News chunks: Religious discord; On atheism; Attacks on democracy in Europe

One of the people I engage with, significantly more knowledgeable and intelligent than me, has been arguing for decades that there are too many rats in the cage for democracy and civil society, referring to dictatorship and human conflict. For decades, that argument has felt more true than false. The AP writes about what appears to be an example of the overcrowded rat cage called Israel:

Jews spitting on the ground beside Christian pilgrims 

in the Holy Land sparks outrage

Old City Jerusalem, Aug. 25, 2023

They look like they are straight out of the Dark Ages

A video that shows ultra-Orthodox Jews spitting on the ground beside a procession of foreign Christian worshipers carrying a wooden cross in the holy city of Jerusalem has ignited intense outrage and a flurry of condemnation in the Holy Land.

The spitting incident, which the city’s minority Christian community lamented as the latest in an alarming surge of religiously motivated attacks, drew rare outrage on Tuesday from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other senior officials.

Since Israel’s most conservative government in history came to power late last year, concerns have mounted among religious leaders — including the influential Vatican-appointed Latin Patriarch — over the increasing harassment of the region’s 2,000-year-old Christian community.

Many say the government, with its powerful ultranationalist officials, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, has emboldened Jewish extremists and created a sense of impunity.  

“What happened with right-wing religious nationalism is that Jewish identity has been growing around anti-Christianity,” said Yisca Harani, a Christianity expert and founder of an Israeli hotline for anti-Christian assaults. “Even if the government doesn’t encourage it, they hint that there will be no sanctions.”

That sounds a lot like the aggressive, cruel mindset of Christian nationalism in the US, i.e., Christian Sharia under an intolerant, bigoted wealthy White heterosexual male Christian Taliban looks approximately the same.

About 10 years ago, me and my family took a trip that included Madrid Spain during Easter. This is the kind of imagery me and my family witnessed:

They look like they are straight 

out of the Dark Ages

Long story even longer, in 1976 (the year after the dictator Franco died) my college room mate and I visited Barcelona. The city was significantly dead, but more alive than the amazingly dead East Berlin at the time, but far less alive than surprisingly fun and sophisticated West Berlin. We went to the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. It was so dead. The two of us just walked into the museum and had had the whole place to ourselves for several hours before it was time for tapas at lunch. There were maybe 4 or 5 other people in the museum. But by the time me and my family visited the Picasso again ~10 years ago, the place was alive and the line ~1 hour long just to get in the freaking door. 

What was different? IMHO, mostly two things. One was the death of the radical right dictator Franco. Two was the loosening strangulation grip of the medieval Roman Catholic church on all aspects of Spain and its society in the 2010s. Despite brutal iron fist Catholic church and the parades in the 2010s, the power of the Church was obviously dying. The women in the parades we witnessed were all old (unlike the picture shown above).

Now in 2023, when I see radical Jews in Israel coming closer to physically attacking Christians in Israel, it looks to me just like Christian nationalists in America coming closer to attacking defenders of American democracy, civil liberties and the secular public interest. It all looks about the same to me.

Q: Is it me, or is it the case that in advanced democracies like the US, religion is more pro-tyranny (theocracy) than pro-secular democracy? 

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A WaPo by Kate Cohen opinion opines:

Opinion | America doesn’t need more God. 

It needs more atheists.

I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.

I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.

I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.

I thought of him as a fiction.

Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:

1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.

2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.

3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.

4. Child rape. War. Etc.

And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.

Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.

Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked! But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.

In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.

If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.

Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.

Now, can you see why the authoritarian radical right has no choice but to align with hard core Christian nationalist (CN) theocrats in support of morally corrupt Christian Sharia law and an elite, wealthy, bigoted White, heterosexual male Christian Taliban? That seems obvious to me. And that's despite vehement CN propagandist denials, deflections, downplays, lies and slanders.

