I don't think it's entirely correct to say a meteorite hitting you is unperceived.
What if perception isn't exclusive to humans or animals? What if everything has qualia to some degree and "objective" reality is just the sun total of all intersubjectivity? If a tree falls and no human is around then no human perceives it, but the tree might be said to perceive it in some way. This seems to me to fit with quantum mechanics in that the "observer" talked about in wave form collapse is not actually referring to a conscious human observer, but instead can refer to an instrument taking a measure. All interaction of all thing is some level of measure. A rock takes the measure of the rain when it erodes. It's qualia is certainly not the same as ours but who is to say there is no qualia? We can't even prove the qualia of other humans, we merely infer it from our own similar experiences.
I think it becomes dicey to impute consciousness to inanimate objects because of mereological nihilism: what is the unified object? Take a highway being jackhammered: what feels that, the highway as a whole, a particular segment, the gravel flying around, the constituent atoms of the gravel? It really is very weird the aggregate activity of a brain feels like something. Why aren't we bound to a neuron, for example?
Maybe each of those groupings feel it in their own way. I feel the collection of myself, but I also feel larger experiences, such as part of a nation or team. Does there need to be a unified object? Is my experience even that unified? If we consider how fractured individual human experience can be ("a part of me is sad you are leaving but another part of me is happy") as is, I don't know if a unified object is necessary.
I think my experience feels unified, but I wonder if that isn't true of everyone. But to actually feel like you are a disjoint entity in ordinary life seems like it should be majorly confusing no? Like having split-personality disorder, or being schizophrenic.
> larger experiences
These are still happening in your mind. They are part of the movie playing in there. Or it could be argued they are actually out there (not quite sure what that would mean), but even then, I don't think there is anything it is like to be a nation or team. I remember an amusing paper that argued that if materialism is true, then necessarily there must be something it is like to be the United States. Because it's an agglomeration, just like the brain, and if agglomerations generate consciousness...
As someone with ADHD, I def don't feel my experience is the most unified, haha. I have very poor working memory and can viscerally feel when I lose a train of thought, when two thoughts are bouncing around my head. And then I think even if one is neurotypical there is still plenty of other ways in which people experience disunity of mind, conflicted feelings, altered states of consciousness. Lots of subtle subconscious processing goes on, espc with emotions. One doesn't have to be mentally ill or on some mind altering substance. You are right this is different than experiencing team spirit or nationalism. Though our little part of experiencing some collective consciousness is different than whatever unified experience hypothetically might exist at a higher level of agglomeration.
Great work! The essay's basically a much more rigorous, scientifically argued version of a post idea I've been toying with for a while now, which would basically argue that supernaturalism and naturalism are in a perpetual stalemate.
Naturalism can say 'I've got Occam's razor on my side; consciousness need be nothing but physically emergent; ideas of a "mind" or a coherent "self" are just stories the self-aware brain tells itself. "Minds" change radically, or even switch off altogether, as a result of sleeping, being half-awake, taking substances, being concussed, being under anesthesia, having dementia, etc. You can even switch the "self" part of the brain off via physical means. Change the brain and you change the person; it's all just brain-states.'
And supernaturalism can reply 'There's tons of anecdotal evidence about out-of-body experiences where the subject knows things they shouldn't be able to know, plus interesting scientific work on reincarnation, etc. More fundamentally, as soon as you claim something is "true" or "false" you're appealing to a world beyond matter. It's not possible for a physical fact (the brain) to make a truth claim about another physical fact (the universe): why give this godlike status to rationality if it's just a brain state among other brain states? Yes, reason's a useful shared standard for seeking agreement among other reasoners, but that's not the same as saying it's actually telling you anything about the world. Even saying "we evolved to understand our environment" involves making any number of philosophical assumptions about time, space, causality, information and the ontological status of matter.'
Me? I choose supernaturalism, because it feels better and, depending on the mood I'm in, truer :)
Yeah, like Wittgenstein said 'Go ahead and believe! It does no harm'. But you, know I've been coming round to the view reason is not anathema to spirituality, as in, you can definitely make reason serve spirituality because reason is a whore (though not a cheap one), like Scott Alexander said in Epistemic Learned Helplessness.
