This post really tickled my brain! Great read, and I'm going to have to re-read it and think about it to fully absorb. I've been toying with the idea of writing a post about physicalism and realism, and this post got the gears spinning. Some first-read thoughts...
Do you distinguish physicalism from materialism? Those that do seem to seem to see the former as more accepting of emergent phenomenon as fundamental and irreducible. Whereas materialists insist everything is ultimately explainable in terms of the lowest level of physical laws (QFT and GR). FWIW, my definition of physicalism stresses an external material world of matter and energy that was here before me, will be here after me, and in which I'm just a temporary component.
> "How can we take our phenomenal experiences as unassailably given, but not our intentions?"
Oof! Yes! I love that aspect of what you're saying. Nail, head. Isn't that why brains evolved in the first place (in all animals)? As a way to navigate and survive (even thrive in) the physical world.
> "Intentional agency lies at the heart of conscious experience; for it, determinism is inconceivable."
And, oh my, yes, determinism. One of the more misunderstood and misused concepts. Worthy of books, let alone posts (let alone *comments*). I think with both brains and determinism, we're not capable of truly grasping the numerical scale involved. Brains with 500 *trillion* synapses (and myriad other influences at the same scale). Physical determinism involves way more particles. So many that we use exponents. A gram of carbon has 50 sextillion atoms (50×10²¹). Our understanding fails badly at such scales. And quantum does add an element of randomness. What's not clear is to what extent that randomness amplifies to the classical scale. But reality, because of scale, is effectively random.
I also like your point that "mind" is a much better word than "consciousness". Much harder to dispute the meaning.
I'm glad you found my post inspires you to write. Looking forward to it!
Honestly I think physicalism is where materialists go when matter stops mattering so much, but the essential attitude is the same. I can see why some who think the way I do would just say, "Meh, it's the same thing!" I'm trying to respect the differences between the two, even though to me those differences hardly matter, given where I'm coming from (no not cloud cuckoo land! I swear! But I think my next post will have people thinking I've lost my marbles.)
On the other hand, I see the move from materialism to physicalism as creating some confusion over what 'physical' means, or I should say confusion on top of confusion, and I've been considering writing a post about this. Materialism was tricky enough considering—since you bring up scale—the materialist's world was filled with tangible objects known through sensory perception, or so the old empiricist story went, concrete objects which could be broken down to some fundamental 'substance' of which all tangibles concrete things, physical things, were composed. Maybe there are still materialists in this classical sense, I don't know, but it seems most would-be materialists have switched to physicalism, which allows a great deal more flexibility over what counts as physical. Too much, in my opinion. Or rather, maybe we need to be more precise in our discussions of what counts as physical, because I suspect we're conflating theories with the things theories are supposed to describe, to put it crudely.
As for reducibility, I think we're thinking along the same lines on that. Physicalism is a broad category with plenty of room for in-fighting. :) Physicalists don't necessarily think 'mental states' are fully reducible to brain states; they differ in their views about this.
"FWIW, my definition of physicalism stresses an external material world of matter and energy that was here before me, will be here after me, and in which I'm just a temporary component." I think physicalists would agree with you on that!
I'm glad you agree with me on agency, but what I'm saying is that intentional agency (as it's experienced) is a given, a necessary feature of our experience that we can't be mistaken about without deep skepticism, so whether we 'believe it or not' is not dependent on theories about evolution or any other scientific theory. It should be the reverse, actually. Theories should be accounting for the primary data of experience...that is, after all, what empiricism used to be about. So given this, the way I'm using the word 'agency' isn't meant to invoke broader implications about ethical responsibility, or at least that would have to be argued for or described more fully...I'll just leave that aside because it's too much to take on in a blog post. All I wanted to get across was that there is this basic experience, from the inside, as it were, of intention.
"I think with both brains and determinism, we're not capable of truly grasping the numerical scale involved." Indeed! It may turn out that scale determines whether and how far determinism applies. But then again, scale is just who's looking at what, is it not?
Perhaps I oversimplify but I see physicalism (and materialism) as general metaphysical commitments more than theories. They're foundations for theories that consider matter monism axiomatic. I think the question isn't "what is physical" (because, yeah, that gets complicated fast) but "does this take place in the physical world". Are the rules of baseball physical? Debatable. Are they part of our physical world? Definitely.
With you 100% on intention and agency. It's central to understanding minds. Nagel seems to be saying something similar. I was suggesting *why* it evolved: to navigate us (intentionally) through the (real, physical) world. Same as with that inside of intention, the inside of free will is another experience I think we should take more seriously.
Synchronicity: Finally reading Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and just read a part that touches on this. He speaks of the "story" we narrate about our experience (and suggests researchers into consciousness treat it like fiction as a self-contained reality). He says that *regardless* of what we imagine is or isn't happening, zombie or not, the consistency and richness of the story our consciousness tells demands explanation.
Scale is numeric and relative to all of reality (Plank scale up to visible universe scale) so not really observer dependent. New and unexpected behaviors emerge from systems comprised of large numbers of relatively independent units. "Mob behavior" carries some of the flavor, but mobs are infinitesimally tiny compared to the large numbers I mean. Ultimately, I expect scale to be part of the answer to the Hard Problem. IIT already steps in that direction.
"I think the question isn't "what is physical" (because, yeah, that gets complicated fast) but "does this take place in the physical world". Are the rules of baseball physical? Debatable. Are they part of our physical world? Definitely."
But doesn't everything take place in the physical world, according to physicalists?
I haven't been able to get into Dennett, and it's not just because I don't track with his view. At least I don't think. I can't seem to understand what he's saying. Something about the way he writes is baffling to me.
Hhave you read Erik Hoel's book on scale in science and causal emergence? You might like it.
Heh, well, yes, that’s the metaphysical commitment. Any phenomena must have a physical basis. I think maybe the difference is that physicalism has to be an axiom rather than a conclusion. It’s an early fork in the road.
I’m actually liking Dennett more than I thought I would from what I’ve heard about him from others. He does have a style I find slightly off-putting, his sense that he’s figured it out and everyone else hasn’t. But I think I can see what others find attractive about his views. Don’t know that I’ll end up sharing them, though.
Not familiar with Hoel. I’ll keep it in mind, thanks!
WRT dualism, from a physicalist point of view, the only dualism I can see is between objective (neural correlates) and subjective (experienced phenomenon). Presuming an eventual understanding of the Hard Problem (why meat can have opinions) -- the dualism, as such, seems similar to the dualism between the views from inside and outside a house. We just don't understand the house, yet, because it has a level of complexity far beyond our experience or *current* physical laws.
An excellent overview of the issues with property dualism.
I agree that dualism has serious issues. Property dualism really just strikes me as the deism of the philosophy of mind. Once we've reasoned ourselves into a concept having no causal effects in the world, it seems like we've concluded it isn't there, but aren't yet ready to let it go. Substance dualism has the interaction problem, which at least preserves some causal influence. But if so, it becomes something that science should eventually be able to detect and study.
On whether to "save the experiences", I think a lot depends on what we mean by "experience". Did Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton save the planets and stars when they redefined what they were? And while Copernicus saved the crystalline spheres, Tycho Brahe killed them, although explaining how they could not be there wasn't achieved until Newton.
I think the physicalist (which for me means "mechanist") understanding of experience isn't that different from the non-physicalist one. It does mean letting go of the idea that it's fundamental, as well as some other assumptions. Rather than being utterly ineffable, it becomes merely very difficult to describe. Rather than being fundamentally private, it becomes very difficult to observe (and effectively impossible before brain scanning technologies). And rather than introspection being incorrigible, it becomes another perception, no more reliable than our perceptions of the outside world. I struggle to see anything about this version of experience that gives up anything crucial.
But I always like to ask, what am I missing with this description? What about experience is being fundamentally overlooked or not accounted for?
In terms of your third footnote, I'd say that science is never finalized. However, while a theory that has been heavily validated empirically may be replaced later by a better one, the new theory has to have at least the same empirical success. Newton's laws are still good enough for most NASA missions, even though we know Einstein's general relativity is more accurate. GR will be replaced someday with a more fundamental theory, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. It's just been too successful. So any description of reality that contradicts scientific theories that have shown their reliability, needs to account for those contradictions. There is wiggle room here, but it's going to be very limited and nuanced for anything in our everyday world, such as brains.
Thanks! Glad we agree on property dualism and mental causality. It does strike me as odd that many take that as a given.
As for 'save the experiences', I was just riffing off of 'save the appearances' although the two are not altogether different. So while empiricism used to mean knowledge derived from sensory perception, hence 'appearances', I take 'sense perception' to be more complicated than it seems. So the experiences in need of saving would include the necessary features of experience on the whole, which would need to be determined through inter-subjective introspection...in other words, thinking and talking.
"It does mean letting go of the idea that it's fundamental, as well as some other assumptions."
I do take experience to be fundamental in the sense that there's no going around it. All of science is done by people who experience.
"Rather than being utterly ineffable, it becomes merely very difficult to describe."
I don't like the word 'ineffable' either. I think the only time that word applies is if we're trying to describe something like the smell of a rose to someone with no notion of smell. I don't think it's impossible to describe the smell of a rose to those who have a reference for comparison. Anyway, the entire point of phenomenology is to describe experience accurately, to uncover its laws or universal features. This is introspection, to be sure, and it's not scientific in the sense of quantifying the qualitative, but I think any science of consciousness should be embracing such a collective venture rather than trying to show why introspection is wholly unreliable. If that were true, science, too, would be thrown into question, since science is made up of the experiences of scientists.
"Rather than being fundamentally private, it becomes very difficult to observe (and effectively impossible before brain scanning technologies)."
I don't think minds can be visually observed—Leibniz's mill applies here—but minds can be known by minds to a degree, although just how this works is an interesting question. I do think consciousness is fundamentally private in the sense that you can't directly experience what I'm experiencing in exactly the manner in which I'm experiencing it because you are not me. Privacy is the consequence of having a unity of consciousness. That said, I think if we investigate experience we'll find it makes little sense to imagine ourselves as fundamentally divorced from the world and each other. I don't think brain scanning technologies will give us any greater certainty or finer detail about the mind than we can get by simply talking to each other, although who knows what technologies might come next. I do think in order for any technology like that to work we will need a better understanding of how we already understand each other's minds.
"And rather than introspection being incorrigible, it becomes another perception, no more reliable than our perceptions of the outside world." Not sure what you mean here.
"So any description of reality that contradicts scientific theories that have shown their reliability, needs to account for those contradictions."
What description of reality do you have in mind?
You're welcome on the acknowledgement and link—thank you for the conversation. I'm wondering if you're planning on starting up your own Substack sometime? I think you'd do well here.
On mental causality, yeah, I think people who hold these views want to resist the epiphenomenal conclusion. You noted Chalmers' response, admit it as a possibility, but then largely gesture toward vague "subtle" ways it may not be the case. Early Frank Jackson, to his credit, accepted the logical implications of the view. Of course, that led early Jackson to become later Jackson.
"All of science is done by people who experience."
Sure, but science never takes any one experience as absolute. It has to account for our experiences, not trust the intuitive assumptions we make from them, at least other than as starting points.
On ineffable, I like Suzi's recent article on seeing through sound. But more broadly, I always find the solution is to look at the upstream causes of something, and the downstream effects, and then back up and ascertain whether there's anything in between other than the cause-effect relation. Many want to insist there's still something intrinsic in between, but then we're back to epiphenomenalism again.
"you can't directly experience what I'm experiencing in exactly the manner in which I'm experiencing it because you are not me."
True. But it seems like that same relation holds between my laptop and phone. My laptop can never be in the same state as the phone because it isn't a phone. It can emulate the phone in a virtual machine, tracking every aspect of its processing state. But it can never be the phone and so can never be in the same information state. But nothing about that tempts us to think the phone's state is fundamental, at least not in the relevant senses.
On introspection being no more reliable than other perception, just as we can misperceive things, it seems clear to me we can mis-introspect things. And just as we can reach the wrong conclusions based on our perceptions, we can also do so based on introspection, even if the immediate impression it gives us is accurate. This is pretty nuanced, but it seems like all we need to avoid experience being an intractable metaphysical mystery.
"What description of reality do you have in mind?"
I didn't have anything specific in mind. I was just responding to your thoughts in the third footnote. It's why I think Chalmers and others are right to respect the science, even though it constrains them.
On starting a Substack, I put a placeholder out there years ago, but have never really used it. (I have similar stubs in Blogspot and Tumblr.) I struggle with the idea of walking away from Wordpress. I just have too many things wired into it. Eric Schwitzgebel has been cross posting between his Blogspot and Substack sites. I've contemplated doing something like that, if it can be done without a lot of work. But work-work has been crowding out mindspace for figuring all that out. Maybe at some point.
I don't mean to say we can't mis-introspect things, or rather, we can mischaracterize what we're experiencing. This is very common! In fact, I think people mischaracterize what they're experiencing when they think they're experiencing a mind-independent world. But I'll talk about this in the next post.
To give you another perspective on your question, what are you missing with that description, I think you’re missing the phenomena you’re trying to explain. You’ve adapted the phenomena to fit your theory when it should be the other way around.
