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Panpsychism Refutation Refuted
From Panpsychism thread on Quora
All arguments in favour of panpsychism emanate from the “comprehending mind”. They are the equivalent of a corrupt programme analysing itself for corruption. The corruption resides in the analytic tools so all results are suspect. There are many arguments in favour of panpsychism, as Paul King and Craig Weinberg have noted, but these arguments absolutely depend on a comprehending mind comprehending itself and becoming entangled with not-self. No external arguments support panpsychism. We can see that complexity throws up unexpected results. Consciousness is an unexpected and counterintuitive result of complexity. We simply don’t understand its genesis. But. The alternative is to suppose that nothing exists until you discover it (there was no gravity until Newton was hit by an apple). That is an absurd position. Panpsychism is a semantic byproduct of thought.
The fantastic thing about sense is that everything in the universe, including the universe itself, makes sense in more than one way. Your argument is completely sensible, and I know first hand because I made sense of things that way for most of my life. At some point, however, I discovered that there was a different way to look at it that makes more sense. Consider the following:
If arguments for panpsychism depend on a comprehending mind comprehending itself like a corrupt program analyzing itself, then arguments against panpsychism depend on the same thing: A bug-ridden debugger debugging itself.
“No external arguments support panpsychism. We can see that complexity throws up unexpected results.”
First of all, I’m not sure what an external argument is. All human arguments begin and end in the ‘comprehending mind’ of the human having them. Evidence from outside of our bodies for things that relate to objects outside of our minds, sure, absolutely. But there is no external evidence of consciousness to begin with. You can’t prove to me that you exist and feel like a person.
Panpsychism (or panprotopsychism) explains this surprisingly well. It’s because evidence is an experience within consciousness and not the other way around (please see my ‘pencil-in-water’ rebuttal: http://www.quora.com/Craig-Weinberg/Consciousness-Insights/160835). You can generate complexity given awareness, but without awareness as an a priori possibility, complexity cannot even generate complexity. Something needs to feel or experience something in order for there to be a difference between simple and complex in the first place. Complexity may throw up results that defy our expectations, but they don’t defy the universe’s expectations if you deny awareness as a primordial ground of being to have expectations within.
“Consciousness is an unexpected and counterintuitive result of complexity.”
Complexity itself is utterly sterile. Without awareness, no amount of stacking of uniform bricks will result in anything other than bricks. Without some form of pattern recognition, we cannot say even how many bricks there might be, what size they are, how long they have been sitting there, etc. There is really no difference between anything and nothing without pattern and experience.
“We simply don’t understand its genesis”
For the same reason that we don’t understand a square circle. Consciousness has no cause, causality is dependent upon experience, memory, and analytical associations among remembered experiences. Without any of those, the universe could only be a single instant of inchoate fragments. To say that we haven’t figured out its genesis yet is to my mind now, a naive assertion of religious faith – wishful thinking in the supremacy of Enlightenment Era approaches to science.
“The alternative is to suppose that nothing exists until you discover it (there was no gravity until Newton was hit by an apple). That is an absurd position.”
No, that is not the only alternative, and yes that position is absurd. It makes the hasty supposition of conflating human consciousness with awareness in general. When applied to criticism of panpsychism, this is a fallacy of begging the question since the panpsychic proposition is itself that awareness is a property that is irreducibly present in the universe, and for me, more importantly *as* the universe. You have to take the next step and realize that even though it wasn’t Newton, there was some first something (an atom? star? spacetime? the singularity?) that experienced gravity, and yes before that experience, gravity as we know it did not exist.
“Panpsychism is a semantic byproduct of thought.”
So are functionalism and materialism. Panpsychism addresses the universe directly, from the inside out. It begins with the Cartesian certainty, that if anything exists for sure around here, it is me. We cannot question that because it will only be ourselves doing the doubting. Only after having faith in our own sense, can we trust ourselves to make sense of empirical evidence from the world of our body. We see people get shot in the head and die. This gives us good reason to believe that a human mind supervenes on a human brain. In the last 500 years we have taken that kind of faith in matter to the extreme. It definitely works on a gross material level…at least until you start choking on the industrial and social backlash.
Now we stand poised on the edge of a next age of Enlightenment. This time the transition may be much more precarious than the last, as unlike in the 17th century, the discoveries are not in-your-face experimental demonstrations of principles that have a chance at shaking bright people out of their religious ignorance. This time, the 21st century discoveries may have to be reinterpretations of what we already thought we understood. We have to face the reality of a world, not that we bring into existence, but which has been brought into existence through billions of years of sense experience on different scales, and which anticipates a temporal unity in which all of those years and all that are to come are but a single moment of totality. This tension, between the retrocausality of the eternal now and the feed forward sense of linear causality, are, I think, where consciousness ‘comes from’. It is not panpsychism that is semantic, it is the entire universe. A sense of significance which divides itself into insignificant fragments which return back to their source on their own. A respiration meta-cycle of meaning and entropy oscillation. Thought is the product of panpsychism. Sense does not emerge from nonsense.
Primordial Syzygy
syz·y·gy
[siz-i-jee] noun, plural -gies.
1.Astronomy . an alignment of three celestial objects, as the sun, the earth, and either the moon or a planet: Syzygy in the sun-earth-moon system occurs at the time of full moon and new moon.
2. any two related things, either alike or opposite.
This is the primordial syzygy for multisense realism. The overlapping RGB regions can be grouped in different ways to bring out different meanings.
