciousness. I also remembered that Tam Hunt (a panpsychist EMF theorist), recently wrote a paper that presents a survey of modern EMF consciousness proposals. So I thought I’d see if you were included there. Not only were you included, but you were one of the people who put that survey together. So there should be plenty for you and I to potentially discuss!
At this point I suppose you may wonder who I am? Unfortunately, no one of distinction. Though my blogging friends are generally aware of my various positions, I do still need to put it all together concisely in one place for the consideration of interested people.
On your post, one thing I like to do regarding consciousness themes is reduce them back to either potentially being systemically causal or not. Natural proposals are preferable, I think, because here it’s all explained from within. Why try to figure something out in your world, when you think it involves inaccessible otherworldly dynamics that aren’t possible to measure? It seems to me that each of the classifications that you’ve mentioned ultimately rely upon otherworldly dynamics, that is beyond perfect physicalism, which is to say, systemic causality itself.
Most of my criticism in this regard has been reserved for the “non-reductive physicalists” that you mentioned. This is not only given their popularity, but also because they advertise themselves to be perfect physicalists. Ha! For example in my thumb pain thought experiment I force them to concede that if a computer were to scan the right marked paper for processing, to then print out the correct other marked paper, then something here (which they don’t identify) would thus experience what they do when their thumbs get whacked. While they may generally grasp that computers work by means of processed information that informs an appropriate substrate, I think their error is presuming that this substrate business can simply be omitted regarding consciousness. Unfortunately the standard path for “physical” consciousness proposals to take, seems to involve the bending of causality rules.
I like that you’re talking about testing your theory. There are two ways that I’ve come up with to test EMF consciousness. One seems inadvertently confirmed already. In modern brain to computer interface (BCI) they’re able to use cortically implanted micro electrodes that detect the electromagnetic radiation associated with the synchronous firing of neurons. Apparently given the words that someone is trying to speak, then crunched with the EMF from a detector at a precise location of the brain, a computer can be trained to just use the EMF to predict what that person is trying to say in general with pretty good accuracy. Why? Theoretically because the detector of this faint EMF is close enough to a source that ephaptically couples with the neurons which operate speech muscles. This is theoretical the sort of bridge by which consciousness causally affects the world in which it exists.
Another such test would be to put EMF transmitters (rather than detectors) in the brain that ought to produce something similar to the EMF that synchronously firing neurons create. If EMF happens to be what consciousness is made of, then a person who is subjected to such extraneous signals ought to be able to tell us that things thus get whacky for them, and presumably given the constructive and destructive EMF interference that alters the very thing that their consciousness happens to be. But if all sorts of appropriate EMF never create such reports, then fine, consciousness should not exist under the right parameters of electromagnetic field.
I wonder if you’ve thought about either sort of testing?
Thanks for that thoughtful message, Eric. You seem to side with reducing mental causation to physical causation, which is a central tenet of physicalists who reduce mental existence to physical existence--and even of nonreductive physicalists who don't reduce mental existence to physical existence. I'm not a physicalist when it comes to what exists or its causality (for example, see 4.3 of my "Arguing from consciousness to God's existence..." at https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones).
Yes, I agree that computer learning has used EEG data to predicted what people are will say next or to image what people are seeing. But the predictions are crude, and the EEGs were not actually detecting conscious visual images in brains, but instead higher-level neural activity engaged in recognizing whose faces were present.
Concerning your proposed test using EMF transmitters, this might be difficult to do. Our conscious sensory experience arises only in highly specialized neural electrical activity whose circuitries are highly integrated. It would be difficult to replicate this electrical activity--and the associated sensory consciousness--artificially.
Again, thanks for your intriguing comments, Eric! I'm finding out that Tina has very interesting friends!
Thank you Mostyn. I’ve had a bit of a look at the paper that you suggested. Apparently given well publicized challenges you believe that consciousness must exist godly, as well as propose that this godly element of reality exists electromagnetically. I instead demand perfectly natural explanations for all that exists, but at least in an electromagnetic sense I suspect that evidence will eventually validate each of us. Of course theism predates science heavily and so modern theistic positions have progressively been refined where correspondence seems appropriate. If scientists determine that animal consciousness (such as ours, also known as “a soul”) exist by means of brain produced electromagnetic radiation, then you might become known for establishing an accepted theistic interpretation of this breakthrough. So in this sense I think our interests are the same. I haven’t yet considered the sort of testing that you propose, though let me clarify some things about the two types of EMF consciousness testing that I propose.
On Brain Computer Interface, I agree that over the years it’s mainly relied upon exterior technology such as detection from EEG. That’s been the easy way to go. But apparently this sort of information stream gets too distorted for the things that modern researchers have been working on. In the following experiment (https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/08/brain-implant-speech-als.html), they put two small EMF detection arrays in two different speech areas of a woman’s cerebral cortex (4 of them in total). Each were accessed by means of terminals on her scalp. Though her muscles had recently atrophied such that she could no longer speak, during training they had a computer relate the known words that she was trying to say with the detected EMF from her attempts. After 100 total session hours of correlating her attempts to speak with the detected EMF, the hope was that her non scripted speech could then be interpreted reasonably well by means of the detected EM field alone. It seems to have worked.
While I get the sense that BCI researchers are staying agnostic on the question of consciousness itself, here’s the narrative that I think EMF theorists like yourself ought to take. Of course the theory is that all elements of our consciousness exist by means of the proper parameters of EMF associated with the right sort of synchronous neuron firing. (For those who don’t know, non-synchronous firing should mainly yield energies that distort through the constructive to destructive interference from other such individual firing which thus yields informational garbage.) Theoretically two of these detection arrays (though apparently not the other two) were close enough to the neurons which operate her speech muscles by means of “ephaptic coupling”. Because the theory here is that attempts to speak should produce a signal which causes neurons to fire or not that operate speech muscles, theoretically the words that she was trying to say ought to correlate well with the detected EM field itself (should consciousness exist by means of a thusly produced field).
