Author: john mcgowan

Consciousness and Life: Response and Clarification

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.

Percept/Concept 2

I wrote a post sometime back that tried to sort out the relation between percepts and concepts.

Here’s the link to that post: https://jzmcgowan.com/2024/03/13/percept-concept/

The issue in that post was the relation of percepts (information taken in via the five senses) to concepts (the categories by which we identify what a percept has given to us). Mostly (although not entirely) that post assumes that the percept comes first, followed by the judgment (assignment) of the appropriate concept. The puzzle, in part, was that this kind of temporal sequencing is not experienced in most cases. The percept and the concept arrive together. I see a tree. I don’t see some amorphous set of sense impressions and then decide they form a tree. The percept comes already conceptualized, categorized.

There are cases where percept and concept are pried apart. And many artists, especially since the Romantics, strive hard to separate the two, to overcome our habitual associations and expectations. To break the crust of habit, the received categorizations of culture, is one of their top artistic goals. Thus, “difficult” poetry strives to slow the reader down, to use words in unfamiliar ways so we have to puzzle out the meaning instead of simply swallowing it at one gulp. The same for many modern paintings or music. A moment of confusion, of disorientation, is deliberately created.

However, according to what has become the reigning orthodoxy in current consciousness studies, I was working with the wrong model of perception. The new orthodoxy says 1) percept and concept cannot be pried apart, but even more consequently, 2) that concept always precedes percept. Here’s is Andy Clark’s description of the current consensus: “the world we experience is to some degree the world we predict. Perception itself, far from being a simple window onto the world, is permeated from the get-go by our own predictions and expectations. It is permeated not simply in the sense that our own ideas and biases impact how we later judge things to be, but in some deeper, more primal, sense. The perceptual process, the very machinery that keeps us in contact with the world, is itself fueled by a rich seam of prediction and expectation” (The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality, Pantheon Books, 2023, p. 17). “Every time we make sense of our worlds through perceptual encounters, we do so by means of both the incoming sensory signals and a rich invisible stream of knowledge-based predictions” (22).

This vision does seem very close to the classic pragmatism of Peirce and William James. We move through the world in a kind of semi-somnolent habitual gliding. Not closely attending, we walk, see trees, eat food, carry on conversations that move along predictable paths. In the ordinary course of events, very little surprises us, brings us up short. All unfolds almost entirely as expected. It takes pretty dramatic deviations from the expected to break through, to make us question what we have casually assumed to be the case. Inquiry (in the pragmatist parlance) begins from doubt. We must set about trying to figure out what we have seen, what is happening, when things don’t go as expected.

Andy Clark is sunnily optimistic about all this. But it is easy to see how it could be given a pessimistic spin, as a writer like Flaubert (with his fierce hatred of received ideas) does. That we process the world through our expectations explains confirmation bias and our bog-stupid inability to alter our expectations and prejudices (this latter word the exactly precise one for this state of affairs) in light of new evidence, new percepts. We quite literally do not see what is in front of us; we see what we expect to see.

In Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he reports on an experiment in which the subjects are shown playing cards. The trick is that the cards have the spades and clubs colored red, and the hearts and diamonds colored black. Over 80% of the subjects will identify a 6 with black hearts as either a 6 of hearts or a 6 of spades. Less than 20% will say: that’s a six with black hearts. And increasing the time subjects were given to view the cards did not substantially change the results. We look at something quickly, make our judgment of what it is, and move on. Anomalies are hard for us to see.

Of course, it is hopeful that a certain percentage do recognize that something is awry, that what perception is offering does not match what was expected/predicted. Clark sees humans as self-correcting animals, adjusting their judgments as we go along. His model is basically one in which “errors” in prediction are registered—and then serve to alter expectations.

Clark’s reliance on a virtuous feedback loop becomes clear when he turns to an account of action. (Again, his account chimes with classic pragmatism.) “[S]uccessful action involves a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Predicting the detailed sensory effects of a movement is what causes the movement to unfold. By making prediction the common root of both perception and action, predictive processing (active inference) reveals a hidden unity in the workings of the mind. Action and perception form a single whole, jointly orchestrated by the drive to eliminate errors in prediction. . . . In other words, the idea of a completed action is what brings the actual action about” (70-71). We are guided by our vision of consequences; we then act to bring the desired consequences about.

