Podcast description: Materialism is dead. There are simply too many questions left unanswered after years of studying the brain. Now, people are scrambling for a new way to understand the mind-body relationship. Cartesian dualism has become a whipping boy in philosophy, but it has advantages over the alternatives. Dr. Joshua Farris discusses Cartesianism and philosophy with Dr. Michael Egnor.
Marx never really considered the mind-body problem in depth.
Engels did and he warned against "vulgar materialism" which seeks to equate consciousness with matter. If anything Engels would be closer to cartesian dualism than the reductive physicalism that dominates mainstream science, and which would definitely fall under "vulgar materialism" IMO.
Not sure what the correct take here is but I really really doubt it's reductive physicalism, it just has too many holes that I don't think it can ever fully plug.
rhetorical question but why
i can see the atoms bro, I can't see the aether
spoiler
all this metaphysical idealism interests me but people into idealism as a whole tend to be fascists or something
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Man even if this is true I don't want to believe just because of how extremely depressing the implications of hard materialist reductionism is so yeah I know what you mean
like they take almost a sadistic glee in reminding people of "uhm acksuhally this is all meaningless"
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I think it's okay to do both. Sometimes the logical/analytic side can be just as playful as the creative, whimsical side. I take a lot of pleasure in just observing an animal's behaviors and trying to rationalize them in my head - almost as much as I do from snuggling them.
To convince those people just punch them in the face until they change their mind.
Disclaimer: I an not a philosophical advisor
I might be someone you would consider a reductionist.
This rings of someone who's caught a nasty break in life more than it does someone trying to follow a metaphysically monist position to its logical conclusions.
Higher-order concepts and abstractions are absolutely meaningful and real, even if they are reducible to whatever base physical reality, because one can speak meaningfully of two people in love, whereas tracing the millions of chemical reactions that make up that "love" will never be feasible.
I'm a big fan of ontic structural realism in this case.
This is the correct take. It might be true that materialism is looking less and less plausible given our best contemporary physical theories, but the idea that "thoughts aren't made out of particles, therefore ghosts did it" is absurd. There's plenty of room left for naturalistic (or even physicalist) explanations. Here's a very rough sketch of a way we might cash out the differences, going from the strongest claim to the weakest claim.
Materialism (in the philosophy of science sense, which is related to but distinct from the Marxist sense) is the claim that the only things that exist are material bodies (and, perhaps, mereological composites of material bodies). Materialism suggests that the world is constructed out of some sort of universal "building blocks," which are themselves indivisible, spatially localized, impenetrable material bodies. The atomism of Enlightenment thinkers like Galileo, Bruno, and (sometimes) Hobbes is the prototypical materialist theory, but it's still an extremely common intuitive assumption among people who don't know too much about contemporary physics, but who are uncomfortable with supernatural entities, abstract objects, and other immaterial things. I feel quite confident in asserting that materialism has definitively been shown to be false by contemporary science (for reasons outlined below). Very extreme (but somewhat naive) eliminatively-minded people sometimes end up in this position, asserting that all that exists are atoms, quarks, or something like that.
Physicalism is more permissive than materialism. Physicalism asserts that all that exists are the entities described by fundamental physics (and possibly mereological sums of those entities). Physicalists relax the demand that all these things be material, though, and are willing to admit things like fields, forces, energy, and other stuff that is not spatially localized, not impenetrable (i.e. doesn't exclusively take up space), or otherwise not consistent with materialism. It's very, very hard to see how we can take contemporary physics seriously without at least admitting fields and forces, since these are fundamental objects of many of our best contemporary physical theories. It isn't at all plausible that, for instance, gauge fields might really be material objects at bottom, or that bosons might really occupy space in such a way that they exclude other bosons and fermions. Not all physicalists are strict reductionists (or eliminativists), but many are. Those who aren't usually see "higher level" objects and entities as being "bookkeeping devices," constructed ways to track the operation of the things physics says exists, or convenient fictions that are nonetheless indispensable for doing the kinds of things we want to do. Most of the time, they'll assert that what's really real are the objects of fundamental physics, and that other things are (at the most) second-class citizens of our ontology. Physicalists usually endorse something like Kim's causal drainage argument, and see the real "causal oomf" as being located in the objects of fundamental physics, whatever those may be. Kim is a prototypical physicalist, but so are Alex Rosenberg, the Churchlands, David Albert, Sam Harris (I think), Peter Unger, and many, many other people. It's a very common philosophical position.
