How can someone be wrong about so much but be so likeable? Cut it out Connor, your attempts to bring me to the dark side through your charm aren't going to work.
Seriously though, great article. One minor point I feel compelled to make: "I just find it confusing when people say my subjective experience literally is atoms." -- I don't disagree with this intuition! This is why I find identity theory pretty implausible (not as implausible as dualism, mind you 😉). Under functionalism, it isn't that the atoms/cells themselves constitute consciousness, but the functions they play do--the old "hardware software" distinction.
Anyways, eventually I'll get around to writing about consciousness and completely change your mind, just you wait.
You're right, functionalism is worth me addressing then! Thanks for the comment - this battle will last millennia (which we will live through, because we are reincarnating souls)
Fun idea, but I prefer to write than doing debates. I feel like I'm really bad at expressing myself in person hahah, hard to get my thoughts straight on the fly
Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe. If there was anything you’d expect to act strangely it would be this totally inexplicable and ineffable thing we have.”
I would go further and say it is the primordial datum upon which science is founded. And yet scientism still reigns, even though it seems obvious that science systematically excludes it in its methodology. And that’s fine for most things, but not so much for understanding its own basis.
Ironically we arrive at the idea that the most certain knowledge is that of my own thinking—consciousness—through Descartes, the one (along with Galileo) who decided to reduce causality to the paltry state it remains in today, the mathematization of everything.
I like what you said about trying to understand wood through the paradigm of magnetism. That’s it!
No greater example of that than illusionism. Just can't grok how people would be wed to Scientism so much that they would deny we're conscious. Maybe I'm missing something, but from my view that's crazy!
I don’t think you’re missing anything! I just read a paper by Galen Strawson who made the same point. He says something like, we should stop and wonder at the power of human credulity that they are prepared to deny the very existence of experience. And sad that it’s not religion but philosophy that reveals the deepest woo woo of humanity. Something like that. I remember the “woo woo” bit because you don’t come across that too often in philosophy papers. Anyway you’re in good company!
As someone who was more an English/history guy than a math/science guy in school, I would not have expected this topic to be interesting, but you made it fascinating. You would probably have made an excellent physics teacher.
>I can conceive of someone that shares all the same physical properites as me, but isn’t conscious. If this is conceivable, consciousness must not be a physical.
How does this not, by itself, imply epiphenomenalism?
>Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe.
They generally dont, thats why theyre physicalists in the first place. The idea that something which only appears in specific complex structures exists on the level of electrons and velocity *is* whats rejected.
There is a similar discussion withing physics about computation rather than consciousness that you may find interesting. Search Laplace demon, Landauer limit.
It doesn't imply Epiphenomenalism, but it does imply that Epiphenomenalism is possible - which I do believe (I just think it's very unlikely)
I don't believe that if someone had no conscious experience they would in fact act the same way, but it is conceivable. The conceivability is the important part here.
Thanks for reccs! I'm in the process of steelmanning physicalism to myself rn, so will come in handy
I don't see how it is possible for epiphenomenalism to be merely possible and not also true. If it is possible for everything to be happening just like it is in a universe exactly like ours but without consciousness, then clearly the addition of consciousness to that world has no physical consequences.
If interactionism is correct, isn't it erroneous to conceive of a zombie? For example, imagine a world that is identical to ours with the same physics, and imagine in that world I start flapping my arms and take off in flight. Easy enough to imagine, but an error to conceive of, because I'm supposed to be imagining a world with the same physics, and in such a world flapping my arms shouldn't give me enough lift to fly. So, are the physics of this universe consistent with a clone of you without the addition of an interacting soul behaving just like you and writing the same thoughts about consciousness solely due to sharing your physics? The answer to this isn't obvious, but it seems pretty clear that either it is or it isn't, and that in either case it is an error to conceive of the reverse. If a physical clone would behave indistinguishably then either physics gives rise to consciousness or consciousness is an epiphenomenon giving rise to nothing. If, on the other hand, something beyond physics is necessary to explain your behavior, then imagining a physical clone without that something extra doing something that physics alone isn't supposed to lead to is like imagining a physical clone flapping its arms and flying.
I highly recommend Matthew Skene's dissertation "Putting the Ghost Back in the Machine" as a great treatment of philosophy of mind debates. He also covers agent-causal theories of free will, the case for phenomenal conservatism, the empirical case for free will, and the empirical reasons for why philosophers aren't rational about philosophical issues. He cites Caplan on several empirical things (as you should).
I also tend to think that concerns about conservation of energy wrt dualism are not that big of a deal, because of soldiers and handshakes.
But I have some sort of sympathy for Epiphenomenalism, because the view that the mental causes things in the physical realm just seems too outlandish and spooky to me.
