In this conversation, a philosopher advocates for panpsychism—the view that consciousness is ubiquitous. He focuses on the "phenomenal powers view," which posits that mental properties, like the feeling of pain, inherently possess causal powers; pain, by its very nature, necessitates an avoidance response. This serves as a foundation for an argument against physicalism: introspective knowledge of phenomenal states (e.g., knowing what pain feels like) allows us to predict and explain behaviors (like avoidance) in a way that purely physical information cannot, suggesting phenomenal and physical properties are distinct. The dialogue explores objections, including conceivable inverted scenarios where pain might not cause avoidance and the case of pain asymbolia, where individuals feel pain without being motivated to avoid it. The philosopher responds by clarifying that such cases may involve a separation between the sensory and affective components of pain, with only the affective part being inherently motivational, thus preserving the core argument that certain phenomenal qualities intrinsically dictate specific causal outcomes.
But sorry about that. I'll take care of that. I didn't realize that was audible, but yeah, there is a definitely fit back there. All right. Okay. Okay. We are live this morning. I'm not kidding. Joining me today, a very special guest, head up, Mark. Hey, thank you for joining me. And I wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do for those who may not know you. Yeah. So for sure. Thanks a lot for having me. So I'm a philosopher at inland Norway University of the Pied Sciences in Lille-Homer, Norway. I used to be a postdoc at Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness with David Charmer's and netblock. I was funded by the Norwegian Research Council and was also at the University of Oslo. And I've also been a regular visitor at your little known Islam in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin. So I mainly work in philosophy of mind and metaphysics and my main focus is panpsychism. The view that consciousness is everywhere. And yeah, to briefly summarize, I think I focused on three main ideas connected to panpsychism. One is a solution to the combination problem, which I call the fusion view. And then there's another view about how panpsychism connects with the questions in the metaphysics of causation, which is called the phenomenal powers view, which says that all causal powers are mental or at least that some. That mental properties are causal powers. So for instance, pain is essentially a repulsive power. And so on. And finally, I focused on how to integrate panpsychism of the sort that's defended in the defendant and philosophy with the integrated information theory, which is a, yeah, do a little less theory of consciousness, which is a neuroscientific, but also partially philosophical theory. Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. So I think your work is very, very cool. And one of the, one of the things that I like about it is sort of well, you mentioned in what you were just saying was kind of focus on causal powers. I think, you know, I've read a bunch of your stuff and I also heard I think a podcast that we're interviewing with you. What you talked about discovering humans problem of causation that sort of being one of the things that really interest you in philosophy. I wonder if I could start by asking about the causal power argument for panpsychism. So can you tell us a little bit about how the argument is supposed to go and why you think it points towards panpsychism. Yeah. So I think this is an argument that might on this surface sound really implausible. But once you go into the details, you see that not only has an argument like this been defended by a lot of philosophers in history historically. So, livenits come interpreted to have the kind of it will in James Schopenhauer. Yeah, many more. And there's also like a reductive version of the argument, which says that, okay, if we think there are causal powers, we can only think of the most mental that leads to panpsychism. That's absurd. Therefore, let's reject causal powers and go for regularity theory or some other theory of causation. But anyway, so the argument is roughly that, okay, we can conceive of causal powers. Okay, so causal powers are properties in virtue of which causes metaphysically necessitate their effects. So, so properties that generate the necessary connection between causes and effects in virtue of only the cause not any sort of external loss that tie them together. And then there is humans problem, which is do we observe these causes and where they have an experience of them and then he says no, I'm okay, we shouldn't think they exist or at least we don't know anything about them. But so my claim is that we actually do have an experience of something that kind of fits the description of the cost of a cause of power. So if we think of what it how pain feels just from introspectively, we just think about the quality of pain. And then we assume that, okay, pain doesn't have causal power. We don't already assume that the regularity theory is true or that pain has causal power in virtue of an external law. Let's say, okay, pain necessitates something in virtue of how it feels. Then it seems inconceivable to me that it necessitates anything else than trying to avoid it. Because pain is its quality is just intrinsically repulsive. So if we just assume that it has necessitates something in virtue, it's quality to me it's inconceivable that it necessitates sort of wanting to have more of it because pain just feels bad. Okay, so that's kind of the beginning of the view. Okay, we observe causal powers in motivation basically, with motivational, phenomenal qualities. And then the rest of the argument is that we don't observe causal powers anywhere else. And we have reason to believe that causal powers are everywhere. And therefore, phenomenal properties consciousness has to be everywhere. And that's panpsychism. So that's like the short version of the argument. Yeah, that's first. First premise. So I have a lot of questions about it, but before I sort of ask about the specifics of it, I'm wondering where you think it fits in the sort of general pantheon of arguments against for for panpsychism or right. Would this be considered an argument against physicalism on your viewers or specifically only for panpsychism or so how do you see it as fitting with the more traditional argument. Right. So I think of it as I actually have one paper which uses this as part of an argument against physicalism. But then I think you can kind of build on that to get an argument for panpsychism. So I think it fits slightly better with dualism with than physicalism, but it fits best with panpsychism. So I guess my argument against physicalism based on this is that so it's a so I said it up as a kind of version of the knowledge argument, which is which says, you know, Jackson's knowledge argument says, yeah, no physical hang on how do I compare it to have to like do a little trick to make them analogous. Okay, I'll just do that my own version and then we can compare it to the knowledge arguments later. So it's a some phenomenal properties explain and predict their effects. So if you know what pain is like, you can predict a prior, prior without you know doing repeated experiments that it will cause avoidance and it explains just in virtue itself why the effect is avoidance and not something else. If you know how pain feels, you just know why people avoid it, you don't have to ask any further questions. Right. And then I know it was painful, but why didn't you like it? Yeah, it's just sort of like because it feels like this. And if you don't understand that, you just forgot how pain feels and just have to like pinch yourself for remember something terrible. But then if and then second premise is no physical properties explain their effects in this way or predict their effects without induction. And therefore, phenomenal properties can't be identical to physical properties. And then yeah, so that's kind of my argument against physicalism on this basis. That's the expinatory knowledge argument. Yeah. So phenomenal properties give us this explanatory predictive knowledge that physical information doesn't give us. And they can't be the same thing. So you know, when we look at things introspectively, then we feel something more revealed about reality than what physics tells us. Hello. So do you I guess part of my question was you I mean you answered part of it, but the other part of it was. Like relative to strength of the argument against physicalism or whatever do you see these like the explanatory knowledge argument as as like primary as like the typical knowledge argument or the explanatory argument to two dimensional argument from charlmers or is this a supplementary argument or with this alone be enough under your Yeah, I think they're kind of complimentary so I think like in the way that like the original knowledge argument, I think will be more convincing for most people, but I think this argument has one thing going for it, which is that you know, with respect to the ordinary knowledge argument as a physicalist, you can just say, OK, this knowledge is illusory Mary seems to learn something but she doesn't really and there is no clear way of kind of proving that Mary gains knowledge that you could get the physics when she leaves the room. I'm not saying you can plausibly deny it, but you can. Deny it.