For example, how can you avoid that experience is “fundamentally private” and so can now observe it? I assume you’ll say we can observe brain scans? But brain scans seem irrelevant, we can already do this by observing behaviour. If you see someone with a red face, yelling and throwing stuff, you infer their inner experience is anger. That isn't observing anger, it's inferring anger from other physical states correlated with it.
I think we have to make a distinction between having an experience and learning about it. I can't have your experience or you mine. But as I noted to Tina, that's the same as saying my laptop can never be in the same state as my phone. Even if my laptop is running a virtual version of the phone, it will never be in the same state as the phone. There's an uncrossable gap between my laptop and phone, but it's not one any of us are tempted to think has metaphysical implications.
On the other hand, my laptop can have an arbitrary degree of information on the phone's states. In the same sense, I can learn about someone's angry state. Of course, there's a causal chain between that state and my inferences. In the case of behavior, this could be misleading. (Maybe they're acting, or showing their internal state in an unusual manner.)
But consider how we know our own states. Here the assumption is often that we somehow know infallibly. But it is an assumption. For a physicalist, any such knowledge would also be an inference from a causal chain from that state. It might be recursive in this case, but it's fundamentally the same as the external inference, albeit perhaps more reliable. (But not perfectly. We've all seen something like someone yelling, "I'm not angry!")
So our knowledge of someone's internal state through behavior is an inference, but so is our knowledge of our own internal states. Which still leave fundamental privacy not established.
The point about private access isn’t that two people can’t be in the same state, or that we can’t learn about other people’s conscious states. The issue is the unique way we “know” about the existence of our own conscious states. The only way we know other people have conscious states is by inference, but that isn’t how we know the existence of our own.
You make a distinction between having an experience and learning about it, but that distinction doesn’t apply to our own experiences. This isn’t an assumption, it’s an observation. To have an experience is to know it. Directly, immediately, privately, and so also infallibly.
For example, maybe I’m drunk and have an experience of pink elephants dancing down the street. I can reflect on the experience and infer it isn’t veridical by referring to my knowledge about elephants and the effects of intoxicants. But I don’t infer that I experienced it. Even in the case of illusions or hallucinations, the experience is the reality. It’s in this sense that our knowledge of our conscious states is infallible, not in the sense that it accurately corresponds to an objective external reality.
And by the same token if someone yells, I’m not angry, they can’t be mistaken about the fact they’re experiencing a certain state. They can be mistaken in their subsequent inference or interpretation of what that experience means. But the existence of the experience itself is what’s at stake, not the particulars of the phenomenology, or how to classify it or communicate it in objective terms.
I pointed out above that this isn't a dispute between experience being absolutely private vs not private at all, or absolutely infallible vs no privileged access at all. It's a dispute between being absolutely private and effectively private in practice with current technology, and between absolute infallibility and (sometimes) more reliable access than outside inferences, again with current technology.
With that in mind, consider what about your experiences leave you to conclude the absolute version of these attributes rather than the in practice versions. You say it's an observation rather than an assumption. What about the observation, what specific aspects of it, mandate the view you're asserting?
I will admit there is a very limited sense of infallibility having a reasonable claim to being true, in that it seems hard to doubt the *seeming* of how things seem to us. That's the sense I get you're defending with your examples. But if so, it only means that the seeming is itself what it seems, but says nothing about what it purports to be about. The stronger version of infallibility is needed for the metaphysical implications many want to take from it.
"And by the same token if someone yells, I’m not angry, they can’t be mistaken about the fact they’re experiencing a certain state."
I'm not following the distinction here. Are you saying that they really do know they're angry and are just being dishonest? Or that they're mistaken about being angry but not that they're in some conscious state? If only the latter, then that seems true, but again in a trivial fashion, and doesn't seem to be the actual subject matter of their statement.
The problem with introspection is there is a mountain of psychological evidence showing it's no more reliable than any other perception.
Someone can insist that the areas that can't currently be tested are still infallible, but I can't see how they can argue that it isn't a major assumption.
Thanks Mike, it’s very interesting to understand your perspective in more detail.
I assume that the question here is to explain what experience “is”. We’re not talking about explaining the particular contents of the seeming, or the meaning of it, or the function of it, or any kind of objective description or classification of it as xyz state of consciousness. The latter are all part of your original distinction “learning” about the seeming.
So, I’d reject that distinction as irrelevant to the question at hand and stick only to the “having” of the experience, or in other words, what is experience as a phenomena?
As to the observed properties of experience that give us absolute attributes - It’s a singular subjective point of view which makes it absolutely private. It’s absolutely infallible in the sense we can’t be mistaken about having it. There’s no possible gap between appearance and reality because we’re explaining the existence of the appearances.
I think any disagreement here turns on your original distinction, the having and the learning. But it's only the having that is relevant to the metaphysical question.
Thanks Prudence. We won't agree here, and that's totally fine. All of my most interesting conversations are with those I disagree with.
I can't find an explanation for the absolute attributes in your response so much as a re-assertion of them. Maybe I'm just missing that explanation. But I won't ask for it again. Your response is pretty common, which is why I don't see these attributes, in their absolute sense, as real issues. Maybe I'll see it different at some point.
Sorry to cut in, but this point about yelling "I'm not angry" is instructive.
When someone yells "I'm not angry!", their physiological indicators tell us they are angry, and it's not necessary to inspect their brain states. Their heart rates, adrenaline level, blood pressure, breathing patterns, and so on may be enough. For that matter, the tone and volume of their voice and the expression on their face or the visible tension in their body may be enough, although at this level they can at least attempt dissimulation.
All of it is explained by the fact that they feel angry. Cognitively they may not acknowledge this, but I would argue that they feel it, as surely as they feel their heart rate. I hope the claim that they actually feel angry is not in dispute. The point I think people are trying to make is that when you observe the indications, you do not feel angry. You are simply incapable of feeling their anger, although you can feel your own. It's in this sense that their anger is private.
On whether the yeller is feeling their anger, that might depend on what we mean by "feel" and how we think about the idea of unconscious feelings. They don't seem aware of their anger yet. Put another way, they haven't learned about their own angry state yet. It reminds me of kids who have an injury but don't notice it until someone points it out to them, at which point they do feel it intensely.
Sure, to feel their anger you would have to be them. But that just seems to put us back to the laptop / phone analogy. It seems like for privacy to have the metaphysical implications often taken from it, it must be more than just not being the other system, it has to prevent us from learning about their internal states.
The only way to avoid this is to posit metaphysically intrinsic properties, but now we're back to something causally impotent.
We're beginning to tease apart the ideas of having a feeling and being aware of a feeling. If the physiological indications are that someone is angry, does this mean they necessarily feel angry? If the answer is "not always," then the physiological observations tell us nothing about how they feel, which I think runs contrary to your claim. I'll wait for your reaction to that before pursuing the line of thought.
I've been ignoring the phone/laptop thing. Can we simplify it by talking about two laptops in the same state, or does that leave something out?
The idea that their outward behavior tells us everything about their internal states seems like old school behaviorism. My view is functionalist, where the internal states matter. Obviously I do think if we knew *everything* about their physical state, that would, in principle, tell us their internal states. But we don't have that in the scenario of just watching someone behave like that.
I paired the laptop with a phone in that analogy to head off the inevitable counter that two digital laptops of the same make and model, with exactly the same components and software, just coming off the assembly line, could effectively be in the same state. Of course, as their histories diverge, actually getting them back into the same state becomes increasingly difficult, although it's possible in principle. Going with the phone heads off that discussion.
That said, if you have another reason for wanting to do two laptops, I'm game.
I just noticed something about what you said here: "Substance dualism has the interaction problem, which at least preserves some causal influence. But if so, it becomes something that science should eventually be able to detect and study."
I agree with what you're saying for the most part, except that last bit about science and substance dualism. Traditional substance dualism by its very structure doesn't admit that mind is subject to physical laws, but instead claims that mind is of an entirely different nature from physical substances and equally fundamental. So for the substance dualist, science can't study mind because mind is not physical. So despite the interaction problem, at least substance dualism makes sense and accords with our experience of ourselves as causal agents and as having phenomenal experience. I'm currently in the midst of reading Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff, and as he puts it: “If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond, “Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities!” This is exactly the way I've been seeing these issues all along. I've been thinking, "Why all of sudden is everyone supposing science can explain mind? I thought we settled this! That's a no!"
So property dualism is giving up causal agency in order to make consciousness ultimately abide by physical laws. The problem with that stance is, as you point out, what makes phenomenal experience special, then? Why shouldn't it, too, be subject to physical laws? The justifications for this special treatment of phenomenal experience within the paradigm of physicalism have been head splitting...and on top of that, property dualism still has the interaction problem!
I think it was David Bentley Hart who said of Daniel Dennett's position something like "at least it's consistent".
I could have been more clear in that statement. I didn't mean science would be able to study the mind in total in a substance dualism case. I meant it should be able to detect the interaction and study it. If the physical is not causally closed, then those breaks in causality, the points where the non-physical and physical interact, become detectable, at least in principle.
Of course, this is often the point where people want to mix in quantum mysticism. Maybe the interaction is in the wave function collapse, or something along those lines. But scientists are studying the wave function collapse, or perhaps more accurately, the dynamics that make it seems like there is one.
In both cases, there is something for science to study. Maybe we can't get to the ultimate reality, but if it has causal effects in the world, we can study the causal chain as far as possible.
Yeah, Goff is one of those people who want science to "stay in its lane" and away from his favorite notions. But if scientists listened to philosophers and theologians, no one would have explored how the human body works, the origins of species, the origins of the universe, or many other things. It's worth noting that Galileo got in trouble for not listening in that manner. He pushed the boundaries where could for his time.
I had the impression "physicalism" was the new word for "materialism," meant to replace the simplistic idea that everything is "matter" with a more sophisticated idea that everything is "physical," meaning that it could also be energy, or fields, or whatever. Regardless, it's still just "there" and it follows its own rules. Consciousness and agency have nothing intrinsic to do with it. The former comes after the fact (somehow), and the latter has no place at all, if we're honest about it.
I applaud your emphasis on agency. At first I thought, "Yes! This is what philosophy now needs to discuss!", until I remembered that way back when, in Philosophy 101, we were talking about "free will." (We were also talking about "epiphenomenalism," which is indeed the generic name for Russell's "property dualism," as far as I can see.) It seems as if "agency" is the new word for "free will."
The latter is slightly cumbersome. Why did we always add the word "free"? I think the unspoken assumption was that the will had to be free _from_ something, namely, the cause and effect that underpinned the case for determinism. Somehow this never crossed paths with the distinction in political philosophy between "freedom from" and "freedom to." But with the word "agency," we seem to recover that second sense of freedom. We get a clearer sense of an "agent," who does not just _have_ agency, but _is_ agency. It's no longer a case of a separate entity, the "mind," that somehow enjoys a property of "freedom" over against a deterministic universe. Free will confronts the actuality of the past, but agency faces the possibility of the future. It's a nuance, but an important one. I think Heisenberg is onto something like this when he talks about "registering decisions" in "the transition from the possible to the actual." "Agency" suggests a positive, proactive, creative _act_ in the unfolding of the universe, whereas "free will" suggests an arbitrary and (paradoxically) reactive stance to the existing facts of the universe. "Agency" feels participatory in a way that "free will" does not.
But why "agency" rather than simply "will"? This could be because "will" carries resonances from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche of something existential, something determined and teleological, whereas "agency" suggests merely a liveliness of response in the moment.
You ask whether there's something besides a "physicalist panpsychism," with its "assumption that we lack agency." Between your link here and the ones in your footnote, I have some reading to catch up on. But I can't agree with Martin Korth's view that "Panpsychism is essentially based on the same notions of space and passive mental causality as materialism," because I've read Alfred North Whitehead, and if he counts as a panpsychist, Korth is just wrong. Whitehead's unremitting critique of materialism rests on exposing our unreconstructed notions of space and time. For him, the agency of "occasions" is at the very heart of reality; space, time, and matter are built from it -- to say nothing of the "sensations" on which much of modern philosophy has been constructed.
But yes! -- Agency is what we need to think more about.
I think we're on the same wavelength when it comes to our understanding of physicalism, except there are some panpsychists who are also physicalists, so they might say consciousness is either part of the physical world or makes up the physical world, but would differ on how they tease out these details. I don't quite trust myself to explain what they mean, but I imagine it's something like "the world is really made up of atomic consciousness stuff", or some such thing and to whatever degree, and these atoms of mind stuff would have to coalesce—according to physical laws—before they became consciousness as we know it. But whatever the case, agency would still be left out of that account. If I understand it right, physicalist panpsychists are coming from the epistemological direction of your basic physicalist, only they're adding mind stuff into the mix, because, hell, why not? Quantum mechanics seems to give people a sense that it's a metaphysical free for all, but none of the physicalist theories so far as I know take experienced agency seriously.
"It seems as if "agency" is the new word for "free will."
Maybe? I see the two as slightly different, although possibly very much connected, something that still needs to be teased out, as you appear to be doing here. I can see this topic getting really really big, so I forced myself not to go there. But I totally agree that agency feels participatory in a way that free will doesn't. It's not something we even need to work at or choose or decide. Free will, on the other hand, has a more driving-interrupting-forceful connotation. And yes, why not just 'will'? Good point.