Naturalism is the most permissive of these positions, and probably the hardest to define (in part because it can get really close to physicalism). Non-physicalist naturalists relax the claim that physics is the final arbiter over what does and doesn't exist, but otherwise hold to many of the same ideas that physicalism does. Naturalists endorse causal closure, but (at least sometimes) embrace things like downward causation, genuine metaphysical emergence, holism, and other ideas that put some composite objects on equal ontological footing with the objects of fundamental physics. A naturalist might assert, for instance, that everything that exists or occurs is consistent with the rules of fundamental physics, but that those rules don't exhaustively describe what's real. That is, they might assert that any real system's behavior can be predicted by the laws of fundamental physics, but that there are interesting features of some real systems' behavior which are missed by those laws. While most physicalists believe that the laws of the higher level special sciences are in principle derivable from the laws of fundamental physics, naturalists have room to deny that claim. A position like ontic structural realism--which denies the distinction between abstract and concrete objects, and asserts that only patterns exist--is a prototypical non-physicalist naturalist position. Dan Dennett, James Ladyman, Don Ross, Cliff Hooker, Philip Kitcher, and Sean Carroll are all non-physicalist naturalists (so am I). Ladyman & Ross' book Every Thing Must Go is a great detailed look at a non-physicalist naturalist system (and a spirited defense of that position) This position is actually rather weak, insisting only on some rather mild claims like causal closure, Ladyman's "primacy of physics principle," (which states that real things can't behave in a way that's inconsistent with physics), or similarly general principles. I find naturalism more plausible than physicalism in virtue of many of the advances that have come out of complex systems theory in the last few decades, which I think have given us good reasons to think that strong emergence, downward causation, and similar ideas that seem a little at odds with physicalism are not only real, but can be given precise scientific and mathematical characterizations.
Cartesian dualism is probably incompatible with all three of these positions, but claiming that contemporary science undermines all of these is just wrong: the complexities of our best contemporary physical theories are actually reasons to endorse naturalism, not reject it.
Thanks for laying that all out! I feel validated. Have you read Everything Must Go? I want to but I may need some more prerequisites first.
Also, out of curiosity, what do you think of the mathematical universe hypothesis?
Oh yeah, I've read it a number of times--it's an excellent piece of philosophy, but you're right that it's not the most accessible thing in the world. Don Ross has a paper called "Rainforest Realism: A Dennettian Theory of Existence" that's a bit more approachable, and hits many of the same notes (Dennett's paper "Real Patterns" from the 1990s was responsible for kicking a lot of this off). You'll get the most out of ETMG if you've got at least a little background in contemporary physics, though you don't need all the details. A good undergraduate-level understanding of quantum mechanics and some idea of the major concepts in QFT would be more than sufficient.
I'm pretty sympathetic to Tegmark's work in general, at least in terms of the formalism. The metaphysics of it leans a little closer to Platonism than I tend to like, just because I'm skeptical of the idea that there's a meaningful distinction between illata and abstracta in general. Insofar as it's a fleshing out of a detailed theory that's compatible with OSR that demonstrates how to understand the "it's patterns all the way down" claim in a way that doesn't require any substrate--that is, doesn't require anything for the patterns to "be patterns in"--it's a great contribution to the literature.
Thanks for your insight. I read both Real Patterns and Rainforest Realism a few years ago which is what drew me to this line of thinking. I used to love to read about quantum mechanics but I definitely would not claim an undergraduate's understanding, so maybe I should pick up a textbook or something first. I do have a friend who is a tenured physics professor in that field, so maybe I can throw a question or two his way if I get stuck lol.
I'm willing to endorse that. As an amateur, when I stumbled on that hypothesis, it was hard not to feel the little satisfaction of everything being wrapped up neatly with a bow, but I'm not sure that's always a feeling to trust. A lot of the earth-shattering ideas that have rewired my thinking have landed chaotically in uneven chunks.
You can certainly give it a try and see if you hit a wall. If you felt like you followed the Ross and Dennett papers, and also feel like you grok Tegmark, you'll almost certainly get quite a bit out of the book. This philosophy of complex systems stuff is my specialty, so feel free to give a shout if you have questions, too.
This is a very important insight. I think both amateurs and professionals sometimes over-estimate the value/importance of "beauty" or "parsimony" in determining what's true. Hold on to that skepticism.
I should correct that I didn't actually read Tegmark, but the Ross and Dennett papers were easy enough. I'll let you know if I have questions when I finally do pick it up!
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Yep, I think we do. I love that example of a funeral lol.
Funnily and ironically enough (and not really related to the topic at hand), Dennett has a term for these sorts of things: deepities. They hold a dual meaning, one that is true and trivial, and another that is false but very consequential. His example is "love is just a four-letter word". This is true in the sense that the word "love" is a four-letter word, which gets your foot in the door, but that's not exactly groundbreaking, and the implied message (that love is a meaningless concept, just a word people use with no connection to reality) is a strong thing to say, but patently false.
I've found this to be a useful concept over the years.
Can you though? You see an image in your conscious mind and with the same mind you (or well some scientists) devised a mathematical model that explains those images rather well in most cases.
All you really truly know is your own consciousness and whatever sensory input it contains, the rest is a model (again within your own consciousness). Not sure why you would subvert this first truth you know about the universe (that your own consciousness exists) in favor of this weird dogmatic reductionism that posits that nothing beyond this model can exist, and if it seems as if it does you must be mistaken about it somehow.
For me the killer argument was this: https://web.archive.org/web/20200206121950/https://iai.tv/articles/consciousness-cannot-have-evolved-auid-1302
Basically when you try to put reductive physicalism together with the theory of evolution you get a hell of a fine tuning problem if you don't allow consciousness in of itself some kind of agency.
I think it makes sense to separate metaphysical idealism from political idealism. In the political context materialism is still king IMO no matter which metaphysic turns out to be true eventually.