I think with this argument, this is a little bit tricky, but if you have phenomenal knowledge makes a prediction. So it's like, I know how pain feels. And from that, I can predict what people can do, how they react. Then it's harder to deny that phenomenal knowledge is re-knowledge. So that's one potential advantage of my argument, I think. - Yeah, I think that's interesting too, is like, whether whatever started the debate that you're on, whether you find the argument ultimately convinced or not, it's interesting to see a kind of new argument against physicalism, which as opposed to the typical conceivability argument. - Yeah. - Yeah. So I wanna ask about a couple of things in what we've been talking about, those that have gone by kind of quickly. So one is, I mean, when you say that causes necessitate their effects, I assume you mean metaphysical necessity, not normal logical necessities, so that you even like someone like Armstrong with his covering lines, who's gonna say, maybe these, nomologically necessitate or something, 'cause there's this universalization, that's true. But that's not metaphysically necessary. So that's what you're talking about, right? You couldn't have a watered down version of the causal powers view that just had normal logical necessity. - No, because the point is that kind of pain necessitates avoidance or avoidance, and it's virtue of its quality alone, not in virtue of any external law that could vary across possible worlds. And so that means in any possible world where pain feels the way it does, it will have this effect, because it has the effect in virtue of the quality. And there's no possible world where pain doesn't feel like pain because then it wouldn't be pain. So I would say that in any possible world, yeah, where pain feels like pain is gonna have this power. Except if you have, you could have, unless you think kind of metaphysics of causation in general can vary across possible worlds. If you think there are some possible worlds where the regularity is theory is true, and somewhere this Armstrong governing laws is true, and others where the causal powers is true. Then I would say that pain necessitates, it's effect in any world where the causal powers use the truth. So you can't have any other causal powers, but if there are these external laws that kind of grab onto it, then those can make it to do something else, but it can't do something else in virtue of itself alone. - Yeah, because so, I mean, there are people who say that they can conceive of like invert cases with pain. I know I've asked Dave Twomer's about this once, and he said he thinks he can't do it. - Yeah. - And I think that your blue is my yellow, but instead my pain is your pleasure. So that all the behavior is the same, but I have the painful quality. So when I have the painful quality, it makes me want, I say I want more of it, and I smile, and that's just like if I'm eating something pleasurable or something like that. So it seems like on your view, you have to deny that that's inconceivable. - I mean, I don't know what to make of that, but someone says they can conceive of it without contradiction, then I wonder what, what is this gonna come down to a brute class of intuitions, or is there a way you can explain what he's saying on your view and make sense of it? - I think there's one way of explaining it, which is that. So, if you already, you might be able to conceive of pain, just being followed by something else that avoidance, and you might be able to conceive of pain being connected to something else that avoidance in virtue of some external law, that's just completely not generated by pain itself, but if you conceive of pain making you in virtue of its quality, do something else that avoid it, that I think is inconceivable. So I would say, or I would at least suggest to someone who finds it conceivable that the pain makes them smile and wanna have more of this, that okay, maybe you're conceiving of that, but in that case, are you conceiving of the pain making you do that, or you conceive of that's just happening after you have pain or happening because of something else that how the pain feels. - Yeah, I mean, because on your, the way I understood what you were saying before, was that, so you have the pain, and the pain necessitates a trying to avoid it, which is a mental item, but then it may be that that mental item is connected to the physical processes in such a way that it gives rise to the smiling and not avoidance behavior, but some like to do behavior. Or is it because it's a trying way that could not be hooked up to the physical in that way? - Yeah, so I think primarily my first claim is that it's conceivable that pain makes you do something else and try to avoid it where trying is just a mental phenomenon, that's a mental action. And then is it conceivable that trying to avoid pain makes you not avoid pain, make you like attract pain? Obviously, that's normal, that's possible, like that can happen often, you try to get away from something and you try to remove your home from something that burns and then you put it somewhere else where it's, you know, there's more pain. (laughing) So that can obviously happen that you try something and you fail. But I mean, so there are different things you can say about how trying connects with the physical action, and this is partially where panpsychism comes in, which has this particular view about what the physical event really is, but apart from that, I guess you can say that well, at least systematically, if you try to avoid pain and it fails, then you're gonna try something avoided in a different way eventually, you're gonna be stuck like that forever. But yeah, so I think that is conceivable, at least, you know, that a few times you try something, some of the opposite thing happens. But so yeah. - And so then what you were saying, so to make sense of someone who conceives of these invert cases, they have to be thinking that the pain itself produces something other than a trying to avoid it. Like the quality, the way the pain feels produces the seeking behavior itself. And you're saying that that's inconceivable? - Yeah, or that's what I suggest to me, that's inconceivable once, you know, all the details are in place, you're conceiving of the pain making you want, making you try to have more of it in virtue of how it feels. That's inconceivable thing according to me. - And so someone is asking actually in the chat over here, Ben Blunts asking, how do you deal with cases of pain in a symbolian? I know you talk a lot about pain in a symbolian actually. So since someone brought it up, I wonder, can you tell us like how does your account deal with the pain? - Yeah, so my view of that from what I've read about this, that's sort of standard interpretation from Nicola Greieck, who wrote about this, who kind of introduced this, as far as I understand into philosophy. He, so pain in a symbolia is when you have people who have a medical condition, where they report feeling pain, that doesn't bother them. And they don't do anything to avoid it. It's not that they have some reason to endure it. They're like, okay, I feel pain, I would ideally like to get rid of it, but I have this other reason to endure it. It's more like, I have pain, I don't care. And in addition, they seem to kind of show kind of the defiance to the pain. They just kind of actively seek it out because I'm laugh at the pain and all sorts of things. That's how I read it described. And if pain makes you avoid it in virtue of how it feels and these people have pain, obviously that doesn't make them avoid it. They're not the problem for my view. So my response is that so, Greg also concludes that what pain in a symbolia shows is that pain has two components. So there's an effective part, which is what motivates you to try and avoid it. Anitasa, purely sensory part, which tells you that, okay, this is pain and not color or not bad smell. Or I don't know, just so that discriminates pain from other qualities. And then he says, well, in pain and symbolia, these things come apart. So asinbolic, they have the sensory part of pain, but not the motivational part or effective part. But then he also says that, or at least says what I take to make it clear that both parts are phenomenal. So it's not that the sensory part is an experienced property. And the effective part is just the functional property. It's like, okay, you're effective if any property that makes you avoid it is effective. It says that because not only can you have people who experience sensory pain, but not effective pain, you can also have people who experience purely effective pain and not the sensory part. So I think it's a particular kind of stimulation of the spine or something like that, where it makes your report just feeling pure and pleasantness. That you really want to get rid of, but it doesn't have any further specification. It doesn't have any quality beyond.
pure unpleasantness. And then I would just say, okay, that's a phenomenal experience. So then it's the effective part of pain that makes you wanna try to avoid it. And there's no counter example to that, I think. So. - Do you have a view about whether the painting symbolics are in pain? I know some people wanna say that they are not really in pain because they're missing this effective or maybe if they say they are not confused or whatever, but is that the important to take a position on that? - Well, it seems to be just some extent the verbal issue. I mean, for me, it would be convenient if we just settled the verbal issue and say it's not pain, but still, but it seems to me that maybe it's helpful to compare to flavor because flavor has two components. It's taste and smell. And sometimes you lose your sense of smell, like you're gonna have a cold, but you can still taste things. And then you still say that the food has flavor just has really dull flavor, but it's not. In a sense, it's not the full flavor. So there's a sense in which food still has flavor in another sense, it doesn't. And maybe it's the same with pain in the symbol. Yeah, you have one component of ordinary pain, but not both. And we have like, whether the concept should apply, that hasn't been settled because this is such a, a unusual case. It does sort of matter for the phenomenal powers view because I think, I mean, I think on the, the paintings in Bollocks have a phenomenal experience, right? I mean, they have an experience of the sensory component of the pain, but they can tell you things about it, you know, like, you know, whether it's a burning pain or a poking pain or if it's a pressure or whatever, so they can rate it on a scale of, you know, one to five, they can give you a number and they can say that, yeah. And, but, and I think that's somewhat different to the case of morphine because on morphine, I think what you get is some people say that it's unpleasant that they don't care, which may be somewhat different, although I'd have to double check to see if that's accurate or not, but if so, I wonder if that would be an issue anyway. So I'm getting distracted. The point is that they have an experience. And so, and so the unpleasant as part of an experience too, and the two typically go together, but if they really come apart in this way, then you could have the unpleasantness with like the sensory component of pleasure. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So you could switch them around in that way, right? Where you would say, oh, this, this pleasurable sensory thing is really horrible. I wanted to stop and vice versa. You could say, well, this, you know, painful thing is really wonderful. I wanted to continue. And so that's another, that's a way you could get an invert kind of case too on that kind of. - Right, yeah. But I think that if those sorts of inversions are possible, I don't think that would be a problem for my view because then instead of saying pain necessitates avoidance, I would say effective pain necessitates avoidance. And you can't have like the inverted case would done to be like sensory pleasure with effective pain, necessitating avoidance or sensory pain without effective pain. And those would both be compatible with the view that, - Yeah. - Yeah, effective pain. - Well, I see, 'cause yeah, I was thinking that if you call both of these things pain, then you're gonna have an issue saying pain necessitates it. But you'll just say, well, they're both pain, but I'll call this one like effective pain and this one sensory pain. And then the claim strictly speaking is effective pain necessitates this. - Right. - But what reaction or effect does sensory pain necessitate? - Yeah, so that's a good question because, yeah, maybe effective pain and effective pleasure has necessitates certain effects, but what about, you know, not only sensory pain and sensory pleasure, but color, sensory color experience and all that. And especially if you wanna combine this view with panpsychism, you kinda want all phenomenal properties to have causal powers and why are only some of them a priori. And like I have a few different ideas about that. So one, the simplest one is to say that, okay, sensory, what we call sensory qualities, color experience and so on, they have causal powers. They're just very weak compared to the causal powers of pain, effective pain or pleasure. So, and also we always experience sensory phenomenology to get there with some kind of emotional phenomenology, even when nothing in particular is happening, we're always having desires. And so the weak powers of sensory qualities are always kinda drowned out