“Conscious matter” may be impossible, but conscious organism doesn’t seem to be. I’m inclined to think that Descartes banishing formal and final causality from nature has something to do with this. When even animals are seen as machines, it’s not only consciousness, but life itself that seems like a logical impossibility.
But if "conscious matter" is impossible, then your "conscious organism" must not be made out of matter. Perhaps I cannot with certainty say, that I am not made out of matter, only that I perceive this to be the case.
However, things that interact (like a bullet to the head) with the matter, that I perceive myself to be I must do one of two mutually exclusive things:
1 not affect my subjective experience (like not ending it)
2 affect my subjective experience.
If I observe 1, then I... would be very surprised. Wouldn't you? This contradicts the strong prior of "People die when they're killed.".
If I observe 2, then something made out of matter, interacted with my subjective experience, which is not made out of matter. However, then we need a new physics to explain, how that interaction would work. Or we would just use our old model, which already perfectly predicts the outcome (cessation of consciousness), by assuming that consciousness is a phenomenon that happens in matter.
As a further alternative, you could also reject the idea that bullets are made out of matter, and then we assume that non-matter bullets (they only seem to be made out of matter) can destroy non-matter consciousness, which just happens to colocate with the matter-brain. It would be more plausible then, if you instead posit that both bullets and brains are not made out of matter. Better argue that matter does not in fact exist, so we don't need to worry about it. However, that would be entirely isomorphic to renaming matter to non-matter, leaving everything else about our world models the same. So we might as well, accept that matter exists and consciousness is a property of matter.
At the outset of modern philosophy, Descartes more or less defined matter in contrast to mind. Matter lacked all quality, value, and purpose; those belong to the sphere of mind. By that definition, matter is certainly incapable of being conscious.
However, a human being is an organism, composed of matter, and eminently capable of consciousness. So while extended, disorganized matter seems incapable of consciousness, it seems that biological organisms are the primary thing with which we are acquainted that is capable of consciousness.
Instead of drawing the line between matter and immaterial conscious mind, I am recommending that we draw the line somewhere between disorganized matter and the higher organisms.
[I think, I can more competently and concisely rephrase some earlier arguments here. Though I'm afraid I am starting to obnoxiously repeat myself.]
But how do you draw a clear-cut line between organized and disorganized matter? The boundaries between me (being organized matter) and my environment (disorganized matter) are never clear-cut. Sorites' Paradox and the continuum fallacy need to be accounted for.
Otherwise Organized/Disorganized matter leads you to vague predicates. So the best solution is to stop using binary logic and instead try to quantify that vagueness. E.g. using fuzzy logic. My room is disorganized (relative to a virtuous person's room) but, it's still more organized than a landfill.
And the same reasoning applies to for consciousness itself. If you go boolean here, you have to claim that a mouse and you are both conscious. However, human consciousness is far more complex, exactly because it is far more organized. If you want to claim that something is either conscious or not as a boolean property, you would have to find the organism/object, that is constructed from minimally-organized matter. But that's always going to be an arbitrary cutoff. You can claim that insects or a rock has no consciousness, but you cannot truly justify it.
With fuzzy logic, you can simply say: "This rock is not conscious." and mean, that you're rounding down, because the consciousness-value that it does possess, might as well be zero. And you can acknowledge, that the board game example is indeed more conscious than a mere rock, and still round it down to "not-conscious". You could also rightly claim that you're more conscious when awake, over when you're asleep over when you're in a coma. And people appropriately speak of being rendered unconscious and slowly losing consciousness, anyway. The natural way the word is used is already employing quantified fuzzy logic, as that is the strictly superior way of modelling the property.
Your first sentence is only true if you assume matter doesn’t have a form and is all the same (an organizing principle). If matter is what the ancients though (matter coming from mater or mother because it is what a thing is made of) then some matter has consciousness (beasts and humans) while some matter doesn’t (rocks).
Sorry, gotta disengage from that discussion. No time, to worm my mind into... what you just said, which I really have trouble parsing. Too many things competing for limited time + attention :(
This looks like begging the question to me. You're claiming consciousness is not like other scientific problems by claiming it is logically impossible for consciousness to be like other scientific problems.