If you're interested in metaphysics I highly recommend other works from Bernardo Kastrup, for example his book "Why Materialism is Baloney" or this video series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbCTxm6_Ps
Politically he's a lib but I can see growing skepticism of western institutions in his recent rants, he's an alright dude IMO.
:doubt:
It's the only truth that's immediately and ineffably accessible to you and it was like that since you were born. All the other truths are derived from that first one.
I know that my consciousness exists and that I perceive the world though my senses but I've had enough panic attacks to know that my perception is not at all reliable and cannot form the foundation for Truth. I can alter the world through my actions in the world, and never through imagination or mere imposition of ideas. On the other hand I can eat things that will bend my perception entirely out of shape regardless of my intentions, and then a few hours later I realise that nothing changed and nobody ever noticed anything was ever different.
It's not about blindly believing your every perception to be the ultimate truth, that's clearly not a good idea, it's more about knowing that your consciousness does indeed exist on a base ontological level.
When you properly internalize that then reductive physicalism doesn't really make that much sense anymore.
What do you mean that consciousness exists on an ontological level? Materialism is useful to me because it allows me to quickly discard any theory that assumes there's any interaction between consciousness and matter beyond what, in the case of humans, a motor neuron is physically capable of.
In that way I can discard rain rituals, most kinds of sacrifice, telepathy, the theory of great men, the innate theory of gender, wishful thinking, marginalism, and so on.
I'd urge you to reconsider some of that and do some research beyond thought terminating gotchas that the rational nihilist debatebro types spout all the time. I used to think like you but then I delved into the topic a bit more into detail and the more I did the less hardline reductionism made sense.
"Consciousness is just what the matter in the neurons does and nothing else" is a tenuous position that's not even all that backed by actual data, it's at best one of the working theories but far from proven beyond reasonable doubt. The only reason it's considered a valid position IMO is because it's en vogue to be a hardline reductionist nihilist in mainstream western scientific circles.
I don't listen to rational nihilist debatebro types, I developed my (rather rudimentary) ontology though practice in science first and and reading Engels, Althusser, Deleuze and others second.
I'm precisely asking you what thought is there beyond it. What real phenomenon can you explain that I cannot. In particular what is the meaning of having "actual data" about consciousness if you say it's beyond the purview of the material world, and therefore above all measurement instruments I can think of.
Consciousness itself.
Reductionism cannot even conceptually close the explanatory gap between the quantitative world of matter and the qualitative world of conscious experience. Even if you get damn near perfect 999 sigma correlations between states of matter and reports of conscious experience the gap is no closer to being closed.
Also Engels would call you a "vulgar materialist" and wouldn't really agree with you there.
Why are you so hostile. I'm not any closer to understanding your point of view. Instead of saying that Engels would dunk on me, why don't you tell me what is it from him that I'm missing?
In your thought experiment, as I understand it, you're proposing that there's a machine or computer simulation that on one hand measures exactly the same as another material thing that harbours consciousness, (Presumably a human brain? Does it make sense to you to locate consciousness in space?), and on the other hand reports itself as conscious and feeling.
If such an experiment were possible—when you say it's 999 sigma you're implying it repeatable in laboratory conditions—indeed I would consider it a complete physical explanation of consciousness. It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, it even tells you that it's a duck, what else could possibly be there to explain?
However I doubt that we'll reach anywhere if we keep just talking past each other. In hopes of reaching common ground, I'd appreciate if you picked one of the topics I mentioned a few comments ago and told me what you think about it or how it relates to your ontology:
You started first with comparisons to sacrifice and rain dances but whatever.
My whole point is that there seems to be more to the universe than just matter. I have no strong opinion on what that really means and on what level this other stuff relates to matter but hard physicalism is a dead end IMO.
I'm sorry, that was not my intention. I meant that I found all of those things to be dead ends and things probably everyone in this site disagrees with. Some of them are common sense today but others are still debated, and materialism allows me to disregard them in a quick and grounded way, along with everything else that assumes there's something outside of matter influencing matter in any way.
The whole point of having an ideology to me is to separate the wheat from the chaff and avoid wasting time considering things that ultimately don't matter. I don't see the point of philosophy that does not serve a purpose. If you say that you believe there's something beyond matter but you have no opinion on what that means or how that relates to the world, alright, we might as well agree because it makes no difference.
A practical point of view like that is pretty good for most contexts but IMO when it gets to philosophically tricky stuff like this you kinda have to dig a bit deeper if you want to do your due dilligence.
I'm sorry I was also being kind of a dick.
What I struggle with is how do you find truth in things that are unmeasurable? Like, I assume there are multiple interpretations, how do you pick one over the other? Or is that beyond the point, like, say pure mathematics, where the objective is aesthetic and consistency and not relation to the world.
You're already finding truth in the unmeasurable. The qualities of your experiences are unmeasurable in of themselves, and you believe they exist, right? You can't measure the redness of red, just the wavelength that causes it.
Let's go back to the 999 sigma super precise model of neural correlates. The measurements you have are configurations of neurons and electrical charges and whatnot, the qualities of the consciousness you don't really know because you can't measure them, you just kinda trust the test subject is telling you the truth of them when they report what they feel.
