| My friend Daniel has sent me some questions/responses related to my recent post on Consciousness and Life. (Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/12/05/consciousness-and-life/). Daniel’s thoughts are in standard type and my attempts to address the issues he raises are in italics. Some thoughts: 1. It may be true that Goff is a “monist,” but it seems a strange description of his position, since he is very much arguing against physicalism–hardly a dualist position. Physicalism, too, isn’t an account “that multiples basic entities.” There is one entity–physical matter, whether it’s a rock, an animal, or a brain within an animal. So I’m confused by the idea that your “pluralist views” coincide with physicalism. I would think the point of physicalism, within the consciousness debate, is to say that there is only one substance. (I know you like the idea of pluralism, but…) The “hard problem” poses a challenge that asks how it is that something that seemingly is without physical substance (a feeling of pain, for instance, or the feeling of a rough fabric touched by a hand) might be, in fact, a physical artifact with a physical location–that is, no different than any other physical substance. As I read Goff, he is deeply committed to monism, which is why he champions “Russellian monism” as his position. Basically, like almost everyone these days who participates in these conversations, Goff is a fervent anti-dualist because he rejects any “extra” non-materialist entity (spirit, soul, whatever). Once he has dismissed dualism, he thinks there are two contenders for a monist account: physicalism and panpsychism. (To be clear, panpsychism is a materialist position; it just bakes in the psychic from the beginning. Matter has a physic component—or, to us Goff’s term, a psychic “aspect.”) He works hard to eliminate physicalism as worthy of belief—and thus to boost his preferred position of panpsychism on the back of physicalism’s flaws. But he also admits panpsychism’s shortcoming, which is why he mostly falls back on “elegance” and ”parsimony” as the reason to prefer panpsychism. And he even comes to accept a tiny bit of “noumenalism” as most likely inevitable, where “noumenalism” means the existence of a “thing in itself” to which human cognition will never have access. (Pages 230-231 in his book, Consciousness and Fundamental Reality.) What I am groping toward is a physicalist pluralism, i.e. a physicalism that is neither monist nor dualist. As I say, I may just have the science entirely wrong—and I also have no doubt that most of the experts in these consciousness debates would find my position out of bounds. More about this is response to point #2. 2. In that sense, yes, a rock and a dog are both made up of the same stuff, even if one is living and one is not. (By the way, it seems that rocks, too, evolve, along with those “living things” you speak of.) I don’t mean to belittle the distinction, but opponents of physicalism are the ones who argue that a dog is different than a rock, not because a dog is alive but because it has consciousness, and consciousness defies physical explanation. Or am I missing something here? What I am trying to deny is exactly the idea that a dog and a rock are made of the same stuff. Here’s my basic idea. BIG BANG: out of that big bang comes a bunch of different stuff. Basically the periodic table. There are hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, iron atoms, gold atoms etc. These atoms are different things; they behave differently and interact with other atoms differently. Since what we get on the ground is a universe composed of many different things—rocks, water, air, plants, animals—it seems odd to assume we started from one thing. Furthermore, evolution precisely results in a wide range of living creatures as different “niches” are exploited by different creatures. William James says of pragmatism: “an attitude or orientation is what the pragmatic method means. The attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories,’ supposed necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts” (29 in Penguin edition of Pragmatism.) And when we look at what’s on the ground now, as opposed to speculating about origins, James asserts: “The world of concrete personal experiences to which the street belongs is multitudinous beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed. The world to which your philosopher introduces you is simple, clean and noble” (15). Philosophers are always trying to clean things up. This is Goff’s “elegance.” But why believe the universe is elegant when all of our experience of it screams that it is not? So I am trying to say 1) why not believe we had many different things from the very beginning and 2) why obsess about origins at all? I’d rather we focused on trying to explain what we have here in front of us right now instead of positing a just so story that claims we got to current multiplicity from some primal unified and monolithic substance. And then we can think about how things present now interact in ways to produce what comes next. So how to get physicalist pluralism? Precisely through the dynamics of evolution for living things and of physics for non-living things. Do we believe that water or salt existed from the very beginning? Or are they products that emerge later through the interactions of basic atoms? Similarly, do we believe life existed from the start? Or does life emerge from interactions of different elements? You can’t get water from one element; you have to have two. So if everything at the beginning is the same stuff, then emergence of water is a mystery. You get an infinite regress here. Because you are going to have to account for the existence of hydrogen and oxygen (also two different things) if you say we start from one basic stuff. Here is where I admit I may have the science totally wrong. But even if I do, there still has to be some account of how new forms appear on the scene. Evolutionary theory goes a long way (although not the whole way) to providing that explanation for new species on the living creatures side. Furthermore, if I am right that consciousness is a feature of living beings, then what the philosophers need to explain is the presence of life, not the presence of consciousness. They should be pan-lifeists, not panpsychists. The emergence of life is much more mysterious than the emergence of consciousness, since once you have life the evolutionists have a pretty compelling account of why consciousness is of benefit to life, to how it would give a living creature an evolutionary advantage. In other words, once you have living creatures, evolution can kick in and its mechanisms account for the growing complexity of life forms. But there is no evolutionary explanation for why life itself emerges. This