There is another possibility you didn't mention here, which is that you're using the word "consciousness" too imprecisely. That is what makes it seem so impossible that it could be reduced to physics. When we reify consciousness into a "thing", we're in trouble, and start getting things like the hard problem of consciousness and the zombie argument, etc. I'd argue that you're on the right track when you understand that philosophical zombies aren't just impossible but are also not conceivable (despite what some people think).
This is a similar case to the concept of life — elan vital was popular before we discovered DNA and the mechanisms of biology. Panpsychism is just elan vital but for consciousness.
You're confusing logical/mathematical truths with empirical investigation. The "square circle" thing is a logical/mathematical question, whereas consciousness is not. These are two totally different areas of inquiry.
("Finding a square circle" isn't even a scientific question anyway since it isn't empirical, you're just describing a mathematical/logical impossibility. Mechanisms are physical things. We wouldn't find a "mechanism" for a "square circle", whatever that would mean.)
You say "The hard problem of consciousness is different because there are no possible hypotheses at all for how the physical activity of a brain could result in your conscious experience". How do you know? Are you so sure you've exhausted all possibilities?
What about consciousness makes you so sure it is not reducible to the physical?
The reason he used square circle is not as a mathematical proof, but to highlight why saying “we just need more empirical knowledge” is not a valid answer to the question. The reason that consciousness can’t be reduced to physical is because of the definition of physical derived from empiricism. The modern scientific methods version of “physical” is an atomistic one that supposes everything is made of small parts. These atoms are odorless, tasteless, colorless particles fundamentally and don’t really add up to anything bigger. If this is your universe there is simply nowhere for consciousness to be in the physical world so it would have to be non-physical. Doesn’t matter how much you look at the physical. It would be like if someone asked you to make a black tower (a physical world complete with first person experience) out of white blocks (third person atoms). Sure you could make a tower, but by its very definition it can’t be a black tower and it’s not about how much time you spend, it’s impossible by definition
I don't think that's a problem, because you don't need a lower level model like Quantum Physics to explain the presence of subjective experience in materialistic terms. Biology, neurology and electromagnetism (that needn't get too deep) all form the basis of those explanations. I don't see how e.g. the uncertainty principle or s, p and d-orbitals would be all that useful, other than explaining electromagnetism better. But we don't need to understand the fundamentals of electromagnetism (I sure don't), to use it as a predictive model, when looking at something higher level like electric signal transmission.
Perhaps, that is a valid point. I do not understand Quantum Physics well enough, to make sense of it. Last time I tried making sense of more complex physics, I got stuck at understanding the non-Euclidean geometry for what a Minkowski-space is, which is required for understanding spacetime. I just didn't want to put in more energy, at that point. And that's all just relativity theory. In my understanding, most statements that use everyday words to make some claim about quantum physics or relativity should be discarded as complete nonsense, until you actually understand the math behind it. Because otherwise, everyday words take on non-everyday meanings and implications and it all becomes an unpredictable mess of confused meanings, meant as clickbait for "baffling" YouTube titles and to sell pop-science books.
If you actually understand what you're saying, then I envy you, because that's quite an achievement.
What I do understand intimately well is cognition/consciousness/perception and its various models. Spent years learning about it and I have discovered a thing or two about it myself. I have never encountered any model or phenomenon, that required anything quantum for prediction nor explanation. Thank God, it's bad enough just dealing with the complexity of neurology.
Always hard to follow such discussion, because people just LOVE to refer to the "problem of consciousness", instead of stating what the problem is. For clarity's sake I will offer a common definition here: [let me know please, if you use a meaningfully different one]
"The hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, refers to the challenge of explaining why and how subjective experiences (or qualia) arise from physical processes in the brain."
If I understand you correctly with:
«The hard problem of consciousness is different because there are no possible hypotheses at all for how the physical activity of a brain could result in your conscious experience, so there is no way for scientific evidence to strengthen one hypothesis over another.»
So your answer to "how/why do subjective experiences (or qualia) arise from physical processes in the brain" is "they don't, this is a nonsensical question". Am I understanding you correctly?
“Conscious matter” may be impossible, but conscious organism doesn’t seem to be. I’m inclined to think that Descartes banishing formal and final causality from nature has something to do with this. When even animals are seen as machines, it’s not only consciousness, but life itself that seems like a logical impossibility.