by more intense powers and therefore we don't really notice them, but if we really experience them in isolation, we would know what their powers are and then what could they even be one idea, which is maybe not super possible, but it's just kinda an example. So you might think that blue is intrinsically calming and red is intrinsically exciting, which are something like that. That could of course just be cultural thing, but that's just an idea. But another, and you might also think that the sensory qualities kind of have the power to generate beliefs instead of actions. So, and then maybe you have to think of beliefs as kind of in terms of cognitive phenomenology, just as efforts are phenomenological events. So red has the power to produce the belief that something red exists. So Harold Langsam has a version of, or what I think is a very similar view as the phenomenal power sphere where he talks about stuff like this. - But is it less plausible there that you can't have the invert kind of cases? - Yeah, I'm not sure. I haven't thought much about this as pain stuff, but again, I think can, like an experience of phenomenal redness can that like in virtue of how of its phenomenology make you do something else than believe that something red is instantiated. And then maybe this will maybe depend a lot on your background beliefs. So we'd have to put and maybe having beliefs that something you can only do if you have a very complicated mind. So therefore, they will be very complicated background assumptions you have to set, but once you set all that in place, maybe it could make a kind of conceivability argument, but I think that kind of argument would be much more difficult to make because the other situation will be way more complex. And so, so I think the best I can do is maybe like suggest that there might be a similar kind of connection in the right circumstances, but it will be much harder to kind of demonstrate as you do. - So because one thing you might want to do is like limits the set of phenomenal properties which have these kind of necessitating powers. But you don't want to do that, right? So I mean, somebody might say, well look, this works really good for pain and pleasure, but I'm not sure if it works for red. So I'll keep it for those and not for these, but you want this to apply to every phenomenon. - Yeah, I think that would be a bit of a problem because then either you would have to say that there's like how causation works is very mixed. So some things kind of have intrinsic cause of power. Some things just follow regularity theory. They just are followed by their effects. And some think, or maybe other things are just like govern, have a subsumed by these governing laws. And it would be really strange if you have, you know, all these views of causation kind of operating within the same world. Or, and if you don't have that, you might have, okay, pain and pleasure have cause of power, but sensory phenomenology is epiphenomenal would also be very odd. So I think that would lead to problems to have only some phenomenal properties that cause of power. - Interesting, okay. So I want to go back. So that was, I mean, I think people, there's a lot more that people could talk about this, 'cause that's really only the first premise in the argument is. - Yeah. - But I do, like one of the things, this is probably beyond where you have interest to talk about, but I am curious about why, or if you have any thoughts about like Hume and people, like Humeans, you know, like, why they kind of missed this point that you're making, because you don't have no experience of causal connection, you say, "Well, yeah, what about pain?" And that's a very common sense, like I'll idea, of course, when you feel it, you're like, "Get it away, I stop it." Like we feel very motivated. It seems like a very obvious example. But why do you think, or maybe you don't have any thoughts on this, but I'm curious if you do. - Yeah, I have to have some thoughts about this. I've actually looked into this, like both, it's a Hume actually considers at length this idea that we experience causal powers in our mental lives, as opposed to in the external world. And then he mainly focuses on whether, and this is also, so a lot of philosophers try to actually philosophy, like consider it is, but most of them focus on will and agency and how will an effort seems to necessitate actions, physical actions. And as we just talked about, then it seems conceivable, not only conceivable, but also actually true that effort
often fail. So because then you have a connection between a mental event, the effort and the physical results. But then what I suggest is that, no, let's not look at it. Let's look at something that is just within the mental, oh yeah, and Hume also considered purely mental action. So you like try and calculate something and then, oh, it doesn't work even though you were really like good that math so far suddenly you just, you know, something happens, you had to stroke or something and you can't do the same mental action anymore and that's conceivable. It's not a prior or a true that you can necessarily, necessarily achieve the result to A-mat even when it comes to mental action. But then there's also a connection between not efforts and results but motives and efforts. And that's something that has been generally missed. Shope and horror talks about it. Maybe a few others. But so that's one thing. It's like easy to miss that. Okay, once you have set the connection between efforts and results aside, there's also another connection to a consider between motives and efforts. And then the other thing is that, as I said, I think this can be used to make an argument for panpsychism. Okay, we experience mental powers. We don't experience an environmental powers. If there are powers everywhere, everything has mental properties. And actually Hume even considers this. He says, okay, we might think that we experience causal power in what it calls the animal nicest or something, which is kind of striving or mental striving. But he says, this obviously can't work because that would, I don't remember exact phrasing, but he says that we'll require that sentiment this everywhere. And obviously it isn't. So they kind of say, okay, maybe this would work, but it leads to panpsychism reductial, therefore we reject it. So really is what paper, do you have a paper where you say? Yeah, I have. It's called or actually, I don't remember how much, yeah, so it's called the argument from the argument for panpsychism from experience of causation, then I go through some of these reductio versions. So Hume is not the only one, but it's interesting that Hume even. That is interesting. I'll put a link to that. Rejected that on that basis. He had other arguments as well, but that was one of them against mental powers. Interesting. So yeah, two things people missed like the mode is effort connection. And also the panpsychist reductio. That's why this is the sex side. So is the, I want to clear on the reductio here. So the basic idea is we have these experience of causes of causal efficiency or something like that internally, but we don't experience cause in the external world. So that's important too, I think. Yeah. And so it seems like you agree with Hume on that, because I've always found that move by Hume very suspicious, because I think you sort of observe causal relationships in the world. And it does seem like psychology has sort of indicated the idea that we do use. Yeah, I think we can, you know, there's this sense in which we might experience causation in the external world. We might have something that represents it. And we also might have evolutionary, like things that makes of able to predict, you know, we have just innate knowledge of how causal sequence is typically look. And that's been selected for. But I think we have maybe innate ability to detect the sort of symptoms of causation. But I don't think we have a direct experience of its nature. We don't have a direct experience when it comes to the physical world or the external world of what it is about the cause that necessitates the effect. But we might have be able to pretty reliably detect that this is the cause because of how causation typically looks. So, you know, in the same way we can't directly experience someone else's consciousness. We can't sort of directly experience the basis of their cause powers. But in the case of like pain, we can do that though, right? Is it the idea that like when I'm introspectively aware of the painfulness of the pain, the awfulness of it, I am aware of the intrinsic nature. On your view, I mean, of the pain and also of what necessitates its effects. So in my own case, I can do it. Right? Just in the other case, if I can't do it. Yeah. So, you know, you can see another person in pain. And if you're like, there might be a sense in which you can experience someone else's pain, but not as directly as your own, I would say, but if you assume that someone else in pain, then I think you kind of experience why they do what they do. But if you have what you think, like if you're not a person like is, then you look at the physical object that you assume has no consciousness, then I think there is no sense in which you have any direct or any, you don't have any representation of what it is about that cause that necessitates the effect. So, I mean, I guess I get the idea, right? So that when you see when you see like a flame catch a curtain on fire, like if you're watching that, sort of see the flame kind of start, the candles start, the curtains start smoking and then poof, it catches fire and you're like, aha, that thing just causes that. Yeah. So what you're saying is, you don't experience, I mean, I think this is the key, I think I agree with you, this is key, what he was saying, you don't experience the necessitation, like what necessitates it. You know, one thing you see, the other maybe you expect them or something, you see they're connected, but you don't have an experience of the necessary binds between them. Yeah, you might maybe project a little bit of kind of that there is necessitation there, but I don't think you directly experience it, but you might you might be projecting it so you kind of represent necessitation in that sequence, but I think that kind of comes from projection from yourself, not from, to really from the observation. Yeah, and I think that's basically Hume's idea too, that's the spreading of the mind or whatever that talks about. Yeah, but one of the, I mean, so the question that I have, I guess, is why we would, if we grant you that premise and human, all those things, why we would end up at panpsychism, because I think the way that the argument goes is like, I have this experience in myself of these causal things, and I don't have experience of it happening out there. So probably the cause out there is like the cause that I experience, because causes are probably similar in this way. Yeah, but why, so in that sense, you say, therefore it's mental, but why couldn't you also reason, and I'm probably missing something simpler, but I'm just wondering why you couldn't say, look, the way in which your similar is in the in the sense of necessitation of their effect, not in terms of the way in which they necessitate it and being mental, but that, so that's what's similar between the fire and the fire and the current is that there's a necessitation relation that they're in that I have experience of, but I don't have any reason to think that that itself is experiential if you think of that way. So yeah, so there they are, sort of, that you can take this kind of mental concept of power that we have from our own experience, and we just like abstract away all the mental stuff, and we just keep the necessitation and say, okay, there's like a non-mental property that does the same thing. So my argument against this is that I think once you strip away the mental stuff, then what do you have is just something purely schematic. You just have, you know, physical and non-phenormal properties necessitate their effect, but we have no idea how, and that's just sort of back to the original humian problem. So because when it comes to pain, it's, you know, it necessitates, it's the fact in virtue of how it feels, so that's kind of the explanatory part. It feels like this, but that doesn't tell you anything about how something can necessitate something else in virtue of not feeling like anything, and also I feel like the, or I think the phenomenologist is so essential to the explanation, and you think, okay, let's say there's something like pain that doesn't feel like something, okay, an experienced pain. I don't know what I can conceive of an experienced pain, having any effect, because then yeah, so I think I would say that one, take away the mental stuff, you just have something that's too thin to be a real kind of positive concept of necessitation. And so what? Just to put the job distribution out. I mean, I see the point, it's an interesting point, but I'm just wondering, so what about like the, well, how would you like the kind of things like that, you know, you get from Thomas and he's constructing the world, you know, kind of case. So you have a kind of base set of facts, and then you have, you know, a way to deduce the consequences of facts. Maybe you have even a fancy cosmoscope, you know, his, his fanciful thought experiment about hooking all this, you know, this base information into something that can kind of project it into a virtual environment that you can experience or whatever. So you take water and H.
