Rudy Rucker
Panpsychism
By AtheEisegete
Sam Harris Forum, March 25, 2008
Edited by Andy Ross
Panpsychism is the idea that a psi field permeates physical
reality and determines how things seem to us. This field takes peak values in
zones associated with human consciousness and finds its unity in the
transparency of all reality to our mental searchlight. The psi field unfolds
mathematically in a rather complicated way that finds its simplest expression to
date in the Schrödinger equation. Solving that equation for big molecules, let
alone for the huge assemblies of molecules making up human brains, is not yet
computationally feasible.
Worlds of human consciousness are most simply characterized logically as the
natural models of sets of sentences. A suitably formalized set of sentences is
true together in a world, or rather a mindworld. Truth is the primitive notion
here. A true indicative sentence, or a statement, expresses a fact. But facts
clump together, and a self-contained set of facts is a world. What makes a set
of facts self-contained is that the set of statements expressing them is closed
under logical implication (this is the proof-theoretic criterion) and modeled in
a ranked V-set in the cumulative hierarchy of sets (this is the model-theoretic
criterion).
Because time marches on and things change, we inhabit a succession of such
worlds. These are physical worlds, each corresponding to a distribution of
momenergy (John Wheeler's word) in spacetime. Special is the permeation with
psi. In each world, the world wave function, the "wow" function, in effect
specifies the facts that make up that world. It does so by assigning
probabilities to the various statements that have meaning in that world. The
probabilities arise in turn from probability amplitudes and entanglements in a
way that is familiar in principle to physicists.
New in this approach — what puts the "mind" in mindworlds — is the treatment of
world closure. In classical physics, we all inhabit one big world, which
stretches off into the unknown future. My radical constructivism says let each
moment of time define its own world, closed and complete, but destined to bud
into a new world at the next moment. The wow function defines a symmetric
distribution of futures that breaks with a "pop" — a probabilistic ontology
parturition (sorry — this just means birth of new things).
As time unfolds and we experience new things, the wow function keeps on popping.
Our interaction with things makes it pop. A world comes to a focus in our
consciousness, which is a holistic mindfield or an extended entanglement
characterized by high peaks of wow. The bubble of peaked wow jiggles and pops,
and there we are in a new world. In my speculative physics for all this, the
peaked wow is carried by deep-radio photons generated by the rhythmic humming of
neurons in the neocortex, but that needs testing.
Headaches Have Themselves
By Jerry Fodor
London Review of Books, May 24, 2007
Edited by Andy Ross
Consciousness is all the rage just now. But nothing has been
ascertained with respect to what philosophers have come to call the hard
problem. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made
entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How could a
couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?
Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this. According
to one, the answer is that consciousness 'emerges' from neural processes.
According to the other view, consciousness must be some sort of illusion.
Consciousness and Its Place in Nature consists of a lead essay by Strawson,
commentaries by 18 other philosophers, and Strawson's extensive comments on the
comments. Strawson has the kind of expansive metaphysical imagination that used
to be at the heart of philosophy. Also, the commentaries are insightful,
informative, sophisticated and excellently argued. I must warn you, however,
that Strawson's way with the hard problem is wildly at odds with the views
current in most of philosophy and psychology.
There are three philosophical principles to which Strawson's allegiance is
unshakeable. The first is that the existence of consciousness is undeniable. The
second is a kind of monism: everything that there is is the same sort of stuff
as such familiar things as tables, chairs and the bodies of animals.
The third thesis is that emergence isn't possible. Strawson holds that there
isn't anything about matter in virtue of which conscious experience could arise
from it. We can't imagine any way of arranging small bits of unconscious stuff
that would result in the consciousness of the larger bits of stuff of which they
are the constituents.
So if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs, and if
at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious, and if
there is no way of assembling stuff that isn't conscious that produces stuff
that is, it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals
is made of must itself be conscious.
Strawson is strongly inclined to conclude that the subjects of the experiences
that basic things have must be the experiences themselves. Part of the surcharge
that we pay for panpsychism is that we must give up on the commonsense
distinction between the experience and the experiencer. At the basic level,
headaches have themselves.
It's not clear that Strawson has in fact arrived at an answer to the hard
problem. Suppose that the little bits of me have (or are) conscious experiences.
How does that account for my being conscious? If you have one experience and I
have another, the total of our experiences comes to two; there isn't a third
experience of which the first two are the constituents. Well, if that's true of
you and me, why isn't it also true of me and the little things I’m made of? How
does their having their headaches help to explain my having mine?
Having been up front about his problems, Strawson considers various strategies
in response to them. Perhaps, for example, commonsense metaphysics really does
have to be abandoned; perhaps, in particular, the object/property distinction
will have to go. Strawson reads some such moral as already implicit in what's
been going on in recent physics. And maybe there are mysteries we must learn to
live with. Maybe the composition of big experiences out of little ones is among
those.
I think it's true that we can't so much as imagine the solution of the hard
problem. The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution
will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling.
Philosophers used to think (some still do) that a bit of analytical tidying up
would make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is
hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem
is through with us.
Why not just say: some things are true about the world because that's the kind
of world it is; there’s nothing more to make of it. That sounds defeatist
perhaps, but it's the sort of thing that we will have to say sooner or later
whether or not saying it would help with the hard problem.
Typical scientific explanations appeal to natural laws. Some natural laws are
explained by appealing to others, but some are basic. Basic laws can’t be
explained. There isn't a reason why they hold, they just do. Even if basic
physical laws are true of everything, they don't explain everything. I don’t say
that's the right way to look at things, but it's a perfectly respectable and
traditional way.
Maybe, however, the hard problem shows that not all basic laws are laws of
physics. Maybe it shows that some of them are laws of emergence. If that's so,
then it's not true after all that if Y emerges from X there must be something
about X in virtue of which Y emerges from it. Rather, in some cases, there
wouldn't be any way of accounting for what emerges from what. Consciousness
might emerge from matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which
consciousness emerges.
It would then have turned out that the hard problem is literally intractable. I
suppose one can imagine a world where all the big things are made out of small
things, and there are laws about the small things and there are laws about the
big things, but some laws of the second kind don't derive from any laws of the
first kind. In that world, it might be a basic law that when you put the right
sorts of neurons together in the right sorts of way, you get a subject of
consciousness.
Strawson is right that the hard problem really is very hard. If you want an idea
of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when
you face its hardness without flinching, this is the right book to read.
AR My own views took many years to mature and so far as I know they owe nothing to Galen Strawson, but with such an odd position I like to give myself some company.
