Does eliminative materialism become panpsychism?

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Eliminative materialism is rejected by the majority of academic philosophers. Searle even calls it neurotic. Eliminative materialism "solves" the hard problem of consciousness by denying that consciousness exists.

"Qualia" is an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us. As is so often the case with philosophical jargon, it is easier to give examples than to give a definition of the term. Look at a glass of milk at sunset; the way it looks to you--the particular, personal, subjective visual quality of the glass of milk is the quale of your visual experience at the moment. The way the milk tastes to you then is another, gustatory quale, and how it sounds to you as you swallow is an auditory quale; These various "properties of conscious experience" are prime examples of qualia. ... At first blush it would be hard to imagine a more quixotic quest than trying to convince people that there are no such properties as qualia; hence the ironic title of this chapter. But I am not kidding. "

FROM

Dennett's http://cogprints.org/254/1/quinqual.htm

My seminar paper showed that Dennett's argument in " Quining Qualia " is circular. Dennett proves that qualia are ineffable. He then says that anything ineffable cannot exist. Therefore, qualia cannot exist. Basically his argument is that the ineffable cannot exist because the ineffable does not exist. My professor friend actually met Dennett at a party. He said that Dennett told him that he doesn't actually believe the outrageous things he says ( for example that an "on" light switch knows that the light is on ) but says them anyway to gain publicity. I agree with Searle, it is neurotic to think that pain doesn't hurt etc.

Ah! But one of these days science will figure it out and this god-of-the-gaps argument will be gone!

no, senses doesn't imply awareness at all. A that cell releases a compound when hit by light provides a basic sense of light/dark. This kind of sensory aparatus is common in the most primitive kinds of life. I don't think there is any reason to suppose that such organisms have anything like awareness. Even more complex organisms like sea cucumbers don't seem to have much in the way of awareness and don't do much with the simple nervous systems they have.

I think that it's clear that more complex and differentiated organisms can do more complicated things with their nervous systems. It seems reasonable to me to suppose that awareness can emerges at some point as the complexity of that signal processing increases.

Why? Says who?

I think when we talk about what it's like to be us, we're talking about our experience of the operation of our minds and bodies and that it's completely to be expected that we have human-like experiences, just as housecats have housecat-like experiences and dogs have dog-like experiences and wolves have wolf-like experiences and so on.

I think that it will be discovered in the near future that mental states do not occur outside of brains and that they do have a physical existence in particular patterns within neural networks. Physicalism will win.

Dennet will be proven wrong in that there is actually a thing which is awareness, but he will be right in that thing is a program that runs in the brain and exists as an ever changing pattern in the neurons of the brain.

An interesting questions is what starts that program running in a newly developing brain and when does it get out of beta? Some aspects of consciousness seem to be running relatively early in fetal development, while others don't seem to come online until well after birth.

One thing I need to clarify here. I'm sure you believe in some type of 'spectrum' of consciousness, ie. my consciousness is not the same as a cat or a hummingbird, but are you suggesting here that it completely stops somewhere on the chain before you get to the root of organic life? If so I don't know how far we can go on with that. I'd think it's appropriate to suggest that it could exponentially curve with complexity but I don't know how we could discuss, let alone debate, whether it's completely nonexistent at the sensing organism level.


It feels intuitive and natural because we experience things.


While I sympathize with your sense of rightness on this point I don't know where I'd find the means to join you. I've been woken up in my sleep too many times by things interacting with me in very complex tactile ways, the best I can currently sort out in taking them at face value comparatively is that they're for the most part fragments of aspects of other people asleep themselves who I have one type of mental connection with or another. I know that's completely inadmissible as evidence of anything, just that this is part of why I'm likely not going to find complete or absolute physicalism persuasive or at a minimum I'm not particularly satisfied that we know nearly as much as we think we do.

The other part about physicalism winning - it's still not coherent enough IMHO for us to be sure what it would be victorious over unless you're speaking expressly to Deepak fans. Past that it's almost as incoherent as the 'science will figure it out', which I don't think science figuring anything out waves some type of magical wand over it and revises its fundamental character.

An interesting set of questions. What do you conceive of as "the root of organic life?"
I think that's a nontirivial question and a careful look at it strongly suggests that there is a point when there is no kind of consciousness at all, yes--though at a point at a much higher level of complexity and differentiation than whatever the imagined "root" is.