The feedback loop comes into play in terms of what Clark calls “precision weightings.” “Various estimates of precision alter patterns of post-synaptic influence and so determine what (right here, right now) to rely on and what to ignore. This is also the way brains balance the influence of sensory evidence against predictions. In other words, precision variations control what bits of what we know and what we sense will be most influential, moment by moment, in bringing about further processing and actions. Expressed like that, the intimacy of precision and attention is apparent. Precision variation is what attention (a useful but somewhat nebulous concept) really is. . . . [A]ttention is the brain adjusting its precision-weightings as we go about our daily tasks, using knowledge and sensing to their best effect. By attending correctly, I become better able to spot and respond to whatever matters most for the task I am trying to perform. Precision estimation is thus the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence” (50).

Although he doesn’t say this, Clark has here added “purposes” to expectations and predictions. We attend to (notice) the elements of a situation relevant to our current purposes. And we adjust our understanding of those situational elements (attain more precise readings of the situation) in response to the feedback received as our purposes are attained or thwarted. So the senses (perceptions) do have their role to play; they do provide information about the situation. But what information is taken in and how it is processed (evaluated) is guided by the prior purposes/expectations.

Clark invokes William James briefly at this point—and accepts that this account reverses common-sense notions of the causal sequence: i.e. that we see something first, then act upon it; here, by contrast, we see something by virtue of the fact that we are looking for it in relation to our purposes/expectations. Attention is influenced more by what we expect to see or are specifically looking for than by what is actually present in the world we encounter. But the ability to shift attention, to move toward a more precise apprehension of the actual situation is “the heart and soul of flexible, fluid intelligence.”

A corollary of this view is that situations, in almost all cases, contain more elements than any perceiver/agent takes in. Attention is selective; we simply do not see what is neither expected nor relevant to our purposes. William James constantly stressed this “more”: the fact that our knowledge is almost always incomplete. Again, it does seem that many artists are dedicated to bringing more of a situation into view–or, at least, at bringing what has not been seen, what had been neglected by common sense (a loaded term), to our attention.

Clark does not take up the issue of just what is required to break through the crust of expectations. He only briefly considers the problems of entrenched prejudices, of failures to apprehend the real—or even the problem of bad judgments about the actual affordances of a particular situation. He does talk of “disordered attention” (51) and “aberrant attention” (52) and considers clinical ways of intervening to redirect attention in such cases. To my mind, however, he is over-optimistic about the ability to shift our incoming biases.

Clark also takes a very individualistic stance on the nature of our preconceptions and expectations. He sees them as the product of individual experience much more than of socialization (however you want to conceive of the process by which individuals are provided with a set of cultural expectations and beliefs.) And he doesn’t address the problem of the loss of flexibility as one ages. At what point are the individual’s expectations hardened to the point where they are very hard to revise, to un-fix.

So I have posed two questions: 1) how strong does the disconfirmation of expectations have to be to actually break through and garner attention? What kinds of shocks actually move us to doubt and inquiry (as conceived in the pragmatist model)? And 2) at what age are expectations mostly entrenched and thus resistant to revision? An open mind is a wonderful thing in part because it is so rare.

And just as open minds are rare, so are true idiosyncratic individuals. There is no reason to deny individual variations, but behavior and beliefs also, to a very large extent, clump. We are all strongly influenced by our closest fellow humans, adopting their styles, beliefs, values, habits etc.

William James famously wrote “the trail of the human serpent is over all.” I will admit that acknowledging the conceptual overlay through which all perceptions are processed depresses me. I am enough of a Romantic that I want, along with William Blake, to throw open the doors of perception. I don’t deny that the available evidence speaks strongly in favor of the new orthodoxy about how we process the world. I just want to be among the twenty percent who see red spades.

Consciousness and Life

I have now read about 15 books on consciousness. The most recent was Phillip Goff’s Consciousness and Fundamental Reality (Oxford UP, 2023 paperback; originally published in 2017). A very bad book, easily the worst of all the ones I have read on this topic. But, as often happens with bad books, it spurred my thinking wonderfully, since it clarified what I am willing to believe about consciousness and what speculations I find incredible (in the literal meaning of that word, i.e. something I cannot judge worthy of belief).