to woe, why on your view, are you wouldn't you not be satisfied with a kind of view that says, look, you know, H2O necessitates that it freezes at a certain temperature because here of definition of freezing and here's how water behaves. And then it kind of just, you can deduce its behavior from a set of facts about it. And why doesn't that give you a kind of grasp on what it means to necessitate the effects, it sort of shows you that it's, you know, metaphysically necessary that the water behaves in this way, right? H2O behaves in this way given. But I think that's like, if I understand it correctly, that's an example of constitutive necessitation. So, okay, water must be behaved like this assuming it's considered by H2O, but you can conceive of H2O, you know, not forming these kinds of bonds at low temperature or, you know, doing all sorts of stuff. So, I think that if you kind of presuppose all the facts about H2O, how they actually behave, then that will necessitate how maybe water behaves assuming water is constituted by it. But yeah, I don't think you have any explain, like causal explanation, I think it's just constitutive necessity and that has to be different than causal necessity for this dummy sense. Yeah, no, it does. But so, let me try one more, because I have other things I want to ask you about, but let me try one more thing. So, what about in the case of like, of mathematical truths? Yeah. So, so there you get to kind of necessitation, maybe the successor function necessitates that such. Right. Yeah, sorry. Go ahead, you go ahead. Yeah, so I think, you know, mathematical necessitation is also different from causal necessitation. So, I think this kind of goes back in history, one sort of causal necessitation is just going to be like logical or mathematical necessitation, just like in nature. But then it's like, how is that possible? How can something concrete do what abstract things do? And, but, I mean, you do have stuff like that in nature, you can have conceptual necessitation, you can say, if you have this positional list view of nature, you can say, okay, an electron is necessarily something that repels other electrons, that's just like an essential property of electrons. And therefore, it's just inconceivable that electrons don't necessitate other electrons. But I think when you're going to a kind of necessity, so I would say that the kind of necessity we find in mathematics and logic is like similar to conceptual necessity. And I think, so you can either say, okay, causal necessity isn't the same as conceptual necessity or, but you can also say that, okay, when you apply that to the physical world, what you get is kind of a constitutive connection, you say that, okay, being an electron is just like constituted by repelling other electrons. So, so you kind of have a constitutive connection, not the real causal connection. And it's even though that makes it inconceivable that electrons don't repel other electrons, it's still conceivable that something is exactly like an electron in any in all other respects. So, that's all the other essential properties of electrons, but not that one. Right. So, yeah, so I don't think you can click on it. I mean, it's interesting because I mean, maybe this is again going too far down off onto a tangent, but it's because the way I see like contemporary physics at least developing is like the notion of cause and effect as we're understanding it here is not really playing much role. Like at the like if you look at strength theory or quantum field theories or something like that, what you have is a set of equations that govern how the system evolves over time. But it's not clear that the notion of cause and effect is like in the equation that governs the electrons movement in quantum mechanics. There's something that describes how it evolves, but it's not clear where the cause and effect stuff is. And there may be even at a far more fundamental level that these kind of notions emerge from something non even space time itself may emerge from something non fundamentally space time-ish. And so if cause and effect isn't a fundamental category of physics, is that that's not going to bother the kind of view that you're talking about because it's looks like like I mean, or will it because it looks like if you take the way physics is at least mathematized currently, the kinds of things you're talking about that are not really part of the theory. Maybe you're okay with that because they're also phenomenal and you have to be added or and just curious what you're taking. Yeah, so I'm not like I haven't like fully grasped those arguments. And that there is causation in physics, but I mean, it seems to me like even if there isn't causation in something, there is necessitation. So there are laws of nature and there's still the case that, you know, some things can't happen and other things can and some things must happen given something else. And so even if there isn't causation, maybe that takes something more and it maybe there's still kind of necessitation and I think maybe like if you take the necessitation you find between pain and avoidance, that might be able to kind of be projected and you can abstract the way some parts of it and then project it to something that's not quite causation, it still has necessitation and not kind of loose all the content. Right. And even if there isn't causation, strictly speaking, in fundamental physics, causation somehow emerges and then what I'm talking about is still causation and we have to kind of modify that to fit the kind of necessitation worth finding physics. But I have to think more about that. Yeah, I mean, yeah, that's interesting. Now I'll switch here in a second, but I mean the reason why it seems like it's important in this context, those is because precisely it does give us another model of necessitation, which is not experientially based, that's sort of what I was thinking. Right. So that it was undercut this argument for the panpsychism. Yeah, I would say that still, you know, physics gives you loss and says, okay, these are necessary, but it doesn't make it inconceivable that there are different laws, okay, in a multiverse theory, right? And physics, it's obviously conceivable that there are different laws. So, so I mean, that was, but just to put a little context in that statement, that's obviously true, but the hope at the beginning was that that's not what people expected. I mean, the reason why people like one reason why they like string theory a lot is because it really does seem to necessitate certain things from minimal assumptions. Now we now we find out, well, depending on the number of, you know, the way the men have the dimensions are twisted, you get all these different contexts, but each one of them necessitates like from its own point of view, the way properties in that system behave. And so yeah, yeah, I guess, but I think you know, it seems like, okay, if you could have a theory of physics where you have one part sort of small basis that is kind of contingent necessitates all the rest mathematically. I guess that's what you're suggesting and then I guess there is less need for causal necessity. But yeah, I guess then I would say, okay, but there's still that initial contingent part and there has to be kind of necessary connections between distinct existences somewhere in the theory. But you know, if there's just like very little of that, yeah, I'll have to think about that. But it seems like, I guess I just don't think there's going to be any kind of radically new concept of necessity coming out of that. It's going to be mathematical necessity, which I think cannot really replace causal necessity, assuming we think there is such a thing. Yeah, okay. So I want to ask about the kind of physical implementation of some of these ideas, because I think the other part of your work, which you mentioned at the beginning too, was the connection to IIT. Yeah. And someone's actually asking in the comments over here that Lucas A is saying what does it, according to your view, mean to be intrinsic and what exactly is meant by the intrinsic properties of matter and being intrinsic in this way. And so I think by talking about IIT, you could talk about what it means to be intrinsic a little bit. So yeah, so I can tell us a little bit how this connects to IT and yeah, so so then term intrinsic, it's used in a few different ways. So first there is the argument for panpsychism or dual aspect resellion panpsychism, which has physics only tells us about relational structural properties, but consciousness is intrinsic. And then what is meant by intrinsic is that the nature is not defined by relations to anything else or even relations to your own parts. So you know, how it feels to be in pain or how pain feels, that's just what pain is. You don't have to say, okay, pain is to relate some other way to. I think that's how pain feels necessitates a relation, but it's not constituted by that relation. Right. So just really quickly before you go too much further, is what you just said meant to contrast with the notion of intrinsic in IT. In IT.
Yeah, yeah. So then I think it's important. So IT also says that consciousness is intrinsic, but then seems like they mean that consciousness exists for itself. So that consciousness can kind of know itself in the Cartesian way. So that's a little bit of a different notion of intrinsic. I think you're compatible, but I think they're yeah not quite the same. So that was just to answer us or what it means by intrinsic question. So just so I'm clear on the distinction you're making in the first sense of intrinsic, it doesn't matter if you know yourself or not or you have this kind of relationship whereas in the second sense, the exists for itself part. You're saying that's that does require kind of knowing yourself which distinguishes it from the other sense of intrinsic. So the first intrinsic is like you're not constituted by relations, but the second sense is kind of you are constituted by a relation, namely relation to yourself, which is a kind of an alveaged relation. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. But I think you can have both. You can both have a relation to yourself essentially, but also have another part of your nature that's not defined by just that relation also of quality. So does that mean that IIT doesn't capture that non-relational aspects of the quality? No. I mean, so yeah. So IIT has these five axioms, which says okay, these are phenomenal logical studies are self-evident and necessary. So this is the structure of consciousness and how it has to be. And yeah, it seems to me that that's kind of not an axiom of IIT that consciousness is intrinsic in that sense that resell in nonism or panpsychism defines, but it says it's an axiom that consciousness is kind of knows itself, where it's necessarily is aware of itself. Yeah. Interesting. Because I mean, one of the criticisms that I've had of IIT for a long time is that the axioms kind of beg certain questions. And one of the questions is the distinction between higher order and first order theories of consciousness. I'm a fan of and so forth. I mean, I'm not a die-hard committed higher order person, but I have defended them and I do think they're worth taking seriously that approach and so forth generally. But it sort of sounds like I can't help but hear what you're saying in a kind of higher order way. Like what you're saying is that IIT actually does have kind of a self-reflexivity of consciousness built in or something like that consciousness involves a kind of self-awareness or awareness of a normal property or something. Is that what you're saying? Am I I think it's more like interpreting it? Yeah, so it's not I mean, I think of higher order theories like one one system is to wear something else. There's something that's aware of something else, but this is kind of the same order view where you have a total reflective relation. So consciousness is aware of itself not of something else. So the consciousness isn't to be aware of a quality that's it's this like pure, purely self-reflexive of the same level. So you don't need two levels. It can just be one level. Right, no, that I get. But I think what makes something higher order is whether there's this kind of awareness. Right, right, okay. Yeah, I get in that sense. It's a little bit higher. Okay, I have to be careful. This is kind of how I interpret the first axiom and then might it might be like mortgared, but I understand that that's kind of in the whatever it is that makes you able in the Cartesian scenario that you are sure that consciousness exists whatever relation consciousness has to itself such that that is possible. Because yeah, so it sounds like it's more of an epistemic thing like it. Yeah, or whatever the metaphysical yeah, the metaphysical basis for that. But in the way that kind of connects to the first notion in intrinsic because you know, for consciousness to exist, it only has to be like this. It doesn't have to have a relation to anything external that in the Cartesian skeptical scenario, you're not might just be a dream. So maybe it actually connects a little bit to that first sense of intrinsic after all. I mean, it goes one way but not the other too, right? Because the recelian notion of intrinsic dozens entail this other notion. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or maybe you could have a view that each phenomenal property was kind of, I mean, maybe on IAT that's what you get a kind of panpsychism where each property does have this kind of self-reflexive status. Yeah, but on like on a typical version, like I think on the way like Philip Goff thinks about recelion monism or excuse me, panpsychism or whatever you want to call it, that the qualities don't have this kind of reflexive self-awareness or whatever it is. Yeah, I mean, it could maybe interpret IT to say that, yeah, as I said, it's not that actual reflexive relation. It's just that kind of metaphysical basis for it. So if you're a very simple consciousness, you don't have the capacity to like think self-reflective thoughts, but you know, if you have a phenomenal property, if you put it into a system that is able to have self-reflective thoughts done necessarily, that system would have that kind of knowledge of that quality. So that's maybe another way of interpreting it. Interesting. I want to ask you about the fusion view in the context of all this stuff, and I'm curious too about, so I want you to tell us about the fusion view, but also I want to know if like you came, if did you have the fusion view before and that you came to IT and you're like, "Oh, IT is a way to implement this," or was it the other way around? So I'm just curious about like what the relationship between the two is in your own thinking. Yeah, it was the first way around. So I wrote my dissertation on panpsychism, and then I had like one part on the combination problem and the fusion view and another part on the normal powers, and then I didn't even, I'm not sure I was even aware of IT at that point, and then after that I heard about IT and that's like panpsychic sereners at shines and start reading about it, and I was like, "Okay, wow, this, uh, not only is it panpsychic, it just fits very well with this fusion view because of the exclusion postulate and maybe if other things, so yeah, it was that that way around that I think the IT fits very well with the fusion view, but it also has some other very interesting characteristics, of course. So can you tell us about the fusion view? I know this is an emergent kind of panpsychism, but amongst the panpsychists is this a minority, the view, or how would you, is it? Yeah, so it's me, Bill Seeger has also defended the version of the fusion view, so it's me and Bill Seeger. I don't think, I don't know, I'm a new one. I'll see that's kind of endorsed it as far as I know, but they haven't, uh, yeah, so, but it's so so with respect to the combination problem for panpsychism, which is like how do you get macro consciousness from putting together micro conscious particles? So the most popular option seems to be the constitutive view that you kind of get macro consciousness from micro consciousness in the same way you get a wall from bricks, you just put them together in bricks together in certain relations, and then that just constitutes a wall. There's no mystery of like, how can you have bricks, you know, organized this way and how come there's a wall that's just obvious? But I think that's never going to be obvious when it comes to consciousness. If you have like many micro minds, it's always going to be conceivable that you just have a collection of micro minds and no macro mind, because I think there's this like unity of consciousness, which is a very substantive thing. It's like, I have my experiences, you have yours, I don't have yours. Like, and as uh, William James says, he has a famous, uh, formulation of the combination problem, he just like could two, like, people together just cram them together as close as you can, there's not going to be a sort of group mind. Right. You tell them all the set a word of a sentence and it's not going to be a idea. Yeah. There's not going to be a consciousness of the whole sentence, even if everyone is about one word. So I think like this sort of order around different minds is very something you should take very seriously, kind of ontologically. So therefore, I think want to explain how you get macro consciousness from micro consciousness. You have to have like something like causation, something has to happen, something substantive. There has to be kind of the transformation. It's not just a constitutive relation. I mean, of course, a constitutive relation would be much tighter, but I think just um, it's not going to work because of, you know, you have consciousness. So yeah, so the idea here, um, first, I mean, I have a lot of questions, but one I wonder is like, what, so what gets fused? Is like my whole mind the fused thing? I know you use this analogy of like the drops of oil or water or whatever they come together. But like, what are the clumps in the, like, is it me? That's a clump versus you or is it like my visual part? That's a clump versus the auditory part or others. Yeah, yeah. So just quickly, I want to say like instead of sort of bricks forming wall and then the kind of bricks retain their identity. You have the wall, but you still have the bricks existing at the same time. I think if you think of mental combination more like, you know, lots of drops and then drops come together and they form a bigger drop and then the original small drops no longer exist, but there's sort of material thus. And so that the macromine kind of replaces the micromines. But eventually though you don't get a drop right, you get a tank of water or something like that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, eventually get like
a whole puddle and then you get to Blake, you know. And then that's the mind is the life. Yeah, yeah, that's so all the time they particle experiences, they're just like drops that have formed this huge pool, which is now your consciousness. So they kind of lose their borders around their consciousness, just dissolve and there's just one new border around the whole whole thing. So how do you on your view? I mean, I like it's a suggestive metaphor and interesting idea. But how do you explain like the differentiation amongst the experience? Because if I mean, why is there an auditory part and a visual part? And why is there all the structure there if it really is just a kind of this pool? Yeah, so Bill Seeger also proposed a fusionion. He says that we have something analogous in the physical world. So we have a black hole where you have a big thing or big in the sense. But then like all the whatever goes into the black hole completely loses their identity. And and the black hole is kind of like a big simple sort of doesn't have parts. But I think we should think of because of what you're saying, we should think of a fusion, not as something that doesn't have parts. So just like completely homogenous lake, it's more like a hole where the hole is prior to the part. So you can have differences within the fusion, but the sort of unity of the hole, the kind of unity of consciousness is much stronger than the unity of any part, if that makes sense. So you can have just like you can have a puddle of water and you have like a little bit of color over hair and you have, you know, pollution in that part and not like it. But there's not to be completely homogenous. So this is all in the metaphorical level of course. This is just kind of get the picture. Yeah, totally. I get that. But so, but it's the idea is supposed to be that I guess that has to be that or tell me if I'm wrong that the micro phenomenal properties must themselves somehow necessitate the structure of the blob. But it sounds like on the other hand, what you're saying is that the macro level properties necessitate or constrain how the structure like the micro structure that so yeah, I'm just curious like what so what role is this? How is you playing at the micro level? Okay, yeah. So I just want to say that there are kind of two aspects of the combination problem or more, but there's the kind of subject combination. How come you have all these like isolated minds suddenly kind of unifying into a bigger mind? And that's kind of the first thing I want to explain. And then how that new unity can have a causal role. And then I'm saying, okay, since the big thing replaces all those small things, it can take over the causal role of small things. So another answer to that is like, okay, this big thing is like constituted by the small things. So it inherits the causal powers. But if constitution is impossible, you have like an emergent consciousness, which just the same will be causally excluded by the base unless the the emerger replaces the base. And that's kind of I think number one reason to consider diffusion. But then there's the other problem, which is the palette problem, which is how like let's assume you can get sort of the unit you can get a big mind from small minds, but how do you get the kind of complex qualities that we experience from those simple qualities that we assume that the micro minds experience. And I guess I'm not sure I have something extremely substantive to say to that except that there is something that's like a thing that could work on the fusion view, which is a bit more difficult to get to work on the constitutive view. And yeah, and it doesn't really bring in the power stuff. I think these views are kind of independent. Might be some connections, but they're not like extremely clearly connected. So there's this view that what's you call that painting style when you just have lots of dots. And then point to listen. Yeah, point to listen. So then you can have you know, redden redden orange, redden yellow dots. And then once you move a bit back that becomes orange. We kind of have this like blending. But then the problem is that kind of depends on your perspective. So then you have to have like the observer as a variable to explain how the the quality changes based on perspective. And then once you have the fusion, we have kind of a genuinely new perspective. So instead of each of these like points being isolated in their own little minds, now they're kind of experienced together from a single point of view. And then you can have maybe these sorts of blending effects. Interesting. I mean, I'm just going back a little bit though, I'm surprised to hear you say that the views are just kind of worth all going to are distinct from each other. The power's viewing in this other stuff because I would have thought, I mean, at least you have to say, and again, I'm just this is for me to try to understand what the views, I don't have any like ulterior motives. I know. I thought that you would have to say that the insolfers that are phenomenal, the micro phenomenal properties necessitate their effects. Yeah. And so there's got to be some story about their connection to the macro level, which involves them necessitating that. Oh, the necessitating, necessitating diffusion. So kind of phenomenal power to fuse. Yeah. That's interesting. So that is actually a possible connection that I've looked into a little bit. And but it's like, I think it's, you know, it's a little bit hard to say something about this that doesn't seem like extremely speculative. So I mean, just kind of if it's sort of all for fun, there are a few things I gave a talk once at the TSC towards the science of consciousness. Like a small talk and I explored some of this stuff. So there, this is actually somewhere you can connect fusion flammable powers and IIT, which is that there are, you might think there's like kind of I don't know exactly how to put this, but there's something about like, okay, so IIT basically says, you know, there's mental combination when there's a small mind kind of becomes part of a system with higher fire. So so the extremely speculative idea would be that it may make sense that, okay, if you're more connected to, so if there's a system where the parts are more connected to each other than they kind of are to themselves, then it sort of makes sense that they combine that they're like, okay, we're going to be one thing now. And and maybe an IIT kind of says that that's what happens when they have maximum integration, then they're kind of more integrated with other parts of this group than you are with anything else. And then, you know, maybe you can have like, okay, that's motivation to to combine, but that's as I said, just like extremely speculative. I don't think that can be defended in similar ways that pain effort connection, but yeah, so that's interesting to think about anyway. I mean, part of the issue for me at least is, you know, I'm kind of a flatfooted materialist and not that anyone cares, but you know, I sort of don't think the conceivability arguments succeed, at least in the sense of, you know, approving that physicalism as false, I think what they do is they sort of, in more of the tradition of intuition pumps, tell you sort of what you have to see in the already thought. But anyway, that's my own view, not that it matters here, but actually the reason why it matters here is because in these sorts of cases, well, I got distracted thinking about intuition pumps. Yeah. Anyway, so I lost my eye. I was going to say something very, ask a very good question, obviously, I had a bunch of, I forgot what it is. Okay, I look at it and think of it. Yeah. What was it that I was even going to talk about? Anyway, it'll come back to me in a second. Yeah, there it is. So maybe now I shouldn't remember it, because now you'll realize it wasn't very interesting after all. Anyway, so it seems to me that once you make the kind of move that you're suggesting right now, then you reopen the same issue, which is the explanatory get problem, because I don't really see how you cannot, a priori, deduce the macro level fusion properties from the macro level without knowing something much more than this kind of speculative thing that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah. And so then I wonder what's the motivation for even rejecting physically? If you get the same issue all over again, then we're just back to square one saying what's the upper-earth connection here? Then you say, well, yeah, but it's a little bit softened a blow because this is at least a gap between something phenomenal and something phenomenal. And then I go, yeah, I guess I'm not as motivated by that idea as being so interesting. But anyway, so I'm just wondering, like, do you think you get this kind of explanatory issue again? Yeah. And do you think it says bad as the first one? So let me know if this is the right way of kind of phrasing it. So yeah, you reject physicalism because of the conceivability issue. And then I'm saying I think it should also maybe actually reject constitutive pan-psychism for the same reason because you can conceive of bunch of micro-mines.