I believe in the qualities of my experiences only to the point that I acknowledge they exist, and I also believe my subjectivity that there's a world out there that I can perceive with my senses (because doing otherwise would make everything meaningless) but I wouldn't really say that I find truth in my personal experiences.
Upon examination I'd say both at work and in everyday life I find truth collectively; I'd even say most people doubt the veracity of their experiences in some level. Say for example you saw an UFO through the window, what would be your reaction? Would you stare and be confident of having experienced an UFO? I think most people would try to take a picture or go to the nearest person and ask them 'do you see that?'.
When researching I do the same thing, first I discuss my findings with my colleagues, and eventually attempt to publish what I experienced and see if someone unrelated to me can agree with my method and maybe even replicate it. Only then can I consider my experience as truth. The problem of course is, what happens when someone disagrees? It is there that measurements become essential.
So it is in others that I separate subjectivity from truth, and I think your example of redness is very appropriate here: the only reason there's even a concept of red is because the vast majority of people have the same chemistry in their eyes and because of that they can agree that blood, a sunset, and a rose all have a quality in common. If this wasn't the case the idea of redness would not exist, and that experience would only be understood as one person finding how a certain thing looks interesting and the other person finding it mundane. Redness, like everything else in consciousness, is mediated by the material world.
What happens beyond the chemistry does not matter at all: whether the next person perceives a red light in the way I experience the green, or (what's most likely) in a completely different way that to me is unknowable, makes no difference to the redness of a rose or the squareness of a square. That redness is a property of the object and not of the subject is evident in that even a colourblind person will know that the rose is red, even if they can't quite tell with their eyes but only be certain thorough other people or machines. Eventually we've managed to replicate the chemistry of the eye, measure colour itself, and transmit any visual experience as pure data over copper wire, in ever-increasing levels of fidelity.
In the super precise model of a brain, remember that the most important property of a model is that it is able to predict behaviour. Once such a model is constructed, you can simulate it in a machine, and this machine will say that it is conscious and it will respond in every way the brain it was modelled after would. The machine will probably be very afraid and need consolation when it learns that its body has very different needs from what they were used to. You're right that I can't put on a graph what being another person is like, but precisely because of that I also won't be able to say that this hypothetical machine is not conscious either. I would for all practical purposes have modelled consciousness.
so you say, no greater deception than the one by yourself for your "self", would lack of consciousness change your action and perception, well through alcohol we know the first ain't true and the second is a byproduct of believing the first, are we all? nothing is less assured or more tenuously within our grasp, also truth and knowledge as such do not exist :chefs-kiss:
That article is a long argument from personal incredulity. Some of my favorite chestnuts:
The concept of spandrels describes a situation in which a phenotypic trait isn't the product of direct selection. At the genomic level, a given mutation doesn't have to have a positive effect on fitness to become fixed in the population; random mating in a finite population is enough to get it there. You could argue that something as complex as consciousness isn't governed by the same rules as a single allele, but you're still giving away the game by acknowledging that consciousness emerges somehow from genes. Genetic expression is limited to a set of chemical reactions, governed by physical laws. All genes can do is produce proteins; all proteins can do is chemically interact with the other components of the cell.
I don't think materialists actually believe this. Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Emotion, for example.
But okay, what if we concede that consciousness cannot have evolved? How did it get there, then?
That's one hell of a spandrel we got there then.
What are the odds of this strange "spandrel" appearing to just so correspond so well to our body, why does getting hurt feel bad as opposed to good? The chances of this happening by accident are inconceivably small considering you can imagine countless of ways it could have developed differently, including no consciousness happening at all yet our bodies doing what they do normally.
Why is this such a ridiculous claim but it isn't ridiculous to claim matter has always been there?
Sure would be, but this is just an extension of the "tornado in a junkyard" trope that creationists use all the time. The argument in the article isn't that "consciousness is improbable" or "consciousness may have an origin other than evolution," it's "consciousness cannot have evolved"; both spandrels and selectively neutral mutations are examples of ways that evolution can act without direct selection on a given trait. The argument starts on a flawed understanding of evolutionary biology.
To paraphrase Douglas Adams, why does a puddle fit perfectly in the depression in which it resides? The fact that consciousness corresponds to our physical experience of reality is, as far as I can tell, an argument in favor of an evolutionary origin of consciousness, not one against. Pain is unpleasant presumably because things that hurt tend to reduce fitness and any organisms that evolved a positive response to pain are probably selected out of the gene pool. Perhaps - we could argue - that consciousness is a spandrel that developed out of selection for organisms that can remember, contextualize, and avoid repetition of fitness-reducing experiences or seek out fitness-increasing experiences. The point here is not that we can definitively state an evolutionary origin for consciousness, merely that the nature of consciousness does not preclude the possibility of an evolutionary explanation.
Endosymbiosis didn't have to happen either, or photosynthesis, or the Krebs cycle, or any of the other myriad prior developments it took to produce people. Improbable does not mean impossible.
This is just a rehash of the "well evolution doesn't explain explain the origins of life" red herring. It's not incumbent on evolutionary theory to explain the existence of matter, and evidence suggests that - whatever its origin or lack thereof - the existence of matter predates the existence of life and that matter is capable of existing independently of life. What evidence do we have that consciousness exists independently of the physical matter of the brain? What does it even mean to say that consciousness predates conscious beings? That the brain somehow developed into a sophisticated antenna for tuning into something that we have no physical evidence of and doesn't fit into our existing physical models? That the universe itself is conscious and is teleologically oriented to producing conscious beings? That we're just God dreaming? I don't see how the claim leads to anything that resembles a testable hypothesis or is in any way distinguishable from a god of the gaps argument.
