Part 1
Physicalism is the philosophical perspective that everything which exists is either physical or reducible to the physical. The physicalist therefore naturally contends that the “ontological primitives”, or fundamental constituents of all of reality, are a handful of subatomic particles. The physicalist’s worldview, when boiled down to its most straightforward form, is that every phenomenon in nature can be, and has been, constructed from the dynamics of these particles and the peculiar, quantum laws which they obey. While physicalism is a fashionable and popular philosophical position today, it is not free of critique. The most notorious and difficult of these critiques of the physicalist’s model is the famous “hard problem of consciousness”. The consciousness problem goes as follows: these subatomic, quantum primitives are apparently not conscious and the emergence of consciousness from an interplay of inert, non-conscious “stuff” is inexplicable. Physicalists have had a hard time reconciling this, and have largely ignored the problem and continued to reduce consciousness to the physical.
The most popular form of physicalism, for example, is of a reductionist variety: reducing the experiential nature of the world to the functions of the physical brain. Reducing experience to the functioning of an organ, adding this intermediary between the experienced world and the experiencer, may seem natural and intuitive to those familiar with neuroscience, but is actually rather problematic. Granting that it would be possible for conscious experience to emerge from the purely non-conscious matter of the brain (which remains inexplicable) the worldview that results from this understanding is bizarrely self-defeating. There is almost no difference, in this brain-consciousness model of physicalism, between dreams, hallucinations, and waking life. The latter is apparently the result of electromagnetic stimulation arriving to your brain from an external world (although we never have direct access to this world) whereas the former two are a sort of masturbatory self-stimulation of the brain without this external input. In the case of all three, our experience of the world is, in fact, an experience of our brains and only our brains – and never an experience of the world itself. In other words, at best, we can experience an imperfect copy of reality, filtered by a lens which cuts out more than it allows through. We are sitting in the electro-chemical movie theater of our skulls and played a film which, apparently, gives us a glimpse into an inaccessible world beyond the theater.
What reason do we have to believe that the film is providing us with a comprehensive worldview? Or even a particularly accurate one? Or, given the theory of evolution, one which is not merely adapted to our particular biological needs but genuinely representative of objective reality? We have none. The brain-physicalist’s world beyond the theater of our skulls is odorless, tasteless, and colorless, mathematical and electromagnetic, lacking nearly all of the traits we associate with the world that we experience. The physicalist here has stretched to create, in essence, two separate realities: the one which corresponds to all of our experiences, and the one which, despite its inaccessibility to us, is “out there”, underlying the reality we experience despite being derived and understood entirely through the lens of the film. And, of course, given our experience with dreams and hallucinations, can we ever know that the waking life we experience is not merely some Matrix-esque simulation? To test a copy, one needs access to the original, and we have no such access and are, in fact, forever shut off from it. The internal reality of our experiences, inescapable and imperfect, is the only source of information we have about the inaccessible external reality, and is the source of all of our theories about the external reality’s existence at all. In other words, if brain-physicalism is correct, it casts doubt on itself; it is metaphysics deduced exclusively through a kaleidoscope.
Those physicalists who avoid this approach may, and sometimes do, go so far as to simply avoid the issue by denying the existence of consciousness at all. Galen Strawson describes this denial as, “the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy.” Strawson’s approach is one of the relatively few alternatives to reduction or denial and his theory claims to circumvent the problem of consciousness’ emergence while nevertheless maintaining a variant of physicalism. He does this by defending a philosophy called panpsychism, which argues that all matter is conscious, or “experiential”, although the intensity or quality of that experientiality will correspond with the complexity and arrangement of the matter. It borders on a modern retelling of animism, but it does resolve the issue of the emergence of consciousness: it can now be deduced from its constituent physical components as all physical matter is simultaneously experiential. The panpsychist wishes to note that emergence, in this sense, is no longer exceptional. One example might be the existence of the property of liquidity, which emerges only when a sufficient number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms are arranged just so. In this case, none of the individual atoms can be said to possess the property of liquidity, and yet in sufficient combination, this property seems to arrive from an ontological nowhere. In the case of liquidity, or countless others, however, we do not find this apparent emergence to be philosophically unsupportable. We can understand a higher-level property such as liquidity as being ultimately deducible from the lower-level properties of the constituent substances. In other words, we can conceive of a computer program which could simulate liquidity given nothing but a full knowledge of the laws of physics and the nature of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. We can conceive of some property of “proto-liquidity” possessed by the atoms, some logical attribute which allows liquidity to explicably emerge. Just so, argues Strawson, with consciousness.