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A WaPo opinion comments on the rise of an authoritarian radical right in Europe, especially Germany:

NORDHAUSEN, Germany — Populist, nationalist and illiberal parties are rising across Europe, peddling a rancid brew of intolerance toward migrants, LGBTQ+ people, Ukraine’s survival and, often, the niceties of democracy itself. But in few places has a right-wing party so extreme surged so quickly as in Germany — even as some of its most prominent leaders trade in barely veiled echoes of the country’s Nazi past.

It’s even more chilling that Alternative for Germany, known as AfD, is now the most popular party across most of the former East Germany, including in one state, Thuringia, where Hitler’s National Socialist Party had its first great success. And it remains to be seen whether the country’s more populous, prosperous and globalized western states will hold out as a firewall against the ethno-nationalist blaze sweeping Europe’s biggest, most consequential nation.

“Whether Germans have learned from their history is an open question,” Sergej Lochthofen, the retired editor of Thuringia’s biggest newspaper, told me.

In France, the main right-wing party, for decades the refuge of scoundrels besotted with World War II’s collaborationist Vichy regime, now vies for the top spot in national polling. Rightist parties either lead governments or share power in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Sweden, Finland and elsewhere.

On Saturday, populism’s rise struck Slovakia, with the parliamentary election success of the overtly pro-Russian, nationalist Smer party, which vows to end support for Ukraine.  

“This is the paradox,” Michael Mickenberg, a scholar of right-wing movements, told me. “The usual pattern is that radical positions repel voters. Here you see both radicalization of the party and growing electoral support.”  

Bigotry and overt racism, along with calls for mass deportation, are staples of AfD’s rhetoric. One prominent figure in the party, Björn Höcke, has suggested that “Africans’ reproductive habits” were unacceptable in Germany, and called on Germans to stop atoning for Nazi crimes, insisting they take a more “positive” view of the nation’s history.  

In the small town of Nordhausen, where the Nazis developed the V-2 rocket — the miracle weapon that Adolf Hitler thought would bring Britain to its knees — I met with Jörg Prophet, a local AfD figure. He lost a recent mayoral election, but still managed about 45 percent of the vote.

Prophet, 61, was raised in communist East Germany, where revisionist World War II history framed the capitalist West, not Hitler and his jackbooted legions, as the war’s real villain. The politician clings to some of that twisted [whitewashed] history. The Allies whose bombing leveled Nordhausen, he said a few years ago, “showed as little morality” as the Nazis. That’s a staggering assertion in Thuringia, where tens of thousands of prisoners died at Buchenwald, one of the Third Reich’s earliest and biggest concentration camps.

Notice how the European authoritarian radical right (ARR) believes and acts a heck of a lot like its American counterpart? It's radicalized, bigoted-racist (anti-immigrant, anti-LGBQT), anti-democracy (hence hostility toward Ukraine), pro-dictatorship, pro-corruption, and happily rewriting inconvenient Nazi and fascist history (like the ARR in the US whitewashing American history of slavery). Same morally rotted beliefs, same propaganda tactics, same pro-thug dictator mindset.

Breaking news: McCarthy is very likely ousted as House speaker

CNN just reported that McCarthy will very likely be ousted as speaker based on the current ongoing voting. So far 7 House radicals have voted against the weasel.

By golly, the authoritarian radical right Republican Party is showing its incompetence, unfitness to govern and authoritarianism. McCarthy worked with Dems to keep the govt from shutting down, which in authoritarian radical right Republican dogma is treason. 

Grumpy Kevin

A traitor accused of treason by his own 

treasonous party

Update from WaPo:

Kevin McCarthy ousted as speaker in Republican-led House 

The Republican-led House voted Tuesday to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as speaker, the first such removal in congressional history. McCarthy’s removal was sought by hard-right members of his own party. Democrats did not provide votes that would have been needed to save him. The move puts the House in uncharted territory as it searches for a leader.