Yes, so true, we don't 'have' agency. That's a good way of putting it. Agency isn't about subversion of nature's laws, or even dominion over the vehicles of our bodies operating in space. I think Husserl helps here—and since I know you know what I'm talking about, I'll just go ahead and talk in his lingo—because we have the horizon or life-world background into which our intentionality is directed, there is at each moment an openness and endless possibility to our directed-ness. It's not something we have to will or even be aware of. That background of possibility is always already there, even when we're feeling (emotionally) trapped or stuck or feeling like we're nothing more than billiard balls bouncing around in a billiard ball universe. Really, thinking about intentionality is kind of mind-blowing and a bit disconcerting. It's really more like retrospecting than introspecting. We can't really experience ourselves as intentional agents in the most accurate way while we're describing it since our describing interferes with the experience. And yet in reflection we can see our own unawareness of our intentionality is somehow a part of it, which makes the notion of free will as some sort of dominion over physical laws seem rather klutzy. How can there be free will in a deterministic universe? How can we make a real choice when we can't choose who we are? These seem like strange questions in light of our unreflective agential-intentionality. Anyway.
I haven't read Whitehead, so I'm not sure whether he counts as a panpsychist. This term is relatively new and I suspect it doesn't work so well to accurately describe past philosophers. I've read some papers on idealist panpsychism that I found didn't fit this mold Korth is talking about, but I'm not sure that's a great paper to read. The title sounds very au courant, but I found it somewhat tedious. I just meant to use it to show there's a huge variety of panpsychisms out there.
In a comment at my blog you asked about Whitehead, and I suggested reading his 1925 _Science and the Modern World_ (SMW), among others. Today I supplemented that recommendation with a quote where he singles out Berkeley for special praise. I want to repeat that quote here, and expand on it, because it has special relevance to the current discussion:
"The man whose ideas I must consider at some length is Bishop Berkeley. Quite at the commencement of the epoch, he made all the right criticisms, at least in principle. . . But all the same, he failed to affect the main stream of scientific thought. It flowed on as if he had never written. Its general success made it impervious to criticism, then and since. The world of science has always remained perfectly satisfied with its peculiar abstractions. They work, and that is sufficient for it.
"The point before us is that this scientific field of thought is now, in the twentieth century, too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more especially urgent in the biological sciences."
If you want to know more about Whitehead's view of where Berkeley went wrong, you'll just have to read the book! -- No, seriously, I'll come back and explain if you don't have the time. But it's a good book, I think you'd like it.
Was Whitehead a panpsychist? Tam Hunt thinks so, and regards him as a major influence. I've had a chance to read the supplementary material in your links, and Hunt does a fairly good job of conveying Whitehead's ideas, with a couple of caveats. On Hunt's interpretation, an electron's experience presumably "consists of little more than rudimentary perceptions of the outside world, through its being influenced by the fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and so on, and a choice as to how to manifest in the next moment based on those rudimentary perceptions." I would interpret Whitehead as saying rather that electromagnetism, gravity, and so on are the result of choices as to how to manifest in the next moment -- as is the electron itself. The choices are made by "actual occasions," which, in as much as they exist, I suppose might constitute a substrate for an open-minded "physicalism."
Hunt also explains that these actual occasions, or "actual entities" (Whitehead's terminology is not always consistent) oscillate between subject and object in discrete intervals of time. This is not quite right; in Whitehead's terms they oscillate between "presentational immediacy," where they take in what is going on in the world of occasions around them, and "causal efficacy," where they create a participatory response, which for other occasions becomes part of what is going on. I think this does involve discrete steps of non-continuous time, but not necessarily in a synchronous way; as I interpret it, each occasion runs on its own "clock," so to speak. (Whether this has anything to do with wavelengths in the subatomic world, Whitehead never commented, as far as I know.)
Hunt talks about the position Strawson ends up taking, that a true physicalist must concede the existence, and therefore the physical nature, of experience. He spots the problem: "But on a more natural reading of ‘physics’ and ‘physical,’ experience does not qualify. Experience is not a fundamental property that physicists need to posit in their theory of the external world; physics forms a closed, consistent theory even without experience." Because of this, people who consider themselves true physicalists don't feel the compulsion to concede the existence of experience. Hunt himself rejects the objection: "I believe that physics is a closed system only through the invocation of unwarranted assumptions, not established fact." But Whitehead also has something to say about this, indirectly, in SMW:
"It is easy enough to find a theory, logically harmonious and with important applications in the region of fact, provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence. Every age produces people with clear logical intellects, and with the most praiseworthy grasp of the importance of some sphere of human experience, who have elaborated, or inherited a scheme of thought which exactly fits those experiences which claim their interest. Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with contradictory instances. What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense."
"We can't really experience ourselves as intentional agents in the most accurate way while we're describing it since our describing interferes with the experience."
I didn't really follow up on this aspect of your comment, about Husserl. But it reminds me of some things Thomas Nagel said in _The View from Nowhere_, which I quoted in one of my posts about the book ("Nagel's Demon" and the Two Eyes):
'What he offers is “not a solution to the problem of free will, but a substitute”, in the form of “the essentially incomplete objective view, or incomplete view for short. The incomplete view of of ourselves in the world includes a large blind spot, behind our eyes, so to speak, that hides something we cannot take into account in acting, because it is what acts.” (p. 127). '
Well, I began reading Strawson's "Why physicalism entails panpsychism," and right off the bat (not Nagel's bat!), I noticed a divergence from Whitehead. In the first paragraph, Strawson begins, "I will equate ‘concrete’ with ‘spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located'." Compare this with Whitehead in _Science and the Modern World_, at the end of Chapter 3:
"The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand _matter_ with its _simple location_ in space and time, on the other hand _mind_, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact.
"Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of _misplaced concreteness_ to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century."
So, spatio-tempotal location and its concreteness are in question for Whitehead, but Strawson begins by invoking them for his "view about the actual universe." I might have the wrong end of the stick, but I have the feeling this is not about Whitehead's version of panpsychism. I'll continue reading. . .
Yeah, it sounds to me like Whitehead is not a physicalist panpsychist. What you're talking about is exactly the thing I want to read about. I get the feeling I'll like him. Ordering the book now!
I imagine a physicalist might nod along in agreement with your critique of property dualism right up until they hit the ice cream example. To me, that's where your article gets interesting. It feels like you're presenting us with a choice between accepting physicalism and denying genuine agency, or preserving genuine agency and rejecting physicalism.
This makes me wonder: Is it possible to have a middle ground between determinism and randomness? What do you think about arguments that we ultimately face just two logical possibilities? One might argue that our actions are either determined by prior causes, or they are random. There is no middle ground. Wouldn't any proposed 'third way' just collapse into either determination or randomness? Even quantum mechanics, often invoked to escape determinism, only gives us randomness, not the kind of genuine agency you're describing.
But I'm curious about something else, too. You mention hoping there's no such thing as physicalist idealism -- which made me wonder: What about an idealist who denies free will?
This isn't just a hypothetical -- there are Buddhist traditions that seem to take this position. They view consciousness as fundamental (not physical reality), yet still see our sense of agency as an illusion. They'd say both the ice cream desire and the action arose from prior causes, even if those causes are mental rather than physical.
This raises an interesting question: while idealists can deny free will, physicalism seems to require denying it. Is this why you see physicalism as particularly problematic for agency, because it doesn't just happen to conflict with it but necessarily excludes it?
It seems like there's an underlying question here about what consciousness is for. There's a strong intuition that consciousness must be about agency -- after all, it really does seem like our conscious experience is to make choices. But maybe that's not the only way to see it.
(And btw -- classic vanilla is an excellent choice. Sometimes the classics are the best!)
"What do you think about arguments that we ultimately face just two logical possibilities?"
I think that question is more relevant with a physicalist assumption (if physicalism takes science to be the final word, whatever that is). If you take experience as the starting point, the question of whether or not the world is determined or random is of little consequence.
You made an interesting point about idealists who deny free will. There are many kinds of idealism out there, but the popular ones these days seem to involve eastern philosophy-religion. Some of these idealisms seem to be coming from a cosmic perspective when they say everything is determined, but they're not taking our lived experience as a starting point either, at least not on that front. Instead, it's god's consciousness that's the starting point, and perhaps our consciousness is merely subsumed in god's. I take god's point of view to be just as confounding as the scientific point of view. I'm more down to earth. It's interesting, though, that with that cosmic view the question of free will changes significantly, it becomes in many ways more poignant since what really matters is whether you can align yourself with god's will. The point is freedom from becoming a slave to empty desire, of aligning your expectations to fit reality. I'm not a theist in the usual sense, but the religious view of freedom is actually more meaningful to me than the ability to make free choices. If you don't have the wisdom to make the right choices, what difference does freedom make?
"This raises an interesting question: while idealists can deny free will, physicalism seems to require denying it. Is this why you see physicalism as particularly problematic for agency, because it doesn't just happen to conflict with it but necessarily excludes it?"
That's a really good way of putting it! Because from a physicalist perspective, you can always say, "Of course we experience ourselves as causal agents" ...but ultimately you'll have to concede this experience doesn't ultimately matter, it's either an illusion or not reflective of reality in one way or another. In other words, experiencing something doesn't make it true, no matter how strange it would seem to deny it, not under physicalism. The physicalist can wait for the truth to be settled by science, but if you buy into Strawson's argument, science will never give you free will: determinism and randomness lead to the same billiard room.
Interestingly, most people find determinism very uncomfortable. Even the most staunch illusionists would rather deny the existence of phenomena than deny free will, at least that's what I'm noticing.
Whereas I see agency as a fundamental feature of our conscious experience, not a matter that can be determined by science or any theory about the physical world. I see the best solution to this friction as simply admitting that a theory about the physical world doesn't apply to experienced consciousness, and I would go so far as to say the theory about the physical world depends on experienced consciousness. It's simply pointing out that science is constituted in minds, which is...where it is...right? :)
This is a great article. I like how you point out how strange it is to deny agency. I find it surreal listening to people denying qualia or free will. All because they think science says so.
Imagine if a doctor came and diagnosed you as having no conscious experience and no free will and insisting it was true, and they had the brain scans to prove it. It would be surreal. What can you say to them? It’s meta-level weirdness.
By the way, your scenario is very similar to what I'm currently writing my novel about. I did change things a bit by having it be a guy whose dead body is found on the side of the road and an autopsy reveals he's missing a brain with no signs it has been taken out. Authorities refuse to investigate the murder since they conclude he was never alive. :)
In the Stanford Encyclopedia on Philosophy entry on physicalism, the short section "1.1 Terminology" does a good job describing the various uses of physicalism. Like the author there, I basically see it as materialism plus the forces of physics. Lots and lots of attempts to find things other than this have been made in the history of philosophy and I don't find any of them persuasive so I'm left with physicalism.
I'm also a compatibilist when it comes to determinism and agency, so I think your causal agency beliefs sound a bit too much like libertarian (i.e. full-blown) free will for me. You wrote, "The fact is, we don’t experience ourselves as non-agents." But that depends on how closely you pay attention to your experience. Sam Harris, after all his years sat in meditation, says that all of our experience bubbles out of non-conscious awareness. So he completely disagrees with your facts. And there's something to that. When you say "I did it because I wanted an ice cream cone", you have to reckon with the infinite regression of asking why did you want that? (And that, and that, and that....) You have to reckon with Schopenhauer's statement "A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." Unlike Sam, I reckon with this by thinking in evolutionary gradations. I think our non-conscious selves develop slowly, slowly over a lifetime (i.e. ontogeny is real) and like the Sorites paradox of the heap, it eventually adds enough grains of experience until it deserves to be called a self. But there is still something paradoxical here that is not so easily dismissed into being sure that we have either full, unchecked agency or full, billiard-ball determinism. To me, that's just not "the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy, and it reveals the deepest woo-woo of the human mind." To me, it just follows the evidence of life's continually connected existence on Earth.
(Unlike panpsychism! Yuck, there's no evidence for that. And I once heard Philip Goff in a small group salon in Durham, England try to convince us otherwise.)
"Unlike panpsychism! Yuck, there's no evidence for that."
A throw-away comment; but in fact the evidence for panpsychism is literally everywhere, in the observation that everything is responsive.
The normal view is to think of this reponsiveness as mechanical. This interpretation can also be applied everywhere, from quarks to human beings, and up to a point it's quite helpful and predictive. At a certain point, its usefulness for predicting exactly what is going to happen next falls off dramatically; people bring up quantum mechanics, but the more obvious examples are in the realm of history, or what one's spouse is about to do next. For the mechanical view of responsiveness, this failure of predictive power is assumed to be a matter of degree and not kind. (An effort seems to be underway to make the assumption work for quantum mechanics as well.)
There is another point of breakdown for the mechanical view. When applied to other humans, it works fine (in theory), but when applied personally, it comes into conflict with our own sense of agency. For the mechanical interpretation of responsiveness, this personal sense of agency is not read as a piece of evidence that might inform the interpretation in fresh and interesting ways, but as a problem for all the other evidence about responsiveness. Taken by itself, that evidence is fully compatible in theory with a mechanical interpretation (in theory), and because this interpretation has proven tremendously effective (up to a point), the project is to continue applying it, regardless of that singular piece of evidence that is one's personal experience. This means either explaining the sense of agency and other phenomena of personal awareness in mechanical terms, or if necessary, explaining it away. This is where we find ourselves today.