To help put this into perspective, consider the electromagnetic field associated with any standard computer. Except when specifically designed to do something (such as send a WiFi signal), such fields are also known to be informational garbage that a computer’s circuits need to be protected from in order for them to not function erroneously from time to time. But what are the chances that a non intended element of this field would correlate well with the things that, for example, a computer screen’s pixels are suppose to be doing? There should be no such correlation, I think, since relationally this field should simply be garbage. Similarly I don’t think the words that we mean to say should correlate with an electromagnetic field associated with the synchronous firing of neurons, that is unless that field happens to exist as the consciousness by which words get translated into associated muscle movements.
On my other proposed test, I agree that our conscious experiences only arise by means of highly specialized and integrated neural activity. But initially my test would not, as implied, be to replicate standard functional consciousness such as to see or feel something. Instead it would simply be to distort that highly specialized and integrated neural process. If researchers were to put a source of EMF radiation close enough to the neurons which create the experiencer, as well as transmit an EM frequency and amplitude that’s similar enough to constructively and destructively alter that EMF, then the experience ought to become distorted in associated ways (that is if what’s seen or whatever exists electromagnetically). Furthermore in order to succeed I’m not even saying that we’d need to distort an associated functional form of consciousness. All we should need to do is put EMF transmitters in appropriate parts of someone’s brain that could simulate the energies of known standard synchronous neuron firing. Then we’d see what results from such transmissions. If exhaustive testing suggests that no EMF transmutations ever alter someone’s consciousness (since the person ought to be able to tell us about their consciousness alteration, or at least show signs of it if they’re thus left incapacitated) then consciousness should not exist electromagnetically. But if there are signs of such alteration then there’d be room for further study. If vision thus becomes affected, could such transmissions in that sense be modulated, for example, to add certain colors or shapes to what the person sees? If experimentally validated that consciousness does exist electromagnetically, I think this could be one of the most transformative discoveries in science to date.
In any case I hope this suggests that we’re aligned in this regard, and so my proposals might help each of us get what we want. Here I’m referring to the scientific establishment of EMF consciousness should it indeed exist in the form of electromagnetic radiation as we suspect.
As one who finds panpsychism intriguing rather than preposterous, I read "A Simple Testable Mind-Body Solution" as an attempt to tackle the combination problem empirically, with EM fields as the proposed mechanism. For the benefit of most readers, it was necessary to include an explanation and justification of panpsychism, but this is where I find the questions most interesting. For me, the study of neural correlates is best left to scientists, and I don't feel qualified to comment on ion channels or electromagnetic brain activity.
Although I've been interested in the subject for some time, I have yet to sort out the relationship between panpsychism, dual aspect theory, and Russellian monism. They all hold a positive role for consciousness, and as such they all insist on a fundamental reality for consciousness. They all defy the deeply held assumption in the West that reality consists of substances in time and space, with emphatically no requirement for consciousness.
Some forms of panpsychism remain within the framework of substance, time, and space, proposing consciousness as something having spatio-temporal substance. Others are more radical: they propose that time and space, along with everything in it, are the manifestation of consciousness. This rather difficult doctrine has its strongest voice in Alfred North Whitehead. "Prehension" was his neutral term for consciousness, for better or worse. Prehensions, in their mutual interaction, express themselves in "occasions," but occasions do not have spatio-temporal locations; rather, the occasions themselves create space and time as expressions of their relationships (if I understand him).
Among radical versions of panpsychism, Whitehead's seems almost mechanical; in this he follows Leibniz. Other traditions assume reality to include consciousness, but look for its expression in the intelligible interaction of all beings, all things that exist. This I think is the Spinozan variety, of which we find rich echoes in Indigenous and Eastern traditions.
Each type of panpsychism asks a different question. Is it a substance? Is it a pattern? Is it a force? The first two can stand clear, more or less, of questions about God, but the third is not so lucky. The modern mind -- not without reason -- gravitates toward more causal approaches.
That was an excellent review of panpsychism, Jim. Russellian monism is the main proponent of panpsychism in contemporary Western philosophy. But it suffers from serious problems, which I list in my "A simple, testable mind-body solution" and detail in my "Avoiding Russellian monism's problems."
In the latter, I argue that it's full of deeply obscure ideas such as protophenomenal entities, emergent experience, mental combination, and grounded abstractions. In the latter case, for example, the abstract mathematical structures of physics get substantial spatio-temporal existence by being grounded in concrete, particular entities. This grounding seems just as mysterious now as in Plato’s day. These various ideas are arguably no less obscure than dualist ideas of causality or physicalist ideas of emergence. These three sets of problems in dualism, physicalism, and Russellian monism constitute the latest form of the mind-body problem.
I add that Galen Strawson's pure panpsychism can be refined to avoid all these problems, without raising problems of its own.
I haven't investigated Russellian monism in any detail. One reason is that it doesn't seem to be much discussed these days, in contrast to Galen Strawson's revised physicalism.
Still, for theoretical purposes, I hope to sort Russellian monism from other theories. In section 1.3 of "A simple, testable mind-body solution," where you describe prominent mind-body theories, you list "dual-aspect theory," which appeals to "an underlying substance (God or nature)." Later you say, "Another view is Russelian monism." But the explanation of Russellian monism invokes dual-aspect theory. Here I may be misreading the text, so for clarity I'll quote at length:
"Another view today is Russellian monism. It typically says that physics describes the world only in terms of abstract mathematical structures and dynamics. Objects are thus described extrinsically via what they do to each other, not intrinsically via what they are in themselves. These monists say that these intrinsic natures exist and ground the abstract descriptions. Without this ground, the world would exist only as abstract structure lacking substance or qualities. An example is Chalmers’ (1996, p. 305) dual-aspect view, in which 'Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.' These monist views are highly complicated."
I guess I'm confused as to the relationship between dual-aspect theory and Russellian monism. I don't think this is your fault. They're often discussed as if they're separate, and yet one is frequently portrayed as a sub-class of the other.
The other issue I meant to raise was that your own variety of panpsychism asserts substance, at first in a physically non-commital way, but immediately afterwards as occupying space: "In NP, consciousness is thus the world’s real, underlying substance (where “substance” merely denotes the fundamental stuff comprising the universe). It occupies space, exerts forces, and is the universe’s sole constituent." I wanted to point out that not all types of panpsychism conceive of consciousness in terms of spatial location (for example, as identifiable with a local electromagnetic field).