is not to say that evolution offers a full mechanistic, biochemical explanation of how consciousness emerges. That emergence is lost in the mists of time. But evolutionary theory makes the emergence of consciousness plausible since consciousness serves the basic evolutionary goals of survival and reproduction. Those goals presume the existence of living forms. Evolutionary theory does not help at all in explaining why living forms themselves come into being. The hard problem is identifying the interactions that produce the phenomenon of consciousness and accounting for why those interactions would generate the particular “feelings” or “sensations” or “states of mind” that they do. I am not claiming to solve the hard problem. I am just saying it seems more plausible to me—or, at least, a hypothesis that should be entertained—to say that the physical bases of consciousness are interactions between different elements rather than manifestations of one basic stuff. To my mind, the interactional thesis better captures the dynamism that characterizes a universe in which life and consciousness did not always exist—and a universe in which life and consciousness (through evolution) are still in the process of emerging, with old forms dying out and new forms coming on the scene (as well as less holistic changes within specific forms.) 3. You probably know it, but I think that you’re forced to include plants in what you’re saying, if “consciousness is a tool for evaluation”; they, too, like any other living thing, “evaluate possible courses of action in response to…circumstances,” no? They certainly seem different, in your sense, from rocks. Happy to include plants. The problem here, it seems to me, is one that I have been surprised to find gets little attention in all these books we have read. Namely, the line between instinct (or automatic stimulus/response) and consciousness. All living creatures, plants very much included, respond to their environment. Therefore, they must have a way of taking in information about the environment and of altering behavior in relation to that information. Consciousness is, I think, an obvious way of assessing incoming information and evaluating what behavior is best suited to the circumstances. But it seems that instinct does the same work without going through the experience of consciousness. My sense is that all the current research in animal studies and even plants (the book How Trees Think has been a path-breaker here) has pretty consistently lessened the terrain governed by instinct while expanding the domain of consciousness. Still, there does seem to be something we can call instinct that is different from consciousness. The newborn “knows” how to suck at the mother’s breast. That seems instinctual, as does breathing. In short, I’d love to see a convincing account of (what I suspect is) the continuum from instinct all the way up to full self-consciousness. I think (although here, again, I could be horribly wrong) that consciousness comes in degrees, with pure instinct at one end of the spectrum but with nothing definitive at the other end. I certainly don’t want to say the form of consciousness that seems typical of humans is “full” (the be all and end all) and therefore marks the other end of the spectrum. Rather, at that other end, we find (I think) a variety of forms of consciousness, each (in most cases) evolutionary adequate for the creatures who have that form. Evolution is not flawless, but we can say that it tends to provide for each creature the consciousness it needs to survive and to reproduce. What sends living creatures to extinction is drastic changes in the environment—new predators/competitors and altered basic conditions—not the failure of current capacities to survive if the environment holds constant (which it never does over the long haul—or even the short haul in some cases). 4. When you say that “consciousness is not an illusion,” I think you may be referring to Illusionism–I’m thinking of Daniel Dennett and Keith Frankish. In that odd philosophical way, there is a little consequence to illusionism one way or the other; we continue to feel things exactly the same, whether or not our qualia or feels are real or not. So I would think you’d find it a more interesting theory, if only because it (a) gets rid of the hard problem (okay, perhaps too easily), and (b) counters Goff’s anti-physicalist arguments. Frankish is especially bullish on the idea of generating new research projects on the brain; the “illusion” seems to be, from his point of view, simply another name for a process in the brain whereby we fool ourselves (probably for good reason, but certainly in keeping with other ways we respond to, say, optical illusions.) He is thoroughly a physicalist. Yeah. The physicalists’ task is pretty straightforward. They need to get the experimental results that show the physical processes that produce consciousness and connect those physical processes to the “feel,” the phenomenology of consciousness. I am of the camp that says this is theoretically possible. I am only saying 1) I think working from the various physical elements involved in these processes is much more likely to produce results than thinking there is some sort of primal stuff that explains things and 2) that the phenomenology will also prove to be a product of those processes, not some illusion. (In fact, I am confused by the very notion of illusion. If the processes produce the illusion, then how is the illusion somehow not real? It’s a real product of an actual physical process. I need to read more about illusionism to overcome this basic misunderstanding of what distinguishes an illusion from something “real”.) In short, I am betting on bio-chemistry as “the answer,” even as I admit an answer seems very far from being reached right now. |
5. I do agree with you that a biological approach is missing in Goff’s view, and I wonder whether this sort of approach amounts to a “functionalist” account of consciousness. (I’m out of my league here.) The point would be, as you suggest, that consciousness is very useful, for any number of reasons, and likely the result of animal evolution. Though I find myself uncomfortable with the idea of evolution having a teleology. There’s a long history of seeing evolution as having some purpose (in its worst version, a divine design, or, just as bad, the goal of humankind as its epitome); I realize that this is not your intent, but I wonder if it’s even necessary to explain the “emergence” of consciousness by some sort of pull of nature. There is a lot of controversy about teleology in respect to both Darwin and subsequent evolutionary theory. (See, for example, John Reiss’s Not By Design, a detailed and historical argument against any teleological understanding of evolution.)