Panpsychism simply takes a different approach to the ubiquitous evidence of responsiveness, by including all the evidence. It attributes responsiveness by reference to that singular scrap of personal evidence that is, if not abundant, nevertheless inescapable. It goes beyond graciously extending the existence of such experience to other humans -- for which, in the final analysis, there is also "no evidence" -- and attributes it wherever it finds responsiveness. This is an extremely dislocating thought, easily as dislocating as the Copernican revolution is said to have been, but it waits at the end of careful enquiry for those willing to think about it.
I think you are on to something, but to me panpsychism is not the way out. The "psyche" in panpsychism refers to a subject feeling something. It is the location of the question "what is it like to be..." something. But how can this question of subjectivity ever make sense when there is no subject to experience it? Subjects require individual structures and durability to exist. This does not happen from quarks to inorganic chemistry.
In my own long series on the evolution of consciousness, I posited something I call "pandynamism". When looking deeply into the hard problem and how consciousness does seem to arise as soon as life does, I wrote:
--> What I hypothesize instead is that the forces of physics are everywhere, and it is a fundamental property of the universe that these forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge. Since the Greek for force is dynami, I would say the universe has pandynamism rather than panpsychism. The psyche only originates and evolves along with life. This psyche expands as the living structures expand their capabilities of sensing and responding to these forces.
That might actually fit with your idea of "responsiveness" Jim. What do you think? I just would never call this panpsychism and I can't stand the arguments of the big panpsychists.
Hi, Ed. It looks like you're more receptive to the general line of thought than I expected.
I'm just heading out the door, and I owe Mike a reply, but my first reaction is that "forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge" seems to beg the question. I have nothing against the concept of emergence, which has its uses. But how does subjectivity emerge from non-subjectivity? Panpsychism takes the presence of subjectivity, even if it only emerges at a late stage, to be a manifestation of something basically "friendly" to subjectivity, we might say, and which for want of a better word we could call "psyche" (although currently I'm leaning toward "feeling" in Whitehead's sense). {EDITED to fix the quote]
I don't consider it begging the question. As I said in my first answer, I think it is literally impossible to have subjectivity without a subject. It's just logical to say these "forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge".
I'm with Chalmers that there may just be something else in the laws of physics that needs to be added in to explain the emergence of consciousness. This is how I describe the data in a way that makes more sense to me than panpsychism.
--> how does subjectivity emerge from non-subjectivity?
Slowly, slowly, in the same way that life emerges from non-life. That's my evolutionary perspective on it.
I hear you, Ed, on the difficulties of understanding psyche or phenomenal properties without a subject to experience them. I actually feel the same way, which is why I prefer certain kinds of idealism (although not all!) I'm a commonsensical person and it takes a great leap of imagination to think about panpsychism in the way it's often described—though perhaps there is no one way, given all the different versions of it. Lately I've come to see panpsychism as a scientific mode of thinking (but that's not to say science as we know it). The difference from a theoretical perspective between pure idealism and pure panpsychism is merely a matter of scale, but from my perspective as a commonsensical person, I don't experience mini subjects or atomic phenomenal properties and so I'm not inclined to postulate such things. That said, panpsychism as such is not incompatible with my understanding of idealism, so I'm not inclined to argue that such entities are impossible either. In principle I can see the two theories living harmoniously.
Physicalism can also admit panpsychism (Strawson), but then, as I contend, you'd still have the problem of causal agency. I think this view does have advantages over straight physicalism, though, in that it at least purports to account for phenomena, albeit at a non-experiential level.
Hi Ed, thanks for the link. Physicalism is indeed complicated, as your SEP article makes clear. (As I side note, I find SEP has a analytic bent and tends to get mired in technical lingo and linguistic analysis. Sometimes this leads to an analytic characterization of philosophies that came before analytic philosophy, and I find that a bit misleading. In that link, for instance, there's a section on "intentionality", but no mention of Husserl or Brentano. Hm. And the characterization of intentionality as the 'aboutness' of thought seems pretty skeletal and uninteresting. Anyway.)
I think meditation often gets confused with phenomenology, but these aren't the same (despite the fact that the word 'meditation' often gets used in both areas). Mediators aren't necessarily philosophically-trained and they quite often talk about there being no 'self'. What do they mean by that? Usually it turns out to mean something like "there is no personality who has desires and dispositions". When I hear them talking about there being no self, I'm hearing complete nonsense because I'm imagining they're talking about the destruction of the unity of experience, not personality, and it takes me a second to get over my philosophical understanding of their terms to see what they're getting at.
It's funny how eliminative physicalists are aligning themselves with eastern philosophers over this issue of self. When Sam Harris says all of experience bubbles out of non-conscious awareness, that's complete nonsense from a phenomenological standpoint. He would have to be conscious of both his experience as it is experienced—all of it—as well as the experience of all of it bubbling out of something he calls non-conscious awareness. Which would be like saying, "I experience the un-experiencable." This sounds like the kind of talk you often hear from meditators, whose experiences I don't doubt at all, but their characterizations of their experiences leave a great deal to be desired if you take them to be philosophical-phenomenological investigations. Like I said, meditation is just not the same sort of activity, the goal is not the same, and the shared terminology between the two practices is unfortunate.
I don't have to reckon with the infinite regression of asking why I wanted what I wanted when I talk about lived agency because I'm not a physicalist. I'm not the one saying everything supervenes on the physical. Plus, I don't have a problem with science understanding the physical world to be deterministic because as I see it, that deterministic framework is useful for a scientific understanding of most things (although once we get into the quantum, maybe that's so clear, I don't know, I'll leave that to the scientists). My position allows for a scientific understanding, but it doesn't allow science to become metaphysics—in other words, physicalism. If you're a physicalist who thinks "everything supervenes on the physical", then you are limited to that scientific lens which acknowledges only efficient causes (to use Aristotle's terminology).
As I understand compatibilism, our agency is not affected by believing that the physical world is deterministic. Is this right? Because if so, then what I'm saying is not altogether different. On the other hand, compatibilism makes no sense in a physicalist framework; physicalism is practically defined as the opposite when it says 'everything supervenes on the physical'. The agency one experiences under the physicalist framework is ultimately hollow and illusory since there's no letting in of any broader notion of causality. Your desires can't cause anything. You need a more robust causal framework to accommodate the experience of desire, not to mention lived experience of anything whatsoever (which is what I'm talking about with intentionality). Aristotle understood this so well with his four causes. It doesn't even occur to analytic philosophers with their various physicalist philosophies of mind that their framework for understanding causality is rather flimsy—this is what I meant when I talked about everyone getting themselves worked up on the issue of 'overdetermination'. This problem of overdetermination disappears once you dump the underlying physicalism and its associated limited causal framework. I see no reason to believe in god or eternal souls or even souls as separable from bodies in that broader framework either, so it's really mystifying to me that people aren't turning to Aristotle with some slight modifications right now. Doing so would be much easier than linguistic contortionism.
Sorry, Tina, I'm just not able to follow all of your arguments here. I don't have a strong sense of what you are actually in favor of. And we seem really far apart about your usage of intentionality, meditation, the "unity" of experience, non-conscious awareness, lived agency, metaphysics beyond science, only acknowledging efficient causes, broader notions of causality, and accusations of linguistic contortionism. I just don't get any of that. It's like we're in different universes. So, let me focus on one question you asked.
--> As I understand compatibilism, our agency is not affected by believing that the physical world is deterministic. Is this right?
No, I don't think that's how compatibilists would put it. We're talking about free will either being compatible or incompatible with the determinism of the physical universe. Compatibilists like myself or Dan Dennett (who I've read the most) will get there by redefining free will to make it compatible with determinism. In other words, we say our free will (what you seem to be calling agency) just is not the philosophical libertarian, free-floating, skyhook supported thing that the ancients thought it was. But it is still something very different than billiard ball interactions. Dennett called what we have the "free will worth wanting" and I like that. If that ends up being "hollow and illusory" compared to what you desire for existence, so be it. That gives us no license to reach for "broader notions of causality" if there is no evidence for them. Where are they? What could they possibly be? So, I believe our agency is very much affected by the physical world being deterministic. And that's okay. What we have is still pretty awesome.
No worries, Ed. I'm coming from a largely idealistic standpoint, but I hate to use that word since most people take idealism to mean solipsism. Maybe radical empiricist is a better way of describing my views.
I think Dennett does a great deal of redefining, but I'm not convinced by semantics. A 'free will worth wanting' doesn't sound much like free will or compatibilism. You say there's no reason to reach for a broader notion of causality if there is no evidence for them, but where is the evidence for determinism? I understand that as a scientific axiom, not anything that can be derived by empirical observation. It's simply asserted. Whether we want to apply the axiom beyond the realm of science is up to us. I don't think it works too well in describing human motivation or experience.
I'm not sure what you mean by the 'libertarian' free will of the ancients. I think they tended to see free will as having more to do with self-mastery and being free from our own desires than simply having choices or exerting power over nature.
Thanks, that helps clarify some things for me. I'd like to hear more about why your empiricism is radical though. At some point, if it moves from evidence to speculation, it isn't really empirical anymore as far as I can tell.
--> where is the evidence for determinism? I understand that as a scientific axiom, not anything that can be derived by empirical observation. It's simply asserted.
That's not an axiom of science to simply assert things. That's maybe a mischaracterization of science put forth by extreme science skeptics like Feyerabend. Scientific knowledge is built slowly with hypotheses and attempts to disprove them. The more work on that the better. (See my review of Naomi Oreskes' book "Why Trust Science?") But skeptics have a point. And that is why all scientific knowledge is only held provisionally. New data could always change things. However, that doesn't leave us with nothing. It's just the way the world is and we have to pragmatically deal with that. I'm writing a paper right now about the evolution of knowledge and how we could characterize it going from extremely weak and fragile to extremely strong and robust. Never does it arrive at certain "truth", but we have discovered principles that let us be more or less convinced about the different pieces of knowledge that we hold. (And by the way, I'm talking about science in the broader sense of its latin roots meaning knowledge. So this pertains to ALL knowledge; not just the academic "sciences" that make up university departments.)
In the case, of determinism, there is all the evidence of all the actions in the entire history of the universe that has so far held up to this hypothesis. When we look at all of this data, there have never been any uncaused actions observed so far. Ever. Therefore, we've achieved extremely wide and diverse consensus about that. And so determinism is something we ought to have very high credences for.
--> I don't think it works too well in describing human motivation or experience.
Really? You don't see reasons behind any and all human actions? I do. Although they are not easy to know, let alone predict with any accuracy yet.
--> I'm not sure what you mean by the 'libertarian' free will of the ancients.
I mean the free will of souls untethered from our bodies or this physical universe. You'll know better than me which Greeks believed in this to what extent. The Christian philosophers made a dogma out of it. In my review of Just Deserts (the book where Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett debate free will compatibilism), I noted that even though they are on opposite sides of one free will debate, they both agree libertarian free will is wrong. I noted:
"Both are naturalists (JD p.171) who see no supernatural interference in the workings of the world. That leaves both men accepting general determinism in the universe (JD p.33), which simply means all events and behaviours have prior causes. Therefore, the libertarian version of free will is out. Any hope that humans can generate an uncaused action is deemed a “non-starter” by Gregg (JD p.41) and “panicky metaphysics” by Dan (JD p.53)."
--> I think they tended to see free will as having more to do with self-mastery and being free from our own desires than simply having choices or exerting power over nature.
That's exactly the "free will worth wanting" as Dennett describes it. He grew to like the phrase that we are puppets who must learn to love our own strings. We can do this when no one else is pulling on them without our consent. But we cannot cut the strings and float free from all causation. In my writings on the evolution of consciousness, I posit that our most recently developed tier gives us the ability to grasp and be motivated by abstractions about the world. This means that it is now possible for our strings to be pulled by an infinite number of ideas, including any imaginary speculative ones. That's as many "degrees of freedom" as one can ever hope to have. And we have it!
It occurred to me last night that your stance on the primacy of experience (a stance I agree with) is similar to my stance on the primacy of physical reality. I consider both central aspects of our existence.
This post really tickled my brain! Great read, and I'm going to have to re-read it and think about it to fully absorb. I've been toying with the idea of writing a post about physicalism and realism, and this post got the gears spinning. Some first-read thoughts...
Do you distinguish physicalism from materialism? Those that do seem to seem to see the former as more accepting of emergent phenomenon as fundamental and irreducible. Whereas materialists insist everything is ultimately explainable in terms of the lowest level of physical laws (QFT and GR). FWIW, my definition of physicalism stresses an external material world of matter and energy that was here before me, will be here after me, and in which I'm just a temporary component.
> "How can we take our phenomenal experiences as unassailably given, but not our intentions?"
Oof! Yes! I love that aspect of what you're saying. Nail, head. Isn't that why brains evolved in the first place (in all animals)? As a way to navigate and survive (even thrive in) the physical world.
> "Intentional agency lies at the heart of conscious experience; for it, determinism is inconceivable."