My first position was Epiphenomenalism! I took it as a given, really. But like I say, the unlikelihood of some behaviours and psychophysical harmony turned me off it
I do see the force in those considerations. That's why I don't adopt Epiphenomenalism (also because Phil of Mind is still quite above my paygrade, tbh). I think the argument from the fact that we talk about being conscious is the most powerful one for me. We really wouldn't expect that given Epiphenomenalism
> You might think “Well it’s awfully convenient for the Dualist that consciousness is the one exception to conservation of energy” - but keep in mind that consciousness is entirely unique. Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe.
This seems like special pleading to me. *Everything* in the universe is different from everything else. What differences between consciousness and everything else make it more plausible that consciousness, specifically, would violate conservation of energy?
> Also, it’s worth adding that we can get a bit complacent when referring to physical “laws”. We sometimes imagine that they are these fundamental things that cause nature to be a certain way, and any theory that denies them must be false. However, they’re really just patterns we’ve have spotted. Oftentimes, we’re wrong and the laws need to be revised.
Philosophers generally distinguish between laws of physics and laws of nature. The laws of nature are the true laws that are never violated, while the laws of physics are the closest approximation to them that we've discovered. We don't know what the exact laws of nature are, but we do know that our current understanding of the laws of physics is a ridiculously good approximation of them, except in cases where some physical property is taken to a further extreme then we've ever observed (e.g., extreme temperature and density, extremely short length scales). But the brain does not have any extreme physical properties that would cause the laws of physics to break down. Plus, we have measured many physical properties of the brain and never seen any violations of known physics. So it's pretty safe to conclude that the brain does, in fact, follow the laws of physics.
> Still, it’s totally obvious that Quantum Mechanics undermines the Conservation of Energy argument.
You should have done more research. The source from that Google snippet says "appear" for a reason. Energy is conserved in the QM formalism, except during wave function collapse, which may not even exist (it's an ad-hoc addition to the theory that isn't well-defined nor needed to actually explain any data). The are also purported violations of conservation of energy in general relativity, but this in part depends on your interpretation (if you include gravitational potential energy, there's no violation), and in any case, GR determines exactly how and when those violations occur - they're purely a result of the geometry of spacetime - so there's still no room for any violations caused by non-physical processes.
But even if conservation of energy is violated, this misses the broader point. The argument against dualism has never been about conservation of energy specifically (at least, not any argument that I've heard - maybe someone ill-informed about physics really does think that it's just conservation of energy that's the problem, and that it would go away without it). In fact, this is the first time I've ever heard someone single out conservation of energy as the problem while ignoring all the other laws. If it was *just* conservation of energy, you could get around it by saying that the mind interacted in very specific ways that change the final state but leave the total energy intact. The problem is that having accurate laws of physics at all automatically precludes any possible interaction between the physical and the non-physical. If there was such an interaction, it would have to violate the laws of physics no matter what they are. Even probabilistic laws, like those in some interpretations of QM, would be violated, because, in order for the interaction to actually have any physical effect, it would have to change the probabilities of certain physical events.
There's also a further problem, which is that we know a lot about how the brain works physically. We know how neurons work and what causes them to fire, and we know that everything our brain controls is controlled through the firing of neurons. Any non-physical process that affects the brain would have to operate on this level. Otherwise, it couldn't do things like make us talk about consciousness.
So dualists face the problem of explaining how it could be that there are violations of the laws of physics that we haven't noticed, which are large enough to affect brain processing and yet do so in a way that we haven't noticed, and that for some reason only affect the brain. And beyond explaining how it's possible, they have to explain why we should believe any of this. To me, even if it's technically epistemically possible, it looks like an extraordinarily ad hoc theory with absolutely no evidence for it except for our incredulity about how consciousness works. And it doesn't even solve that problem: dualism doesn't explain how consciousness works, it just tucks it away from the physical world to avoid having to explain it, all while introducing a whole host of new questions (Where did consciousness come from if it's not physical? Why and how does it interact with the physical world? How can consciousness be temporal when it's non-physical and time is a physical thing? Why do all the things that are actually caused by consciousness appear to have physical causes in the brain? And why is it that the only thing in the universe consciousness interacts with is the one thing that appears to be able to produce the same effects as consciousness does on its own by purely physical means?).
How can someone be wrong about so much but be so likeable? Cut it out Connor, your attempts to bring me to the dark side through your charm aren't going to work.
Seriously though, great article. One minor point I feel compelled to make: "I just find it confusing when people say my subjective experience literally is atoms." -- I don't disagree with this intuition! This is why I find identity theory pretty implausible (not as implausible as dualism, mind you 😉). Under functionalism, it isn't that the atoms/cells themselves constitute consciousness, but the functions they play do--the old "hardware software" distinction.
