Consciousness science update: Panpsychism, et al.

Scientific American writes about the ongoing mystery of consciousness and how scientists and philosophers are thinking about it. There is still plenty of disagreement. Sci Am writes about a recent workshop at Marist College in New York state:

Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism

More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

As philosopher David Chalmers asked: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” He famously dubbed this quandary the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Part of the appeal of panpsychism is that it appears to provide a workaround to the question posed by Chalmers: we no longer have to worry about how inanimate matter forms minds because mindedness was there all along, residing in the fabric of the universe. Chalmers himself has embraced a form of panpsychism and even suggested that individual particles might be somehow aware. He said in a TED Talk that a photon “might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.” Also on board with the idea is neuroscientist Christof Koch, who noted in his 2012 book Consciousness that if one accepts consciousness as a real phenomenon that’s not dependent on any particular material—that it’s “substrate-independent,” as philosophers put it—then “it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience.”

Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.

Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”

But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”  

Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”  

Even those who lean toward panpsychism sometimes seem hesitant to dive into the deep end. As Garcia put it, in spite of the allure of a universe imbued with consciousness, “I would love to be talked out of it.”

The article notes that some experts object to panpsychism because it doesn’t address what philosophers call the “other minds” problem, where a person has direct access to their own mind but can't know anything about another person’s mind. This reasoning is grounded in concern that invoking an underlying layer of mindedness is a bit like invoking God. One expert commented: “I sometimes wonder if the panpsychist position is similar to ‘god of the gaps’ arguments,” referring to the idea that God is needed to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge.

Another idea cosmopsychism was floated at the workshop. It is the notion that the universe itself is conscious. A philosopher participating in the workshop floated a slightly different idea known as “psychological ether theory,” which says that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness. In other words, consciousness existed before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. That reasoning was that if psychological ether is real, then in all likelihood God exists.

A cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine rejected the idea of spacetime and looking for something deeper. That was based on an increasingly popular idea in physics that space and time may not be fundamental but may instead be emergent phenomena themselves. The deeper entity related to consciousness may consist of “subjects and experiences” that “are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime.” That idea developed in a 2023 paper entitled “Fusions of Consciousness.”

That paper comments:

Consciousness is perplexing, even for expert researchers. Witness the recent plethora of conflicting theories. Even their core ideas are at odds: quantum states of neuronal microtubules, causal architectures that integrate information, neuronal global workspaces, user illusions and attentional schemas, panpsychism, and various forms of dualism. However, most of these theories of consciousness agree on a key assumption: spacetime, and some of its particles, are fundamental, i.e., ontologically primitive, irreducible, and non-emergent. For example, physicalist theories assume this and nothing more, while many panpsychists likewise assume this but would add that the “intrinsic nature” of such particles is nothing other than consciousness.

Hm, looks to me like we've got a way to go before the concept of consciousness gets tidied up and nailed down. Get me another brain.