Is causal closure evidence for panpsychism?

Conversation
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Epiphenomenalism is the view that (1) physical events exert causal influence on mental events, but (2) mental events do not exert causal influence on physical events.

Pro
The primary argument in favor of epiphenomenalism comes from the mountains of evidence we have about the behavior of matter down to the level of subatomic particles, as summarized in the standard model and general relativity (forget about dark matter, dark energy, etc. for now). Given this evidence, some conclude it is unlikely that mental events could also be affecting the behavior of matter without our having noticed this in experiments.

There are two primary responses to this argument: First, most of our evidence here comes from observing ostensibly unconscious matter, and not e.g. living brain tissue. Second, if panpsychism is true, we would not expect to observe differences between the behavior of conscious matter and unconscious matter, since on panpsychism it’s just all conscious.

Con
The primary argument against epiphenomenalism comes from an apparent correlation between mental states and adaptive behaviors that seems tricky to explain without at least some causal arrows running from mental to physical. For example, our experience of unpleasant mental events like hunger, thirst, pain, and fear tends to be followed by adaptive physical behavior like eating food, drinking water, and avoiding damaging stimuli. Options for explaining this correlation include some combination of (a) mental events causally contributing to the physical behavior, (b) the physical behavior causally contributing to the mental events, or (c) some third factor causally affecting both. However, if (b) or (c) were the sole explanations, it’s difficult to see why the correlation exists at all - any old mental events will do so long as the right behavior occurs, so the connection seems arbitrary. Thus, it seems that (a) has to be at least part of the explanation for the correlation.

(For clarity, there are obviously plenty of cases where physical events causally influence physical behavior while the subject has the illusion that mental events are causing the behavior - e.g. split brain patients rationalizing why they moved their left hand. That’s not under dispute. What’s under dispute is whether such physical events account for 100% of the causal factors contributing to the physical behavior.)

There are two primary responses to this argument: First, some try to challenge whether the correlation actually exists. For example, hunger may also be followed by maladaptive behavior (overeating leading to obesity). I tend not to buy this response, though. For example, in this particular case at least it seems that there really was a correlation between hunger and adaptive behavior over most of human history, and that it is only in recent times when food was plenty that the correlation became muddled because selection forces have not had enough time to adequately address the overeating problem. Second, some would point out that the arbitrariness problem lodged against (b) and (c) above as sole explanations could also be levied against mental causation. That is, it seems like a surprising coincidence that the psychophysical laws are such that negative mental events would cause adaptive behavior. However, this doesn’t seem to solve the arbitrariness problem lodged against epiphenomenalism, but rather just shows that there is a second problem that needs to be solved by the anti-epiphenomenalist.

Taking all this into consideration, I tend to believe that epiphenomenalism is false with moderate confidence. It’s hard to find hard data on this, but anecdotally it seems that this is the majority opinion of philosophers of mind (although not anywhere close to a consensus).

Prompt
With all that in the background, here’s my challenge for discussion: If it’s really true that (A) all matter follows the behavior set forth in the standard model and general relativity (“causal closure”), and (B) epiphenomenalism is false for the reasons discussed above (“anti-epiphenomenalism”), that seems to constitute evidence for panpsychism.

In other words, if at least some physical events are causally affected by consciousness, we would expect conscious matter to behave differently from unconscious matter. If we then observe that all matter behaves the same (although granted it may be difficult to do that due to practical limits and eventually the perennially-annoying Heisenberg), that seems to constitute evidence that all matter is conscious.

To be extremely clear, I am using “evidence” here the way that epistemologists do, meaning anything that is probability-increasing with respect to a proposition. I’m not claiming anything like mathematical proof or hard scientific evidence that demands a consensus. Rather, it simply seems that if (A) and (B) are true, that should meaningfully increase our Bayesian posterior.

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I have problems with the question. What are “mental events” as distinct from physical events? What if mental events are physical events, more or less the opposite of panpsychism? Second, whatever is “conscious matter”? It sounds like referring to matter that makes up a toaster as “toaster matter”. But toaster matter is the same as other matter; it just happens to be organized into a toaster. So conscious matter is matter that happens to be organized into a conscious mind. I suppose that unconcious matter is matter that isn’t so organized.