Regarding randomness being the intervention of a will, saying it's highly speculative is hardly critical of the idea. It's speculation that's not inconsistent with anything we observe, and it might explain things.
Well, I think I read somewhere once that appealing to randomness to try to rescue free will doesn't really work, but it's true I don't remember why they said that. Trying to sort that out probably merits a whole post.
Thank you for a great essay! I've been wanting to read something like this overview for a while :) Two and a half thoughts:
T1) Echoing what Superb Owl wrote, I think panpsychism would be a great addition here.
T2) When it comes to idealism, Samuel Johnson's appeal to the rock and the door's appeal to Berkeley's face always seemed very weak to me. Sure, you kick the rock, but what you get back are still only the perceptions of a rock. And why would there be no laws for how minds interact with perceptions (or how different perceptions interact with each other)? If there are, I don't see why we should assume that one can just walk through doors willy-nilly.
T2.5) The issue of how things happen when no one is there to perceive them is the only one that strikes me as a genuine problem, but continuing the echo from before, I feel like some version of panpsychism could patch up that hole.
Lastly, in regards to "[if] the eliminativists are right, mind has no being. What consciousness reveals is that there is something it is like to be nothing." -- I really enjoyed that thought! Chewing on it right now.
Thanks for the compliment! Yeah, I totally forgot panpsychism, I guess I didn't see it as one of the major views. I'll add it in at some point. About laws of the mind though, isn't it weird to say external mind behaves according to laws, but internal mind pretty much doesn't? There would be a real cleavage between inner and outer for that to be true, which would undermine idealism, it seems.
I saw a great presentation by a German scientist who explained consciousness as the result of the brain having a model of itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k
So I can't entirely disagree, though of course, I have to ask: why is there anything it is like to be a self-model? "Self-model" sounds all map and not territory. He didn't actually address Mary's room, just said he didn't buy it, but it's not clear from what he's presenting why Mary wouldn't learn anything new upon leaving the room. If the answer is "There is no Mary", that's 555-COME-ON-NOW tier. Maybe there is no Mary, but there definitely is seeing, there definitely is hearing, etc.
It also made me feel like I was watching Lucky's monologue from Waiting for Godot all over again:
Basically you're saying it was too difficult to understand? I mean, comparing it to that monologue seems a bit unfair. I think the entire point is that the self is the map. You're right in that it doesn't solve the question why there is something for it to be like a self-model, but does give us explanations and provide us with ways to make new predictions, like the medical cases from the video.
I think it reminds me of Lucky's monologue because he is pretending like the philosophical house of cards he's building can actually prove things, whereas I think he's trying to make language do things it fundamentally cannot. But I also feel his philosophy cannot be adequately expressed in a video, and will probably attempt to read his book at some point, assuming it's not abstruse.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Panpsychism by name under Idealism.
I'm personally a fan of dual-aspect monism [1], combined with panpsychism.
I'm also intrigued by Schrödinger's notion of an intersubjective reality [2], but without some form of panpsychism I don't think it really holds up--otherwise the moon isn't there when we're not looking.
Really great overview of the different answers though. I'm not sure I agree with the thesis that all views are incoherent, but there's definitely something sticky about the whole question.
I completely forgot panpsychism, but shouldn't it be under dualism? Under panpsychism, there is still the physical as distinct from mind (I remember Plotinus calling matter the most evil thing there is, for example). I'll read that post of yours later. Handy image in that wiki link though. Maybe, I'll go back at some point to add the issues with neutral monism (which I also forgot) and dual-aspect theory.
Empiricism sees nothing though. I just read a book from a neuroscientist, Erik Hoel, called The World Behind the World, that says neuroscience is in shambles, none of the theories make sense, no one sees a way forward, and that it's even possible that similar to Godel's incompleteness theorems, there is such a thing as scientific incompleteness: the possibility that not everything can be explained through science. Interestingly, while consciousness is the big one, there are other areas where science is foundering or has hit walls.