organized however you want and there's not going to be a macro mind. And I kind of saw that problem by saying, yeah, the connection is causal and and conceivability of things coming apart, that's okay for causal connections. This is just not for a consecutive connection. So it's a problem. But then, you know, you add my phenomenal powers, which says that actually even causal connections should have, you know, that's kind of the issue here. Yeah. So I think I would say that, well, as I said, even on my view, you can conceive of sort of motives and efforts within the same mind, being necessarily connected, but when it comes to connection between effort and result, that's a bit more up in the air. And I think you have to add some principles to get that to work. And that's not going to be a prior in the same way. And given pants like this, I think there are a few things you can say to make that connection work, but it's not going to be as transparent. And when it comes to mental combination, that's going to be a connection between minds, not the connection within the mind. So therefore, it kind of makes sense that that connection is not apron or that's kind of what I would say. So, yeah. I might be missing it, but, you know, suppose I have the property of being in pain, and you know, all the things that entails the full property of it. And now, on your view, that property is the result of a fusion of some microphonomenal properties. But how, but it seems like any given microphonomenal property could turn out to combine to make this macro property of pain, or that there's no way to make sense of the connection between the microphonomenal properties and the properties that they have and the macro-phenomenal properties. Yeah. But on your view, it seems like there would have to be something that made sense of that connection. And not just in terms of the results or whatever, but in terms of the way it feels phenomenologically, that it's phenomenal properties got to be necessitated by the microphonomenal properties. Yeah. That's the way I'm understanding it. If I'm not understanding it right, then I want to know like where did I go wrong? Right. So there seems to be one issue that kind of how it feels to me right now that has to kind of resemble or be connected to how it felt to be the particles that used to create me. Right. And then I would say, well, maybe not in principle, because those particles don't exist anymore. So they're, I'm not constituted by those particles. They kind of disappeared to just like the drops, but still there might be some resemblances. But and again, that goes back to this palette problem. And I think I don't have a clear answer to that problem, but I think a few things you can say at this and seem to be kind of impossible to get. And then there's the other issue, which is like, let's say you have a bunch of micromancy that come together in the way that is the condition for fusion. Is it a priori that they will then take this step and like, okay, we've got to use. Or is that just like a brute law of nature and that and then these brutal laws of nature they're incompatible with the non-parasuse. But but you don't so I mean, but you don't accept. Something I think that's people like traumas does accept and what should no one cares. I'm just trying to get clear what your views on this thing. You should accept this or I don't have a horse in this race. But as far as I understand like David, he thinks that the macro level consciousness can be multiple realized at the micro level so that there's some combinations, which might result in the very same macro property. Yeah, yeah, but you have to deny that right or there has to be some relationship that's much stronger between the micro phenomenal properties and the macro phenomenal properties. So I think there are a few different reasons why yeah, if you are take the fusion view, then you have to be a little bit skeptical multiple realization. I think that's right because you know, if you have. So I talk about this as actually one reason why actually I can't be straightforwardly combined with resellion pants like is a meter because I team applies that multiple realization is possible. And it also has the exclusion postulate which makes it a little bit like the fusion view. So if you're a. I hope this answers the question, but so if you have the. Pants like is you think that the mental realizes the physical and you might have. If you have realization you can have multiple realization you can do different experiences realize the same physical property, but you can't have the same mental realizing two different physical properties right. Right, so that that's not going to work if you have the same realizer same realized system you can't. Very the supervenient thing independently of the base right. So it's not supervenous anymore. Yeah, and then if you have a yeah exactly and then if you have a fusion view, then you're saying okay, there's only one level of the realizer. There's only the macro experience there are no micro experiences in addition. So if you have multiple realization, then you have two different physical structures like one silicon brain one organic brain. Have the same experience and that means that you have two different physical systems realized by the same experience that's not going to work. So if you're saying okay, but if you have a constitutive view, you might say okay, the macro experiences are the same, but the micro experiences are different than that accounts for the differences in microstructure. But if you think there's only one layer. Then I don't think you can have multiple realization. Interesting. Yeah, because now I remember you do have this in the you have a paper on this where you suggest that maybe IIT is compatible with like some aspects of consciousness being digitized or in a computer, but not not the qualitative part or something like that. Yeah, yeah, I think I suggest a few ways you can modify it. So I think it's a little bit so that you don't get exactly this. But yeah, I don't know if this is this is, yeah, so I think this multiple realization thing that's yet another issue that you have to you can't have straight forward multiple realization given the future. Okay, so I want to ask more about IIT. I mean, first I'm curious about I mean, so you already described like you had your future refers and you saw it. That's very compatible with it. But I wonder what you're considered view about it is before I get into the specifics. Do you think I mean you seem to think like empirically it's a contender, but as far as like giving us the neural correlates of consciousness. Do you think it's the most possible candidates or how you just wish it would be or what you're thinking about is status. Yeah, so I feel like I'm not in the position to really evaluate empirical arguments. I don't know enough about, especially the competing series. So I'm, I just say I'm like, mostly interested in IT for the purely philosophical reasons. I mean, from what I read, it seems like it gives you an example of the thing you're interested in. It can account for a lot of empirical data, but I'm not personally in I don't think my opinion, the weather that's the size of an object that I'm not like informed enough about that stuff. I mean, I take it that it's not that there is kind of a plausible empirical case, but doesn't seem to be decisive. But I also think that there are principal difficulties in kind of deciding between theories of consciousness and the purely empirical level. Yeah, but they of course have to be compatible with that empirical data to. But I guess so part of what I was asking because I was curious if you say I think that I think that you think that if I I T were empirically confirmed. And this would be a way in which panpsychism could be empirically confirmed. Yes, I think so, but I think even if I was empirically confirmed, you put in principle, say avoid panpsychism by saying, OK, only a threshold of five, you can set a threshold for five. So sure get rid of the idea that it's maximal five and just say it's a maximal five above and. Yeah, exactly so you can say something like that. I think that would be arbitrary, but if you really hate panpsychism, you can say you can introduce something like that. I wouldn't be especially well motivated, but and of course that kind of qualification will maybe not be testable because you can't directly test the simple systems that can't report whether they're conscious you can just infer it from how similar they are. But I think you know, maybe that would look arbitrary. I mean, it does, especially given that IITs aimed at least to be motivated by the axioms and then. Yeah, I mean, to me, it's always that's further question. How do you get from the axioms to postulates because already there's like multiple ways you can instantiate those. But anyway, I don't get distracted by too much too much of that stuff. Yeah, I was thinking you could, in principle, maybe confirm it in the penalty of the axioms just because it looked at all the data where people seem conscious enough, maybe not it is the only. And then that's the theory that's compatible with that and then. Yeah, I think Daniel would have made a bit of the. That would be kind of empirical argument for panpsychism. And so far as you say it's arbitrary to introduce a threshold. I think it would have a empirical.
arguments for Pensikus. Yeah. Interesting. Okay. So I mean, someone was asking actually, you look at say again, was asking if there was a way to interpret it in a non-pensikus way. I think what you're saying is the only way to do that is by this arbitrary stipulation about level of five. But there hasn't really seemed to be any good reason to do that. I mean, no, I don't think I don't think there's, yeah, it's gone the same arbitrary. But the only way to do it, I mean, sounds like that's what you think. Yeah. There's one other issue. So the reason why you get Pensikus from IT is that you have integration all the way down. So I think Chris of Cox says that you have a proton that's made of a triad of quarks and quarks can never come apart. And those quarks will form an integrated system. But then you have a, you know, lonely electron or a lonely photon is our dose integrated. But then they were just so I did this new imply complete Pensikus and but something very close. And it's also not exactly clear how to apply IT at the level of physics. So but at least to get something very close to Pensikus and so it seemed kind of more consistent to have an interpretation of. I mean, that's what you, I know you say this in one of your papers, you actually make this good. Well, if we can get this far and all we need is like to extend it to an electron, we need some physical way to interpret it, as being, I mean, so what is the idea there that we want to grant it like a provisional integrated status until we think of a way to show that it's or say that maybe it's not integrated but it's still conscious or so how does the extension actually supposed to work? Yeah, so either you can say, okay, I don't know enough about this at all. This is something that was suggested in another paper's adenbarate, I think, who suggests that if we look at an electron and we think of it as an excitation in the field, then then that will be the integrated information. So that's not my idea, that's just something that could make sense. But another thing you could do is say, IT is an purely philosophical basis. You could see IT is actually not a theory consciousness, it's a theory mental combination. So whenever you're maximal five, you have combined consciousness, but when you don't have, fight at all, then you just have basic consciousness. And then so it's just so happens that typical linear pancycase, you assume that combination happens at first as fairly complex levels, maybe there's just like particle consciousness and then it combines in humans or implants, maybe, but not or in biology, but then you might say, okay, the first level of combination is actually the level of protons and molecules and atoms and IT just kind of tracks that from the bottom. And so you have basic kind of integrated basic consciousness in isolated particles and then, you have combination whenever there's inspiration and combination does not to give you a very complex consciousness at all. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I mean, given that you're friendly to IT, what do you make of like the grid problem? Yeah. I said that the grid bothers me a little bit. So yeah, the grid problem says that you can you can get extremely high phi just by in very repetitive structures. So it's got that inactive too. Yeah, inactive. So and so Scott Aronson talks about expanding graphs and then Juelo and this reply says, yeah, it can actually get something even simpler, which is just exactly. He's like, I'll see you in bed. Yeah, I also just got there. So it bites the bullet and devours it or something. Yeah, exactly. And I talked to Christoph about this. He didn't seem very bothered about it either. So yeah, so I think it's an interesting issue because first of all, I thought, okay, what about we just introduce an extraxium and says, okay, so there's the inactivity and I think I think and that block has said that that's what bothers him the most. But then I think they have a case there because they say one of the things that is good about IT is that it can account for the fact that consciousness doesn't seem to be correlated with activity. So you can have cases, for instance, meditation. Again, I'm not sure I'm presenting this totally correctly, but I understand it that where brain activity goes down, but sort of consciousness goes up. So there doesn't seem to be a correlation between activity and consciousness and human consciousness. So it's actually a good thing that you don't have to have activity to have consciousness. And there's a question whether you can sort of say, okay, but you can't have complete inactivity. But still, I think that's maybe support, maybe inactivity is in the problem. But then I think at least to me, intuitively is the repetitiveness that these grids are so repetitive. Right. And then I thought, okay, I want to catch this down extra axioms and for those who don't like that, and say consciousness is not repetitive. But then, Julia says, well, if you, that's just going to break IT because to account for why there's high, high in the brain, you need to assume that these repetitive grid structures give high, high because the brain is full of grids. And yeah, that's what it says in the reply. And that's if you look at the brain and see, okay, the similar conscious parts of the brain are full of grids, maybe you should just adjust your intuition that the grid scanty conscious. But I have to say part of the issue is that for me, anyway, part of the issue is not just that it's that grid is conscious, but that it has a higher level of five than I do. Yeah, yeah. Arbitrarily high levels of five can be achieved. Yeah. And so I'm sure what it means to me that it's more conscious than me. Yeah. Even if you could accept that it's conscious, I think that is more conscious. Yeah. What that means. So I think there's also a response to, so when it you talk about being more conscious, so how I understand it, when in the conflict of IT, being more conscious, that means sort of like being more enlightened or enlightened brighter or something like that, it sort of means that the more distinctions you can make within your consciousness, then the more conscious you are. So if you like, yeah, the more, just to simplify, if you have like the more pixels you have and the more values those pixels can take on in principle, then the more conscious is you have. So it's just kind of about the amount of information you can. The level of content, like how much yeah, yeah, it's sort of like on that level, it's not like how bright is the light or how ethically valuable are you? Maybe at least not straightforwardly. There might be connections, of course, but they maybe they can come apart to some extent. And then so if you add to the grid to just get like more pixels kind of, but it's just pixels of the same sort. So you don't get the kind of variety that you have. So in our case, we think maybe yeah, more consciousness that gives you more kinds of sensory experience, more kinds of thoughts, all this stuff that we think is good, but in the grid, you kind of get just more of the same. Right. I mean, you could have all sorts of complex structures implemented in that kind of grid, like yeah, by different patterns and so forth. What's yeah. So Julius says that the grid would just have an experience of just empty space. Yeah. I know. But how does he know that? I mean, that's one of the things I've always worried about is yeah, how can you tell? Yeah. I think there's an assumption here, which is, you know, maybe it's maybe it's something to do with the axioms or the posthilich or whatever, but that there's an assumption that you know, since there's not a lot of conceptual, what they call conceptual structure are irreducible, can mix, you know, these naturally, whatever they are. There's not a lot of those then for us not going to be a lot of content. And so maybe it's just empty space. But I think that already is a muster what in the theory guarantees that assumption that they won't be content. Yeah, exactly. That correlates with the mix. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure, but I know there is a paper that came out quite recently where they talk about the phenomenology of space. And they just kind of map a lot of structural features of the grid to features of spatial phenomenology. And they tried to show that there's like an explanatory relation there. And I know it's sure I can exactly kind of I can. Yeah, I'll look it up. That sounds great. Well, what's exactly what they're saying, but at least they're trying to give an answer to this. Interesting. Okay, I'll have to check that out. So, I mean, you suggest a way of modifying the exclusion principle. So can you tell us a little bit about, I mean, and I want to talk about the grain problem too. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to keep you around forever. But if you have a little bit more time, maybe I want to talk about the problem of grain and how you think that gets solved and why you think the exclusion principle needs to be modified. Right. So that's in view of what we talked about earlier, the multiple realization thing. So, I think, you know, to solve that issue, you can't have same realizer different physical structure or same phenomenal experience, different physical structure if you're a resellion and think that the phenomenal realizes physical. So, so the air then you either have to modify the exclusion principle and say when you have a macaro experience, you still have overlapping micro experiences. And then the micro experiences are kind of the realizers of the differences in physical structure. So, like the fact that two people, silicon version and organic version can have the same macro experience, but then the silicon version has a different overlapping micro experience to account for the different microstructure and the organic version has a
different. Wait, so you think they should do that? So I suggest two things. So, so yeah, this is one thing you can do. And that's, um, okay, this is really, this is a little bit complicated, but what I'm saying is that so, so the issue with IoT is that pi is everywhere. So if you just remove the exclusion principle as that every system with phi is conscious, then you get just sort of like, uh, I'm conscious, me minus one, Adam is conscious, and so on, so you get infinite overlapping consciousnesses. Maybe there's a little bit phi between me and the computers. I mean, some people are going to be fine with that. Like Luke Rollas, I think he's going to be cool with that, but a lot of people aren't going to be cool. Yeah. So I think that's a bit of an issue, maybe because what I was talking about earlier, I think, because of the unity of consciousness is a very substantive thing. So they really were aware that I was just like everywhere. Um, so, so then I say instead of to avoid this complete universalism with, uh, you can't just get rid of the exclusion principle. Instead, what you can do is say, uh, I don't remember exactly what it said, but it's kind of a modified version where there can be overlapping experiences, but only if the next level sort of adds to phi. Uh, right. So the exclusion possible gets redefined as excluding lower levels of grain. Yeah. Yeah. But it doesn't exclude higher levels. Yeah. But actually, I, this was a bit complicated, but it's in the paper. It's just a a version of the exclusion principle that says, okay, some of these overlapping our exclusive consciousnesses are excluded, but not all of them. So you get overlapping consciousness, but you don't get like complete universalism. So you get, uh, you get sort of, yeah, consciousness in systems are more unified than their parts, but not that are have a certain amount of unitay but still less, less than their parts. That's, I mean, part of the problem here, and this is I think a general problem with IIT. So I wonder if you think this idea can be extended, but the part of problem is like, there's no, it's not clear what level the theory is pitched at. So you'll get different measures of phi, depending on whether you look at, you know, the level neurons being connected to the level of fundamental particles. So that's basically the grain problem, right? It depends on the analysis, the level of analysis. So phi will vary at most levels. So actually, according to IIT, you're supposed, this is why phi is extremely difficult to calculate in practice. You should just take any grain and compare and calculate phi and the grain that gives you maximum phi, that's the real grains. Calculate phi on the level of neurons at the level of particles. You should just consider all those carvings or all those resolutions or whatever, like, and them. But yeah, so this is basically, wait, wait, so you have to do every one of those, that whichever one has maximum phi, then that's the real level, according to the, I didn't realize that. Okay. Yeah. So if you, yeah, if you think of your brain as constituted of neurons, it will get terrified. And if you think of it as a system of particles, so therefore you should think, okay, it's a system of part of neurons because that's how you find something like that. Yeah. So that, you know, makes it, of course, very difficult to calculate phi because there are so many things you have to calculate and compare to get the maximum. Yeah, but it also seems a bit stipulative. I mean, I guess that's the problem with the exclusion principles. Like you can't live with it, you can't live without it. It seems, you know, stipulative, to simply say, you know, the phi exclusionary in this way. But at the same time, if you don't do that, then you end up with these sort of very strange results that, you know, you get these overlaps and so forth. Yeah, yeah. But anyways, I suggest like that's one version where you can modify the exclusion principle that's it. There's like, not everything is conscious, but there's still overlap. But then that will not be compatible with the fusion view that I suggested that will be kind of positive panpsychism. Right. And I take that to have a few philosophical problems. So then I suggest what you can also do is just keep the exclusion principle. But you can just say that, well, actually, there's no multiple realization strictly speaking. So a silicon brain and a normal brain, they might have an experience of sort of the same overall structure, but it will feel a little bit different. So, you know, instead of my red and green is going to be like to, or, you know, I have pain and pleasure. And the silicon brain has kind of not pain and pleasure that feels exactly the same, but it's still kind of wants the pleasure and doesn't want to pain. The kind of behaves similarly, but it's still different quality. So there will, there won't be, you have to have some differences in the macro experiences that the college will. The differences in microstructure. But you can still have coarse-grained structural similarities between those two experiences that the comfort, how they behave mostly similarly. I see. I was getting lost in the dialectics. So what you're saying, there's two options. One, you kind of have the constitutive panpsychist way, but you, you're not, that's not your favorite. And the other is the normalization, no multiple realization view, which was where your time are earlier. Yeah. Yeah. So that's kind of what I prefer because I prefer to fusion be one, I think, constitutive panpsychism has some problems that I have nothing to do with IT. Yeah. I mean, now that you're saying it though, I mean, is, is the robot or the silicon silicon head a, has a pain and is motivated to have it stop, but the pain quality, so there's a structural similarity there, but the, but it's a different quality that's doing the motivating. That's the same thing. That seems like it, you can't. That's my speculative suggestion. And then I also think that there's gonna, like you can have two qualities that behave similarly in most contexts, but not all of them. So, but I also think that, you know, a silicon brain and the organic brain, I don't know if you can, they're gonna work exactly the same way either there might work the same way in most contexts, maybe not all of them. I'm not sure. So, but you are allowing though that two different qualities necessitate the same effect? Well, I might say that, well, in principle, I can do that, but it's, but I think maybe they can necessitate the same, almost the same effect. So, practically speaking, for the purposes that we use the silicon replica, it will be the same, but if you look at all the details it won't be exactly the same. That's something I might seem better motivated. And you relate this to the way that you're talking about this to the dancing and fading quality argument from Dave. So, if we're thinking about a continuity between you and the silicon version of you, and we're replacing one neuron at a time or whatever, you know, that kind of thought experiment. Right. Do you think that what happens as you go from biological head to silicon head? I is that, well, yeah, I guess what we're just saying, the quality shifts slightly, but the overall structure stays the same. Yes, that's what I would say. So, I mean, I think this dancing quality thing has never bothered me that much to say that okay, the quality of dancing, you don't notice. I think, you know, if you