Goff is a panpsychist—and goes through a torturous path of posited axioms and piled up distinctions (cutting the bologna thinner and thinner, as a colleague of mine used to put it) to make his case. Monotheism has much to answer for. Basically, Goff is striving to be a monist because monism is more “elegant,” more parsimonious, as a theory than any account that multiplies basic entities.

His book just confirmed me in my pluralist views. And pushed me further toward materialism (or what in consciousness studies often gets called “physicalism.) I am, no doubt, ill informed about the basic science here. But I will venture to guess that one of Goff’s major problems is that he takes physics as the fundamental science relevant to his metaphysical project—a project defined by the attempt to identify the “deep nature” of “fundamental reality.” Goff is a believer in substance—and he ends up in a recognizably Spinoza-like place (although he only mentions Spinoza once in his book.) There is only one substance, but it manifests itself in different aspects (Spinoza’s modes) for Goff. And since one of Goff’s axioms is that consciousness self-evidently exists, then the single substance must have some rudimentary consciousness (although he does affirm that consciousness comes in more or less elaborated forms). In his most recent book, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2023), Goff substitutes “the cosmos” for God, with what only seems to me a sliver of difference between the two even as he denies belief in God. (I base this on a podcast interview with Goff; I have not read the new book.) You can access the podcast interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHFzS8MIhK0

Enough of Goff. What do I now believe? I buy Goff’s insistence that the existence of consciousness is self-evident. Consciousness is not an illusion; the phenomenon of experiencing consciousness needs to be accepted as evidence of its reality—and thus any metaphysical account of “what is” must include consciousness.

From there, accounting for the existence of consciousness leads into the question of whether it is something very different from the things that do not appear to possess consciousness. Just about everyone out there right now hates dualism; they don’t want a metaphysical account that ends up with two radically different fundamental things: consciousness and non-consciousness. So the alternatives seem to become: 1) reduction of consciousness to matter and its processes (physicalism) or 2) panpsychism (baking consciousness into matter from the very start).

On the face of it, neither alternative is very attractive. For the physicalist, the problem is that the actual physical processes by which you get from bio-chemical interactions to consciousness continue to elude us (despite assurances that date back to the 17^th century that the connection will someday be uncovered). For the panpsychist, the problem is that basic matter—stones, not to mention atoms and electrons, do not demonstrate any of the features of consciousness. So on what basis do you claim that consciousness is somehow present in such instances of matter?

Let me start from what may be a huge misunderstanding on my part. Still: as I understand it, when we go to the periodic table of elements, we get a plurality of instances of matter that we could say are structured the same (i.e. however you characterize atomic structure) but which are different. A gold atom is not a hydrogen atom. And a gold atom will interact differently with an oxygen atom than a hydrogen atom will. So that seems to me to argue against the notion of a fundamental sameness, a monism, at the bottom of the manifested world. Instead, we begin from a variety of things that then interact in ways that produce further variety. Scientific laws may delineate the forms that interactions typically take—but the actual outcomes of interactions depend on which elements are interacting. Furthermore, modern science (again as I understand it—and I could well be wrong) usually works with probabilities, not certainties. Interactions do not always produce the same results. There is a considerable dose of leeway, even if science can fairly accurately (over a range of cases) predict the probability of one outcome over other possible ones. All of this, to my mind, suggests neither monism, not dualism, but pluralism.

But let’s leave physics behind. I think it’s a big mistake on Goff’s part to take physics as the place to land in any attempt to account for consciousness or for fundamental reality. As I see it, biology over the past fifty years has replaced physics as the science most likely to get us to the root of things. What is most striking to me about Goff’s book is the failure to link consciousness to life. I much prefer the various thinkers—Daniel Dennett (Freedom Evolves, Penguin,2004), Nicholas Humphrey [Sentience: The Invention of Consciousness, MIT Press, 2023), Kevin Mitchell (Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, Princeton UP, 2023)—who approach consciousness through an evolutionary lens.