As that quoted paragraph pointed out, Jim, the old dual aspect theory has been recently adopted by some Russellian monists. As my paper on Russellian monism points out, there are many versions of Russellian monism. In fact, Strawson is a Russellian monist too. Also, there are many, many versions of panpsychism (Skribina surveyed them all recently). Mine is just one example of it. Thanks for those perceptive comments, Jim!
Thanks for that Eric. I too demand evidence from the physical and natural sciences. My various papers stick closely to evidence from recent neuroscience to argue that existing theories of neuroscience and neurophilosophy about mind/body relations are all deeply problematic—and that my panpsychist neuroelectrical approach might avoid these problems in testable ways.
Where God comes into all this is that neuroscience fails to fully explain how minds arose in physical ways (both reductive and nonreductive physicalism are highly problematic here). So, the only viable account of how minds arose is in terms of God’s mind. I argue this latter point exclusively in “Arguments from consciousness to God’s existence.
Concerning your test, I was intrigued by you question "could such [EM] transmissions in that sense be modulated, for example, to add certain colors or shapes to what the person sees?" I addressed something like this point in note 14 of "Electromagnetic-field theories of qualia: can they improve upon standard neuroscience?" (Jones & Hunt, 2023). There, I suggest that we could attribute different qualia to the different resonances of neuroelectrical activity in color detectors, or to the different masses and rest energies of neuroelectrical activity in color detector. This may have some relevance to any tests of how qualia arise.
Hope these comments were relevant to your point, Eric
A key consideration for me is how much to trust our introspective judgments. It seems like a lot of issues disappear once we accept that they can be as wrong as any other perceptual judgment. It's a view easier to adopt after reading about neurological case studies, what happens when the brain doesn't work right, or works abnormally.
These issues aren't something we can just concentrate and see around. They don't happen because we're not being sufficiently virtuous. They arise because in evolution it was never adaptive for our internal monitoring systems to provide an accurate model of the brain's processing. Introspection doesn't seem fit for that purpose.
Which is why I'm not concerned about the binding problem, or the hard problem of consciousness, or many other issues philosophers wrestle with, and which often lead to dualism, idealism, panpsychism, or other outlooks. There's still a lot to learn about how the brain does things, but accepting introspective fallibility seems to leave the remaining problems scientifically tractable, Chalmers' "easy problems".
Unless of course there's a reason to accept introspective infallibility I've overlooked.
Thanks, Mike. You know what I think, so I'll leave this one for Mostyn to answer.
Thanks for that rather skeptical comment, Mike. Dennett is also skeptical of privately accessed qualia on grounds that this access isn’t trustworthy. We lack ways of verifying their properties and settling disagreements about them. He then jumps to the conclusion that we should admit “there simply are no qualia at all.” My reply is that skepticism about memory means that we can’t be sure about anything not immediately present, whether it be private or public. Moreover, such skepticism hardly establishes that things not immediately present don’t exist. To paraphrase Descartes, we can't doubt that we have experiences. So, given that experience exists, the question becomes how it exists relative to minds. My argument is that the clearest, simplest answer is a form of panpsychism.
Hi Mostyn,
My views are pretty similar to Dennett's, although I tend to use different language. Dennett denies a particular version of qualia, which most people today in turn deny is the one they mean.
That's the problem with terms like "qualia", "phenomenal consciousness", or "phenomenal properties". It's never clear what someone means by them. Usually it's associated with Nagel's "what it's like" phrase, but it's not clear what that means either. And simply saying "experience" without elaboration seems itself ambiguous. All of which inclines me toward Pete Mandik's Qualia Quietism.
No one denies we have experience in a functional sense, that is in terms of sensory processing, affective reactions, and learning. It's the stronger notion, equivalent to the strong version of qualia, that's problematic. Of course many judge that their experience is that stronger type, but that's exactly the introspective judgment I think we should question.
I will admit if I were ever convinced that introspective judgments can't be doubted, something like panpsychism might be tempting.
I agree that terms like "qualia" and "experience" are often obscure. So, perhaps my point about the need to take qualia seriously can be more clearly made using the example of a headache? A doctor may become impatient with senile patients who don't give clear answers to questions like "Is it becoming more frequent or less?" or "Is it becoming more intense or less? or "Is it throbbing like the headache you complained of last month?" This doctor may even begin to wonder if the senile patients are really having headaches. But when the doctor feels a headache himself, he can hardly deny that he feels the pain. Even if he has problems describing its frequency, intensity, quality, etc. And even if he doesn't check to see which neural or functional concomitants of his headache may have. It's thus hard for the doctor to deny the existence of his headache. The point here is that while the doctor's introspective judgments can be fallible about how frequent or intense his headache is, or whether it's throbbing or steady, there's no doubt that his headache exists.
It's funny you use a headache as an example because I've had one this afternoon. But the question isn't whether or not the headache exists. (Mine sure does, although it's getting better since I ate something.) The question is about what we judge its nature to be.
We can see it as a mental state caused by something wrong, either due to muscle tension, sinus infection, fatigue, hunger, or other issues, an affective state that might incline us toward certain behaviors. Such a state is functional in nature, with causes and effects, and it's not hard to imagine a machine having something equivalent. Our ability to monitor it in third person is limited by current technology, but always improving.
Or we can judge it to be something fundamental, ontologically irreducible, indescribable, unanalyzable, and/or metaphysically private. If we do, then it appears to be an intractable problem, a profound mystery. But my point is that this judgement seems optional, a theoretical assumption, something separate from simply acknowledging the existence of the headache itself.
Hi Mostyn,
I appreciate the summary of your point of view and look forward to seeing the thing itself!
Neal
This is a really interesting read. I need to take some time to read the links more carefully but just a couple of questions.
The problem I have with panpsychism is it seems like a politically correct form of idealism for naturalists. The only objection to idealism you give is it’s controversial because it requires a universal mind aka God.