Spot on. Once you introduce formal and final casualty the mind body problem and skepticism fades away
But if "conscious matter" is impossible, then your "conscious organism" must not be made out of matter. Perhaps I cannot with certainty say, that I am not made out of matter, only that I perceive this to be the case.
However, things that interact (like a bullet to the head) with the matter, that I perceive myself to be I must do one of two mutually exclusive things:
1 not affect my subjective experience (like not ending it)
2 affect my subjective experience.
If I observe 1, then I... would be very surprised. Wouldn't you? This contradicts the strong prior of "People die when they're killed.".
If I observe 2, then something made out of matter, interacted with my subjective experience, which is not made out of matter. However, then we need a new physics to explain, how that interaction would work. Or we would just use our old model, which already perfectly predicts the outcome (cessation of consciousness), by assuming that consciousness is a phenomenon that happens in matter.
As a further alternative, you could also reject the idea that bullets are made out of matter, and then we assume that non-matter bullets (they only seem to be made out of matter) can destroy non-matter consciousness, which just happens to colocate with the matter-brain. It would be more plausible then, if you instead posit that both bullets and brains are not made out of matter. Better argue that matter does not in fact exist, so we don't need to worry about it. However, that would be entirely isomorphic to renaming matter to non-matter, leaving everything else about our world models the same. So we might as well, accept that matter exists and consciousness is a property of matter.
At the outset of modern philosophy, Descartes more or less defined matter in contrast to mind. Matter lacked all quality, value, and purpose; those belong to the sphere of mind. By that definition, matter is certainly incapable of being conscious.
However, a human being is an organism, composed of matter, and eminently capable of consciousness. So while extended, disorganized matter seems incapable of consciousness, it seems that biological organisms are the primary thing with which we are acquainted that is capable of consciousness.
Instead of drawing the line between matter and immaterial conscious mind, I am recommending that we draw the line somewhere between disorganized matter and the higher organisms.
[I think, I can more competently and concisely rephrase some earlier arguments here. Though I'm afraid I am starting to obnoxiously repeat myself.]
But how do you draw a clear-cut line between organized and disorganized matter? The boundaries between me (being organized matter) and my environment (disorganized matter) are never clear-cut. Sorites' Paradox and the continuum fallacy need to be accounted for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
Otherwise Organized/Disorganized matter leads you to vague predicates. So the best solution is to stop using binary logic and instead try to quantify that vagueness. E.g. using fuzzy logic. My room is disorganized (relative to a virtuous person's room) but, it's still more organized than a landfill.
And the same reasoning applies to for consciousness itself. If you go boolean here, you have to claim that a mouse and you are both conscious. However, human consciousness is far more complex, exactly because it is far more organized. If you want to claim that something is either conscious or not as a boolean property, you would have to find the organism/object, that is constructed from minimally-organized matter. But that's always going to be an arbitrary cutoff. You can claim that insects or a rock has no consciousness, but you cannot truly justify it.
With fuzzy logic, you can simply say: "This rock is not conscious." and mean, that you're rounding down, because the consciousness-value that it does possess, might as well be zero. And you can acknowledge, that the board game example is indeed more conscious than a mere rock, and still round it down to "not-conscious". You could also rightly claim that you're more conscious when awake, over when you're asleep over when you're in a coma. And people appropriately speak of being rendered unconscious and slowly losing consciousness, anyway. The natural way the word is used is already employing quantified fuzzy logic, as that is the strictly superior way of modelling the property.
Your first sentence is only true if you assume matter doesn’t have a form and is all the same (an organizing principle). If matter is what the ancients though (matter coming from mater or mother because it is what a thing is made of) then some matter has consciousness (beasts and humans) while some matter doesn’t (rocks).
Sorry, gotta disengage from that discussion. No time, to worm my mind into... what you just said, which I really have trouble parsing. Too many things competing for limited time + attention :(
No worries man. Prayers for you.
This looks like begging the question to me. You're claiming consciousness is not like other scientific problems by claiming it is logically impossible for consciousness to be like other scientific problems.
There is another possibility you didn't mention here, which is that you're using the word "consciousness" too imprecisely. That is what makes it seem so impossible that it could be reduced to physics. When we reify consciousness into a "thing", we're in trouble, and start getting things like the hard problem of consciousness and the zombie argument, etc. I'd argue that you're on the right track when you understand that philosophical zombies aren't just impossible but are also not conceivable (despite what some people think).