It might be useful to reframe these thoughts from the territory of sensing organisms to the full spectrum of life, including the edge cases like the viruses.

I strongly suspect that viruses are chemical machines with no consciousness, no senses, no intentions and no awareness. They are not even "alive" by most definitions of life. But the molecular machinery that regulates their functioning and interacts with living cells to make more copies of the virus are not profoundly unlike the molecular machines at that run the cellular machinery of living organisms.

Do you propose that these chemical automata are conscious in some way? If so, on what basis?

Then there are living cells that take in energy and chemicals and when they get large split into several copies but otherwise do not seem to have any kind of interaction with the outer world and show no signs of doing any kind of sensing or analysis. The only information they exchange is in amino acid chains that act as templates for their cellular machinery, automatically producing proteins when certain sequences are encountered. I see no reason to suppose that some kind of mind is at work there.

Yes, but that tells us nothing about whether or not e-coli or ebola experience things. We can recognize other mammals having their own kind of experiences because they are so close to us in organization that we recognize their behavior as inidicative of a similar inner life (well, most of us--pace B.F. Skinner & pals).

Those behaviors involve sensory and processing systems that sea cucumbers don't have. Do sea cucumbers have similar feeling states? I think the idea is absurd. They don't have the systems needed to support such feeling states. The do have extremely simple nervous systems--no brains, but a very few, very simple nerves. Perhaps there is some sort of base level pre-conscious awareness in such a system. I don't see how basic energy and information transfers, limited by thermodynamics, would permit such a system to support something like "feelings" or "awareness" or a "sense of what it's like to be." I don't see how such a problem can be solved by quantuum effects either.

There are certainly less complicated life forms than sea cucumbers that have no nervous systems at all. Since everything that we see of "what it's like to be" involves the operation of such systems and we know that suspending the operation of the nervous system as in general anethesia does suspend the sense of "what it's like to be" then I do think it's highly unlikely there can be any awareness without a nervous system.

That's very interesting. I'd like to know more about that.
I'm sure there is vastly much more to know. There is much more than has yet been dreamt of in our philosophies. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that some of the models that we have developed will remain essentially true in light of the discoveries to come, much as Newtonian physics is still a good model for the interaction of objects at the scales we typically encounter in everyday life and we need to look to very large masses or very fast objects like satellites and spacecraft before we really need to take relativistic effects into account.

Quibble: I don't think science figures anything out, people use science to help their process of figuring things out.
More to the point: is awareness part of the fundamental character of rock? I don't see any grounds for such a conjecture.

If you take as given that we live in a panpsychic cosmos, then panpsychism seems to make sense, but if your supposition is that consciousness is some kind of natural energetic process, like all the others that we have examined, then there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to give any weight to the idea of panpsychism as some sort of explanation for the experience of what it's like to be, think and feel.

Shouldnt that guy's video be entitled "Materialism Implies Panpsychism", and not "....Infers Panpsychism"?

Eliminative materialism is the opposite of panpsychism. Panpsychism is the belief that consciousness is everywhere. Eliminative materialism is the belief that consciousness is nowhere, that consciousness is a myth.

Yes, I thought that was odd.


That's technically correct but ignores the nuances of the position.
Dennett, P&P Churchland and Frank Jackson do not all make identical claims, though all are eliminativists.

I think that it will be discovered in the near future that mental states do not occur outside of brains and that they do have a physical existence in particular patterns within neural networks. Physicalism will win.

Adamantium

Lets use a specific mental state to make our reasoning more precise. Visualize a triangle. It is silly to say that one just created a physical triangle in your brain. Neurons do not fire in a triangular shape nor do you create a subatomic particle that is triangular in shape. Besides , it is silly to believe that we can see neurons and/or subatomic particles without scientific equipment. Read this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument ; One has knowledge ( of what a triangle looks like ) that has no physical basis. To say that the triangle is embedded physically in the brain in a non-triangular form is not a solution. It is like saying that holding a CD of Mozart is identical to hearing his music.

https://thelycaeum.wordpress.com/2013/1 ... -argument/

Last edited by wittgenstein on 12 Mar 2017, 11:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

It is true that Dennett does not say explicitly that consciousness does not exist. However, he redefines it. He says that consciousness is and only is a brain state. In other words pain is and only is C fibers firing , there is no subjective experience of pain. In other words pain does not hurt! Dennett's strategy is extremely disingenuous! Its like saying ," I never said that I don't believe in God! I define God as a ham sandwich and I believe that ham sandwiches exist!"
By definition eliminative materialists believe that consciousness does not exist.