Update from Huffpo:

Kevin McCarthy: ‘I’m Not Going To Provide Anything’ 

To Dems To Save My Speakership

The GOP leader is apparently counting on his own party to keep him in charge as his far-right flank prepares to try to oust him

He provided nothing and apparently got nothing. 

Context: Republicans cited the federal debt as a major reason for voting against McCarthy. In their usual insulting hypocrisy and gigantic double standard politics, they are silent about their own support for Trump's Dec. 2017 tax bill that created tax breaks for rich people and blew a huge hole in the federal deficit. The Hill reports:

“Chaos is Speaker McCarthy. Chaos is somebody who we cannot trust with their word,” Gaetz said on the House floor. “The one thing that the White House, House Democrats and many of us on the conservative side of the Republican Caucus would argue is that the thing we have in common: Kevin McCarthy said something to all of us at one point or another that he didn’t really mean and never intended to live up to.”

“I don’t think voting against Kevin McCarthy is chaos,” he continued. “I think $33 trillion in debt is chaos.”

Also note Gaetz calling his pro-dictatorship radical right caucus "conservative" when in fact they are corrupt pro-dictatorship liars and thugs. 

Back by popular demand -- News Bits!: A paperwork boo-boo; The real DJT re-exposed (barf);

Business Insider reports that (i) DJT's trial will be decided by the judge, not a jury, and (ii) it was a paperwork mistake to not ask for a jury trial. BI writes:

Trump isn't getting a jury in his $250 million civil fraud trial 

because his lawyers failed to ask for one

 

Former President Donald Trump was entitled to receive a jury trial in his New York civil fraud case. And while he himself wanted a trial by jury, his attorneys didn't correctly fill out court paperwork. Instead, Trump is set to receive a bench trial solely decided by a judge he's repeatedly attacked.

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CNN reports that Trump's former chief of staff John Kelly has confirmed some naughty bits about DJT:

“What can I add that has not already been said?” Kelly said, when asked if he wanted to weigh in on his former boss in light of recent comments made by other former Trump officials. “A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them.’ A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because ‘it doesn’t look good for me.’ A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family – for all Gold Star families – on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are ‘losers’ and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

“A person who is not truthful regarding his position on the protection of unborn life, on women, on minorities, on evangelical Christians, on Jews, on working men and women,” Kelly continued. “A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason – in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

“There is nothing more that can be said,” Kelly concluded. “God help us.”

That's just for the record to refresh some mildly stale, disgusting memories.

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Here's an interesting bit from everyone's favorite coffee table magazine, PSRM (Political Science Research and Methods): Democrats won the 2020 election by mobilizing new voters and getting some 2016 Trump and Jill Stein voters to switch to Biden. If the 2020 electorate had only consisted of "standpatters" (individuals who vote in all elections and consistently affiliate with one party), Trump would have won.

DJT could easily win re-election in 2024. 

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AI update: The WaPo reports: 

ChatGPT provided better customer service than his staff. 

He fired them.

Suumit Shah never liked his company’s customer service team. His agents gave generic responses to clients’ issues. Faced with difficult problems, they often sounded stumped, he said.

But when Shah saw that ChatGPT could respond to questions with intricate, lifelike responses, he knew it could fix the customer service hotline of his India-based e-commerce platform, Dukaan.

Shah used the software to improve his in-house customer service chatbot Lina, training it largely on his company’s help center content. In December 2022, he let the ChatGPT-powered bot field nearly all messages and found his customers were largely happy.

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Other bits!

Fuckery in the House today!

Both outcomes suck because,

Republican

The thug enjoying his fraud trial by a judge

the thug publicly hates on and distrusts

Left vs. Right

An opinion that finally gets it right about the ARRRP

It's long overdue: A WaPo opinion by Jennifer Rubin says what has been obvious for years about the authoritarian radical right Republican Party:

Senate Democrats must enact rules changes. Comity is long gone

Once upon a time, we had two functional parties that respected the rule of law, the outcome of elections and the norms necessary to preserve democratic governance. In that world, the filibuster was rarely invoked, an incapacitated member could be replaced on committee, indicted or even “merely” disgraced members would resign voluntarily and blue slips and single-member holds on appointments were not abused.