What does that mean? A lot of things. So let me list them here—and then try to discuss each of these items in turn. 1) Consciousness should be considered in relation to the ways it furthers an organism’s ability to survive and to produce descendants. 2) Consciousness should be considered within an evolutionary timeframe. It is not static, but something that changes over time. There is no reason to expect that it always existed (just as human beings did not always exist) and there is no reason to think it is not always in process. Adaptation, mutation, and change never stop. 3) The crucial category for thinking about the fundamental nature of things is “life,” not atomic or sub-atomic structure or some version of quantum mechanics. In short, biology leads us from a “substantialist” way of approaching metaphysical questions to a dynamic, process-focused way of addressing such questions. There is not some fundamental “stuff,” but a dynamic unfolding as “stuff” interacts and is transformed over time.

OK. Let me tackle each of these issues in turn. First, an evolutionary perspective on consciousness. I am mostly following Kevin Mitchell here. Basically, consciousness is a tool for evaluation. A living organism must evaluate its circumstances (what are threats, what are opportunities, what are the affordances) and must evaluate possible courses of action in response to those circumstances (which actions are most likely to be effective, require more of less expenditure of energy, have the least harmful side effects etc.) Self-consciousness is a way of evaluating what we can term the “internal environment.” How am I feeling, what do I want? Since circumstances change in a non-static world, the advantage of having the flexibility consciousness provides is a very valuable evolutionary advantage. Automatic stimulus/response mechanisms cannot adapt to different situations with the subtlety that consciousness affords.

On another level of explanation, the evolutionary view seems to entail accepting a dualist understanding of causation. Harkening back to Aristotle, the mechanistic efficient causation of physics now needs to be supplemented with a teleological causation acting at the level of the whole. Basically, the idea is that efficient causation is from the bottom-up, parts interacting to create something new. (That something new may, at times, be something larger, the product of a merger of the parts. But that is only one possibility; efficient causes can produce any number of effects.) A teleological cause is from the top-down. The whole has purposes that cause certain behavior in the parts. In evolutionary terms, the organism has an overriding purpose (survival and reproduction) that then causes the selection of certain capacities (sight, consciousness) that serve that purpose. In the most basic terms, the organism must work against entropy, must expend energy to keep its complex systems functioning, must defy the 2^nd law of thermodynamics. Mitchell touches to some extent on this insistence that efficient cause does not rule the entire roost, but to get the full blown rewriting of our theories of causation to serve an evolutionary account of consciousness, you need to go to Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (Norton, 2013) and Mark Solms, The Hidden Spring: A Journey to the Source of Consciousness (Norton, 2021). Their work leads to a cybernetic understanding of consciousness and its function within an information-processing model of living organisms. I do not claim to comprehend this model is all its intricacies, but the basic need to establish the credibility of a non-mechanistic form of causality is clear enough.

My second issue—the non-static, dynamic nature of evolutionary time is less complex. The big point here, for me, is that we hardly need (as the panpsychist insists) to have the psychic baked in from the very start. Things emerge over the long, long time spans of evolution; why should it be impossible that consciousness emerges? Improbable, yes. But impossible, no. If there are evolutionary good reasons for consciousness to emerge, then there are forces to work to make that happen. The real improbability is that life itself emerges. Once life does emerge, the emergence of consciousness is less hard to understand since consciousness delivers such substantial advantages for adaptation, survival, and reproduction. In terms or metaphysics, accepting a dynamic and long time frame moves us away from trying to identify basic entities that are there from start to finish. New interactions of pre-existing elements create new things.

So my third issue: life as the crucial category. I think that here I am going to get pushed into something that looks like, most likely is, dualism. But Goff’s book got me thinking about how intimately connected consciousness and life are—and how this intimate connection has not been explicitly addressed in the various books I have read. Here’s what I mean: consciousness is something only living creatures have. A stone is not conscious. But what is a living creature? A stab at a basic definition: a living creature is one that must take in fuel of some sort that it metabolizes to provide the energy required to keep certain life-sustaining processes going. Digestion, consciousness, blood circulation, fighting off infections are just some of these life-sustaining processes. And, crucially, a living creature can be defined as one that can die. To die is to have those various processes come to an end. No more seeking for and then ingesting fuel, no more feeling hungry, no more devising strategies for allaying hunger.

So the dualism seems to be between something that is alive and something that is not. And it seems as if alive things have consciousness and non-alive things do not. Furthermore, things that were once alive can stop being alive; they die and when they die they lose consciousness. All of which suggests to me that consciousness is produced by bio-chemical processes that require energy to occur and, since these processes can go awry in ways that do not sustain life but cause death instead, that the teleology of “life” must organize the multiple processes embodied in a living organism as it tries to ward off death. Consciousness is just one of those processes—and even if it is more mysterious to us than the digestive system, there seems no reason to believe it is different in kind. Hence my physicalism.