have an extreme situation where, you know, I don't think that kind of thing would arise naturally, but it seems like if you really go for it, you can make that kind of thing happen. And in this case, okay, in principle, it will be possible to have dancing quality between, I don't know if you would sort of gradually get the different qualitative spectrum. If you replace your neurons with silicon, won't silicon ones or how that would happen. But it might be at some point you would have the other one. Yeah, eventually at some point, and I'm not sure. But so what you can't allow is the fading quality. You can allow the dancing, but not the fading. Oh, what's the fading again? That it gradually changes to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure what would actually happen if this is true. Maybe there would be one threshold where all the quality shifts, but no, that's not going to work because then you're going to get multiple realization. So, yeah, actually you have to have fading quality, but not fading into nothing that's fading into different. Right. So you can't have absent quality. No, it can't have absent quality. But you can actually can't have dancing quality because then you would have, if the, you know, you change one and one and one and one and the experience doesn't change, that means you have same relays, same relays, but slightly different physical system. So actually not going to work. Oh, so you can't have dancing quality. No, no, that wouldn't work because then you would have, yeah, as you gradually, change the physical realized system. Still, the realizer is not going to change until you have the shift, the Southern shift. And then then you will have the same problem that you have same realizer, different realized systems until the end. Yeah, interesting. Okay. There's a lot of things that things are there. Yeah. I haven't thought about that before, but it seems like it's kind of rules out dancing quality for that reason. Not because it's not impossible that you wouldn't know it is, but because it would just have this. I mean, I think the whole thing is interesting because when I, you know, talked to Christoph, it's a big theme of his book on IIT that it doesn't allow for digital consciousness or that, you know, simulated brain wouldn't be conscious because it wouldn't have any, I,
it won't have any integration of information. Although obviously they think you can build some kind of machine that has integrated information, but it's causal structure has to be sort of. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - So, but so, is what you're, are you assuming then that we have a system that mimics the causal structure of brain? Or do you think that IIT allows for simulated brain to be conscious? - No, so the first thing, so I'm assuming that the silicon brain is like a neuromorphic silicon brain. So it's not the digital feed-forward system. Because then you would have fading quality. Then you would have conscious disappear or decompine in that system. And fusion would infuse once you replace the normal brain with a silicon brain if it's a digital computer. But if you have a sort of neuromorphic silicon brain that has replicates the feedback integrated structure of the brain, then that's what I've been assuming here. - So you wouldn't upload into a digital environment? - No, then your fusion would defuse, so don't do it. (laughing) - Don't do it. (laughing) - I mean, I think it's interesting. I mean, one of the things that I was sort of trying to press them on, and maybe you don't care about this so much, but I was like, so they're doing computer simulations where they build things with, they measure the fire of it. But then they say, oh, they're not conscious, 'cause they're in a simulated environment. - Yeah. - And so it seems like, well, if there's fire, if fire you can measure there, then I thought that theory says, that's what matters, whether no matter what it's sort of, I mean, 'cause it seems like ultimately, you end up like if I ATH is true, then we can like prove we're not in the matrix. I mean, we're not in a simulation, because yeah, yeah, I think. - That seems like a lot to follow from a theory of consciousness. - But I think if you have a sim, if you like, simulate a system with fire on the computer, then you also simulate the causal connection. So yeah, I feel like two nodes in the network that's on their computer screen. There's no direct causal connection between those two nodes. They just have kind of a common cause in the process of the processor and the CPU, right? So I think that's kind of easy to argue for IT that you just like, in the computer, you replicate how the structure looks to you, but the causal connections are extremely. - I mean, to put it sort of differently, I mean, this is now science fiction. I'm not one for big conceivability arguments, but hey, you know, what? - Yeah. - A little bit. - Just for fun though. - But I mean, you could imagine like we're in a simulation right now, like currently at this moment, we're in a simulated environment. And we're studying our simulated brains and we're saying, "Hey, look at all this "integrated information here." But in such a case, we would be integrated information, theory would be wrong, because we'd be in a simulated environment. So some other theory of consciousness would be true, some functionalism or some other kind of dualism or something. - Yeah. - And so, but we would have all this evidence about integration of information, and so we would have evidence for IT, but the evidence would be incorrect according to IT, because we didn't know this further fact. - Yeah. - So it does actually make the relevance of the simulation hypothesis. It seems like actually they noted established IT, you have to rule that out first, 'cause in a simulation, IT would be not true. - Well, you can still, in given IT, you can still have the kind of matrix as in the matrix movie simulation, where you have kind of a real brain, and the input is artificial. So the consciousness is realized by a max-fi system, but all the input is fake. But if you have kind of the consciousness itself also being simulated, that is something IT would rule out. But I think, you know, non-functionalism in general would rule that out, not just IT. I mean, I was, I was, I think you can argue against that without IT, just on a general basis, that maybe we can prove that there's no simulation of that sort, there might be a simulation of sort of the actual matrix search, where we're all in the pod and the brains and vats, but that we're totally digital. That I think you can maybe make a prior account case against. - Interesting. - But I don't know like how strong it would be, but yeah, I would like to hear that actually, but save that for a future conversation. - Yeah, well that's just like a standard conceivability stuff, just kind of anti-functionalism. Yeah. So I don't know. - Oh, I see. - Yeah. - But I mean, I think you could, I mean, you know, Dave is an empty functionalist in some sense, and he thinks you could have consciousness in a simulated environment. It's just, you know, you could kind of laws that connect up the functional states to the-- - Right, right. - Yeah. - I don't know, everyone gets to invoke whatever laws they want, which is kind of cheating, I think, you know, but whatever, I mean, they're there, they're there, but it's like what the, which ones we can appeal to. - Yeah. - But I do think it's interesting, because you know, my own like background is I really like the identity theory, my brain identity, like just old fashioned type identity theory. And so on that kind of view, it's also not gonna be possible to be simulated, have simulated consciousness. So I think it's interesting. And that's one of the things I really like about your work, by the way, is it takes a lot of the things that I really care about, like causation, for example, and the causal role of consciousness and the role that it plays, and then argues for a completely different-- - Right, yeah. - And that's, I mean, I love that kind of philosophy, because it really, that showcases what philosophy is all about. It's like, okay, there's many places we can start from, and but there's not, there's also many places we can end up with from the saves to the point. - Right. - So that's the best kind of philosophy. It challenges your initial assumptions and say, look, there's another ending point here. And so you can't just start from where you want, and end up where you wanna go, because there's another way. So anyway, so I appreciate that sort of work, and even if I don't agree with everything, I really think that it's nice that we have people like you out there thinking seriously about these issues. And, and a lot of people think, "Pen, I get some kind of silly," but I don't. I think it's good to take it seriously, and I'm glad that people like you, and that are very serious, are paying this careful attention to it. - Yeah, it's good to like map out logical space, as best as you can, I think. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Absolutely. - So. - So it's really interesting to just explore all the possibilities, and you don't need to decide which one is true in me this way. - Exactly. Well, on that note, had I do have to eventually let you go here. So, I would like to just ask at the end, if there's anything that you were expecting would come up that hasn't come up, what you wanted to, and the answer can be no, but I do always like to check at the end. - Yeah, no, I think a lot of stuff came up, so yeah, I feel like. (laughing) - A lot of stuff came up. - A lot of stuff came up. - But might be both like worked out once, and just also some of the more speculative stuff. So yeah. - Yeah, sorry, but I know I can't resist once I have a half big thought. - No, no, that's a, I'm a little bit around. - I'm sorry. - I like that, so yeah. So yeah, I think we covered both like, snow and powers and fusion and it, and all that. So. - Cool, well, I really do recommend your work, even to people who disagree with Pansackism. I think your work is a great place to start, and lots of interesting, I thought, working ideas. So on that note, thank you very much for joining me. - Yeah, thank you. - And hang out for just a second. I'll say bye off air, but thank you. All right, we're off. - We're off, yeah. Sorry for messing up the room.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
The guest, a philosopher specializing in panpsychism, argues that consciousness is fundamental and present everywhere.
He presents the "phenomenal powers view," suggesting causal powers are mental, using pain as an example where its qualitative feel intrinsically necessitates avoidance behavior.
This leads to an argument against physicalism
The discussion addresses potential counterexamples, such as inverted qualia and pain asymbolia, defending the view by distinguishing between sensory and affective components of experience.
Summary:
In this conversation, a philosopher advocates for panpsychism—the view that consciousness is ubiquitous. He focuses on the "phenomenal powers view," which posits that mental properties, like the feeling of pain, inherently possess causal powers; pain, by its very nature, necessitates an avoidance response. , knowing what pain feels like) allows us to predict and explain behaviors (like avoidance) in a way that purely physical information cannot, suggesting phenomenal and physical properties are distinct.
The dialogue explores objections, including conceivable inverted scenarios where pain might not cause avoidance and the case of pain asymbolia, where individuals feel pain without being motivated to avoid it. The philosopher responds by clarifying that such cases may involve a separation between the sensory and affective components of pain, with only the affective part being inherently motivational, thus preserving the core argument that certain phenomenal qualities intrinsically dictate specific causal outcomes.
FAQs
Panpsychism is the view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe, meaning it exists everywhere, not just in humans or animals.
The argument suggests that we directly experience causal powers through phenomena like pain, which intrinsically motivates avoidance, and since causal powers appear to be universal, consciousness (phenomenal properties) must also be universal, leading to panpsychism.
It argues that phenomenal knowledge, such as understanding pain, allows us to predict and explain behaviors (e.g., avoidance) in a way that physical information alone cannot, suggesting that phenomenal properties are not identical to physical properties.
The combination problem addresses how simpler forms of consciousness combine to form more complex conscious experiences, such as human consciousness, which is a key challenge for panpsychist theories.
The phenomenal powers view posits that mental properties, like pain, are causal powers themselves, meaning they inherently necessitate certain effects (e.g., pain leads to avoidance) without relying on external laws.
Pain asymbolia is a condition where individuals feel pain but lack the motivational component to avoid it. This supports the idea that pain has separable sensory and affective phenomenal parts, with the affective part driving avoidance behavior.
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