But by saying that you're implying consciousness has causal efficacy in of itself, meaning it cannot be a spandrel, yet reductionist physicalism claims it doesn't. You're contradicting yourself.
That's circular reasoning though.
"Qualia is the way it is because of this and that specific evolutionary beneficial neuronal activity and the neuronal activity is like that because the qualia feels bad or good in evolutionarily beneficial ways"
That's the thing with hardline physicalism, you're always gonna end up chasing your tail, it's an epistemological dead end when it comes to consciousness.
Not sure what you're saying here. Do you really think I'm a creationist or something? Did you even read the article I linked with your full attention?
Nobody is saying the theory of evolution is wrong, just that there was something else other than matter that was a participant in natural selection.
I'm saying these are creationist claims wrapped up in a veneer of philosophy and being promulgated by a creationist in the podcast that you linked.
Dang, dawg, I don't even have evidence that you read past the first couple sentences in my reply above. Yes, I read the article. It's not very well written and makes a lot of baffling claims, some of which I tried to address. Let's look at what we might describe as Kastrup's thesis:
But, per Patricia Churchland:
Ah, so the game is to redefine "physicalism" as to exclude everything that isn't matter? Again, I don't think anyone believes this. Information is not material - it can be encoded on and retrieved from physical substrates. Yet I don't think anyone is out there arguing that information in and of itself does not or cannot exist.
I didn't reply to every bit of your comment because most of it is just missing the point in ever more convoluted ways, and that includes most of this one. The Churchland quote in particular bares no relevance at all for what I'm trying to convey here so I'm not gonna be replying to any of that.
My argument (and the article's) is more specific than your vague gesturing:
Physicalism denies qualia (whatever that may be) in of itself any causal efficacy in the material world, whether by (somehow) equating it on an ontological level with configurations of matter or claiming each fundamental particle is a tiny bit conscious (that's usually called panpsychism).
If the specific qualities of qualia in of themselves (whatever they may be) cannot effect any change in the material world and if the theory of natural selection is true then it is quite wonderous that they correspond so well with what our body is currently doing.
You specifically mentioned pain as being evolutionarily beneficial (which I agree, it clearly is), and by doing so you inadvertently gave it causal efficacy, so that statement cannot possibly make sense in a purely physicalist account of consciousness unless you assume this wonderous coincidence that it just happens to be so.
When you think about it that sounds more like creationism than what I'm proposing.
The Churchland quote was literally a direct response to the central nugget of the Karstrup piece. I'm not sure what else I was supposed to take away from that. Maybe you should do what you're demanding from me and read the piece with your full attention.
This is a strawman. Physicalism leads to the conclusion that qualia are an emergent property of interactions of matter. It doesn't require self-similarity at every level of organization. Heck, Karstrup is the one making the panpsychist argument in his conclusion: "[consciousness] can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature."
I don't know how many times I'm going to have to copy-paste this but: Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Literally what the Churchland piece says, and she's arguing against your position. From further down:
Qualia are associated with physical states of the brain. Whether they're an emergent property of something more fundamental is of no consequence to evolution.
Keep flailing, I think there's some straw that you missed there.
It's not a strawman, you've yet to explain how your entire framework doesn't rely on this miraculous coincidence that qualia corresponds so well to what our bodies are actually doing.
Churchland is right, physicalism doesn't explain why X = Y instead X = Z but it kinda should otherwise you end up with this absurd coincidence that just so happened against all odds.
You're avoiding the argument again.
Yes, what you just quoted is true about physicalism, it doesn't answer the why but in this particular case it should be doing that, because again, otherwise you end up with an absurdity of assuming something extremely unlikely. That's why I'm saying physicalism is an inadequate framework for explaining consciousness.
Okay, maybe I'm just lost on what you're asserting here. Why what does what? Why the brain is capable of producing an internal state that's connected to what's happening in the body? Because that's like, what it's for, man.
Alright let's do a though experiment.
Let's take your eyesight. Imagine that instead of your normal eyesight you have almost the same thing but a single "qualia pixel" in the upper right corner of your eyesight is colored bright pink for whatever unknown reason. Why is that image not your real eyesight instead of your actual one?
Now imagine a few more pixels changing randomly, then imagine all the possible permutations of all colors for each pixel. Why aren't any of those your real eyesight? It seems there is no reason why they wouldn't be any of those other configurations because your body would be acting in the exact same way as it did before since it's entirely controlled by what unconscious matter is doing.
Do you see the absurdity now? It seems highly unlikely that our qualia should be just as they are. So shouldn't we be trying to find out why X = Y instead of Z in this case?