But the attempt to stay within the naturalist paradigm means the combination problem turns out to be just substituting a different word for the hard problem. Instead of the mystery of how does consciousness emerge from physical stuff, we have the mystery of how does physical stuff combine to form human consciousness.
And what we mean by physical stuff is radically different because it has properties of mass, charge and … proto-consciousness.
And it seems to me that last property is arbitrary. What is proto-consciousness other than some kind of free floating qualia? But experience adrift from a subject doesn’t seem coherent to me. And calling it a micro-subject doesn’t seem to help, it’s applying a quantitative division to a qualitative unity.
We replace the mysteriousness of consciousness popping into existence from non-conscious entities, with the mysteriousness of human consciousness popping into existence from electron consciousness. Both rely on a mysterious emergence.
Hello! Are you an idealist too? There's two of us? Don't tell, they'd banish us you know. ;)
"The problem I have with panpsychism is it seems like a politically correct form of idealism for naturalists."
Yeah, I hear you. More often I can't even make sense of the papers I read about panpsychism well enough to even criticize them. When I can, they seem like physicalism couched in a different lingo. I don't appreciate that sort of thing at all.
"But experience adrift from a subject doesn’t seem coherent to me"
I wondered about that too. He does try to avoid the subject combination problem, though, as well as many of your other objections. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how he handles them.
Hello, yes I think idealism is so obviously the right answer I can't understand why it gets so little attention. I'm mostly influenced by Hindu Vedanta.
I need to read those links in a bit more detail and give it some thought. I did like the idea of a field, especially electromagnetic. I've been working on an article about idealism which compared the filter "mechanism" of idealism's solution to the mind body problem by analogy with an electromagnetic field. But I got stuck and lost in the quagmire and couldn't finish it, because the ideas aren't clear in my head. So I need to think about it all a bit more which is why this article really sparked my interest.
I'm not terribly familiar with eastern philosophy or any of the more recent incarnations, though I'm noticing some eastern philosophy videos popping up as suggestions on my YouTube feed. The algorithms must be onto me!
I'm not really sure what I am, but I tend towards idealism mainly because I'm in favor of its objections to materialism, though I find Husserl's more neutral phenomenology promising too. Essentially I think theories of mind should account for experience rather than explain it away.
Good luck straightening out your analogy to the EM field! I hope the paper is useful to you.
Tina, I really like your idea that reductionism fails to take consciousness seriously. I sympathize a lot with idealism's view that reality is purely mental. I try, however, to avoid common criticisms of idealism (see my reply to Prudence's idealism) starting with "I must apologize.". Thanks very much for your three insightful questions too--which I addressed in another posting by you today, Tina.
I must apologize, I didn't follow some of your comments above, Prudence. Instead of trying to answer to them in ways that may not really answer them, what I'd like to do is to assure you is that I’m very sympathetic to idealism, In fact my NP can be seen as a form of idealism, at least in the sense that both treat the nature of reality as purely mental or conscious.
To start with, Western idealism treats reality as fundamentally mental, which reverses RP. The physical world derives from minds or ideas. For example, Berkeley’s (1710) subjective idealism treats the physical world as collections of perceptions in our minds and God’s. So, in seeing the world, we see the face of God. Hegel’s (1857) absolute idealism treats reality as a slumbering spirit that appears as the objective world via perception and as minds via introspection. Its self-awareness and freedom arise dialectically as it reflects on the world, becomes self-aware, and progresses. This culminates in civilization based on liberty but disciplined by rational law. While this monism differs from the theistic dualism above, both give spirit-based accounts of how minds arise. Some versions of idealism could quite conceivably adopt theism’s claim that God made us in his image.
Incidentally, Hegel's idealism above is akin to the Upanisads, which were becoming known in Europe at this time.
Idealism arguably raises problems with its claim that matter and bodies only really exist in the form our perceptions or God’s thoughts. This basically treats bodies (including brains) as figments of minds. But why then do our minds depend so tightly on our bodies? For example, damaging our brains damages our minds. Also, communications between minds depend on bodily activities. Both facts are easily explained if bodies exist apart from minds, produce minds, and transmit signals between minds. But both facts are perplexing if bodies only exist as figments of minds.
My NP agrees with idealism in treating reality as purely mental, at the same time it tries to avoid idealism’s problems above. For example, while idealism treats bodies as figments of minds and doesn’t explain why minds depend on brains, in NP, bodies aren’t figments of minds—minds are the hidden reality of certain bodies.
I hope these comments shed some light on the relationship between our two views, Prudence. Thanks again for your interest.
Thanks for your comments, sorry I’m unclear, I’ve been trying to clarify some ideas about idealism but I’m out of my depth.
This is why your article caught my interest. I was trying to clarify an idea like your EM field, but in reverse.
Instead of the panpsychist view of particles of consciousness which combine to form the subject as a field, I picture it as the idealist view of a unified field of consciousness which “refracts” to form individual subjects.
Each subject isn’t a particle, but rather density deformations of the unified consciousness field. This retains the unitary nature of consciousness and avoids any combination problems.
Two ways I picture this, the first is something like those rubber sheets used to show how the mass of celestial bodies deforms the field of space time.
But a more accurate image is light refraction, because consciousness is an inherently dynamic phenomena like light.
Think of a pencil placed in a glass of water, the appearance shifts because light slows down as it passes through denser substances. Each body/brain is like that, a density variation of the field of consciousness.
A slowing of consciousness is a stupor, an ignorance, or a limiting of the field of awareness to particular parameters. Those parameters are the body/senses/brain.
And so each subject is the field of universal consciousness deforming to give a particular first person view of the rest of the universal field (ie the external world).
Don’t worry about responding if this reads like gooblegook lol, or is of no interest to you. I enjoyed reading your ideas.
I'm intrigued by your idea of density., Prudence, if I grasp it correctly I make use of something like it in explaining how consciousness at microlevels combines via strong, dense electromagnetic fields to form overall minds. Without strong fields (with dense energy flow) all consciousness would be atomized at micro levels--without any overall minds at higher levels. Dense fields right along neural circuits produce the mind's unified consciousness, but this density weakens in the weak fields between our different brains, so consciousness is unified only in brains, not between brains.