I am both more positive and more negative than you on the issue of explicability.
More positive in that I believe that new observations will eventually clear the current log jam in scientific theory, as has happened in the past. Remember that Maxwell's suggestion for the Michelson-Morley interferometer was going to confirm the aether hypothesis once and for all.
More negative in that science is about relations between phenomena and it is likely that conscious experience is at its core an irreducible phenomenon. However, the more we know about the relations of the core the better.
When we have described what something is like we then seek an explanation. A full and honest description must always precede the explanation or we will be explaining a fantasy. Most importantly we should never edit our descriptions because of pre-conceived beliefs because otherwise we will merely be confirming our pre-conceptions.
Prior to attempting to explain Experience it is helpful to consider other phenomena and their explanations.
Consider a simple set of events like rubbing a piece of plastic with a cloth and watching it pick up small particles or hairs by electrostatic attraction. First of all we describe the events to set the context then we increase the precision of the description by using small balances to measure how far the attraction stretches springs attached to thin shreds of material, carefully measure distances and even velocities. We then interrelate our measurements with mathematics so that we can predict how far the spring is stretched at different distances between the spring and the plastic etc. The next, most important step, is that other people check our work by repeating it.
Our “explanation” of electrostatic attraction becomes a set of mathematical relations between the various events. We can then compare these relations with those that occur elsewhere and spot similarities, for instance between electrostatics and magnetism, and construct a common set of relations called “physical theory”. Physical theory allows us to predict how events change over time and so explains the current state of the world and loosely predicts its future state.
But does the physical theory of electrostatics “explain” why a particle jumps through space? What is space? What is mass? What is a virtual photon? How does change happen? In the case of space this is usually treated as a given. So right at the beginning of our theories we have irreducible concepts, a-priori assumptions, and our theory becomes the relations between these irreducible minima of understanding. (Although, of course, space is part of space-time, related to mass and dark energy, and so may not be truly “given” - it may be related to other givens).
What happens when we get to the minimum set of “givens”? What happens when physical theory identifies and interrelates the smallest set of independent phenomena? We will then have some idea of how these phenomena came to be laid out as they are today and a lesser idea of how they will be laid out tomorrow. This is a worthy and great pursuit but we can never understand the irreducible phenomena in themselves using the relations between these phenomena.
In the case of Experience it obviously contains relations between events so much of it is not irreducible. However, all events contain irreducible parts. In a simple machine this does not matter because our interest is in its output for a given input. Our Experience is different, we want to know what it is in itself to understand it.
Which parts of Experience are irreducible? Which parts, when removed, remove Experience? At first inspection it looks like it is the geometry, or form of Experience that is essential. However, even this may not be the essential phenomenon because geometry contains relations between its parts. This is all bad news for those who would like to stick probes into Experience, putting a ruler into some sort of ethereal, convoluted knot in space-time might not be easy. However, probes are not essential, we may still be able to explore the relations within Experience.
If we use a crude ruler that only has 1 cm divisions any millimetre measurements will be estimates. However, if a hundred people use the crude ruler the average estimate will be fairly close to the result from a good ruler used by one person. People can estimate correctly - remember that Galileo laid the foundations of physics by singing to get his timings!
The science of Experience has scarcely begun but we can ask people to honestly describe Experience and build speculative mathematical relations between their estimates. People say Experience is like a projected sphere of events - the maths for the relations within this sphere might be those of a typical sphere:
\(r^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2\)
People say the events are arranged around a centre point, the maths might be:
\(0 = r^2 - t^2\)
But does this “explain” Experience? No, no more than the physical theory of relations explains anything but it might help us to find the irreducible phenomena of Experience.
I don't think it's entirely correct to say a meteorite hitting you is unperceived.