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Okay, but what is the reason for thinking all matter is conscious in the first place? There just isn’t any amount of our not understanding why brains (or other forms of information processing hardware) are conscious that makes it more expected that the fundamental constituents of matter should be thought to be conscious.

I just can’t shake the idea that the case for pansychism is fundamentally based on an argument from ignorance. We don’t understand why there are conscious things/conscious experience, therefore everything should be thought to be conscious. But that just doesn’t follow. In fact that still leaves the existence of consciousness to be a fundamental mystery. Why is anything conscious? You’ve just given the attribute to everything, still without explaining why it exists.

Also, why can you lose consciousness by taking certain drugs, not eating or drinking enough, through extreme physical exertion, or head-trauma? And why does cutting off many of your extremities still leave you conscious but having the experience of being not-the-part-that-was-removed but still just the part with the head attached?

Can we just stop with all the silly philosophizing about consciousness. It’s a product of something occurring in your head, it’s not somewhere else, we don’t understand how or why it’s there but it is, and it’s not in a proton or a photon. Get over it.

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I don’t find that a convincing argument. It may well be that a particular mental event is correlated with a particular stimulus/response complex in an arbitrary way. That is to say, in a different world a conscious organism’s experience of thirst might feel like how pain or being tickled feels like for us in our world. That would still be consistent with epiphenomenalism, so long as the mental event was produced in a consistent and predictable manner by physical brain processes.

I don’t think I’m following your argument. Like John, I don’t understand what you mean by “conscious matter.” If substance dualism is true, but panpsychism isn’t, could we not expect non-conscious matter to behave in the same way regardless whether its behaviour is being caused by other non-conscious matter or by mental events? For instance, if someone throws a rock using his arm, and another person causes it to move thru non-physical telekinetic powers, we would not necessarily be able to tell the difference just from the properties of the rock and the path of its physical movement.

I believe we can understand the category of “mental events” as being comprised of thoughts, beliefs, emotions, subjective perceptions etc. while remaining neutral as to whether these are a subcategory of physical events, or something completely distinct.

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Still, if mental events are a subcategory of physical events, it’s no longer a problem for them to causally affect other physical events, though it’s still possible that at least some of them don’t.

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Also wrt panpsychism, what are things without sensory organs or the capacity to reason supposed to be conscious of? They have the experience of what? I literally cannot make sense of what the proposition is supposed to be. What is an electron conscious of?

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I do think it is, at least, a logically coherent attempt to address problems in the two competing theories. Dualism has difficulty accounting for how a non-physical “substance” can have effects on physical entities. And physicalism has so far been unable to produce a convincing account of how physical processes can produce mental properties. Panpsychism, in theory, can address both issues. But it has its own intractable problem, the combination problem. Proponents of panpsychism hold that every fundamental particle has consciousness, but this is not to say they have the same sort of awareness, thoughts and sensations that we do. How, then, is our particular form of consciousness created by combining lots of tiny bits of consciousness? Does consciousness exist in some intermediate form in inanimate objects like rocks and furniture? That just seems too weird to be true.

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I’m not really seeing a coherent argument for the idea that causal closure is evidence for panpsychism even in the technical sense you suggest. Indeed if we go for a physicalist concept of mind - which seems to be implied by the combination of causal closure and the falsehood of epiphenominalism - then there’s no reason to think that rocks are conscious at all. Consciousness would be associated with particular physical structures.

On the other hand if causal closure were false then mind must include a component beyond known physical properties. It seems to me that would at least marginally increase the likelihood of pansychism. By the same token the truth of physical closure must reduce the likelihood of panpsychism, and thus be evidence against it,

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I think at a sort of bird’s eye view of the problem of consciousness is why it exists in the first place if everything is described by the equations of physics. It don’t see how panpsychicsm solves that problem (or if it is even supposed to?). It seems at best to be an attempt to get away with the problem that only things with brains appear to be conscious, while other things do not. And it does so by simply asserting that everything else is conscious too. So now we don’t have to explain why only brains appear conscious and other things to do not. Problem solved I guess.