Yes, the ideas rhyme somehow, but I’m at a loss to understand the details of both the philosophy and the physics.
The difference as I see it is this idea of “consciousness at micro levels” is vulnerable to the combination problem. In correlating micro consciousness to neurons or some physical particle like thing, a subject will have to emerge from the lower levels.
I also think the idea of “micro-level” consciousness is problematic, because consciousness is a subject, a unitary point of view. And we can’t combine subjects to get one other subject.
So you can either create that one subject by combining particles of free floating qualia, or by “tying a knot” in an already unitary substance. The knot is an increase in density, a warping of the universal consciousness field.
The physics of light refraction is explained by light waves interacting with the background EM field. The increase in density is an interaction of the wave frequencies of the light ray and the background field.
I’m most comfortable speaking in theological language and this would translate to - the free will of the soul (the light ray) refracts or deforms (deviates from) the will of God (the background EM field or universal conscious field.) But replace God with “non-local field of consciousness” and it’s still the same idea.
And that interaction of the soul and God is the Hindu idea of “maya”, the illusion of the material world. The view from underwater is an illusion, a deformation of reality.
Prudence, I found an article that ties Western electromagnetic-field approaches to minds into the ancient Hindu/Vedic tradition of an all-encompassing field of pure consciousness construed as a universal Self called Atman or Brahman. The article is written by Susan Pockett, a respected theorist in the former (Western tradition). It can be found at: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Field_theories_of_consciousness/Field_theories_of_global_consciousness
Also, you wonder above how my own field approach, NP, could escape the combination problem. I explicitly explain how the combination problem can be avoided in the section entitled "The Mind’s Subject" of my paper "A simple, testable mind-body solution." This paper can be downloaded from the list of my papers: https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones
Hope these two short passages above are helpful, Prudence.
Hi Mostyn,
I very much appreciate all that you're trying to accomplish with this bold theory, especially since other panpsychist theories I've come across on the internet seem to me to be nothing more than physicalism in disguise. I agree that they preserve the problem they're trying to overcome while adding another level of mystery. You seem to be taking seriously the first person POV of experience (which I also take as the foundation to knowledge, a la Strawson) and attempting to reconcile that to the third person POV of scientific inquiry. Not an easy task, that's for sure! Kudos to you for taking such a fair-minded approach. I do have some questions for you, of course. :)
My first question concerns consciousness as a hidden nature. You say in your mind-body solution paper that "pure panpsychism treats everything purely as consciousness" and then you go on to explain why this shouldn't affect scientific inquiry, since physicists don't describe things in terms of their intrinsic nature, but merely in terms of their effects or function. Then: "In NP's metaphysical approach, we're directly aware of our own conscious thoughts and feelings. Yet we're indirectly aware of the external world through (for example) reflected light, instruments, and sense organs. The world is thus hidden, and its real nature is up for grabs. So, for all we know, consciousness may be the real, underlying nature of the world beyond how it appears to our senses and instruments."
My question is, why should experiential stuff be "hidden" behind things like neurons and brains and EM fields if consciousness is ALL there is? Shouldn't neurons and brains BE consciousness-stuff too?
Second question (might be the same as above): How would you respond to someone who wonders why there is no observational evidence of consciousness in brains or EM fields? Should micro-experiences relate back to experience as it's experienced?
Third question: Do you anticipate combining your third-person approach in which consciousness is atomically conceived (in a manner similar to scientific thinking) with a more holistic, first-person phenomenological approach?
Thanks again for letting me post your intriguing theory. I feel like you've saved me from having to read a bunch of hooey and have explained some of the things that have eluded me concerning the more recent discussion of mind body problem.
Thanks for these three very clear questions, Tina. Here are my replies:
1. In NP, everything is consciousness, but only in the neural EM field does this consciousness unify to form a mind. So, I’m directly aware of my unified mind, but I’m not directly aware of other minds because the field is too weak between brains. Other minds are in this sense hidden. The only way I can find out about other minds is indirectly through my perceptual system, and this only shows me people's brains, not their minds.
2. That’s very difficult for reductive physicalists to answer. But nonreductive physicalists don’t try to reduce minds to brains—they’re property dualists—so they can readily explain why we can’t observe conscious images in visual systems. They have other problems instead. Nor does my NP reduce minds to brains—and it explains why we can’t see minds in brains (see 1 above). The reason NP locates minds in brains is because of, for example, the extensive linking neural impairments to mental impairments.
3. As I see it, NP reconciles fits phenomenology and physics together. The brain’s EM field unifies consciousness to form the mind, and phenomenology describes this unified consciousness. But I believe that the mental dynamics described by phenomenology transcends the neural dynamics described by physics. My choice of what ice cream tastes best is made by my consciousness not by neural networks.
PS, sorry I was so slow responding to all the great questions by your followers--I was finishing up my first draft of the T&G review paper last night and today.
Thanks, Mostyn. I think I see what you're saying. It's all a bit hard to wrap my mind around—to me it's like idealism turned inside out.
I keep coming up with questions! (This one relates to the novel I'm working on. I'm fishing for the weirdest but at least remotely plausible ideas surrounding mind).
1. You mentioned an interesting case about conjoined twins who perceived what the other was perceiving, though I think their shared perceptions were limited...can't find the example now. Would it be possible, according to your theory, to merge minds so that they overlapped completely? Or would one mind simply be destroyed as they merged, given that there would no longer be two unities, but one? Or would they merge to create a whole new person?
2. Also, assuming in your theory mind melding is possible (to some degree), do you think it would be possible to develop some sort of technology to make that happen? What kind of technology would that be? Feel free to speculate wildly.
3. This is sort of a stupid question, but I'll go ahead and ask it. Is there an atomic experience of, say, the smell of poo? Or is that the result of a cacophony (as it were) of smells? But then what about the scent of a rose? Or is that reducible to components that we can't experience by themselves?
Your next mind-body novel sounds ever more intriguing, Tina!
That’s an interesting way of describing my NP theory—idealism turned inside out. If reductive physicalism is mainly criticized for not taking minds seriously, idealism is mainly criticized for not taking matter/brains seriously. NP attempts to take both seriously by explaining how minds could be the real nature of brains beyond their perceptual appearances.