Those days are long gone.

Today’s Republican Party effectively refuses to allow the other side to govern when it wins elections. Republicans denied President Barack Obama the opportunity to replace the deceased Justice Antonin Scalia (but allowed a Republican president to jam through a Supreme Court niminee after voting had begun in 2020). Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) has held up hundreds of military appointments for months; at various times, individual Republicans have refused to allow votes on State Department or Justice Department nominees.

When the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) was incapacitated by illness this year, Republicans refused to allow Democrats to replace her on the Judiciary Committee. (After her death last week, Republicans appear willing to allow Democrats to fill her committee seat.) Meanwhile, Republicans’ blue slips have periodically stalled confirmation of judicial nominees.

This is the nature of the MAGA Republican Party. It cares not one whit for governing and considers Democrats’ electoral victories of no consequence. (The latest game: Make baseless impeachment threats to hamper duly elected Democrats from fulfilling their duties, as they’re doing with President Biden and a newly elected Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin.) Pleading with individual Republicans to break ranks or offering trade after trade to accommodate those acting in bad faith is useless. Worse, it blurs responsibility for chaos, paralysis and gridlock.

This is the nature of the MAGA Republican Party. It cares not one whit for governing and considers Democrats’ electoral victories of no consequence. (The latest game: Make baseless impeachment threats to hamper duly elected Democrats from fulfilling their duties, as they’re doing with President Biden and a newly elected Supreme Court judge in Wisconsin.) Pleading with individual Republicans to break ranks or offering trade after trade to accommodate those acting in bad faith is useless. Worse, it blurs responsibility for chaos, paralysis and gridlock.

The problem is Republicans’ insistence on denying the key component of a democracy: the power of the people to elect the leaders of their choice to govern. Republicans have grown attached to tactics that perpetuate minority rule, including thwarting voting (e.g., filibustering voting rights legislation) and denying election results (e.g., signing onto a brief to disenfranchise millions of Americans, baselessly challenging Biden’s electors). 

Even small changes in Senate rules could have a big impact. For example, blue slips and holds could have a time limit (e.g., 90 days), allowing members’ concerns to be aired without thwarting the majority. 

Likewise, a party should be able to fill seats on committees after the incapacitation or death of a member without “permission” of the other party. Indicted senators should be removed from and replaced on committees related to the indictment. Hearings on Supreme Court nominees could be required to commence within 90 days of a nomination. 

Democrats for too long have been squeamish about allowing actual majority votes (or, rather, majority rule). The Constitution specified supermajorities in specific cases (e.g., treaties, Senate removal after an impeachment). It was never intended to be the norm.

Democracies that do not allow majorities to govern lose legitimacy. Simply put: We need to shore up democracy.  

After all, GOP shenanigans have shown that Republicans cannot be trusted to operate in good faith under the rules. The only alternative is to change those rules — or succumb to the evisceration of our democracy.

So, there's one more mind that has finally become aware. The ARRRP does not operate in good faith. Someone finally publicly said it. Rubin sees and articulates the nature and magnitude of the severe ARRRP threat to democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law, honest, transparent governance and the public interest.

This in no way means that Dems can stop trying for bipartisanship. They should keep publicly trying, but without letting that get in the way of doing what can still be done to protect democracy and the public interest. Offer bipartisanship, but don't let that slow anything down or be any barrier to doing what can still be done. The open question asks whether it is too late to significantly shore democracy up. It might already be too late.