Okay, I've spent a long time thinking about this and I'm concluding that we're doomed to talk past each other forever because we're starting from different priors. But here's my best effort:
To suppose the existence of a "qualia pixel" without some underlying physical explanation is to presuppose the existence of some form of Cartesian dualism because you're assuming that qualia have an existence independent of the brain and can be manifested by something other than the physical interaction of matter and energy. To not grant that makes answering your question easier - I can give my brain spurious inputs by staring at a lamp too long and getting an afterimage. In this case, I'd argue what I'm "seeing": the room, the afterimage superimposed on it, as my "real vision" because that's the signal my retina is sending my brain. Damage any parts of those systems - the retina, the optic nerve, the visual centers, etc., and the qualia disappear. The conclusion is that qualia have no independent existence outside of the architecture of the brain.
Now let's tackle the argument that qualia aren't necessary for cognition and therefore aren't subject to evolution. This is true insofar as we consider them independent of the brain. The lobster is capable of receiving, internalizing, and then reacting to stimuli but it probably doesn't experience qualia as such, and from that we can conclude that cognition - at least at some levels - is capable of existing without qualia. However, to extend that and say that all cognition is possible without it or that all cognition is possible without producing qualia as a byproduct is overextending the argument. It kind of reminds me of a reverse riff on Behe's irreducible complexity argument. Behe argues that if you take some functional structure, say a bacterial flagellum, and remove any one part, it stops functioning. Thus, Behe concludes, the flagellum must have been designed in situ by some intelligent force. Hopefully the flaws in this argument are obvious: the flagellum could have arisen from parts that developed for other purposes and by happy coincidence ended up working for propulsion (another example here is feathers. The first feathered animals couldn't fly and we can conclude that feathers didn't evolve "for" flight; they ended up suiting the purpose later). Yes, we can argue that that is one hella big coincidence, but the thing about dice is if you toss them enough times they'll all come up sixes. Monkeys and typewriters. Etc.
The argument Kastrup makes is the inverse of this; let's call it the argument from reduceable complexity. He argues that because we can imagine a philosophical zombie, consciousness is unnecessary and therefore cannot have been produced by evolution. But evolution produces weird, "unnecessary" crap all the time. Take peacocks, for example. Males have those large showy tails that make it harder to move around and easier to get spotted by predators. So why did it evolve? Enter the "handicap hypothesis": a form of sexual selection where a feature that reduces survival is an honest signal of fitness because only the most vigorous males can manage to cope with it. Testosterone in humans might be an example; higher levels of testosterone suppress the immune system. The brain itself might be another given the huge energy demand that it imposes. At any rate, we can envision a species of bird that doesn't rely on a survival-reducing feature for sexual selection. Should we conclude from this premise that the peacock's tail cannot have evolved? I don't think so - evolution just seeks a local maximum from whatever was there before, and that can produce some pretty counterintuitive outcomes.
So to deal with Kastrup's central premise (i.e., consciousness/qualia could not have evolved), he would have to demonstrate the following:
Now, suppose he's correct and qualia play no role in behavior etc. and are not a byproduct of processes that are subject to selection, then how do we explain their existence? I'm still not a huge fan of Kastrup's last line that consciousness is "can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature." Seriously, how does this enrich our understanding and get us closer to understanding the nature of consciousness? Does it indicate that consciousness is somehow a law like gravity and is simply 'baked in' to the boundary conditions of the universe? How is that different from a materialist/determinist point of view wrapped up in a Deepak Chopra-ism? Does it posit the existence of a "consciousness field" that ordinary matter taps into once it's reached a certain level of complexity? Does it propose the existence of some intangible Mind that is capable of manipulating matter in the brain to produce behavior in a way that's completely consistent with our current understanding of chemistry and physics? Does it propose some realm of the hyperreal where causality works differently and all ordinary matter is just a lower-order reflection of hyperreal phenomena? How are we supposed to investigate any of these possibilities?
Karsten's argument is superficially more sophisticated than "flagellum therefore the Abrahamaic god" but it follows the same format: "Science cannot explain thing X, therefore it will not be able to explain thing X, therefore unfalsifiable claim Y." His conclusion doesn't follow from the premise because he doesn't have - and cannot provide - any positive evidence to support it.
Probably but I'll give it one last shot.
You're right we're starting from different priors, I'm saying reductive physicalist priors don't really make that much sense and should be reconsidered. You're also right that reductive physicalism is more or less internally consistent and your conclusions that you made within this framework are valid, and who know maybe against all odds it turns out to be true but I find that extremely unlikely. What I'm saying is the whole framework is almost certainly doomed to be a dead end when it comes to finding out the truth about consciousness.
You said you're fine with believing consciousness is a coincidence but I don't think you completely understand what kind of a coincidence we're really talking about here. It's not 1 in a million or 1 in a billion, it's 1 in damn near infinity. For every configuration of neurons in the brain you can imagine them resulting in nearly infinite variations of qualia, including no qualia at all (philosophical zombie) as I hope I've demonstrated with the qualia pixel thought experiment. If you assume the null hypothesis (which you probably should in a physicalist framework) there is no reason at all to expect one configuration over the other, so IMO it should be pretty baffling to the researcher that we just so ended with our particular set of qualia that just so seems to fit so well with what's going on with the body.