And, oh my, yes, determinism. One of the more misunderstood and misused concepts. Worthy of books, let alone posts (let alone *comments*). I think with both brains and determinism, we're not capable of truly grasping the numerical scale involved. Brains with 500 *trillion* synapses (and myriad other influences at the same scale). Physical determinism involves way more particles. So many that we use exponents. A gram of carbon has 50 sextillion atoms (50×10²¹). Our understanding fails badly at such scales. And quantum does add an element of randomness. What's not clear is to what extent that randomness amplifies to the classical scale. But reality, because of scale, is effectively random.
I also like your point that "mind" is a much better word than "consciousness". Much harder to dispute the meaning.
I'm glad you found my post inspires you to write. Looking forward to it!
Honestly I think physicalism is where materialists go when matter stops mattering so much, but the essential attitude is the same. I can see why some who think the way I do would just say, "Meh, it's the same thing!" I'm trying to respect the differences between the two, even though to me those differences hardly matter, given where I'm coming from (no not cloud cuckoo land! I swear! But I think my next post will have people thinking I've lost my marbles.)
On the other hand, I see the move from materialism to physicalism as creating some confusion over what 'physical' means, or I should say confusion on top of confusion, and I've been considering writing a post about this. Materialism was tricky enough considering—since you bring up scale—the materialist's world was filled with tangible objects known through sensory perception, or so the old empiricist story went, concrete objects which could be broken down to some fundamental 'substance' of which all tangibles concrete things, physical things, were composed. Maybe there are still materialists in this classical sense, I don't know, but it seems most would-be materialists have switched to physicalism, which allows a great deal more flexibility over what counts as physical. Too much, in my opinion. Or rather, maybe we need to be more precise in our discussions of what counts as physical, because I suspect we're conflating theories with the things theories are supposed to describe, to put it crudely.
As for reducibility, I think we're thinking along the same lines on that. Physicalism is a broad category with plenty of room for in-fighting. :) Physicalists don't necessarily think 'mental states' are fully reducible to brain states; they differ in their views about this.
"FWIW, my definition of physicalism stresses an external material world of matter and energy that was here before me, will be here after me, and in which I'm just a temporary component." I think physicalists would agree with you on that!
I'm glad you agree with me on agency, but what I'm saying is that intentional agency (as it's experienced) is a given, a necessary feature of our experience that we can't be mistaken about without deep skepticism, so whether we 'believe it or not' is not dependent on theories about evolution or any other scientific theory. It should be the reverse, actually. Theories should be accounting for the primary data of experience...that is, after all, what empiricism used to be about. So given this, the way I'm using the word 'agency' isn't meant to invoke broader implications about ethical responsibility, or at least that would have to be argued for or described more fully...I'll just leave that aside because it's too much to take on in a blog post. All I wanted to get across was that there is this basic experience, from the inside, as it were, of intention.
"I think with both brains and determinism, we're not capable of truly grasping the numerical scale involved." Indeed! It may turn out that scale determines whether and how far determinism applies. But then again, scale is just who's looking at what, is it not?
Perhaps I oversimplify but I see physicalism (and materialism) as general metaphysical commitments more than theories. They're foundations for theories that consider matter monism axiomatic. I think the question isn't "what is physical" (because, yeah, that gets complicated fast) but "does this take place in the physical world". Are the rules of baseball physical? Debatable. Are they part of our physical world? Definitely.
With you 100% on intention and agency. It's central to understanding minds. Nagel seems to be saying something similar. I was suggesting *why* it evolved: to navigate us (intentionally) through the (real, physical) world. Same as with that inside of intention, the inside of free will is another experience I think we should take more seriously.
Synchronicity: Finally reading Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and just read a part that touches on this. He speaks of the "story" we narrate about our experience (and suggests researchers into consciousness treat it like fiction as a self-contained reality). He says that *regardless* of what we imagine is or isn't happening, zombie or not, the consistency and richness of the story our consciousness tells demands explanation.
Scale is numeric and relative to all of reality (Plank scale up to visible universe scale) so not really observer dependent. New and unexpected behaviors emerge from systems comprised of large numbers of relatively independent units. "Mob behavior" carries some of the flavor, but mobs are infinitesimally tiny compared to the large numbers I mean. Ultimately, I expect scale to be part of the answer to the Hard Problem. IIT already steps in that direction.
"I think the question isn't "what is physical" (because, yeah, that gets complicated fast) but "does this take place in the physical world". Are the rules of baseball physical? Debatable. Are they part of our physical world? Definitely."
But doesn't everything take place in the physical world, according to physicalists?
I haven't been able to get into Dennett, and it's not just because I don't track with his view. At least I don't think. I can't seem to understand what he's saying. Something about the way he writes is baffling to me.
Hhave you read Erik Hoel's book on scale in science and causal emergence? You might like it.
Heh, well, yes, that’s the metaphysical commitment. Any phenomena must have a physical basis. I think maybe the difference is that physicalism has to be an axiom rather than a conclusion. It’s an early fork in the road.
I’m actually liking Dennett more than I thought I would from what I’ve heard about him from others. He does have a style I find slightly off-putting, his sense that he’s figured it out and everyone else hasn’t. But I think I can see what others find attractive about his views. Don’t know that I’ll end up sharing them, though.
Not familiar with Hoel. I’ll keep it in mind, thanks!
WRT dualism, from a physicalist point of view, the only dualism I can see is between objective (neural correlates) and subjective (experienced phenomenon). Presuming an eventual understanding of the Hard Problem (why meat can have opinions) -- the dualism, as such, seems similar to the dualism between the views from inside and outside a house. We just don't understand the house, yet, because it has a level of complexity far beyond our experience or *current* physical laws.
An excellent overview of the issues with property dualism.
I agree that dualism has serious issues. Property dualism really just strikes me as the deism of the philosophy of mind. Once we've reasoned ourselves into a concept having no causal effects in the world, it seems like we've concluded it isn't there, but aren't yet ready to let it go. Substance dualism has the interaction problem, which at least preserves some causal influence. But if so, it becomes something that science should eventually be able to detect and study.
On whether to "save the experiences", I think a lot depends on what we mean by "experience". Did Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton save the planets and stars when they redefined what they were? And while Copernicus saved the crystalline spheres, Tycho Brahe killed them, although explaining how they could not be there wasn't achieved until Newton.
I think the physicalist (which for me means "mechanist") understanding of experience isn't that different from the non-physicalist one. It does mean letting go of the idea that it's fundamental, as well as some other assumptions. Rather than being utterly ineffable, it becomes merely very difficult to describe. Rather than being fundamentally private, it becomes very difficult to observe (and effectively impossible before brain scanning technologies). And rather than introspection being incorrigible, it becomes another perception, no more reliable than our perceptions of the outside world. I struggle to see anything about this version of experience that gives up anything crucial.
But I always like to ask, what am I missing with this description? What about experience is being fundamentally overlooked or not accounted for?
In terms of your third footnote, I'd say that science is never finalized. However, while a theory that has been heavily validated empirically may be replaced later by a better one, the new theory has to have at least the same empirical success. Newton's laws are still good enough for most NASA missions, even though we know Einstein's general relativity is more accurate. GR will be replaced someday with a more fundamental theory, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. It's just been too successful. So any description of reality that contradicts scientific theories that have shown their reliability, needs to account for those contradictions. There is wiggle room here, but it's going to be very limited and nuanced for anything in our everyday world, such as brains.
Thanks for the acknowledgement and link Tina!
Thanks! Glad we agree on property dualism and mental causality. It does strike me as odd that many take that as a given.
As for 'save the experiences', I was just riffing off of 'save the appearances' although the two are not altogether different. So while empiricism used to mean knowledge derived from sensory perception, hence 'appearances', I take 'sense perception' to be more complicated than it seems. So the experiences in need of saving would include the necessary features of experience on the whole, which would need to be determined through inter-subjective introspection...in other words, thinking and talking.
"It does mean letting go of the idea that it's fundamental, as well as some other assumptions."
I do take experience to be fundamental in the sense that there's no going around it. All of science is done by people who experience.
"Rather than being utterly ineffable, it becomes merely very difficult to describe."
I don't like the word 'ineffable' either. I think the only time that word applies is if we're trying to describe something like the smell of a rose to someone with no notion of smell. I don't think it's impossible to describe the smell of a rose to those who have a reference for comparison. Anyway, the entire point of phenomenology is to describe experience accurately, to uncover its laws or universal features. This is introspection, to be sure, and it's not scientific in the sense of quantifying the qualitative, but I think any science of consciousness should be embracing such a collective venture rather than trying to show why introspection is wholly unreliable. If that were true, science, too, would be thrown into question, since science is made up of the experiences of scientists.
"Rather than being fundamentally private, it becomes very difficult to observe (and effectively impossible before brain scanning technologies)."
I don't think minds can be visually observed—Leibniz's mill applies here—but minds can be known by minds to a degree, although just how this works is an interesting question. I do think consciousness is fundamentally private in the sense that you can't directly experience what I'm experiencing in exactly the manner in which I'm experiencing it because you are not me. Privacy is the consequence of having a unity of consciousness. That said, I think if we investigate experience we'll find it makes little sense to imagine ourselves as fundamentally divorced from the world and each other. I don't think brain scanning technologies will give us any greater certainty or finer detail about the mind than we can get by simply talking to each other, although who knows what technologies might come next. I do think in order for any technology like that to work we will need a better understanding of how we already understand each other's minds.
"And rather than introspection being incorrigible, it becomes another perception, no more reliable than our perceptions of the outside world." Not sure what you mean here.
"So any description of reality that contradicts scientific theories that have shown their reliability, needs to account for those contradictions."
What description of reality do you have in mind?
You're welcome on the acknowledgement and link—thank you for the conversation. I'm wondering if you're planning on starting up your own Substack sometime? I think you'd do well here.
On mental causality, yeah, I think people who hold these views want to resist the epiphenomenal conclusion. You noted Chalmers' response, admit it as a possibility, but then largely gesture toward vague "subtle" ways it may not be the case. Early Frank Jackson, to his credit, accepted the logical implications of the view. Of course, that led early Jackson to become later Jackson.
"All of science is done by people who experience."
Sure, but science never takes any one experience as absolute. It has to account for our experiences, not trust the intuitive assumptions we make from them, at least other than as starting points.
On ineffable, I like Suzi's recent article on seeing through sound. But more broadly, I always find the solution is to look at the upstream causes of something, and the downstream effects, and then back up and ascertain whether there's anything in between other than the cause-effect relation. Many want to insist there's still something intrinsic in between, but then we're back to epiphenomenalism again.
"you can't directly experience what I'm experiencing in exactly the manner in which I'm experiencing it because you are not me."
True. But it seems like that same relation holds between my laptop and phone. My laptop can never be in the same state as the phone because it isn't a phone. It can emulate the phone in a virtual machine, tracking every aspect of its processing state. But it can never be the phone and so can never be in the same information state. But nothing about that tempts us to think the phone's state is fundamental, at least not in the relevant senses.
On introspection being no more reliable than other perception, just as we can misperceive things, it seems clear to me we can mis-introspect things. And just as we can reach the wrong conclusions based on our perceptions, we can also do so based on introspection, even if the immediate impression it gives us is accurate. This is pretty nuanced, but it seems like all we need to avoid experience being an intractable metaphysical mystery.
"What description of reality do you have in mind?"
I didn't have anything specific in mind. I was just responding to your thoughts in the third footnote. It's why I think Chalmers and others are right to respect the science, even though it constrains them.
On starting a Substack, I put a placeholder out there years ago, but have never really used it. (I have similar stubs in Blogspot and Tumblr.) I struggle with the idea of walking away from Wordpress. I just have too many things wired into it. Eric Schwitzgebel has been cross posting between his Blogspot and Substack sites. I've contemplated doing something like that, if it can be done without a lot of work. But work-work has been crowding out mindspace for figuring all that out. Maybe at some point.
I don't mean to say we can't mis-introspect things, or rather, we can mischaracterize what we're experiencing. This is very common! In fact, I think people mischaracterize what they're experiencing when they think they're experiencing a mind-independent world. But I'll talk about this in the next post.
To give you another perspective on your question, what are you missing with that description, I think you’re missing the phenomena you’re trying to explain. You’ve adapted the phenomena to fit your theory when it should be the other way around.
For example, how can you avoid that experience is “fundamentally private” and so can now observe it? I assume you’ll say we can observe brain scans? But brain scans seem irrelevant, we can already do this by observing behaviour. If you see someone with a red face, yelling and throwing stuff, you infer their inner experience is anger. That isn't observing anger, it's inferring anger from other physical states correlated with it.
Thanks for taking a shot at it!
I think we have to make a distinction between having an experience and learning about it. I can't have your experience or you mine. But as I noted to Tina, that's the same as saying my laptop can never be in the same state as my phone. Even if my laptop is running a virtual version of the phone, it will never be in the same state as the phone. There's an uncrossable gap between my laptop and phone, but it's not one any of us are tempted to think has metaphysical implications.
On the other hand, my laptop can have an arbitrary degree of information on the phone's states. In the same sense, I can learn about someone's angry state. Of course, there's a causal chain between that state and my inferences. In the case of behavior, this could be misleading. (Maybe they're acting, or showing their internal state in an unusual manner.)