(1) Your first question is a penetrating one about whether conjoined twins might merge their minds entirely in my theory. I note in the Russellian monism paper that Tatiana and Krista Hogan have partially interconnected brain circuits that enable them to (for example) see through each other’s eyes, while not being able to access each other’ minds fully. This aligns with NP, which says that the mind resides in electrical activities along interconnected brain circuits. So, to address your question—minds would fully merge in such twins only when their brain circuits fully interconnect.
You also ask what would happen to the the twins minds (their persons, selfs, wills) if they merge. Various scenarios seem possible depending on how the brains circuits (including their decision-making circuits) interconnect. There could two different selves making their own decisions (but aware of each other’s perceptions, emotions, and feelings). Or one self could be wired to be dominant in decision making. Or one self could be eliminated. The possibilities might include entities such as corporate minds containing hierarchies of lesser minds with varying degrees of mutual awareness between them.
(2) What would this mind-melding technology look like? We’d have to start by mapping in detail how circuitries normally affect mental operations (much of this is still unknown). Then we’d have to explore experimentally how altering these connections would affect mental operations. As the paragraph above suggests, this would be highly complex. But a further consideration is that (as I mentioned to you yesterday) NP attributes emergent causal powers to conscious minds, for example, in thinking about emotions and actions. These mental powers transcend the causal powers that neuroscience attributes to neural circuits.
(3) Finally, you ask how overall sensory qualia arise from atomic-level sensory qualia. This is addressed best in one of my papers now under review. It focuses on visual images. Simply put, the three different primary colors arise in the three different color detectors in visual systems. The electrical connections between them unite them into an overall pictorial form. Some circuits blend the primary colors into myriad secondary colors. This gets complicated, but it’s testable. So, my answer is that simple sensory colors, odors, etc. combine via electrical circuitries to form more complex colors, odors, etc.
You sure ask thought-provoking questions, Tina!
Oops! Sorry Neal--a penultimate draft of the paper (A simple, testable mind-body solution?) can be found at https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones. I'd paste it here but I'm afraid it wouldn't get through to you. Incidentally, I've finished the first draft of that review of T&G. Perhaps I could send it to you to check before I send it to a journal? Tina said you like WWII--so do I! Hard for us baby boomers not to have it etched into our souls, I guess.
I won't be able to follow the technical scientific aspects of the paper, but I look forward to the metaphysics. And sure, feel free to send me your first draft of your review. Thanks so much for writing it!
I'm more than happy to write the T&G review, Neal--I'm genuinely interested in it. My review of T&G tries to tie its ideas about thought and language into my own. Concerning my mind-body paper, my main reason for posting it is just to see if it's clear to a general audience, in other words, where I confuse readers. I aspire to write clearly like you and Tina do so well.
I'm looking forward to reading your review, and I appreciate the compliment on our writing! Thank you!
By the way, aside from the science part, which I wouldn't expect you to bring to my level as that would require many, many pages, I think your explanation of the metaphysics is quite clear. Any confusion on my part comes from trying to conceptualize things in a way I'm not used to, but I think you've explained your view succinctly. I also appreciated your summary of various theories of mind and their problems (the section of your paper I've posted here) as the introduction to your theory. I think that helps orient readers to what it is you're trying to accomplish, even if they're already familiar with the various positions. I actually think your paper is clearer than Strawson's. He gets fairly rhetorical—which is amusing and refreshing when so much of academic philosophy is so dry—but of course all that fun with language can come at the price of clarity.
Thanks for those comments, Tina. In the book I'm writing on mind-body, I take more time to explain the science in clear, simple terms. I'm glad to hear you say the accounts of other theories is readable, and the metaphysics is succinct and clearer than Strawson's. I can also appreciate what you say about it being unusual and hard to wrap one's head around.
Looking forward to reading the book!
Hello Mostyn,
It’s nice to meet you. When Tina told me that she was excited about presenting a guest with a consciousness theory, I was happy to hear it. And mainly because of the likelihood that I could then reduce that person’s theory back to “magic” (by which I mean contrast it with “worldly” proposals). Of course I did promise to nevertheless be nice, though this way there’d be the potential to present something which seems more plausible. Aside from panpsychism however, your post didn’t leave me much to object with. So I figured that I’d write something up regarding how I’d further dismiss what you dismiss, my reservations about panpsychism, and maybe even open up the potential for consciousness to exist electromagnetically. Looking through the comments however I saw some vague references to EMF consciousness. I also remembered that Tam Hunt (a panpsychist EMF theorist), recently wrote a paper that presents a survey of modern EMF consciousness proposals. So I thought I’d see if you were included there. Not only were you included, but you were one of the people who put that survey together. So there should be plenty for you and I to potentially discuss!
At this point I suppose you may wonder who I am? Unfortunately, no one of distinction. Though my blogging friends are generally aware of my various positions, I do still need to put it all together concisely in one place for the consideration of interested people.
On your post, one thing I like to do regarding consciousness themes is reduce them back to either potentially being systemically causal or not. Natural proposals are preferable, I think, because here it’s all explained from within. Why try to figure something out in your world, when you think it involves inaccessible otherworldly dynamics that aren’t possible to measure? It seems to me that each of the classifications that you’ve mentioned ultimately rely upon otherworldly dynamics, that is beyond perfect physicalism, which is to say, systemic causality itself.
Most of my criticism in this regard has been reserved for the “non-reductive physicalists” that you mentioned. This is not only given their popularity, but also because they advertise themselves to be perfect physicalists. Ha! For example in my thumb pain thought experiment I force them to concede that if a computer were to scan the right marked paper for processing, to then print out the correct other marked paper, then something here (which they don’t identify) would thus experience what they do when their thumbs get whacked. While they may generally grasp that computers work by means of processed information that informs an appropriate substrate, I think their error is presuming that this substrate business can simply be omitted regarding consciousness. Unfortunately the standard path for “physical” consciousness proposals to take, seems to involve the bending of causality rules.