Except I’m still left wondering why consciousness exists if it’s not there at the fundamental level according to the equations of physics. But rather than wondering why brains are conscious and other things are not, on panpsychism I’m wondering why everything from individuals electrons, containers of benzene molecules, and thunderclouds are conscious too now. How, then, is panpsychism a superior theory?

Then I don’t know what they mean by consciousness.

Yes. It’s not just weird, it’s incomprehensible to me. What is it I am being asked to imagine here? An electron is zipping through the vacuum of intergalactic space, having the experience of… what? It has no eyes or ears, no nerves, no nerve cells, no neurons, no wiring, no connections, no transistors, no logic gates, nothing. It has not undergone a process of learning to interact with the world. It appears to have no way to store information, no capacity to form memories, no hardware to run any sort of analysis or simulation. There is no harware for processing information. There’s no brain, no microchips, no circuitry, nothing. And still the idea is it can experience something. What would it be experiencing? Be aware of? And why would it be if it lacks literally everything we know of to be important for things we connect to being relevant to thinking, cognition, sensing, and so on?

It’s just obviously nonsense. Panpsychism is obvious nonsense. It’s philosophers who navel-gazed themselves into oblivion.

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Do you wonder why a petunia exists if it’s not there at the fundamental level according to the equations of physics? Or is every fundamental particle a little bit petunia?

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I don’t wonder that because I can sort of see how petunias, which are basically just some spatiotemporal arrangement of matter, emerge from lower level phenomena. Not unlike understanding how subatomic particles can form atoms, atom can form molecules, and so on.

I can’t see how consciousness emerges. I can’t “add up” the particles (or imagine them moving a certain way) and get to a point where it becomes obvious that an entity that has the experience of the smell of coffee is what I am describing. Detect molecules of coffee through some sort of mechanism, sure. Act a certain way, exhibit specific behaviors on the detection? Trivial. But the actual experience of it’s smell? The atoms combining and moving around in different ways don’t get me there.

I think the hard problem of consciousness is a real problem. It is a fundamental mystery. But I don’t see a solution anywhere in any philosophy. And all the attempts to deny the obvious obvious connection between the brain, our senses, and consciousness are in my opinion worse. None of them answer the questions I first posed in this thread.

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I don’t think it claims to solve the problem so much as suggest a possible reason why we have not yet solved the problem. Rather than our failure being because brains are just very complicated and we don’t yet know enough about them, panpsychism suggests this failure is because we are missing something about the fundamental nature of the physical universe, that goes beyond neuroscience, biology and even chemistry. In that regard, it is just doing what philosophical ideas tend to do: Exploring all the logically possible solutions to a problem without much regard to how well they map onto the world as we directly experience it.

One thing I don’t understand is why this possible solution must involve consciousness itself being fundamental. Could we not be missing some fundamental physical parameter that will answer not only the problem of consciousness but other problems as well? This would be similar to how general relativity was required before we could calculate the precession of the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit. Of course, general relativity was not conceived for that particular purpose. Maybe some other future discovery of physics will also incidentally help explain consciousness.

Neither do I really. It is often worded as “There is something it is like to be a human being or a quark.” But that doesn’t mean those “somethings” are identical, or even all that similar, to each other. Like you, I think panpsychism just raises more problems than it solves.

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So you’ve mastered plant developmental biology? Great. Now do a frog.

How is a fundamental mystery different from a mystery? How does it differ from the hard problem of a frog or a petunia except perhaps in complexity? You can’t describe any of them by the equations of physics, which was your former benchmark. Or perhaps the difference is that you can see petunias and frogs, even see intermediate states, but you can’t see consciousness. Perhaps if you could actually see the pattern of neurons firing in detail it would become clearer. It’s certainly the only thing for which we have any evidence.

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It is important to distinguish a “hard problem” from a merely very difficult problem. An example of a hard problem would be the precession of the perihelion of Mercury that I mentioned earlier. This problem defied all attempts to resolve it thru classical Newtonian physics. For instance, it was hypothesized that there was another, undetected, planet orbiting between Mercury and the sun, but of course no such planet was ever found. Solving the problem required an entirely new understanding of fundamental physics.