The question becomes, however, can we really conceive of subatomic particles possessing a “proto-consciousness”? Is it equally conceivable to imagine the emergence of conscious experience (e.g. red-ness or sweet-ness) from any properties of inert, physical material no matter how dynamic and complex? We have not the slightest reason to think that the inanimate physical particles of a rock or a table each possess an individual potential for consciousness, and that further each group or division of such particles possess a collective potential for consciousness. With no clear delineation, are we left to believe that at some very basic level, the constituents of self-awareness reside in rocks and tables? The merit of panpsychism may be merely that it at least allows for physicalism to work, but even there, it is only semantically a physicalist philosophy at all. Panpsychism is a capitulation of physicalism rather than its preservation, as the panpsychist by definition defers that consciousness is foundational.
If we are not to accept brain-consciousness, consciousness denial, or panpsychism, where do we turn? Can physicalism be preserved at all? A final nail in the coffin may well be the problem of Boltzmann Brains. Even if physicalism is true, despite our inability to identify a consistent explanation of our observable reality in physicalist terms, physicalism itself predicts its own utter unlikelihood. Physics predicts that it is far more parsimonious, more likely, more Occam-friendly, and least extravagant to assume that only a free-floating brain exists and nothing else. In other words, because brains can produce waking-quality experience during dreaming, which apparently doesn’t require external-to-brain matter, it makes sense that for a statistical distribution of possibilities of matter arrangements, for every brain-in-addition-to-a-universe matter arrangement there must be countless brain-in-a-thermodynamic-soup arrangements according to nothing more than the foundational laws of thermodynamics. While the laws of physics, of course, do not explicitly rule out the possibility of a universe in which both brains and external physical objects exist, they propose that it is exceedingly unlikely that your specific brain is one that’s surrounded by matter which exists in parallel to all of the subjective experiences you’re having (as opposed to the vastly more likely possibility of your brain hanging in the void of space, essentially dreaming).
So, rather than specifically strive to preserve physicalism, let’s instead get to the heart of the matter. We must, as in any good philosophy, first do away with our presumptions and cut straight to the empirical reality of what we actually know. Immediately, the critical philosopher will discover that it is impossible to possess any information about reality which is not experiential and perspectival. This is the antithesis of the consciousness denial argument, the Cartesian fundamental. We know, first and primarily, that our consciousness exists. From here, rather than searching for an explanation for the emergence of consciousness in the world, we are, in fact, searching for an explanation of the world within our consciousness, for our conscious experience and perspective is already a given – and it is the only given, the only absolute certainty. Therefore before we attempt to define the world that exists outside, or external, to our conscious experience, we have to first establish that such a world exists at all…
Originally posted by u/Utthana on 2016-05-10 03:37:30
Part 3
These powerful subjective experiences are widely accounted for by not just personal accounts but also large scholarly studies and correspond precisely with our model of consciousness as being merely “channeled” or “concentrated” by brain states rather than miraculously arising from them. And yet these experiences contradict physicalism so severely that physicalists have developed a disdain for these sorts of experiences entirely, and any mention of out-of-body, psychedelic, or meditative experiences are prone to be met with hostility in academia, seen as perhaps fabricated or conspiratorial in their inability to be worked into a traditionally physicalist worldview. They are, however, precisely in line with the theory of consciousness as an underlying fabric of reality itself, which is precisely in line with our empirical evidence. And this is the case with a variety of phenomena which cannot be so readily dismissed as somehow invalid, such as blindsight (the ability to experience sight despite the absence of sensory input), which becomes far more explicable when our experiences of the world are not limited to their associated sensory and neurological faculties. Most unavoidably of all, dreams, bizarre subjective experiences undoubtedly routinely had by even the most hard-and-fast physicalist, remain inexplicable in physicalism, whereas when seen as the dislocation or dispersion of a concentrated consciousness, dreams become considerably more comprehensible.
We have analyzed most notable renditions of physicalism and have found that, even if we are lenient, it has a habit of self-denial and contradiction. It is undoubtedly fashionable and intuitive, but it crumbles under closer evaluation. When we examine empirical reality, we find only perspectivity, subjectivity, and experientiality – indeed, we cannot even conceive of the smallest, simplest thing without these. Consciousness appears to underlie all reality and all potential reality, and the “world” we experience is a manifestation within consciousness, always and inescapably non-objective. The implications of such a perspective are varied and foreign, and perhaps most daunting is the very real sense in which the objects that arise in our experience, objects which we conventionally think of as being physical and external, are subjective and perspectival. The border between physical objects and ideas becomes much fuzzier. This world, despite its superficial similarities to the physicalist’s world, can differ vastly in its implications, and while many of these implications would require entire papers of their own to explore at length, others can actually be observed and experimented for. Understanding consciousness as an extended capacity does not come naturally or readily and may require the reconsideration of many default, conventional assumptions we have about our world – but when critically analyzed and viscerally digested, it opens doors that physicalism had shut, and others which had been masked entirely. As long as these doors remained closed and physicalism, despite its failings, continues to quietly permeate all of philosophical discourse, our intellectual progress will be unnecessarily constrained and our understanding of reality itself will remain stifled and confused.
Originally posted by u/Utthana on 2016-05-10 03:37:30