I like that you’re talking about testing your theory. There are two ways that I’ve come up with to test EMF consciousness. One seems inadvertently confirmed already. In modern brain to computer interface (BCI) they’re able to use cortically implanted micro electrodes that detect the electromagnetic radiation associated with the synchronous firing of neurons. Apparently given the words that someone is trying to speak, then crunched with the EMF from a detector at a precise location of the brain, a computer can be trained to just use the EMF to predict what that person is trying to say in general with pretty good accuracy. Why? Theoretically because the detector of this faint EMF is close enough to a source that ephaptically couples with the neurons which operate speech muscles. This is theoretical the sort of bridge by which consciousness causally affects the world in which it exists.
Another such test would be to put EMF transmitters (rather than detectors) in the brain that ought to produce something similar to the EMF that synchronously firing neurons create. If EMF happens to be what consciousness is made of, then a person who is subjected to such extraneous signals ought to be able to tell us that things thus get whacky for them, and presumably given the constructive and destructive EMF interference that alters the very thing that their consciousness happens to be. But if all sorts of appropriate EMF never create such reports, then fine, consciousness should not exist under the right parameters of electromagnetic field.
I wonder if you’ve thought about either sort of testing?
Thanks for that thoughtful message, Eric. You seem to side with reducing mental causation to physical causation, which is a central tenet of physicalists who reduce mental existence to physical existence--and even of nonreductive physicalists who don't reduce mental existence to physical existence. I'm not a physicalist when it comes to what exists or its causality (for example, see 4.3 of my "Arguing from consciousness to God's existence..." at https://philpeople.org/profiles/mostyn-w-jones).
Yes, I agree that computer learning has used EEG data to predicted what people are will say next or to image what people are seeing. But the predictions are crude, and the EEGs were not actually detecting conscious visual images in brains, but instead higher-level neural activity engaged in recognizing whose faces were present.
Concerning your proposed test using EMF transmitters, this might be difficult to do. Our conscious sensory experience arises only in highly specialized neural electrical activity whose circuitries are highly integrated. It would be difficult to replicate this electrical activity--and the associated sensory consciousness--artificially.
Again, thanks for your intriguing comments, Eric! I'm finding out that Tina has very interesting friends!
Thank you Mostyn. I’ve had a bit of a look at the paper that you suggested. Apparently given well publicized challenges you believe that consciousness must exist godly, as well as propose that this godly element of reality exists electromagnetically. I instead demand perfectly natural explanations for all that exists, but at least in an electromagnetic sense I suspect that evidence will eventually validate each of us. Of course theism predates science heavily and so modern theistic positions have progressively been refined where correspondence seems appropriate. If scientists determine that animal consciousness (such as ours, also known as “a soul”) exist by means of brain produced electromagnetic radiation, then you might become known for establishing an accepted theistic interpretation of this breakthrough. So in this sense I think our interests are the same. I haven’t yet considered the sort of testing that you propose, though let me clarify some things about the two types of EMF consciousness testing that I propose.
On Brain Computer Interface, I agree that over the years it’s mainly relied upon exterior technology such as detection from EEG. That’s been the easy way to go. But apparently this sort of information stream gets too distorted for the things that modern researchers have been working on. In the following experiment (https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2023/08/brain-implant-speech-als.html), they put two small EMF detection arrays in two different speech areas of a woman’s cerebral cortex (4 of them in total). Each were accessed by means of terminals on her scalp. Though her muscles had recently atrophied such that she could no longer speak, during training they had a computer relate the known words that she was trying to say with the detected EMF from her attempts. After 100 total session hours of correlating her attempts to speak with the detected EMF, the hope was that her non scripted speech could then be interpreted reasonably well by means of the detected EM field alone. It seems to have worked.
While I get the sense that BCI researchers are staying agnostic on the question of consciousness itself, here’s the narrative that I think EMF theorists like yourself ought to take. Of course the theory is that all elements of our consciousness exist by means of the proper parameters of EMF associated with the right sort of synchronous neuron firing. (For those who don’t know, non-synchronous firing should mainly yield energies that distort through the constructive to destructive interference from other such individual firing which thus yields informational garbage.) Theoretically two of these detection arrays (though apparently not the other two) were close enough to the neurons which operate her speech muscles by means of “ephaptic coupling”. Because the theory here is that attempts to speak should produce a signal which causes neurons to fire or not that operate speech muscles, theoretically the words that she was trying to say ought to correlate well with the detected EM field itself (should consciousness exist by means of a thusly produced field).
To help put this into perspective, consider the electromagnetic field associated with any standard computer. Except when specifically designed to do something (such as send a WiFi signal), such fields are also known to be informational garbage that a computer’s circuits need to be protected from in order for them to not function erroneously from time to time. But what are the chances that a non intended element of this field would correlate well with the things that, for example, a computer screen’s pixels are suppose to be doing? There should be no such correlation, I think, since relationally this field should simply be garbage. Similarly I don’t think the words that we mean to say should correlate with an electromagnetic field associated with the synchronous firing of neurons, that is unless that field happens to exist as the consciousness by which words get translated into associated muscle movements.
On my other proposed test, I agree that our conscious experiences only arise by means of highly specialized and integrated neural activity. But initially my test would not, as implied, be to replicate standard functional consciousness such as to see or feel something. Instead it would simply be to distort that highly specialized and integrated neural process. If researchers were to put a source of EMF radiation close enough to the neurons which create the experiencer, as well as transmit an EM frequency and amplitude that’s similar enough to constructively and destructively alter that EMF, then the experience ought to become distorted in associated ways (that is if what’s seen or whatever exists electromagnetically). Furthermore in order to succeed I’m not even saying that we’d need to distort an associated functional form of consciousness. All we should need to do is put EMF transmitters in appropriate parts of someone’s brain that could simulate the energies of known standard synchronous neuron firing. Then we’d see what results from such transmissions. If exhaustive testing suggests that no EMF transmutations ever alter someone’s consciousness (since the person ought to be able to tell us about their consciousness alteration, or at least show signs of it if they’re thus left incapacitated) then consciousness should not exist electromagnetically. But if there are signs of such alteration then there’d be room for further study. If vision thus becomes affected, could such transmissions in that sense be modulated, for example, to add certain colors or shapes to what the person sees? If experimentally validated that consciousness does exist electromagnetically, I think this could be one of the most transformative discoveries in science to date.