I don't think handwaving this remarkable coincidence away as just a byproduct of the universe being huge is a good counter argument either. Does this mean there are other planets/galaxies/universes where consciousness evolved in a more unfortunate way and there are billions of conscious beings screaming internally in horrible pain from all the seemingly random input they're getting while their bodies do their thing on their own without the beings willing it? Or are we to assume a yet grander coincidence where consciousness always just so coincidentally evolves as a spandrel "the right way" everywhere in the universe? That almost feels like an "intelligent design" type argument.
However you look at this coincidence the more you think about it the more absurdities you have to be okay with.
And yes I understand the universe doesn't all that often work in accordance with our first intuitions about it but if you're so adamant about keeping physicalism as the only One True framework you've made it unfalsifiable because you're always gonna be able to handwave all discrepancies as just strange coincidences we shouldn't really think about that hard. Saying "it is how it is" when your scientific framework doesn't have a coherent answer isn't the slam dunk argument you think it is. At that point it's not at all different from religious belief.
Just because physicalism as a tool got us pretty far in other sciences doesn't mean it's gonna get us to the finish line in every single scientific question we have. I don't see why I should consider physicalism to be the be all end all of ontologies when it clearly leads to some quite strange conclusions.
Why can't we keep it when doing physics and chemistry and choosing a more appropriate framework for other scientific disciplines? Actual empirical evidence isn't at all clear about an entirely physicalist account of consciousness being true, we have damn near no clue what really goes on in the brain except on a very high level so I don't see a reason to be so adamant about using it here. It's definitely something to consider but I don't see why alternative theories that assume a different ontology should be automatically discredited.
Maybe, maybe not. It's something to consider, and I'm not sure why we should be completely refraining from considering it just because your intuition tells you it's ridiculous. I'm not claiming I have particularly good or satisfying answers to the question of consciousness but neither does physicalism no matter how hard it pretends it does.
With the scientific method, same as we always do. Nothing in science necessitates an entirely physicalist ontology, we are very much free to pick another one if it fits better. We already have social sciences that don't deal with just matter and only matter like for example psychology. Why should neuroscience be a hardnosed physicalist science?
Take for example this hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
What's exactly stopping you from testing it scientifically given you have good enough measuring equipment?
There's a psychological experiment where the researchers had participants watch a video of two teams playing basketball, one with white shirts and one with black shirts. Half of participants were asked to count passes only made by players in white shirts. The other half were just told to watch the video. Midway through the video a guy in a gorilla suit walks behind the players, waves to the camera, and then walks off. After watching the video, participants were asked whether they had seen anything unusual. Participants in the first group said no; participants in the second mentioned the gorilla.
Now the question: Did participants in the first group see the gorilla or not? On the one hand, they were presented with the exact same video as the second group. Gorilla photons entered their eyes and were presumably detected by their retinas, and the corresponding signals were sent up the optic nerve. On the other hand, the higher-order processing necessary for the brain to identify that particular stimulus as a gorilla and file it into memory to be retrieved later were not activated because they were otherwise engaged with counting passes and the workload that machinery can take on is finite. The first group may have seen the gorilla, but they didn't experience the gorilla on a qualitative level.
A materialist interpretation would include that, while they are themselves intangible, qualia can only arise if presented to the consciousness by lower order machinations of the brain that are tightly linked to physical phenomena, and those machinations are very much subject to natural selection. Presumably whatever mechanisms that cause us to experience the gorilla are also involved in things important to survival, like assessing whether the gorilla presents a threat and deciding to fire up the fight-or-flight response. If the gorilla were deadly, it's possible the ball-watching group would have experienced a delayed reaction and been more likely to end up gorilla chow. While we can assume that a lobster doesn't act in the same way - its threat determining and fight-or-flight machinery activate in the absence of qualitatively experiencing the gorilla, in humans, as far as we can tell, those processes are sine qua non for the qualitative experience to occur. Thus, I don't think the "pink pixel" experiment is particularly illuminating, because it presumes that because qualia may not play a role in natural selection, all qualitative experiences should be equally likely. Even our limited understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness shows that that isn't true. My argument isn't that our particular experience of consciousness just dropped out of the sky the way it was, I said it worked out the way it did predicated on lower-order physical phenomena. The "pink pixel" thought experiment seems like it purports to ask what the odds are of producing a completely ordered deck of cards by shuffling; but, in reality, it suggests we should be asking why shuffling a deck of cards doesn't produce non-existent combinations like the ace of queens or a 6 of spade-clubs.
The problems with assuming that evolution could not have produced consciousness because, if that were the case, we could just as easily have been metaphysical screaming pain ghosts trapped in bodies otherwise programmed to go about their lives and argue with each other on the internet is that (a) it's not a parsimonious outcome (the "screaming pain ghost" hypothesis doesn't coexist harmoniously with our accumulated understanding of consciousness), (b) it leads to epistemological nihilism. There's no way we can't say we aren't screaming pain ghosts right now because we'd have no way of expressing that fact. The idea that qualia can be empirically determined based on personal testimony, and arise from physical stimuli (with the requisite exceptions), is a prior in even the so-called "soft sciences" like psychology. Kastrup (and presumably by extension you) concludes that these are problems inherent in evolution, but they aren't; they're problems associated with assuming qualia aren't subject to any physical restrictions, which isn't something that any scientist that deals with the brain endorses, as far as I can tell. Your presentation of physicalism/materialsm is defined so narrowly that I don't think anyone actually subscribes to it.