Anyways, eventually I'll get around to writing about consciousness and completely change your mind, just you wait.
You're right, functionalism is worth me addressing then! Thanks for the comment - this battle will last millennia (which we will live through, because we are reincarnating souls)
Can't we just do a podcast together and get this whole thing squared away in one 30 minute episode?
Fun idea, but I prefer to write than doing debates. I feel like I'm really bad at expressing myself in person hahah, hard to get my thoughts straight on the fly
Fine, coward. Maybe in the next millennium
Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe. If there was anything you’d expect to act strangely it would be this totally inexplicable and ineffable thing we have.”
I would go further and say it is the primordial datum upon which science is founded. And yet scientism still reigns, even though it seems obvious that science systematically excludes it in its methodology. And that’s fine for most things, but not so much for understanding its own basis.
Ironically we arrive at the idea that the most certain knowledge is that of my own thinking—consciousness—through Descartes, the one (along with Galileo) who decided to reduce causality to the paltry state it remains in today, the mathematization of everything.
I like what you said about trying to understand wood through the paradigm of magnetism. That’s it!
No greater example of that than illusionism. Just can't grok how people would be wed to Scientism so much that they would deny we're conscious. Maybe I'm missing something, but from my view that's crazy!
I don’t think you’re missing anything! I just read a paper by Galen Strawson who made the same point. He says something like, we should stop and wonder at the power of human credulity that they are prepared to deny the very existence of experience. And sad that it’s not religion but philosophy that reveals the deepest woo woo of humanity. Something like that. I remember the “woo woo” bit because you don’t come across that too often in philosophy papers. Anyway you’re in good company!
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fi.pinimg.com%2F736x%2F58%2F7b%2Fae%2F587bae20003e2db26555bc8cbfa84150.jpg&tbnid=i5IgR8422g2-7M&vet=1&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2Fi-feel-quite-important--26880928999450684%2F&docid=0LeVTLV6q8BaQM&w=500&h=280&source=sh%2Fx%2Fim%2Fm1%2F2&kgs=617c59178f2fab69&shem=abme%2Ctrie
As someone who was more an English/history guy than a math/science guy in school, I would not have expected this topic to be interesting, but you made it fascinating. You would probably have made an excellent physics teacher.
Thanks! I'm still learning as it's a new topic for me, but I enjoy writing as I go. Glad you enjoyed it
>I can conceive of someone that shares all the same physical properites as me, but isn’t conscious. If this is conceivable, consciousness must not be a physical.
How does this not, by itself, imply epiphenomenalism?
>Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe.
They generally dont, thats why theyre physicalists in the first place. The idea that something which only appears in specific complex structures exists on the level of electrons and velocity *is* whats rejected.
There is a similar discussion withing physics about computation rather than consciousness that you may find interesting. Search Laplace demon, Landauer limit.
It doesn't imply Epiphenomenalism, but it does imply that Epiphenomenalism is possible - which I do believe (I just think it's very unlikely)
I don't believe that if someone had no conscious experience they would in fact act the same way, but it is conceivable. The conceivability is the important part here.
Thanks for reccs! I'm in the process of steelmanning physicalism to myself rn, so will come in handy
I don't see how it is possible for epiphenomenalism to be merely possible and not also true. If it is possible for everything to be happening just like it is in a universe exactly like ours but without consciousness, then clearly the addition of consciousness to that world has no physical consequences.
If interactionism is correct, isn't it erroneous to conceive of a zombie? For example, imagine a world that is identical to ours with the same physics, and imagine in that world I start flapping my arms and take off in flight. Easy enough to imagine, but an error to conceive of, because I'm supposed to be imagining a world with the same physics, and in such a world flapping my arms shouldn't give me enough lift to fly. So, are the physics of this universe consistent with a clone of you without the addition of an interacting soul behaving just like you and writing the same thoughts about consciousness solely due to sharing your physics? The answer to this isn't obvious, but it seems pretty clear that either it is or it isn't, and that in either case it is an error to conceive of the reverse. If a physical clone would behave indistinguishably then either physics gives rise to consciousness or consciousness is an epiphenomenon giving rise to nothing. If, on the other hand, something beyond physics is necessary to explain your behavior, then imagining a physical clone without that something extra doing something that physics alone isn't supposed to lead to is like imagining a physical clone flapping its arms and flying.
I highly recommend Matthew Skene's dissertation "Putting the Ghost Back in the Machine" as a great treatment of philosophy of mind debates. He also covers agent-causal theories of free will, the case for phenomenal conservatism, the empirical case for free will, and the empirical reasons for why philosophers aren't rational about philosophical issues. He cites Caplan on several empirical things (as you should).