In any case I hope this suggests that we’re aligned in this regard, and so my proposals might help each of us get what we want. Here I’m referring to the scientific establishment of EMF consciousness should it indeed exist in the form of electromagnetic radiation as we suspect.
As one who finds panpsychism intriguing rather than preposterous, I read "A Simple Testable Mind-Body Solution" as an attempt to tackle the combination problem empirically, with EM fields as the proposed mechanism. For the benefit of most readers, it was necessary to include an explanation and justification of panpsychism, but this is where I find the questions most interesting. For me, the study of neural correlates is best left to scientists, and I don't feel qualified to comment on ion channels or electromagnetic brain activity.
Although I've been interested in the subject for some time, I have yet to sort out the relationship between panpsychism, dual aspect theory, and Russellian monism. They all hold a positive role for consciousness, and as such they all insist on a fundamental reality for consciousness. They all defy the deeply held assumption in the West that reality consists of substances in time and space, with emphatically no requirement for consciousness.
Some forms of panpsychism remain within the framework of substance, time, and space, proposing consciousness as something having spatio-temporal substance. Others are more radical: they propose that time and space, along with everything in it, are the manifestation of consciousness. This rather difficult doctrine has its strongest voice in Alfred North Whitehead. "Prehension" was his neutral term for consciousness, for better or worse. Prehensions, in their mutual interaction, express themselves in "occasions," but occasions do not have spatio-temporal locations; rather, the occasions themselves create space and time as expressions of their relationships (if I understand him).
Among radical versions of panpsychism, Whitehead's seems almost mechanical; in this he follows Leibniz. Other traditions assume reality to include consciousness, but look for its expression in the intelligible interaction of all beings, all things that exist. This I think is the Spinozan variety, of which we find rich echoes in Indigenous and Eastern traditions.
Each type of panpsychism asks a different question. Is it a substance? Is it a pattern? Is it a force? The first two can stand clear, more or less, of questions about God, but the third is not so lucky. The modern mind -- not without reason -- gravitates toward more causal approaches.
That was an excellent review of panpsychism, Jim. Russellian monism is the main proponent of panpsychism in contemporary Western philosophy. But it suffers from serious problems, which I list in my "A simple, testable mind-body solution" and detail in my "Avoiding Russellian monism's problems."
In the latter, I argue that it's full of deeply obscure ideas such as protophenomenal entities, emergent experience, mental combination, and grounded abstractions. In the latter case, for example, the abstract mathematical structures of physics get substantial spatio-temporal existence by being grounded in concrete, particular entities. This grounding seems just as mysterious now as in Plato’s day. These various ideas are arguably no less obscure than dualist ideas of causality or physicalist ideas of emergence. These three sets of problems in dualism, physicalism, and Russellian monism constitute the latest form of the mind-body problem.
I add that Galen Strawson's pure panpsychism can be refined to avoid all these problems, without raising problems of its own.
I haven't investigated Russellian monism in any detail. One reason is that it doesn't seem to be much discussed these days, in contrast to Galen Strawson's revised physicalism.
Still, for theoretical purposes, I hope to sort Russellian monism from other theories. In section 1.3 of "A simple, testable mind-body solution," where you describe prominent mind-body theories, you list "dual-aspect theory," which appeals to "an underlying substance (God or nature)." Later you say, "Another view is Russelian monism." But the explanation of Russellian monism invokes dual-aspect theory. Here I may be misreading the text, so for clarity I'll quote at length:
"Another view today is Russellian monism. It typically says that physics describes the world only in terms of abstract mathematical structures and dynamics. Objects are thus described extrinsically via what they do to each other, not intrinsically via what they are in themselves. These monists say that these intrinsic natures exist and ground the abstract descriptions. Without this ground, the world would exist only as abstract structure lacking substance or qualities. An example is Chalmers’ (1996, p. 305) dual-aspect view, in which 'Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside.' These monist views are highly complicated."
I guess I'm confused as to the relationship between dual-aspect theory and Russellian monism. I don't think this is your fault. They're often discussed as if they're separate, and yet one is frequently portrayed as a sub-class of the other.
The other issue I meant to raise was that your own variety of panpsychism asserts substance, at first in a physically non-commital way, but immediately afterwards as occupying space: "In NP, consciousness is thus the world’s real, underlying substance (where “substance” merely denotes the fundamental stuff comprising the universe). It occupies space, exerts forces, and is the universe’s sole constituent." I wanted to point out that not all types of panpsychism conceive of consciousness in terms of spatial location (for example, as identifiable with a local electromagnetic field).
As that quoted paragraph pointed out, Jim, the old dual aspect theory has been recently adopted by some Russellian monists. As my paper on Russellian monism points out, there are many versions of Russellian monism. In fact, Strawson is a Russellian monist too. Also, there are many, many versions of panpsychism (Skribina surveyed them all recently). Mine is just one example of it. Thanks for those perceptive comments, Jim!
Thanks for that Eric. I too demand evidence from the physical and natural sciences. My various papers stick closely to evidence from recent neuroscience to argue that existing theories of neuroscience and neurophilosophy about mind/body relations are all deeply problematic—and that my panpsychist neuroelectrical approach might avoid these problems in testable ways.
Where God comes into all this is that neuroscience fails to fully explain how minds arose in physical ways (both reductive and nonreductive physicalism are highly problematic here). So, the only viable account of how minds arose is in terms of God’s mind. I argue this latter point exclusively in “Arguments from consciousness to God’s existence.
Concerning your test, I was intrigued by you question "could such [EM] transmissions in that sense be modulated, for example, to add certain colors or shapes to what the person sees?" I addressed something like this point in note 14 of "Electromagnetic-field theories of qualia: can they improve upon standard neuroscience?" (Jones & Hunt, 2023). There, I suggest that we could attribute different qualia to the different resonances of neuroelectrical activity in color detectors, or to the different masses and rest energies of neuroelectrical activity in color detector. This may have some relevance to any tests of how qualia arise.
Hope these comments were relevant to your point, Eric