I don't think that's quite right. He doesn't think there is some additional thing to neurons firing that is a subjective experience of pain. The experience of pain is how we are aware of those neurons firing.

It gets complicated. Sometimes we react to stimulus that we are not yet consciously aware of, e.g. removing a limib from a source of pain slightly before becoming aware of the pain. Sometimes we are overwhelmed by a strong stimulus and don't perceive it as pain until after we have consciously analyzed the experience.

What seems obvious about the feeling of being gets less so when closely examined.

I'm a little baffled by why my suggestion that there's a root of consciousness would cause this much acid reflux.

You have mechanical processes together that somehow accrue the semblance of the first inklings of consciousness. Call those processes proto-consciousness if that's appropriate, call them what you will. There has to be some type of process that it emerges from. I don't see why that's in any way a controversial supposition. The idea that at a certain level of neural complexity consciousness just springs forth doesn't make much sense at all.


I'd say my suspicions are similar, I'd get bogged down trying to argue anything otherwise and I still think this is aside from the main point above - ie. I really doubt it's as simple as consciousness going from not existing to existing. It's probably much closer to consciousness increasing logarythmically from imperceptible to perceptible levels.


I don't think anyone knows outright, and I'd be a bit crazy to suggest that I know something here that career biologists, chemists, or physicists don't. What I would say is that 1/ (1 X 10^15) of human consciousness isn't no consciousness at all, it's really damn close but it would be an important distinction if true.



And that would suggest that there's a lot of variance with what happens at this level. I see it as interesting, I don't know why it would stop emergence from being an emergence from something like itself on a lower level.


Forgive me, I think my sarcasm was too subtle with that statement. It's intuitive for there to be something it's like to be us because there's something that it's like to be us. Outside of that it makes no sense whatsoever from a materialist perspective. That's all I was going for with that statement.



I'm not sure how far it will get you being that it's purely anecdotal though. I can explain my behavior and my ideological trajectory somewhat by it, but I don't think I can explain it anyone in such clarity that if they didn't believe it were possible that they'd believe it on my telling. Back when I was going through my couple years of reductive materialism if someone would have told me these things I would have needed to write it off as a) sleep paralysis, b) dreams where the person only thought they woke up, or c) that they were just having mental difficulties of some type that were too complex for me to diagnose.

Even where I'm at and with what I've experienced I still run into people who I feel strongly compelled to dismiss based on the combination of what they're saying and how strung out and neurotic their presentation is. A good recent example is an acquaintance through friends from years back who was really sharp, very high IQ, but even then a bit stuck on conspiracy theories and in the past year he told me that he was abducted by Annunaki, talked to by a stoned/high alien who wanted to have an intellectual chat with him, that he was given a ring by this alien which he said had perpetually moving parts, had a picture of it on facebook (looked pretty solid and static to me), and it recently went missing. I don't think I can even begin to unravel what happened there, what percentage of it was what, how much of that story I can write off as mental illness, whether he might have had a sleep paralysis experience coupled with receiving an apport of some type. Most people take a very general and practical alternative to trying to unwind that story - the technical term for this is that he's crazy, they'd be satisfied with that answer and move on (which - to an extent that's understandable because even if really fantastic things did happen to the person in question their reliability as a witness is too damages in other ways to tell what from what). When I was a kid in 5th grade summer camp I was spinning jacks near the edge of a paperback book I had, those jacks would spin and deflect off the edge of its pages, however one just vanished. I looked all over the place for it, around the edges of the book, on the floor, anywhere I possibly could. The book was closed flat and I thought I was being absurd to fan the pages but the damn thing fell out! That makes no sense whatsoever! To that end while I've been highly skeptical of peoples claims of apports/apportation I have to accept the possibility that it's not all lunacy when I've seen similarly strange things happen, and I don't know whether it's fraud or not (from the telling I've heard of it it seems like it might be credible) that there's a guy in Brazil who has small C and D grade gemstones sprinkling down around him wherever he walks.