What if perception isn't exclusive to humans or animals? What if everything has qualia to some degree and "objective" reality is just the sun total of all intersubjectivity? If a tree falls and no human is around then no human perceives it, but the tree might be said to perceive it in some way. This seems to me to fit with quantum mechanics in that the "observer" talked about in wave form collapse is not actually referring to a conscious human observer, but instead can refer to an instrument taking a measure. All interaction of all thing is some level of measure. A rock takes the measure of the rain when it erodes. It's qualia is certainly not the same as ours but who is to say there is no qualia? We can't even prove the qualia of other humans, we merely infer it from our own similar experiences.
I think it becomes dicey to impute consciousness to inanimate objects because of mereological nihilism: what is the unified object? Take a highway being jackhammered: what feels that, the highway as a whole, a particular segment, the gravel flying around, the constituent atoms of the gravel? It really is very weird the aggregate activity of a brain feels like something. Why aren't we bound to a neuron, for example?
Maybe each of those groupings feel it in their own way. I feel the collection of myself, but I also feel larger experiences, such as part of a nation or team. Does there need to be a unified object? Is my experience even that unified? If we consider how fractured individual human experience can be ("a part of me is sad you are leaving but another part of me is happy") as is, I don't know if a unified object is necessary.
I think my experience feels unified, but I wonder if that isn't true of everyone. But to actually feel like you are a disjoint entity in ordinary life seems like it should be majorly confusing no? Like having split-personality disorder, or being schizophrenic.
> larger experiences
These are still happening in your mind. They are part of the movie playing in there. Or it could be argued they are actually out there (not quite sure what that would mean), but even then, I don't think there is anything it is like to be a nation or team. I remember an amusing paper that argued that if materialism is true, then necessarily there must be something it is like to be the United States. Because it's an agglomeration, just like the brain, and if agglomerations generate consciousness...
As someone with ADHD, I def don't feel my experience is the most unified, haha. I have very poor working memory and can viscerally feel when I lose a train of thought, when two thoughts are bouncing around my head. And then I think even if one is neurotypical there is still plenty of other ways in which people experience disunity of mind, conflicted feelings, altered states of consciousness. Lots of subtle subconscious processing goes on, espc with emotions. One doesn't have to be mentally ill or on some mind altering substance. You are right this is different than experiencing team spirit or nationalism. Though our little part of experiencing some collective consciousness is different than whatever unified experience hypothetically might exist at a higher level of agglomeration.
Great work! The essay's basically a much more rigorous, scientifically argued version of a post idea I've been toying with for a while now, which would basically argue that supernaturalism and naturalism are in a perpetual stalemate.
Naturalism can say 'I've got Occam's razor on my side; consciousness need be nothing but physically emergent; ideas of a "mind" or a coherent "self" are just stories the self-aware brain tells itself. "Minds" change radically, or even switch off altogether, as a result of sleeping, being half-awake, taking substances, being concussed, being under anesthesia, having dementia, etc. You can even switch the "self" part of the brain off via physical means. Change the brain and you change the person; it's all just brain-states.'
And supernaturalism can reply 'There's tons of anecdotal evidence about out-of-body experiences where the subject knows things they shouldn't be able to know, plus interesting scientific work on reincarnation, etc. More fundamentally, as soon as you claim something is "true" or "false" you're appealing to a world beyond matter. It's not possible for a physical fact (the brain) to make a truth claim about another physical fact (the universe): why give this godlike status to rationality if it's just a brain state among other brain states? Yes, reason's a useful shared standard for seeking agreement among other reasoners, but that's not the same as saying it's actually telling you anything about the world. Even saying "we evolved to understand our environment" involves making any number of philosophical assumptions about time, space, causality, information and the ontological status of matter.'
Me? I choose supernaturalism, because it feels better and, depending on the mood I'm in, truer :)
Yeah, like Wittgenstein said 'Go ahead and believe! It does no harm'. But you, know I've been coming round to the view reason is not anathema to spirituality, as in, you can definitely make reason serve spirituality because reason is a whore (though not a cheap one), like Scott Alexander said in Epistemic Learned Helplessness.
For sure! "Faith seeking understanding" is a great motto I do believe.
Regarding randomness being the intervention of a will, saying it's highly speculative is hardly critical of the idea. It's speculation that's not inconsistent with anything we observe, and it might explain things.