But consider how we know our own states. Here the assumption is often that we somehow know infallibly. But it is an assumption. For a physicalist, any such knowledge would also be an inference from a causal chain from that state. It might be recursive in this case, but it's fundamentally the same as the external inference, albeit perhaps more reliable. (But not perfectly. We've all seen something like someone yelling, "I'm not angry!")
So our knowledge of someone's internal state through behavior is an inference, but so is our knowledge of our own internal states. Which still leave fundamental privacy not established.
Unless of course I'm still missing something?
The point about private access isn’t that two people can’t be in the same state, or that we can’t learn about other people’s conscious states. The issue is the unique way we “know” about the existence of our own conscious states. The only way we know other people have conscious states is by inference, but that isn’t how we know the existence of our own.
You make a distinction between having an experience and learning about it, but that distinction doesn’t apply to our own experiences. This isn’t an assumption, it’s an observation. To have an experience is to know it. Directly, immediately, privately, and so also infallibly.
For example, maybe I’m drunk and have an experience of pink elephants dancing down the street. I can reflect on the experience and infer it isn’t veridical by referring to my knowledge about elephants and the effects of intoxicants. But I don’t infer that I experienced it. Even in the case of illusions or hallucinations, the experience is the reality. It’s in this sense that our knowledge of our conscious states is infallible, not in the sense that it accurately corresponds to an objective external reality.
And by the same token if someone yells, I’m not angry, they can’t be mistaken about the fact they’re experiencing a certain state. They can be mistaken in their subsequent inference or interpretation of what that experience means. But the existence of the experience itself is what’s at stake, not the particulars of the phenomenology, or how to classify it or communicate it in objective terms.
I pointed out above that this isn't a dispute between experience being absolutely private vs not private at all, or absolutely infallible vs no privileged access at all. It's a dispute between being absolutely private and effectively private in practice with current technology, and between absolute infallibility and (sometimes) more reliable access than outside inferences, again with current technology.
With that in mind, consider what about your experiences leave you to conclude the absolute version of these attributes rather than the in practice versions. You say it's an observation rather than an assumption. What about the observation, what specific aspects of it, mandate the view you're asserting?
I will admit there is a very limited sense of infallibility having a reasonable claim to being true, in that it seems hard to doubt the *seeming* of how things seem to us. That's the sense I get you're defending with your examples. But if so, it only means that the seeming is itself what it seems, but says nothing about what it purports to be about. The stronger version of infallibility is needed for the metaphysical implications many want to take from it.
"And by the same token if someone yells, I’m not angry, they can’t be mistaken about the fact they’re experiencing a certain state."
I'm not following the distinction here. Are you saying that they really do know they're angry and are just being dishonest? Or that they're mistaken about being angry but not that they're in some conscious state? If only the latter, then that seems true, but again in a trivial fashion, and doesn't seem to be the actual subject matter of their statement.
The problem with introspection is there is a mountain of psychological evidence showing it's no more reliable than any other perception.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/introspection/#EmpiEvidAccuIntr
Someone can insist that the areas that can't currently be tested are still infallible, but I can't see how they can argue that it isn't a major assumption.
Thanks Mike, it’s very interesting to understand your perspective in more detail.
I assume that the question here is to explain what experience “is”. We’re not talking about explaining the particular contents of the seeming, or the meaning of it, or the function of it, or any kind of objective description or classification of it as xyz state of consciousness. The latter are all part of your original distinction “learning” about the seeming.
So, I’d reject that distinction as irrelevant to the question at hand and stick only to the “having” of the experience, or in other words, what is experience as a phenomena?
As to the observed properties of experience that give us absolute attributes - It’s a singular subjective point of view which makes it absolutely private. It’s absolutely infallible in the sense we can’t be mistaken about having it. There’s no possible gap between appearance and reality because we’re explaining the existence of the appearances.
I think any disagreement here turns on your original distinction, the having and the learning. But it's only the having that is relevant to the metaphysical question.
Thanks Prudence. We won't agree here, and that's totally fine. All of my most interesting conversations are with those I disagree with.
I can't find an explanation for the absolute attributes in your response so much as a re-assertion of them. Maybe I'm just missing that explanation. But I won't ask for it again. Your response is pretty common, which is why I don't see these attributes, in their absolute sense, as real issues. Maybe I'll see it different at some point.
Thanks for the conversation!
Sorry to cut in, but this point about yelling "I'm not angry" is instructive.
When someone yells "I'm not angry!", their physiological indicators tell us they are angry, and it's not necessary to inspect their brain states. Their heart rates, adrenaline level, blood pressure, breathing patterns, and so on may be enough. For that matter, the tone and volume of their voice and the expression on their face or the visible tension in their body may be enough, although at this level they can at least attempt dissimulation.
All of it is explained by the fact that they feel angry. Cognitively they may not acknowledge this, but I would argue that they feel it, as surely as they feel their heart rate. I hope the claim that they actually feel angry is not in dispute. The point I think people are trying to make is that when you observe the indications, you do not feel angry. You are simply incapable of feeling their anger, although you can feel your own. It's in this sense that their anger is private.
Hey Jim!
On whether the yeller is feeling their anger, that might depend on what we mean by "feel" and how we think about the idea of unconscious feelings. They don't seem aware of their anger yet. Put another way, they haven't learned about their own angry state yet. It reminds me of kids who have an injury but don't notice it until someone points it out to them, at which point they do feel it intensely.
Sure, to feel their anger you would have to be them. But that just seems to put us back to the laptop / phone analogy. It seems like for privacy to have the metaphysical implications often taken from it, it must be more than just not being the other system, it has to prevent us from learning about their internal states.
The only way to avoid this is to posit metaphysically intrinsic properties, but now we're back to something causally impotent.
We're beginning to tease apart the ideas of having a feeling and being aware of a feeling. If the physiological indications are that someone is angry, does this mean they necessarily feel angry? If the answer is "not always," then the physiological observations tell us nothing about how they feel, which I think runs contrary to your claim. I'll wait for your reaction to that before pursuing the line of thought.
I've been ignoring the phone/laptop thing. Can we simplify it by talking about two laptops in the same state, or does that leave something out?
The idea that their outward behavior tells us everything about their internal states seems like old school behaviorism. My view is functionalist, where the internal states matter. Obviously I do think if we knew *everything* about their physical state, that would, in principle, tell us their internal states. But we don't have that in the scenario of just watching someone behave like that.
I paired the laptop with a phone in that analogy to head off the inevitable counter that two digital laptops of the same make and model, with exactly the same components and software, just coming off the assembly line, could effectively be in the same state. Of course, as their histories diverge, actually getting them back into the same state becomes increasingly difficult, although it's possible in principle. Going with the phone heads off that discussion.
That said, if you have another reason for wanting to do two laptops, I'm game.
I just noticed something about what you said here: "Substance dualism has the interaction problem, which at least preserves some causal influence. But if so, it becomes something that science should eventually be able to detect and study."
I agree with what you're saying for the most part, except that last bit about science and substance dualism. Traditional substance dualism by its very structure doesn't admit that mind is subject to physical laws, but instead claims that mind is of an entirely different nature from physical substances and equally fundamental. So for the substance dualist, science can't study mind because mind is not physical. So despite the interaction problem, at least substance dualism makes sense and accords with our experience of ourselves as causal agents and as having phenomenal experience. I'm currently in the midst of reading Galileo's Error by Phillip Goff, and as he puts it: “If Galileo traveled in time to the present day to hear that we are having difficulty giving a physical explanation of consciousness, he would most likely respond, “Of course you are, I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities!” This is exactly the way I've been seeing these issues all along. I've been thinking, "Why all of sudden is everyone supposing science can explain mind? I thought we settled this! That's a no!"
So property dualism is giving up causal agency in order to make consciousness ultimately abide by physical laws. The problem with that stance is, as you point out, what makes phenomenal experience special, then? Why shouldn't it, too, be subject to physical laws? The justifications for this special treatment of phenomenal experience within the paradigm of physicalism have been head splitting...and on top of that, property dualism still has the interaction problem!
I think it was David Bentley Hart who said of Daniel Dennett's position something like "at least it's consistent".
I could have been more clear in that statement. I didn't mean science would be able to study the mind in total in a substance dualism case. I meant it should be able to detect the interaction and study it. If the physical is not causally closed, then those breaks in causality, the points where the non-physical and physical interact, become detectable, at least in principle.
Of course, this is often the point where people want to mix in quantum mysticism. Maybe the interaction is in the wave function collapse, or something along those lines. But scientists are studying the wave function collapse, or perhaps more accurately, the dynamics that make it seems like there is one.
In both cases, there is something for science to study. Maybe we can't get to the ultimate reality, but if it has causal effects in the world, we can study the causal chain as far as possible.
Yeah, Goff is one of those people who want science to "stay in its lane" and away from his favorite notions. But if scientists listened to philosophers and theologians, no one would have explored how the human body works, the origins of species, the origins of the universe, or many other things. It's worth noting that Galileo got in trouble for not listening in that manner. He pushed the boundaries where could for his time.
I had the impression "physicalism" was the new word for "materialism," meant to replace the simplistic idea that everything is "matter" with a more sophisticated idea that everything is "physical," meaning that it could also be energy, or fields, or whatever. Regardless, it's still just "there" and it follows its own rules. Consciousness and agency have nothing intrinsic to do with it. The former comes after the fact (somehow), and the latter has no place at all, if we're honest about it.
I applaud your emphasis on agency. At first I thought, "Yes! This is what philosophy now needs to discuss!", until I remembered that way back when, in Philosophy 101, we were talking about "free will." (We were also talking about "epiphenomenalism," which is indeed the generic name for Russell's "property dualism," as far as I can see.) It seems as if "agency" is the new word for "free will."
The latter is slightly cumbersome. Why did we always add the word "free"? I think the unspoken assumption was that the will had to be free _from_ something, namely, the cause and effect that underpinned the case for determinism. Somehow this never crossed paths with the distinction in political philosophy between "freedom from" and "freedom to." But with the word "agency," we seem to recover that second sense of freedom. We get a clearer sense of an "agent," who does not just _have_ agency, but _is_ agency. It's no longer a case of a separate entity, the "mind," that somehow enjoys a property of "freedom" over against a deterministic universe. Free will confronts the actuality of the past, but agency faces the possibility of the future. It's a nuance, but an important one. I think Heisenberg is onto something like this when he talks about "registering decisions" in "the transition from the possible to the actual." "Agency" suggests a positive, proactive, creative _act_ in the unfolding of the universe, whereas "free will" suggests an arbitrary and (paradoxically) reactive stance to the existing facts of the universe. "Agency" feels participatory in a way that "free will" does not.
But why "agency" rather than simply "will"? This could be because "will" carries resonances from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche of something existential, something determined and teleological, whereas "agency" suggests merely a liveliness of response in the moment.
You ask whether there's something besides a "physicalist panpsychism," with its "assumption that we lack agency." Between your link here and the ones in your footnote, I have some reading to catch up on. But I can't agree with Martin Korth's view that "Panpsychism is essentially based on the same notions of space and passive mental causality as materialism," because I've read Alfred North Whitehead, and if he counts as a panpsychist, Korth is just wrong. Whitehead's unremitting critique of materialism rests on exposing our unreconstructed notions of space and time. For him, the agency of "occasions" is at the very heart of reality; space, time, and matter are built from it -- to say nothing of the "sensations" on which much of modern philosophy has been constructed.
But yes! -- Agency is what we need to think more about.
Hey Jim, glad you liked the post!
I think we're on the same wavelength when it comes to our understanding of physicalism, except there are some panpsychists who are also physicalists, so they might say consciousness is either part of the physical world or makes up the physical world, but would differ on how they tease out these details. I don't quite trust myself to explain what they mean, but I imagine it's something like "the world is really made up of atomic consciousness stuff", or some such thing and to whatever degree, and these atoms of mind stuff would have to coalesce—according to physical laws—before they became consciousness as we know it. But whatever the case, agency would still be left out of that account. If I understand it right, physicalist panpsychists are coming from the epistemological direction of your basic physicalist, only they're adding mind stuff into the mix, because, hell, why not? Quantum mechanics seems to give people a sense that it's a metaphysical free for all, but none of the physicalist theories so far as I know take experienced agency seriously.
"It seems as if "agency" is the new word for "free will."
Maybe? I see the two as slightly different, although possibly very much connected, something that still needs to be teased out, as you appear to be doing here. I can see this topic getting really really big, so I forced myself not to go there. But I totally agree that agency feels participatory in a way that free will doesn't. It's not something we even need to work at or choose or decide. Free will, on the other hand, has a more driving-interrupting-forceful connotation. And yes, why not just 'will'? Good point.