All of that doesn't really even get into the category of what one might call shamanistic experiences, which is quite likely what my acquaintence was talking about, and how deep of a rabbit hole those are even without any move toward the sort of magical pragmatism that you brought up in reference to Ramsey Dukes or Jordan Peterson.


Dean Radin in some of his lectures has brought up this rather strange argument made by physicists and other people in the STEM disciplines that he's talked to - a suggestion that if his psychical research, like the Gansfeld experiements, prove to be correct that it would mean all of the physics, chemistry, and biology books would need to be thrown out because they're completely wrong - that the universe is magic! That argument makes absolutely no sense when you think about it. Newtonian physics on the level we use it today (ie. anything above the level where quantum rules dominate) can't and won't disappear because there's no magical power to Dean Radin's findings that will somehow dissolve the laws of nature. It's extremely unlikely that we're holding the integrity of physical reality together with our collective beliefs and even if 7 billion people all of a sudden took on Deepak Choprah's outlook on the universe there's no reason to believe that the laws governing nature would go to Potter (pun intended).

If Newtonian physics is good enough for building tall buildings, long bridges that don't get shredded by wind vortices, planes, trains, etc.. then there's no reason whatsoever to suggest that it's somehow less true if we somehow find out that mainstream science has been wrong about psy. It'll be even more interesting if we find out that it's both very real and that quantum physics has absolutely nothing to do with it because that would also point to even deeper layers that we have yet to explore and it might show the way.

On an additional note - we've had yogis, mystics, magicians, sorcerers, etc.. through all of history and particularly in antiquity there were far more people who were much more seriously devoted to such practices than you or I could imagine. Even at the times where I was at my most disciplined in meditation and ritual practice I'd be seen as a complete joke of a dabbler to these people - ie. they had no 9 to 5, they had no extracurricular activities, their immersion was complete. While they could have done some interesting things with that I don't think there's any good reason to believe that the laws of physics were somehow in this state of flux because of them and what they were doing and that it only tamed down once Christianity laid the groundwork of such things being anathema and satanic, which the protestants were at the forefront of banning mysticism and where the sciences of the post-Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution period took the same ethic further.

The moral of that story - still more evidence that we won't be riding on broomsticks chasing snitches in aerial phys-ed classes at Hogwarts is psy gets proven true. Rather we'll just have another weak but present force that we have no account for by our current theories and we'll have to then figure out why we're seeing what we're seeing and go from there. It wouldn't be the first time that's happened in science, I'm sure it wouldn't be the last.




I think I had more subtle sarcasm buried in there. When I see people say 'Oh, science will figure that out' (there was a girl on a facebook page who said that to me a while back and I see that happening here), it seems completely irrelevant whether science will figure something out or not. If science figures something out I'm all for it. I think this goes back to what I said earlier - that god of the gaps is only an appropriate charge for those trying to wedge god into the gaps and there's nothing for science to dispel in closing said gaps other than raw superstition and unsubstantiated faith.


Do you think the challenge you're having here might be a scaling problem?

I remember, either Mark Blyth or Jonathan Haidt, in one of their lectures talking about how terrible human minds were for being able to size up or grasp certain kinds of problems - like trillions of tons of ice moving at .2 inches per hour. Similarly with the consciousness of rock I'd say the same thing - we're asking is it nothing, or is it 1/(1x10^15) or even 1/1/(1x10^30) of human consciousness? We may never have the capability of measuring a level of consciousness so close to zero but we might find ourselves, if proto-consciousness ends up somewhere within measurable range, forced to accept the possibility as implied by things that are measurable.



The lead-in to panpsychism though - if we can't identify any fundamental aspect of the universe that should even give rise to consciousness, then our whole way of thinking about it is in trouble. To say that it's a higher-order amalgamation of processes that are strictly unconscious seems as absurd as the idea that a trillion monkeys put together would be able to levitate or breath fire. To that end I'm sympathetic to the scientists who absolutely scorned anyone who'd talk about it in claiming that consciousness itself was 'woo' and a completely unscientific, even anti-scientific, topic because in a way they're right - consciousness is woo as f and it is a complete absurdity from the physicalist perspective. It has to be, there really isn't a sensible choice without a lot of hand-waving and, I know I'll probably get in trouble for using this word but here it goes, obscurantism.