Well, I think I read somewhere once that appealing to randomness to try to rescue free will doesn't really work, but it's true I don't remember why they said that. Trying to sort that out probably merits a whole post.
Thank you for a great essay! I've been wanting to read something like this overview for a while :) Two and a half thoughts:
T1) Echoing what Superb Owl wrote, I think panpsychism would be a great addition here.
T2) When it comes to idealism, Samuel Johnson's appeal to the rock and the door's appeal to Berkeley's face always seemed very weak to me. Sure, you kick the rock, but what you get back are still only the perceptions of a rock. And why would there be no laws for how minds interact with perceptions (or how different perceptions interact with each other)? If there are, I don't see why we should assume that one can just walk through doors willy-nilly.
T2.5) The issue of how things happen when no one is there to perceive them is the only one that strikes me as a genuine problem, but continuing the echo from before, I feel like some version of panpsychism could patch up that hole.
Lastly, in regards to "[if] the eliminativists are right, mind has no being. What consciousness reveals is that there is something it is like to be nothing." -- I really enjoyed that thought! Chewing on it right now.
Thanks for the compliment! Yeah, I totally forgot panpsychism, I guess I didn't see it as one of the major views. I'll add it in at some point. About laws of the mind though, isn't it weird to say external mind behaves according to laws, but internal mind pretty much doesn't? There would be a real cleavage between inner and outer for that to be true, which would undermine idealism, it seems.
I saw a great presentation by a German scientist who explained consciousness as the result of the brain having a model of itself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mthDxnFXs9k
But I have to thank you, since I might spin an entire article out of it. "Waiting for Godot Destroyed the World" or something like that.
Having seen it, I think he's:
1. eulering (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/10/getting-eulered/)
2. Trying a secular presentation of Buddhism
So I can't entirely disagree, though of course, I have to ask: why is there anything it is like to be a self-model? "Self-model" sounds all map and not territory. He didn't actually address Mary's room, just said he didn't buy it, but it's not clear from what he's presenting why Mary wouldn't learn anything new upon leaving the room. If the answer is "There is no Mary", that's 555-COME-ON-NOW tier. Maybe there is no Mary, but there definitely is seeing, there definitely is hearing, etc.
It also made me feel like I was watching Lucky's monologue from Waiting for Godot all over again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGQToJ9RR-4
Basically you're saying it was too difficult to understand? I mean, comparing it to that monologue seems a bit unfair. I think the entire point is that the self is the map. You're right in that it doesn't solve the question why there is something for it to be like a self-model, but does give us explanations and provide us with ways to make new predictions, like the medical cases from the video.
I think it reminds me of Lucky's monologue because he is pretending like the philosophical house of cards he's building can actually prove things, whereas I think he's trying to make language do things it fundamentally cannot. But I also feel his philosophy cannot be adequately expressed in a video, and will probably attempt to read his book at some point, assuming it's not abstruse.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Panpsychism by name under Idealism.
I'm personally a fan of dual-aspect monism [1], combined with panpsychism.
I'm also intrigued by Schrödinger's notion of an intersubjective reality [2], but without some form of panpsychism I don't think it really holds up--otherwise the moon isn't there when we're not looking.
Really great overview of the different answers though. I'm not sure I agree with the thesis that all views are incoherent, but there's definitely something sticky about the whole question.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-aspect_theory
[2] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-schrodinger-believed#%C2%A7my-view-of-the-world
I completely forgot panpsychism, but shouldn't it be under dualism? Under panpsychism, there is still the physical as distinct from mind (I remember Plotinus calling matter the most evil thing there is, for example). I'll read that post of yours later. Handy image in that wiki link though. Maybe, I'll go back at some point to add the issues with neutral monism (which I also forgot) and dual-aspect theory.
You missed Empiricism.