Awesome! Will check it out
Good read!
I also tend to think that concerns about conservation of energy wrt dualism are not that big of a deal, because of soldiers and handshakes.
But I have some sort of sympathy for Epiphenomenalism, because the view that the mental causes things in the physical realm just seems too outlandish and spooky to me.
My first position was Epiphenomenalism! I took it as a given, really. But like I say, the unlikelihood of some behaviours and psychophysical harmony turned me off it
I do see the force in those considerations. That's why I don't adopt Epiphenomenalism (also because Phil of Mind is still quite above my paygrade, tbh). I think the argument from the fact that we talk about being conscious is the most powerful one for me. We really wouldn't expect that given Epiphenomenalism
> You might think “Well it’s awfully convenient for the Dualist that consciousness is the one exception to conservation of energy” - but keep in mind that consciousness is entirely unique. Even Physicalists have to admit that consciousness is very different from everything else in the universe.
This seems like special pleading to me. *Everything* in the universe is different from everything else. What differences between consciousness and everything else make it more plausible that consciousness, specifically, would violate conservation of energy?
> Also, it’s worth adding that we can get a bit complacent when referring to physical “laws”. We sometimes imagine that they are these fundamental things that cause nature to be a certain way, and any theory that denies them must be false. However, they’re really just patterns we’ve have spotted. Oftentimes, we’re wrong and the laws need to be revised.
Philosophers generally distinguish between laws of physics and laws of nature. The laws of nature are the true laws that are never violated, while the laws of physics are the closest approximation to them that we've discovered. We don't know what the exact laws of nature are, but we do know that our current understanding of the laws of physics is a ridiculously good approximation of them, except in cases where some physical property is taken to a further extreme then we've ever observed (e.g., extreme temperature and density, extremely short length scales). But the brain does not have any extreme physical properties that would cause the laws of physics to break down. Plus, we have measured many physical properties of the brain and never seen any violations of known physics. So it's pretty safe to conclude that the brain does, in fact, follow the laws of physics.
> Still, it’s totally obvious that Quantum Mechanics undermines the Conservation of Energy argument.
You should have done more research. The source from that Google snippet says "appear" for a reason. Energy is conserved in the QM formalism, except during wave function collapse, which may not even exist (it's an ad-hoc addition to the theory that isn't well-defined nor needed to actually explain any data). The are also purported violations of conservation of energy in general relativity, but this in part depends on your interpretation (if you include gravitational potential energy, there's no violation), and in any case, GR determines exactly how and when those violations occur - they're purely a result of the geometry of spacetime - so there's still no room for any violations caused by non-physical processes.
But even if conservation of energy is violated, this misses the broader point. The argument against dualism has never been about conservation of energy specifically (at least, not any argument that I've heard - maybe someone ill-informed about physics really does think that it's just conservation of energy that's the problem, and that it would go away without it). In fact, this is the first time I've ever heard someone single out conservation of energy as the problem while ignoring all the other laws. If it was *just* conservation of energy, you could get around it by saying that the mind interacted in very specific ways that change the final state but leave the total energy intact. The problem is that having accurate laws of physics at all automatically precludes any possible interaction between the physical and the non-physical. If there was such an interaction, it would have to violate the laws of physics no matter what they are. Even probabilistic laws, like those in some interpretations of QM, would be violated, because, in order for the interaction to actually have any physical effect, it would have to change the probabilities of certain physical events.
There's also a further problem, which is that we know a lot about how the brain works physically. We know how neurons work and what causes them to fire, and we know that everything our brain controls is controlled through the firing of neurons. Any non-physical process that affects the brain would have to operate on this level. Otherwise, it couldn't do things like make us talk about consciousness.
So dualists face the problem of explaining how it could be that there are violations of the laws of physics that we haven't noticed, which are large enough to affect brain processing and yet do so in a way that we haven't noticed, and that for some reason only affect the brain. And beyond explaining how it's possible, they have to explain why we should believe any of this. To me, even if it's technically epistemically possible, it looks like an extraordinarily ad hoc theory with absolutely no evidence for it except for our incredulity about how consciousness works. And it doesn't even solve that problem: dualism doesn't explain how consciousness works, it just tucks it away from the physical world to avoid having to explain it, all while introducing a whole host of new questions (Where did consciousness come from if it's not physical? Why and how does it interact with the physical world? How can consciousness be temporal when it's non-physical and time is a physical thing? Why do all the things that are actually caused by consciousness appear to have physical causes in the brain? And why is it that the only thing in the universe consciousness interacts with is the one thing that appears to be able to produce the same effects as consciousness does on its own by purely physical means?).