News: New Supreme Court term; Thoughts on tyranny of the minority

The scene outside the New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan today 

before the expected arrival of former president Donald Trump for his fraud trial

NPR reports about cases the USSC is going to hear this term, which is now underway:

Abortion: Abortion is back in court, this time presumably to further obliterate abortion rights. The case comes from the authoritarian radical right (ARR) 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, TX, LA and MI. That court has directly attacked the authority of the FDA to approve the chemical abortion pills, which are now often sold by mail. The pills now account for more than half of all abortions in the US. This is a clear example of creeping authoritarianism and overreach that ARR Christian nationalist judges are feeling empowered to impose God's sacred moral standards on American society. 

Gun control: Gun control is back, presumably to for the ARR USSC to obliterate more gun safety laws. This time the law at issue is one that bans gun possession for anyone who's a subject of a domestic violence restraining order. In 2022, the six ARR USSC judges issued a very broad decision declaring that the right to possess and carry a gun is a fundamental constitutional right. In that case, the court said that constitutional laws and regulations about guns have to be analogous to laws on the books at the time of the founding. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that crackpottery which has been used to overturn  down various important gun safety laws. 

What controls is the meaning of the Constitution at the time the Bill of Rights was written in 1789. in that case,  NYSRPA v. Bruen, the text, history, and tradition test (the hopelessness of this cherry picked test for constitutionality is discussed by a gun law expert in this 7-minute video) now governs laws restricting the right to keep and bear arms – invalidating any gun laws that fail to meet its standard. The problem for gun safety laws is that there are many modern situations involving guns that didn't exist in 1789. 

In this case, the government defending the federal law, points to what it calls analogous laws in 1789. But that's weak because there weren't domestic violence laws because women didn't have many rights in 1789. They didn't have the vote or property rights, for the most part, and they had little to no recourse under the law from an abusive husband. Given that, one case easily see the ARR USSC striking the law down. That would allow wife beaters to happily buy a gun and shoot her dead at the husband's pleasure. What great fun, go buy a gun!

Context bit: In 2021, I posted about the original research paper that showed gun ownership is a risk factor for domestic homicide. That 1993 paper triggered a ban on federal money for gun violence research in 1996. That ban was still largely in place in 2021. It probably still is mostly in place today.

Killing federal agencies: Another gigantic case the ARR USSC is going to decide deals with how federal agencies are funded. This is another case from the ARR 5th Circuit. The case argues that funding for some major federal agencies is unconstitutional. The case focuses on killing the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, originally proposed by Elizabeth Warren. Brass knuckles capitalist business elites and ARR Republicans hate, hate, hate the CFBP. They want it dead, dead, dead because it protects consumers from capitalist fun and profitable things like price gouging, predatory lending, false advertising and blatant business fraud, which is sometimes conducted on a massive scale. 

The NPR segment commented: 

The 5th Circuit ruled that the Constitution requires an actual appropriation by Congress each year or every other year. And if that is so, if the 5th Circuit is right, it could put not just the CFPB out of business but lots of other agencies, including the Federal Reserve itself and the FDIC, which ensures bank deposits, both of which are funded in similar ways.

ELIZABETH WARREN: If this Supreme Court says that Congress doesn't have the power to set up government agencies and laws without going through appropriations, understand not only do all the banking regulators fall on their faces, Social Security and Medicare are now at risk. They don't run through appropriations. They are funded through a separate tax, a separate way to have an agency organized. So the implications of this case - this could echo through the lives of every person in America.

This case could wind up dealing a death blow to many federal agencies, a long-cherished goal of the government-hating ARR Republican Party, brass knuckles capitalist elites and Christian nationalist elites who also hate government and consumer protections. According to CN elites, protecting consumers is God's job, not the government's job.

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Vox writes about the always fun topic of tyranny of the minority in America today: 

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced a [] problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side ....: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the [monster] of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the [monster] of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down an anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.  

The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.

These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.

As we all know, it is currently politically impossible to institute significant constitutional reform. It just might be too late for that and for American majoritarian democracy.

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.