Yes, so true, we don't 'have' agency. That's a good way of putting it. Agency isn't about subversion of nature's laws, or even dominion over the vehicles of our bodies operating in space. I think Husserl helps here—and since I know you know what I'm talking about, I'll just go ahead and talk in his lingo—because we have the horizon or life-world background into which our intentionality is directed, there is at each moment an openness and endless possibility to our directed-ness. It's not something we have to will or even be aware of. That background of possibility is always already there, even when we're feeling (emotionally) trapped or stuck or feeling like we're nothing more than billiard balls bouncing around in a billiard ball universe. Really, thinking about intentionality is kind of mind-blowing and a bit disconcerting. It's really more like retrospecting than introspecting. We can't really experience ourselves as intentional agents in the most accurate way while we're describing it since our describing interferes with the experience. And yet in reflection we can see our own unawareness of our intentionality is somehow a part of it, which makes the notion of free will as some sort of dominion over physical laws seem rather klutzy. How can there be free will in a deterministic universe? How can we make a real choice when we can't choose who we are? These seem like strange questions in light of our unreflective agential-intentionality. Anyway.
I haven't read Whitehead, so I'm not sure whether he counts as a panpsychist. This term is relatively new and I suspect it doesn't work so well to accurately describe past philosophers. I've read some papers on idealist panpsychism that I found didn't fit this mold Korth is talking about, but I'm not sure that's a great paper to read. The title sounds very au courant, but I found it somewhat tedious. I just meant to use it to show there's a huge variety of panpsychisms out there.
Hi, Tina. Yes, I'm glad you posted about this.
In a comment at my blog you asked about Whitehead, and I suggested reading his 1925 _Science and the Modern World_ (SMW), among others. Today I supplemented that recommendation with a quote where he singles out Berkeley for special praise. I want to repeat that quote here, and expand on it, because it has special relevance to the current discussion:
"The man whose ideas I must consider at some length is Bishop Berkeley. Quite at the commencement of the epoch, he made all the right criticisms, at least in principle. . . But all the same, he failed to affect the main stream of scientific thought. It flowed on as if he had never written. Its general success made it impervious to criticism, then and since. The world of science has always remained perfectly satisfied with its peculiar abstractions. They work, and that is sufficient for it.
"The point before us is that this scientific field of thought is now, in the twentieth century, too narrow for the concrete facts which are before it for analysis. This is true even in physics, and is more especially urgent in the biological sciences."
If you want to know more about Whitehead's view of where Berkeley went wrong, you'll just have to read the book! -- No, seriously, I'll come back and explain if you don't have the time. But it's a good book, I think you'd like it.
Was Whitehead a panpsychist? Tam Hunt thinks so, and regards him as a major influence. I've had a chance to read the supplementary material in your links, and Hunt does a fairly good job of conveying Whitehead's ideas, with a couple of caveats. On Hunt's interpretation, an electron's experience presumably "consists of little more than rudimentary perceptions of the outside world, through its being influenced by the fundamental forces of electromagnetism, gravity, and so on, and a choice as to how to manifest in the next moment based on those rudimentary perceptions." I would interpret Whitehead as saying rather that electromagnetism, gravity, and so on are the result of choices as to how to manifest in the next moment -- as is the electron itself. The choices are made by "actual occasions," which, in as much as they exist, I suppose might constitute a substrate for an open-minded "physicalism."
Hunt also explains that these actual occasions, or "actual entities" (Whitehead's terminology is not always consistent) oscillate between subject and object in discrete intervals of time. This is not quite right; in Whitehead's terms they oscillate between "presentational immediacy," where they take in what is going on in the world of occasions around them, and "causal efficacy," where they create a participatory response, which for other occasions becomes part of what is going on. I think this does involve discrete steps of non-continuous time, but not necessarily in a synchronous way; as I interpret it, each occasion runs on its own "clock," so to speak. (Whether this has anything to do with wavelengths in the subatomic world, Whitehead never commented, as far as I know.)
Hunt talks about the position Strawson ends up taking, that a true physicalist must concede the existence, and therefore the physical nature, of experience. He spots the problem: "But on a more natural reading of ‘physics’ and ‘physical,’ experience does not qualify. Experience is not a fundamental property that physicists need to posit in their theory of the external world; physics forms a closed, consistent theory even without experience." Because of this, people who consider themselves true physicalists don't feel the compulsion to concede the existence of experience. Hunt himself rejects the objection: "I believe that physics is a closed system only through the invocation of unwarranted assumptions, not established fact." But Whitehead also has something to say about this, indirectly, in SMW:
"It is easy enough to find a theory, logically harmonious and with important applications in the region of fact, provided that you are content to disregard half your evidence. Every age produces people with clear logical intellects, and with the most praiseworthy grasp of the importance of some sphere of human experience, who have elaborated, or inherited a scheme of thought which exactly fits those experiences which claim their interest. Such people are apt resolutely to ignore, or to explain away, all evidence which confuses their scheme with contradictory instances. What they cannot fit in is for them nonsense."
"We can't really experience ourselves as intentional agents in the most accurate way while we're describing it since our describing interferes with the experience."
I didn't really follow up on this aspect of your comment, about Husserl. But it reminds me of some things Thomas Nagel said in _The View from Nowhere_, which I quoted in one of my posts about the book ("Nagel's Demon" and the Two Eyes):
'What he offers is “not a solution to the problem of free will, but a substitute”, in the form of “the essentially incomplete objective view, or incomplete view for short. The incomplete view of of ourselves in the world includes a large blind spot, behind our eyes, so to speak, that hides something we cannot take into account in acting, because it is what acts.” (p. 127). '
Well, I began reading Strawson's "Why physicalism entails panpsychism," and right off the bat (not Nagel's bat!), I noticed a divergence from Whitehead. In the first paragraph, Strawson begins, "I will equate ‘concrete’ with ‘spatio-temporally (or at least temporally) located'." Compare this with Whitehead in _Science and the Modern World_, at the end of Chapter 3:
"The enormous success of the scientific abstractions, yielding on the one hand _matter_ with its _simple location_ in space and time, on the other hand _mind_, perceiving, suffering, reasoning, but not interfering, has foisted onto philosophy the task of accepting them as the most concrete rendering of fact.
"Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on an equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of _misplaced concreteness_ to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century."
So, spatio-tempotal location and its concreteness are in question for Whitehead, but Strawson begins by invoking them for his "view about the actual universe." I might have the wrong end of the stick, but I have the feeling this is not about Whitehead's version of panpsychism. I'll continue reading. . .
Yeah, it sounds to me like Whitehead is not a physicalist panpsychist. What you're talking about is exactly the thing I want to read about. I get the feeling I'll like him. Ordering the book now!
Wonderful article Tina! I really enjoyed it!
I imagine a physicalist might nod along in agreement with your critique of property dualism right up until they hit the ice cream example. To me, that's where your article gets interesting. It feels like you're presenting us with a choice between accepting physicalism and denying genuine agency, or preserving genuine agency and rejecting physicalism.
This makes me wonder: Is it possible to have a middle ground between determinism and randomness? What do you think about arguments that we ultimately face just two logical possibilities? One might argue that our actions are either determined by prior causes, or they are random. There is no middle ground. Wouldn't any proposed 'third way' just collapse into either determination or randomness? Even quantum mechanics, often invoked to escape determinism, only gives us randomness, not the kind of genuine agency you're describing.
But I'm curious about something else, too. You mention hoping there's no such thing as physicalist idealism -- which made me wonder: What about an idealist who denies free will?
This isn't just a hypothetical -- there are Buddhist traditions that seem to take this position. They view consciousness as fundamental (not physical reality), yet still see our sense of agency as an illusion. They'd say both the ice cream desire and the action arose from prior causes, even if those causes are mental rather than physical.
This raises an interesting question: while idealists can deny free will, physicalism seems to require denying it. Is this why you see physicalism as particularly problematic for agency, because it doesn't just happen to conflict with it but necessarily excludes it?
It seems like there's an underlying question here about what consciousness is for. There's a strong intuition that consciousness must be about agency -- after all, it really does seem like our conscious experience is to make choices. But maybe that's not the only way to see it.
(And btw -- classic vanilla is an excellent choice. Sometimes the classics are the best!)
Thanks Suzi!
"What do you think about arguments that we ultimately face just two logical possibilities?"
I think that question is more relevant with a physicalist assumption (if physicalism takes science to be the final word, whatever that is). If you take experience as the starting point, the question of whether or not the world is determined or random is of little consequence.
You made an interesting point about idealists who deny free will. There are many kinds of idealism out there, but the popular ones these days seem to involve eastern philosophy-religion. Some of these idealisms seem to be coming from a cosmic perspective when they say everything is determined, but they're not taking our lived experience as a starting point either, at least not on that front. Instead, it's god's consciousness that's the starting point, and perhaps our consciousness is merely subsumed in god's. I take god's point of view to be just as confounding as the scientific point of view. I'm more down to earth. It's interesting, though, that with that cosmic view the question of free will changes significantly, it becomes in many ways more poignant since what really matters is whether you can align yourself with god's will. The point is freedom from becoming a slave to empty desire, of aligning your expectations to fit reality. I'm not a theist in the usual sense, but the religious view of freedom is actually more meaningful to me than the ability to make free choices. If you don't have the wisdom to make the right choices, what difference does freedom make?
"This raises an interesting question: while idealists can deny free will, physicalism seems to require denying it. Is this why you see physicalism as particularly problematic for agency, because it doesn't just happen to conflict with it but necessarily excludes it?"
That's a really good way of putting it! Because from a physicalist perspective, you can always say, "Of course we experience ourselves as causal agents" ...but ultimately you'll have to concede this experience doesn't ultimately matter, it's either an illusion or not reflective of reality in one way or another. In other words, experiencing something doesn't make it true, no matter how strange it would seem to deny it, not under physicalism. The physicalist can wait for the truth to be settled by science, but if you buy into Strawson's argument, science will never give you free will: determinism and randomness lead to the same billiard room.
Interestingly, most people find determinism very uncomfortable. Even the most staunch illusionists would rather deny the existence of phenomena than deny free will, at least that's what I'm noticing.
Whereas I see agency as a fundamental feature of our conscious experience, not a matter that can be determined by science or any theory about the physical world. I see the best solution to this friction as simply admitting that a theory about the physical world doesn't apply to experienced consciousness, and I would go so far as to say the theory about the physical world depends on experienced consciousness. It's simply pointing out that science is constituted in minds, which is...where it is...right? :)
This is a great article. I like how you point out how strange it is to deny agency. I find it surreal listening to people denying qualia or free will. All because they think science says so.
Imagine if a doctor came and diagnosed you as having no conscious experience and no free will and insisting it was true, and they had the brain scans to prove it. It would be surreal. What can you say to them? It’s meta-level weirdness.
I know, right! Imagine they bring you a brain scan that looks like this:
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-thursday-edition-1.3679117/scientists-research-man-missing-90-of-his-brain-who-leads-a-normal-life-1.3679125
By the way, your scenario is very similar to what I'm currently writing my novel about. I did change things a bit by having it be a guy whose dead body is found on the side of the road and an autopsy reveals he's missing a brain with no signs it has been taken out. Authorities refuse to investigate the murder since they conclude he was never alive. :)
This is the important point:
"SB: So, does that mean then that there is not one region of the brain responsible for consciousness?
AC: Precisely. These cases are definitely a challenge for any theory of consciousness that depends on very specific neuro-anatomical assumptions."
The same is true for many or all physical structures in nature and the universe--
everything is far more interwoven, non - linear etc. than most people, reductionists, realize. Of course, shamans probably knew that.
It does seem to be that way! If we take Nature in its fullest, more glorious sense, it eludes our pathetic logic.
In the Stanford Encyclopedia on Philosophy entry on physicalism, the short section "1.1 Terminology" does a good job describing the various uses of physicalism. Like the author there, I basically see it as materialism plus the forces of physics. Lots and lots of attempts to find things other than this have been made in the history of philosophy and I don't find any of them persuasive so I'm left with physicalism.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/
I'm also a compatibilist when it comes to determinism and agency, so I think your causal agency beliefs sound a bit too much like libertarian (i.e. full-blown) free will for me. You wrote, "The fact is, we don’t experience ourselves as non-agents." But that depends on how closely you pay attention to your experience. Sam Harris, after all his years sat in meditation, says that all of our experience bubbles out of non-conscious awareness. So he completely disagrees with your facts. And there's something to that. When you say "I did it because I wanted an ice cream cone", you have to reckon with the infinite regression of asking why did you want that? (And that, and that, and that....) You have to reckon with Schopenhauer's statement "A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills." Unlike Sam, I reckon with this by thinking in evolutionary gradations. I think our non-conscious selves develop slowly, slowly over a lifetime (i.e. ontogeny is real) and like the Sorites paradox of the heap, it eventually adds enough grains of experience until it deserves to be called a self. But there is still something paradoxical here that is not so easily dismissed into being sure that we have either full, unchecked agency or full, billiard-ball determinism. To me, that's just not "the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy, and it reveals the deepest woo-woo of the human mind." To me, it just follows the evidence of life's continually connected existence on Earth.
(Unlike panpsychism! Yuck, there's no evidence for that. And I once heard Philip Goff in a small group salon in Durham, England try to convince us otherwise.)
"Unlike panpsychism! Yuck, there's no evidence for that."
A throw-away comment; but in fact the evidence for panpsychism is literally everywhere, in the observation that everything is responsive.