My problem with Kastrup's article, which I haven't yet been able to get you to engage with directly, is that Kastrup doesn't demonstrate an alternative method of inquiry. His whole article is just dedicated to tearing down the current methods - it doesn't propose anything to fill the hole. We just grandly conclude that consciousness is an ineffable, irreducible, and inaccessible component of reality without any meaningful implications. If the nature of reality is such that our only avenue of accumulating knowledge about something is by examining its physical footprint and that there are whole swathes that remain fundamentally inaccessible and unknowable, that kinda sucks from a philosophical perspective but doesn't really provide any alternatives to what we're already doing and the epistemologies we're already using. But Karstrup asserts that his way will produce a better understanding. What's wrong with demanding him to pony up some evidence this is the case? It's also not intuitively ridiculous, it's epistemologically ridiculous. If something is, by its nature, intangible, incorporeal, incapable of interacting with physical reality and any methods of inquiry we might use, real or imagined, why would we bother going looking for it even if it's there? It might as well not exist. We can come up with equally impossible models all day with no way of choosing from among them. I say Plato is right and there is some conceptual realm of forms that only our minds can access. Now what?
Kastrup argues that consciousness cannot have evolved. Cannot involves a different level of certainty and a higher burden of evidence than "didn't." He's not arguing that consciousness could have arisen by evolution but he has evidence that there's an alternative origin, he's arguing that it's impossible for it to have arisen by evolution at all. Any semi-plausible explanation for consciousness that still adheres to what we know about evolution should be sufficient to dispense with the "cannot" claim, and I feel like I keep providing those. As for the "did not" claim, Kastrup doesn't provide any positive evidence or even propose an alternative mechanism or means by which we can search for an alternative mechanism. Unless he's willing to provide one of those things, I don't see why he's worth listening to.
Also, quantum physics is definitely not my bag, but I don't see how OOR departs from existing models of what we know about the universe and how it operates. It appears to be more targeted at addressing the problem of determinism, which isn't something that seems particularly relevant here.
Honestly I think you're yet again sidestepping the core of my (and Kastrup's) argument and instead choose to meander around with explaining how physicalism works. I understand how it works and what conclusions it makes, I'm trying to point out other also valid conclusions within physicalism that should be raising an eyebrow and making you question if physicalism really makes that much sense.
Also Kastrup doesn't just assume a priori that consciousness cannot have evolved, the point of that article is to show that it almost certainly didn't by using just the physicalist framework. It's a conclusion, not an assumption. He maybe should have been a bit more specific and said "our particular experience of consciousness co-evolved with our bodies" rather than the mainstream line "our bodies evolved consciousness in of themselves", he himself doesn't at all believe that the exact consciousness as we experience it today was around forever like ghosts or souls or whatever.
I've explained multiple times that, while yes it is conceivable that under physicalism consciousness evolves exactly like it did in you or me it is extremely unlikely if you don't give the subjective qualities of consciousness in of themselves any causal efficacy (which physicalism doesn't, it considers them either equivalent to or a product of configurations of matter). You keep outright ignoring this quite specific argument and focus on more general philosophical points. You are yet to address that rather extreme unlikelihood other than handwaving it away as "it just is" which is IMO completely unscientific and is close to religious belief itself.
Kastrup also doesn't deny that the content of our qualia is heavily correlated with the material world, he's just claiming that it's not wholly caused by the material world on an ontological level.
I'm sorry he wasn't able to present to you an entire alternative scientific framework in a 15 minute article, I'll write him a stern email to do better next time. He's written multiple books, essays and did a bunch of lectures, here's a series of lectures about what exactly he's proposing and he goes way more in depth why he's proposing what he's proposing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbCTxm6_Ps&list=PL64CzGA1kTzi085dogdD_BJkxeFaTZRoq
It does because it touches on the problem of what's the valid interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is definitely not a solved problem in mainstream science and can most definitely involve other ontologies other than physicalism depending on what interpretation you choose.
Oh yeah I'm really into Kastrup. IIRC he is the only person ever alive who has sucessfully defended a PhD on this topic, pretty much everyone else gets laughed out of the room. I feel like it's bullshit though, but some of his arguments against hard physicalism are fairly convincing.
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I think he might be pretty solidly left wing tho, not a communist but he definitely has that bent from what I've seen him post on FB
edit: One of the most insane things I've ever read in a book was Kastrup talking about how there was a tribe in like, the Amazon that had a huge suicide problem because they were so detached from materialism as a metaphysics people had ZERO fear of death and would immediately off themselves when family members died to follow them
If what he's proposing is bullshit I feel like it's way less bullshit than hard physicalism. "Everything is Mind" is a hard pill to swallow but it makes more sense to me than "nothing is Mind".
I think he's still a lib but one of the good ones, he seems to be able to sniff out the bullshit that comes out of western media. I can totally see him getting more radical in the coming years.
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Dennett is the most ridiculous one of the bunch, philosophically he's a complete charlatan. Just endless sophistry and obscurantism to avoid ever considering what the questions is all about.
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I don't quite understand this take, having read a few of his books back in the day. I feel like people get really hung up on the qualia existence thing or something.