The primary spectral hues with the perimeter orientation are juxtaposed with the pastel hues having center-radial orientation. This produces a dialectic of subjective introversion versus objective extroversion as well as a three syzygies:
Subject Thesis (Who & Why, Sense & Motive, Pink & Yellow) minus Space (Subjects are always ‘here’)
Object Antithesis (What & How, Matter & Energy, Green & Red) minus Time (Objects are always ‘now’)
Realism Synthesis (When & Where, Time & Space, Light Blue & Deep Blue) is inferred by triangulating Subject & Object
Using this symmetry to solve the Hard Problem and bridge the Explanatory Gap:
Think of the living brain as the what and how of what we are, and consciousness is the who and the why. Neither supervenes on the other but, neither are they separable entirely. Like the syzygy, they are elements which are separate in some sense, united in some sense, overlapping and underlapping in some sense, defined by each other in some sense, and defining a super-signifying whole which is more than the sum of its parts in another sense.
Consider that of the seven billion people alive today, each one has a different identity and life, yet we all share more or less the same physiology. We cannot expect to locate the who & why of our identity in the what and how terms of our body.
The question marks outside of the circle represent the another dialectic, between the anthropic significance of the syzygy and the a-signifying mechanism of entropy.
”?” is used to connote the unconscious fully. Not merely the absence of awareness but the absence of the capacity for awareness of the absence. There is nothing there to signify a label of nothingness or oblivion, it simply is not anything.
Syzygy vs ?:
acceleration vs inertia
sequence vs consequence
significance vs entropy
pattern vs coincidence
initiative vs randomness
signal vs noise
orientation vs disorientation
teleology (purpose) vs teleonomy (evolution)
animism vs mechanism
augmentation vs cancellation
positive vs negative
multiplication vs division
Tags: consciousness, cosmology, explantory gap, hard problem of consciousness
Power Over The Known Universe
“Physics is the study of the structure of consciousness. The “stuff” of the world is mindstuff.” – Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington
I agree. Where I disagree with computationalism is that I see the stuff of the mind as not just numberstuff, but sense. Not only no stuff at all, but the antithesis of stuff. Not emptiness (the lack of stuff), but the insoluble solvent of stuffness itself. Where arithmetic is represented as methodical encoding, sense guesses and makes it up as it goes along.
It seems enigmatic and mysterious because it is a thesis which is blind to itself except through its reflected antithesis, which is not mysterious or enigmatic but public and declarative. This does not mean that we can’t understand what it is and communicate effectively about that understanding.
We can use the symmetry as a mirror to reflect light into the dark of our blind thesis. Both comp and materialism ignore the symmetry and assume that subjectivity is part of a material or an arithmetic thesis, which leads to the Explanatory Gap, Hard Problem, and Symbol Grounding problem. Instead, if we focus on the symmetry itself we can infer the qualities of the Hard Solution, which is of course, inference and symmetry themselves. This is what sense is all about. Connecting the dots. Taking a leap of faith. Bridging the gap. It is not a wild ass guess, but a puzzle to be solved, an itch to be scratched, a need to be filled.
How I think it works is through a multisense realism. Inferences accumulate a figurative history which is retained in the now. What we learn is stored literally in our ongoing perception. These living histories or channels of sense are woven together as worlds or perceptual inertial frames. The trick is that weaving such a world elevates the subjective perception above what they have woven, so that they can see through the motives of worlds beneath them while the subject becomes invisible or opaque (also glamorous, magnificent) to the less significant subjects. What it looks like to the elevated subject is determinism. Knowledge and power.
By seizing or appropriating this power over lesser worlds, the subject disenchants her antithesis and amplifies her own – in the form of increasingly effective motive force. The power to see through things brings a power to see things through. Decisiveness, strategic foresight, intelligence. Transparency informs the eye, the aye, and the I to progress its own preferences and willfulness. It takes the reigns and questions what used to be a simple public fact (‘man cannot fly’) and turns it into private ideas (‘seems like maybe man can fly with a propeller and wings’) until eventually one of those ideas lead to other ideas that ultimately transform a private history of thought into new public fact. Using knowledge for power is what technology is.
The idea of betting on something important is a simple way of remembering what sense and motive is all about. Having something of value to bet is the first requirement. You have to be able to care about the difference between winning and losing. There needs to be a sense of meaning or significance. Being able to exercise some causally efficacious participation in the world is the other requirement. To make a leap of faith, to guess. Qualia and free will. Signs and designs. When viewed from a distance however, we mechanemorphize it electromagnetically as current and power. Physically as mass and acceleration or matter and energy (which I think means that ‘light’ is really acceleration, btw). Mass is significance made literal, as perceived indirectly from an elevated frame. If perceived directly instead, weightiness and power are figurative qualities of experienced intensity.
Q: In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
In theory, could we predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain?
The theory that we could predict future behavior if we knew enough about the brain is logically sound, but I think that the underlying assumptions are flawed. The relation between behavior and the brain may in fact *not* be linked by cause and effect but by simultaneous integration. Even the best imaginable auto mechanic cannot predict where the car will be driven (although they can predict things about the car’s ability to function on the road).
What I suggest is that human behavior is driven by semantic conditions within the context of the individual’s experience as a whole as well as physiological-neurolgogical-biochemical conditions of the body’s existence. My hypothesis is that interior experience is a concretely real sensorimotive phenomenology rather than a ‘simulation’, ‘interpretation’, or ’emergent property’ of neurological ‘data’ or ‘information’. As such, our perceptions intensify or diminish, consolidate, branch, negate, etc according to the logic of their significance within the biographical narrative rather than exclusively in the activity that we currently know how to measure in the brain from the ‘outside’.
Knowing everything about a brain would certainly enable many predictions, but without understanding the life of the subject from the inside, it is probably not possible to predict what they are going to think and do for the rest of their lives, even if you could know every possible future of the entire universe. If the universe could do that, it probably wouldn’t go through the formality of actually presenting the universe as the ‘live show’ that it appears to us to be.
Multisense Realism 
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