See https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/our-reality - if you dont look you wont see. :)
Empiricism sees nothing though. I just read a book from a neuroscientist, Erik Hoel, called The World Behind the World, that says neuroscience is in shambles, none of the theories make sense, no one sees a way forward, and that it's even possible that similar to Godel's incompleteness theorems, there is such a thing as scientific incompleteness: the possibility that not everything can be explained through science. Interestingly, while consciousness is the big one, there are other areas where science is foundering or has hit walls.
I am both more positive and more negative than you on the issue of explicability.
More positive in that I believe that new observations will eventually clear the current log jam in scientific theory, as has happened in the past. Remember that Maxwell's suggestion for the Michelson-Morley interferometer was going to confirm the aether hypothesis once and for all.
More negative in that science is about relations between phenomena and it is likely that conscious experience is at its core an irreducible phenomenon. However, the more we know about the relations of the core the better.
Here is an excerpt from https://drsimonrobin.substack.com/p/our-reality that explains this problem of explanation.
The problem of explanation
When we have described what something is like we then seek an explanation. A full and honest description must always precede the explanation or we will be explaining a fantasy. Most importantly we should never edit our descriptions because of pre-conceived beliefs because otherwise we will merely be confirming our pre-conceptions.
Prior to attempting to explain Experience it is helpful to consider other phenomena and their explanations.
Consider a simple set of events like rubbing a piece of plastic with a cloth and watching it pick up small particles or hairs by electrostatic attraction. First of all we describe the events to set the context then we increase the precision of the description by using small balances to measure how far the attraction stretches springs attached to thin shreds of material, carefully measure distances and even velocities. We then interrelate our measurements with mathematics so that we can predict how far the spring is stretched at different distances between the spring and the plastic etc. The next, most important step, is that other people check our work by repeating it.
Our “explanation” of electrostatic attraction becomes a set of mathematical relations between the various events. We can then compare these relations with those that occur elsewhere and spot similarities, for instance between electrostatics and magnetism, and construct a common set of relations called “physical theory”. Physical theory allows us to predict how events change over time and so explains the current state of the world and loosely predicts its future state.
But does the physical theory of electrostatics “explain” why a particle jumps through space? What is space? What is mass? What is a virtual photon? How does change happen? In the case of space this is usually treated as a given. So right at the beginning of our theories we have irreducible concepts, a-priori assumptions, and our theory becomes the relations between these irreducible minima of understanding. (Although, of course, space is part of space-time, related to mass and dark energy, and so may not be truly “given” - it may be related to other givens).
What happens when we get to the minimum set of “givens”? What happens when physical theory identifies and interrelates the smallest set of independent phenomena? We will then have some idea of how these phenomena came to be laid out as they are today and a lesser idea of how they will be laid out tomorrow. This is a worthy and great pursuit but we can never understand the irreducible phenomena in themselves using the relations between these phenomena.
In the case of Experience it obviously contains relations between events so much of it is not irreducible. However, all events contain irreducible parts. In a simple machine this does not matter because our interest is in its output for a given input. Our Experience is different, we want to know what it is in itself to understand it.
Which parts of Experience are irreducible? Which parts, when removed, remove Experience? At first inspection it looks like it is the geometry, or form of Experience that is essential. However, even this may not be the essential phenomenon because geometry contains relations between its parts. This is all bad news for those who would like to stick probes into Experience, putting a ruler into some sort of ethereal, convoluted knot in space-time might not be easy. However, probes are not essential, we may still be able to explore the relations within Experience.
If we use a crude ruler that only has 1 cm divisions any millimetre measurements will be estimates. However, if a hundred people use the crude ruler the average estimate will be fairly close to the result from a good ruler used by one person. People can estimate correctly - remember that Galileo laid the foundations of physics by singing to get his timings!
The science of Experience has scarcely begun but we can ask people to honestly describe Experience and build speculative mathematical relations between their estimates. People say Experience is like a projected sphere of events - the maths for the relations within this sphere might be those of a typical sphere:
\(r^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2\)
People say the events are arranged around a centre point, the maths might be:
\(0 = r^2 - t^2\)
But does this “explain” Experience? No, no more than the physical theory of relations explains anything but it might help us to find the irreducible phenomena of Experience.