Dennett believes that there is no feeling of pain, only C fibers firing. My response to that is to show that Dennett contradicts himself 1. If pain is and only is C fibers firing then torture is impossible. We cannot feel pain and so if no physical damage occurs ( there are forms of torture that do not harm the victim. The torture is specifically designed to escape detection ) there are no consequences from being tortured. 2. Therefore, Dennett must not object to being tortured if no physical damage occurs. 3. Dennett would strongly object to being tortured. 4. Therefore his beliefs contradict each other and so cannot be true.

Dennett believes that only the objective ( third person perspective ) exists. After having sex with his wife Dennett asked her, " it was good for you! Was it good for me?" LOL

The idea of a triangle is something that we learn about in school. Such learning takes place in the brain. Damage the brain in the right way and it doesn't happen. The rules that define what a triangle is and what a triangle is not are stored in the memory of the brain.

The CD of Mozart is not the same as hearing the music, but that does not mean that the information contained on the CD is not the music. When properly decoded, it is the music. The hearing is not the cd, not the data in the cd, not the movement of the speaker cones and not the vibrations in the air. It's not the movement of the hairs in the inner ear in response to the sound waves, and it's not the action potentials fired off by the neurons in response to the movement of those hairs--but it does seem most likely that the hearing is in the processing of those signals by the mind, which is most likely an electrochemical program running in the nervous system.



It's not that exactly, the point is more that with different scales you have the possibility for different types of structure. There is, for example, no basic level of goldness in an electron, proton or neutron or any flavor of quark. You only get the properties of gold when you get 79 protons to form a nucleus with a like number of neutrons and electron orbitals form around them. There's a distinct break between the properties of the constituent parts of the atom and the atom as an atom when it begins to form chemical bonds with neighbors.

The sciences look at the world through different disciplinary lenses because of these different scaling effects. You want a particular flavor of biology if you are interested in ecosystems or the behavior of species. If you are interested in the molecular mechanisms in the tissues of a plant or animal, you are going to look with a different flavor of biology and a lot of chemistry. If you are interested in the effects of individual electrons, you will be using chemistry and physics and so on.


You know that a person is made up of certain types of atom. The majority of atoms in your body are oxygen (65%), but it doesn't make sense to look for culture in Oxygen atoms. You need information coded in particular kinds of amino acid chain before you can start relating those atoms to the physical structure of a human being.

Just as atoms alone don't explain human bodies or have their properties, DNA and RNA don't explain the operation of the nervous systems of animals. Understanding that chain is the great work that is currently the aim of diligent researchers all over the planet.

It's that sense of different structures requiring different scales that is behind my reaction.

There are forces, like gravity, that operate in much the same way across vastly different scales. Everything I have seen suggests that consciousness is not one of those but is rather a property of brains of a certain complexity.

I suppose it could be possible that there is some sort of field of consciousness that gives awareness to otherwise unaware matter, something like the way the Higgs field endows particles with mass, but I don't see any particular reason to suppose that such a thing is true, at the moment. If it were true, I would think that chemists and physicists would have noticed some sort of tiny effects of consciousness in their study of molecules, atoms and particles, but I don't think there has been anything there to study.

"The idea of a triangle is something that we learn about in school. Such learning takes place in the brain."
Adamantium
Agreed. However, one cannot know what a triangle looks like until one experiences it ( and that is what a eliminative materialist denies, that we have experiences, there are only brain states) . Ironically, many scientifically minded people take a Platonic stance ( that ideas, forms come first ) rather then an empirical stance ( that we first experience something and then put them into categories ) . Perhaps an example will help. Suppose I visualize an elephant with a giraffe head. I have no idea what such a creature is called. So I think and think and come up with a " giraphant". The experience http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/1 ... 0199579938 ( what it feels like to know something. The symbols 1+1=2 are just ink patterns until perceived by a conscious entity ) comes first and then the idea categorization. However, it is silly to suggest ( as an eliminative materialist must ) that it is impossible to visualize a giraphant.