This is a similar case to the concept of life — elan vital was popular before we discovered DNA and the mechanisms of biology. Panpsychism is just elan vital but for consciousness.
Would you say the same thing about the square circle? That one day science will find the mechanisms by which square circles could exist?
You're confusing logical/mathematical truths with empirical investigation. The "square circle" thing is a logical/mathematical question, whereas consciousness is not. These are two totally different areas of inquiry.
("Finding a square circle" isn't even a scientific question anyway since it isn't empirical, you're just describing a mathematical/logical impossibility. Mechanisms are physical things. We wouldn't find a "mechanism" for a "square circle", whatever that would mean.)
You say "The hard problem of consciousness is different because there are no possible hypotheses at all for how the physical activity of a brain could result in your conscious experience". How do you know? Are you so sure you've exhausted all possibilities?
What about consciousness makes you so sure it is not reducible to the physical?
The reason he used square circle is not as a mathematical proof, but to highlight why saying “we just need more empirical knowledge” is not a valid answer to the question. The reason that consciousness can’t be reduced to physical is because of the definition of physical derived from empiricism. The modern scientific methods version of “physical” is an atomistic one that supposes everything is made of small parts. These atoms are odorless, tasteless, colorless particles fundamentally and don’t really add up to anything bigger. If this is your universe there is simply nowhere for consciousness to be in the physical world so it would have to be non-physical. Doesn’t matter how much you look at the physical. It would be like if someone asked you to make a black tower (a physical world complete with first person experience) out of white blocks (third person atoms). Sure you could make a tower, but by its very definition it can’t be a black tower and it’s not about how much time you spend, it’s impossible by definition
One problem is that it's not entirely clear what is meant by the word "matter".
If you tried explaining Quantum Physics to an Enlightenment materialist, you'd be accused of being a mystic.
I don't think that's a problem, because you don't need a lower level model like Quantum Physics to explain the presence of subjective experience in materialistic terms. Biology, neurology and electromagnetism (that needn't get too deep) all form the basis of those explanations. I don't see how e.g. the uncertainty principle or s, p and d-orbitals would be all that useful, other than explaining electromagnetism better. But we don't need to understand the fundamentals of electromagnetism (I sure don't), to use it as a predictive model, when looking at something higher level like electric signal transmission.
> I don't see how e.g. the uncertainty principle or s, p and d-orbitals would be all that useful
However, the fundamental importance of the observer might be.
Perhaps, that is a valid point. I do not understand Quantum Physics well enough, to make sense of it. Last time I tried making sense of more complex physics, I got stuck at understanding the non-Euclidean geometry for what a Minkowski-space is, which is required for understanding spacetime. I just didn't want to put in more energy, at that point. And that's all just relativity theory. In my understanding, most statements that use everyday words to make some claim about quantum physics or relativity should be discarded as complete nonsense, until you actually understand the math behind it. Because otherwise, everyday words take on non-everyday meanings and implications and it all becomes an unpredictable mess of confused meanings, meant as clickbait for "baffling" YouTube titles and to sell pop-science books.
If you actually understand what you're saying, then I envy you, because that's quite an achievement.
What I do understand intimately well is cognition/consciousness/perception and its various models. Spent years learning about it and I have discovered a thing or two about it myself. I have never encountered any model or phenomenon, that required anything quantum for prediction nor explanation. Thank God, it's bad enough just dealing with the complexity of neurology.
Always hard to follow such discussion, because people just LOVE to refer to the "problem of consciousness", instead of stating what the problem is. For clarity's sake I will offer a common definition here: [let me know please, if you use a meaningfully different one]
"The hard problem of consciousness, a term coined by philosopher David Chalmers in 1995, refers to the challenge of explaining why and how subjective experiences (or qualia) arise from physical processes in the brain."
If I understand you correctly with:
«The hard problem of consciousness is different because there are no possible hypotheses at all for how the physical activity of a brain could result in your conscious experience, so there is no way for scientific evidence to strengthen one hypothesis over another.»
So your answer to "how/why do subjective experiences (or qualia) arise from physical processes in the brain" is "they don't, this is a nonsensical question". Am I understanding you correctly?