Yes, evolution acts blindly; it does not have any “purpose.” But, of course, we almost inevitably end up talking about it as having agency. The very term “natural selection” is agency-laden. To “select” is an act—and “nature” is proposed as the agent. Personifying evolution is a bad habit that just about everyone finds difficult (close to impossible) to avoid. That’s because evolution produces things and we (by virtue of grammar Nietzsche would say) connect production to agency. The product is the noun and the action that produced it is the verb.
And, yes, using the term “teleological” only increases the chances of mistaking evolution for some kind of intention-guided agent. But the field of evolutionary studies, especially the writers focusing on consciousness, appear to have decided that “teleological” is the term they are going to use when speaking of evolutionary causes. I assume this choice of terminology comes from relying on Aristotle’s famous—and still canonical—account of causation.
I do think, and here is where we may fundamentally disagree, that the basic point is still valid: an evolutionary cause is not a mechanical, efficient (in Aristotle’s use of that term) cause. How so? What is a cause? A cause is a force that makes something happen in the world. An efficient cause requires an interaction between the cause and the effect. Causation, in this case, is direct. The cause acts upon something and brings about a change (the effect) in the thing acted upon. The water is spilled and the tablecloth gets wet.
An evolutionary cause does not act that way. It is indirect. The efficient cause in evolution is genetic mutation (another source of pluralism, by the way, even as its randomness drains any “purpose” from its generation of effects). But the evolutionary cause is the “fitness” of that mutation for an organism living in a specific environment. So an evolutionary cause has these multiple elements: a living organism embedded in a specific environment, a genetic mutation, a competition for resources required for life and reproduction within that environment, and an environment complex enough to have different “niches” so that multiple species can co-exist. With those elements in place, evolution “selects” for the features of an organism that give it a better chance to survive and reproduce.
What the theorists I reference (Deacon and Solms) do is take this high-level evolutionary cause and bring it into the organism itself. Living creatures become increasingly complex as evolutionary history unfolds. Thus, animals have digestive systems, hearts (blood circulation), lungs (oxygen intake), reproductive systems, and more as well as consciousness. These various systems are regulated (governed) in terms of the needs of the organism as a whole. They are not free agents, but subordinated to the primary evolutionary goal: survival and reproduction. Hence the argument for top-down causation attuned to an end result. The coordination of the various parts of a complex organism cannot be explained solely by efficient causes. That’s the argument.
Is this functionalism? Yes. Darwinian theory is adamantly functionalist. And there have been various ways to try to wriggle out from under what might be called “vulgar functionalism” or what some writers have called “Darwinian fundamentalism.” Basically, vulgar functionalism claims that every instance of animal behavior must be understood as advancing the primary evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction. Hence, baseball must be understood in terms of its helping its players find a mate.
The most common way people (Stephen Gould is a major source here) try to sidestep Darwinian fundamentalism is to say that certain capacities (like the hand/eye coordination that helps someone be a skilled baseball player) evolve in relation to the Darwinian imperatives, but then these capacities are put to uses in ways unconnected to those imperatives. In short, this is a surplus theory. It does not take all our energy and time to fulfill our Darwinian needs, so we use our spare energy and time to do things that our evolved capacities make possible. Needless to say, this solution has not pleased everyone. Plenty of people want to be able to introduce some other fundamental motives into animal existence than just the two Darwinian ones.
Finally, rocks. My life/non-life dualism amounts, I think to saying that efficient causes are sufficient to explain the changes time brings to non-living things. Rocks are not subject to evolutionary causes. Geology has no need or uses for teleological or Darwinian causes. Rocks are not selected in relation to criteria of fitness. Biology is the science that attends to living things, which is why physics and geology are not the right place to go when considering questions about consciousness (if I am right that consciousness is confined to living things). Yes, rocks change over time, but not as a result of evolution; only as a result of brute, mechanical causes.
6. Still, I think we can make general observations about the usefulness or function of consciousness: If I reach for the pan on the stove, I will feel the presence of heat and think twice about grabbing it barehanded. The feel of heat is mine, an instance of consciousness. This feel doesn’t seem like a physical thing; and as skeptics of physicalism point out, it’s not as though you’re going to cut into my brain and find that feel (though you might find the neural correlates). For some reason, none of this seems to trouble me (at least not today). I have a sense that the feel is a function of my brain; or it may be function of my brain in coordination with networks associated with other parts of my body; but one way or the other, it’s related to my physical body. Or, again, it may be a less a thing–what I’ve been referring to as a “feel”–than an illusion my brain creates. No difference.
McGowanBlog 