But I am still left with a dualism between the living and the non-living. Another way to express that dualism is to say that the processes of geology are also dynamic and non-static, but they are not processes in which natural selection (as understood by evolutionary theory) plays any role at all. Continental drift has nothing to do with adaptation and, thus (if my thinking hasn’t gotten utterly confused at this point), can be seen as solely an outcome of efficient causes, with no involvement of teleological causes.

I will end here. What I have said here does nothing to address the marvels and mysteries of the phenomenological experience of consciousness. Not surprisingly, as a literary person, the phenomenology is in many ways more interesting to me. How different living creatures think and feel is fascinating. We never cease to be surprised at how differently different creatures evaluate what appears to be the same situation. Except, of course, different creatures actually notice different aspects of that situation; different things are salient for them, attract their attention. And that doesn’t even consider different desires. But I don’t know that I have yet found a good way to even begin to sort out the complexities here. I think we need a book titled The Varieties of Conscious Experience—a deliberate echo of William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.

Power, Self-Respect, and Remorse

I have been finding it very hard lately to read any novels from start to finish. I begin five novels for every one that I actually complete. Most things I pick up to read strike me as thin in any number of ways: in character development, in linguistic texture, or just jejune in their portrayal of human motives and emotions. I can recommend The Known World by Edward Jones, a book I think is an absolute masterpiece. Jones imagines a whole world out of whole cloth, and presents it in an intricate tapestry of fragmented events spread over five or six years time. The writing is spare, but that heightens its impact. He has a terrible story to tell, but the artistic mastery is exhilarating. Especially when there are so many bad novels out there.

I just finished reading The Noise of Time, a 2016 novel by Julian Barnes. It is a fictional retelling of the life and career of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. I have, in the past, found Barnes’ work fey at times, but I do get to the end of his novels (of which I have read maybe three or four.) I picked up this one at the public library out of despair, needing to find something, anything, that I would actually read to the end.

What a pleasant surprise then to find it one of the best things I have read in ages. The basic conceit of the novel centers around the compromises Shostakovich has to make to stay alive in the murderous world of Stalin and then Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. The novel is a meditation on Power (always capitalized in the novel) and the demands it makes upon those over whom it holds dominion. In some sense, it is pure Hegelian master/slave. Power can—and will—kill you. So what will you do to stay alive? And if you do manage to do what’s necessary to stay alive, Power will have shredded any and all threads of self-respect. You will have groveled, lied, betrayed others as well as yourself, and have proved to yourself and all observers your abject cowardice. Even all that self-abasement may not be enough. Power is fickle and may choose to execute you anyway at any moment when it no longer deems you useful to its ends—or when its paranoia sends it on one of its periodic killing sprees.

The idea that Power craves dominion, that it feasts upon demonstrating to its underlings their submission, comes through loud and clear in the novel. And can only make one think of Trump and his need to publicly humiliate his underlings. The latest example is making RFK Jr. eat McDonald’s burgers.

One source of Power’s power (so to speak) is its total lack of conscience, its complete inability (refusal?) to feel remorse, its disconnect between self-respect and any assessment of its own deeds. Maybe this is wrong; maybe Power walks in deluded self-righteousness, truly believing in the evil of its enemies and the beneficence of its own actions. Power, of course, feeds on the production of enemy lists just as much as it feeds on the abjection of its underlings. In any case, Barnes’ Shostakovich thinks that conscience and remorse did once hold some sway in human affairs. Think of Henry IV in the Shakespeare plays, haunted by his crime against his lawful sovereign Richard, whom Henry drove from the throne and then killed. But, Shostakovich thinks, such is no longer the case.

“He had judged [Shakespeare] sentimental because his tyrants suffered guilt, bad dreams, remorse. Now that he had seen more of life, and been defeated by the noise of time, he thought it likely that Shakespeare had been right, had been truthful: but only for his own times. In the world’s younger days, when magic and religion held sway, it was plausible that monsters might have consciences. Not anymore. The world had moved on, become more scientific, more practical, less under the sway of old superstitions. And tyrants had moved on as well. Perhaps conscience no longer had an evolutionary function, and so had been bred out. Penetrate beneath the modern tyrant’s skin, go down layer after layer, and you will find that the texture does not change, that granite encloses yet more granite; and there is no cave of conscience to be found” (178-79).