The normal view is to think of this reponsiveness as mechanical. This interpretation can also be applied everywhere, from quarks to human beings, and up to a point it's quite helpful and predictive. At a certain point, its usefulness for predicting exactly what is going to happen next falls off dramatically; people bring up quantum mechanics, but the more obvious examples are in the realm of history, or what one's spouse is about to do next. For the mechanical view of responsiveness, this failure of predictive power is assumed to be a matter of degree and not kind. (An effort seems to be underway to make the assumption work for quantum mechanics as well.)
There is another point of breakdown for the mechanical view. When applied to other humans, it works fine (in theory), but when applied personally, it comes into conflict with our own sense of agency. For the mechanical interpretation of responsiveness, this personal sense of agency is not read as a piece of evidence that might inform the interpretation in fresh and interesting ways, but as a problem for all the other evidence about responsiveness. Taken by itself, that evidence is fully compatible in theory with a mechanical interpretation (in theory), and because this interpretation has proven tremendously effective (up to a point), the project is to continue applying it, regardless of that singular piece of evidence that is one's personal experience. This means either explaining the sense of agency and other phenomena of personal awareness in mechanical terms, or if necessary, explaining it away. This is where we find ourselves today.
Panpsychism simply takes a different approach to the ubiquitous evidence of responsiveness, by including all the evidence. It attributes responsiveness by reference to that singular scrap of personal evidence that is, if not abundant, nevertheless inescapable. It goes beyond graciously extending the existence of such experience to other humans -- for which, in the final analysis, there is also "no evidence" -- and attributes it wherever it finds responsiveness. This is an extremely dislocating thought, easily as dislocating as the Copernican revolution is said to have been, but it waits at the end of careful enquiry for those willing to think about it.
I think you are on to something, but to me panpsychism is not the way out. The "psyche" in panpsychism refers to a subject feeling something. It is the location of the question "what is it like to be..." something. But how can this question of subjectivity ever make sense when there is no subject to experience it? Subjects require individual structures and durability to exist. This does not happen from quarks to inorganic chemistry.
In my own long series on the evolution of consciousness, I posited something I call "pandynamism". When looking deeply into the hard problem and how consciousness does seem to arise as soon as life does, I wrote:
--> What I hypothesize instead is that the forces of physics are everywhere, and it is a fundamental property of the universe that these forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge. Since the Greek for force is dynami, I would say the universe has pandynamism rather than panpsychism. The psyche only originates and evolves along with life. This psyche expands as the living structures expand their capabilities of sensing and responding to these forces.
https://www.evphil.com/blog/consciousness-23-summary-of-my-evolutionary-theory
That might actually fit with your idea of "responsiveness" Jim. What do you think? I just would never call this panpsychism and I can't stand the arguments of the big panpsychists.
Hi, Ed. It looks like you're more receptive to the general line of thought than I expected.
I'm just heading out the door, and I owe Mike a reply, but my first reaction is that "forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge" seems to beg the question. I have nothing against the concept of emergence, which has its uses. But how does subjectivity emerge from non-subjectivity? Panpsychism takes the presence of subjectivity, even if it only emerges at a late stage, to be a manifestation of something basically "friendly" to subjectivity, we might say, and which for want of a better word we could call "psyche" (although currently I'm leaning toward "feeling" in Whitehead's sense). {EDITED to fix the quote]
I don't consider it begging the question. As I said in my first answer, I think it is literally impossible to have subjectivity without a subject. It's just logical to say these "forces are felt subjectively when subjects emerge".
I'm with Chalmers that there may just be something else in the laws of physics that needs to be added in to explain the emergence of consciousness. This is how I describe the data in a way that makes more sense to me than panpsychism.
--> how does subjectivity emerge from non-subjectivity?
Slowly, slowly, in the same way that life emerges from non-life. That's my evolutionary perspective on it.
I hear you, Ed, on the difficulties of understanding psyche or phenomenal properties without a subject to experience them. I actually feel the same way, which is why I prefer certain kinds of idealism (although not all!) I'm a commonsensical person and it takes a great leap of imagination to think about panpsychism in the way it's often described—though perhaps there is no one way, given all the different versions of it. Lately I've come to see panpsychism as a scientific mode of thinking (but that's not to say science as we know it). The difference from a theoretical perspective between pure idealism and pure panpsychism is merely a matter of scale, but from my perspective as a commonsensical person, I don't experience mini subjects or atomic phenomenal properties and so I'm not inclined to postulate such things. That said, panpsychism as such is not incompatible with my understanding of idealism, so I'm not inclined to argue that such entities are impossible either. In principle I can see the two theories living harmoniously.
Physicalism can also admit panpsychism (Strawson), but then, as I contend, you'd still have the problem of causal agency. I think this view does have advantages over straight physicalism, though, in that it at least purports to account for phenomena, albeit at a non-experiential level.
Hi Ed, thanks for the link. Physicalism is indeed complicated, as your SEP article makes clear. (As I side note, I find SEP has a analytic bent and tends to get mired in technical lingo and linguistic analysis. Sometimes this leads to an analytic characterization of philosophies that came before analytic philosophy, and I find that a bit misleading. In that link, for instance, there's a section on "intentionality", but no mention of Husserl or Brentano. Hm. And the characterization of intentionality as the 'aboutness' of thought seems pretty skeletal and uninteresting. Anyway.)
I think meditation often gets confused with phenomenology, but these aren't the same (despite the fact that the word 'meditation' often gets used in both areas). Mediators aren't necessarily philosophically-trained and they quite often talk about there being no 'self'. What do they mean by that? Usually it turns out to mean something like "there is no personality who has desires and dispositions". When I hear them talking about there being no self, I'm hearing complete nonsense because I'm imagining they're talking about the destruction of the unity of experience, not personality, and it takes me a second to get over my philosophical understanding of their terms to see what they're getting at.
It's funny how eliminative physicalists are aligning themselves with eastern philosophers over this issue of self. When Sam Harris says all of experience bubbles out of non-conscious awareness, that's complete nonsense from a phenomenological standpoint. He would have to be conscious of both his experience as it is experienced—all of it—as well as the experience of all of it bubbling out of something he calls non-conscious awareness. Which would be like saying, "I experience the un-experiencable." This sounds like the kind of talk you often hear from meditators, whose experiences I don't doubt at all, but their characterizations of their experiences leave a great deal to be desired if you take them to be philosophical-phenomenological investigations. Like I said, meditation is just not the same sort of activity, the goal is not the same, and the shared terminology between the two practices is unfortunate.
I don't have to reckon with the infinite regression of asking why I wanted what I wanted when I talk about lived agency because I'm not a physicalist. I'm not the one saying everything supervenes on the physical. Plus, I don't have a problem with science understanding the physical world to be deterministic because as I see it, that deterministic framework is useful for a scientific understanding of most things (although once we get into the quantum, maybe that's so clear, I don't know, I'll leave that to the scientists). My position allows for a scientific understanding, but it doesn't allow science to become metaphysics—in other words, physicalism. If you're a physicalist who thinks "everything supervenes on the physical", then you are limited to that scientific lens which acknowledges only efficient causes (to use Aristotle's terminology).
As I understand compatibilism, our agency is not affected by believing that the physical world is deterministic. Is this right? Because if so, then what I'm saying is not altogether different. On the other hand, compatibilism makes no sense in a physicalist framework; physicalism is practically defined as the opposite when it says 'everything supervenes on the physical'. The agency one experiences under the physicalist framework is ultimately hollow and illusory since there's no letting in of any broader notion of causality. Your desires can't cause anything. You need a more robust causal framework to accommodate the experience of desire, not to mention lived experience of anything whatsoever (which is what I'm talking about with intentionality). Aristotle understood this so well with his four causes. It doesn't even occur to analytic philosophers with their various physicalist philosophies of mind that their framework for understanding causality is rather flimsy—this is what I meant when I talked about everyone getting themselves worked up on the issue of 'overdetermination'. This problem of overdetermination disappears once you dump the underlying physicalism and its associated limited causal framework. I see no reason to believe in god or eternal souls or even souls as separable from bodies in that broader framework either, so it's really mystifying to me that people aren't turning to Aristotle with some slight modifications right now. Doing so would be much easier than linguistic contortionism.
Sorry, Tina, I'm just not able to follow all of your arguments here. I don't have a strong sense of what you are actually in favor of. And we seem really far apart about your usage of intentionality, meditation, the "unity" of experience, non-conscious awareness, lived agency, metaphysics beyond science, only acknowledging efficient causes, broader notions of causality, and accusations of linguistic contortionism. I just don't get any of that. It's like we're in different universes. So, let me focus on one question you asked.
--> As I understand compatibilism, our agency is not affected by believing that the physical world is deterministic. Is this right?
No, I don't think that's how compatibilists would put it. We're talking about free will either being compatible or incompatible with the determinism of the physical universe. Compatibilists like myself or Dan Dennett (who I've read the most) will get there by redefining free will to make it compatible with determinism. In other words, we say our free will (what you seem to be calling agency) just is not the philosophical libertarian, free-floating, skyhook supported thing that the ancients thought it was. But it is still something very different than billiard ball interactions. Dennett called what we have the "free will worth wanting" and I like that. If that ends up being "hollow and illusory" compared to what you desire for existence, so be it. That gives us no license to reach for "broader notions of causality" if there is no evidence for them. Where are they? What could they possibly be? So, I believe our agency is very much affected by the physical world being deterministic. And that's okay. What we have is still pretty awesome.
No worries, Ed. I'm coming from a largely idealistic standpoint, but I hate to use that word since most people take idealism to mean solipsism. Maybe radical empiricist is a better way of describing my views.
I think Dennett does a great deal of redefining, but I'm not convinced by semantics. A 'free will worth wanting' doesn't sound much like free will or compatibilism. You say there's no reason to reach for a broader notion of causality if there is no evidence for them, but where is the evidence for determinism? I understand that as a scientific axiom, not anything that can be derived by empirical observation. It's simply asserted. Whether we want to apply the axiom beyond the realm of science is up to us. I don't think it works too well in describing human motivation or experience.
I'm not sure what you mean by the 'libertarian' free will of the ancients. I think they tended to see free will as having more to do with self-mastery and being free from our own desires than simply having choices or exerting power over nature.
Thanks, that helps clarify some things for me. I'd like to hear more about why your empiricism is radical though. At some point, if it moves from evidence to speculation, it isn't really empirical anymore as far as I can tell.
--> where is the evidence for determinism? I understand that as a scientific axiom, not anything that can be derived by empirical observation. It's simply asserted.
That's not an axiom of science to simply assert things. That's maybe a mischaracterization of science put forth by extreme science skeptics like Feyerabend. Scientific knowledge is built slowly with hypotheses and attempts to disprove them. The more work on that the better. (See my review of Naomi Oreskes' book "Why Trust Science?") But skeptics have a point. And that is why all scientific knowledge is only held provisionally. New data could always change things. However, that doesn't leave us with nothing. It's just the way the world is and we have to pragmatically deal with that. I'm writing a paper right now about the evolution of knowledge and how we could characterize it going from extremely weak and fragile to extremely strong and robust. Never does it arrive at certain "truth", but we have discovered principles that let us be more or less convinced about the different pieces of knowledge that we hold. (And by the way, I'm talking about science in the broader sense of its latin roots meaning knowledge. So this pertains to ALL knowledge; not just the academic "sciences" that make up university departments.)
In the case, of determinism, there is all the evidence of all the actions in the entire history of the universe that has so far held up to this hypothesis. When we look at all of this data, there have never been any uncaused actions observed so far. Ever. Therefore, we've achieved extremely wide and diverse consensus about that. And so determinism is something we ought to have very high credences for.
--> I don't think it works too well in describing human motivation or experience.
Really? You don't see reasons behind any and all human actions? I do. Although they are not easy to know, let alone predict with any accuracy yet.
--> I'm not sure what you mean by the 'libertarian' free will of the ancients.
I mean the free will of souls untethered from our bodies or this physical universe. You'll know better than me which Greeks believed in this to what extent. The Christian philosophers made a dogma out of it. In my review of Just Deserts (the book where Gregg Caruso and Dan Dennett debate free will compatibilism), I noted that even though they are on opposite sides of one free will debate, they both agree libertarian free will is wrong. I noted:
"Both are naturalists (JD p.171) who see no supernatural interference in the workings of the world. That leaves both men accepting general determinism in the universe (JD p.33), which simply means all events and behaviours have prior causes. Therefore, the libertarian version of free will is out. Any hope that humans can generate an uncaused action is deemed a “non-starter” by Gregg (JD p.41) and “panicky metaphysics” by Dan (JD p.53)."
--> I think they tended to see free will as having more to do with self-mastery and being free from our own desires than simply having choices or exerting power over nature.
That's exactly the "free will worth wanting" as Dennett describes it. He grew to like the phrase that we are puppets who must learn to love our own strings. We can do this when no one else is pulling on them without our consent. But we cannot cut the strings and float free from all causation. In my writings on the evolution of consciousness, I posit that our most recently developed tier gives us the ability to grasp and be motivated by abstractions about the world. This means that it is now possible for our strings to be pulled by an infinite number of ideas, including any imaginary speculative ones. That's as many "degrees of freedom" as one can ever hope to have. And we have it!
It occurred to me last night that your stance on the primacy of experience (a stance I agree with) is similar to my stance on the primacy of physical reality. I consider both central aspects of our existence.