I don’t credit the analysis; there is no evidence at all that a religious world is more moral than an irreligious one. The barbarities of past history should put that notion to rest. But that leaves us with the mystery. The victim of crime is more haunted, more susceptible to self-questioning and self-collapse, than the perpetrator. The raped is undone; not so much the rapist. The total lack of conscience, of any portion of self-respect being tied to acting in good faith or with generosity or with kindness, comes to seem a source of power’s power, not a defect from which it will suffer. As Edmund in King Lear puts it, the very credulousness of the good, along with their desire to actually be good, makes them easier targets for the fully and cheerfully unscrupulous. There are no limits tyranny will not transgress.

That still leaves us the question of why others go along. Fear of death, certainly, in the most extreme instance. And once tyranny is established, fear of other less dire consequences for resisting: prison, loss of livelihood, loss of wealth. Ducking one’s head and trying to live out of power’s notice will be the strategy adopted by many. But why enable power to gain its seat in the first place? Why the cult of the strong, even abusive, leader?

When I was still teaching, I would ask my students how many of them had experienced a sports coach yelling at them. Now that girls are almost as likely to have participated in sports as boys, it was usually 75% of my students who had had that experience. And, almost to a person, they would defend the coach’s yelling, even his (or her; although it was much less frequently a her) humiliating a particular person in front of the whole group. The coach’s actions showed he cared, they’d say—and then claim the yelling did produce better play from the team. So, I would then ask, you want me to yell at you, to show I care, and as a good way to get better results from you? No, they didn’t want teachers who yelled or humiliated students as part of their pedagogy. But they were hard put to explain why such behavior was OK for the sports coach, but not for the teacher. Or why they hated the few teachers who had deployed such tactics while admiring the coaches who did similar things.

Barnes considers the admiration for tyrants by having Shostakovich think not of sports coaches, but of orchestra conductors, especially the notorious, but much lauded, Toscanini.

“Such conductors screamed and cursed at orchestras, made scenes, threatened to sack the principal clarinet for coming in late. And the orchestra, compelled to put up with it, responded by telling stories behind the conductor’s back—stories that made him out to be a ‘real character.’ Then they came to believe what this emperor of the baton himself believed: that they were only playing well because they were being whipped. They huddled together in a masochistic herd, occasionally dropping an ironic remark to one another, but essentially admiring their leader for his nobility and idealism, his sense of purpose, his ability to see more widely than those who just scraped and blew behind their desks. The maestro, harsh though he might of necessity be from time to time, was a great leader who must be followed. Now, who would still deny that an orchestra was a microcosm of society?” (87).

Irony, the novel makes abundantly clear, is pitifully inadequate response to tyranny. Yes, while trying to keep your head low, you will try to salvage some self-respect by only offering your assent ironically. You always reserve to yourself the knowledge that you see through them, and don’t assent in the deepest recesses of your soul. But not only is irony totally ineffective, accomplishing nothing, but you can only trick yourself for so long if you are one of the unfortunates who truly values self-respect. It won’t take much to recognize how cheap irony is, how pathetic a dodge.

“And irony has its limits. For instance, you could not be an ironic torturer; or an ironic victim of torture. Equally, you could not join the Party ironically. You could join the Party honestly, or you could join it cynically; those were the only two possibilities. And to an outsider, it might not matter which was the case, because both might seem contemptible. . . . If you turned your back on irony, it curdled into sarcasm. And what good was it then? Sarcasm was irony that had lost its soul” (190-91).

John Quiggan, the Australian economist and blogger, tells us Trump will be a dictator. (Find his short post here: https://crookedtimber.org/2024/11/19/trumps-dictatorship-is-a-fait-accompli/#comments)

Right now, in the brief interlude before Trump takes office, the Americans I talk to are fearful, but don’t really believe that full-blown tyranny is our future. We might very well be sleep walking; Quiggan may be right. And then we will have to learn the awful expedients to which one resorts to in order to live under tyranny—and learn just how much self-respect each of us is willing to sacrifice to insure survival.