The thing is, AFAIIK, no one ever thought of this as a “hard problem” until after it was resolved. Scientists weren’t tearing their hair out and saying physics was broken, nor were philosophers writing treatises on “the problem of Mercury’s orbit.”

In contrast, it seems for most of history the nature of life was considered a “hard problem”, hence ideas like vitalism. Yet, as it turns out, life can be completely understood just by understanding the chemistry involved in each biological process.

My point is I don’t think there is an argument demonstrating that consciousness actually is a hard problem, as opposed to just being an exceedingly difficult one. And history shows that we can only determine which category a problem falls into after we have solved it.

Here’s an interesting discussion between David Chalmers and Brian Greene where they seem to agree that there are many hard problems in physics. For instance, we don’t really know what things like mass or charge are. However, we don’t much worry about this because we can use these concepts to make precise predictions of what we will observe in the world. In that sense, we feel we have a more or less complete understanding of these things.

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By there not appearing to be a solution even in principle.

I think that can actually be done, given enough time and a large enough sheet of paper. Not being a physicist I’m not going to be wasting my time trying of course (and I’m sure they won’t bother either).

It partially is because I can see frogs and petunias, yes (though here are other things I can’t really see fully at any one place that I nevertheless can still understand because I can in my imagination break them up into smaller parts and imagine how it all fits together, such as a democracy to pick something complex but still comprehensible).

Frogs and petunias have shapes, they take up space, light reflects off their surfaces. I can’t open someone else’s head and see their conscious experiences (at best I could just see the movement of subatomic particles, or vibrations in some sort of field). Even with various sorts of microscopes and scanning instruments I could at best detect what we would characterize as neural correlates of consciousness. Increased bloodflow to certain areas of the brain, for example.

There isn’t a pattern of the movement of subatomic particles in time and space (or patterns of blood flow to different brain regions) from which it becomes obvious that “therefore the organism should have the experience of the smell of coffee”, but there is a very obvious pattern of the movement of subatomic particles that describes a petunia or a frog. Atoms that combine into molecules, molecules that assemble into cells of all sorts, cells that form tissues etc.

The smell of coffee does not appear to me to be described by a collection of moving things in particular shapes or at different rates, or however you want to describe that. When these particles over here to the left jiggle at a higher rate, and these ones over here split through these dendrites, it’s just obvious the coffee will smell a bit more stale?

It’s obvious to me that there will never be such an explanation that is obvious to anyone. Because one describes shapes and movement, and the thing to be explained appears to have no such components. What is the shape of the smell of coffee? What is it’s direction?

So I’m trying to imagine different patterns of movement of subatomic particles, or patterns of neurons firing in time and space, pulses (of light? little particles rolling across a path?) running across wires in a brain in all sorts of different ways, and at some point there’s a pattern that should make me go “Ahh of course, I see now why that pattern of movement of particles obviously should produce the smell I recognize as that of coffee” and merely from the pattern of movement it will be totally obvious why it won’t be the smell of chocolate, or smelly feet?

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Yes, but it was obvious that the problem to be solved was a problem for physics and mathematics. The problem to be solved was that of an observed pattern of movement. And that an explanation was going to take the form of forces pulling on objects in space. Even if it wasn’t obvious what the equation looked like, it was obvious that that is what it would take. Math. That the search was for a different set of mathematical equations that described how one or more forces pulled on the different planets.

It’s not obvious that equations that describe the movement of subatomic particles will solve the mystery of consciousness. Chiefly because the problem of conscious experiences seem to describe at least some irreducible phenomena that have no subcomponents that can be reduced to spatiotemporal patterns of movement. The classic example is the experience of a particular color. Red. How do you get the color red from movement of particles in a pattern? There’s some undiscovered pattern that will make it obvious? A shape I have yet to conceive of will explain red? It seems obvious to me that there is not.

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In the pattern of neurons firing in a brain with certain connections among neurons? How is that any more mysterious than the operation of a frog. All I can see here is that you think you can imagine the workings of a frog but not of a conscious mind. But what you think you can imagine isn’t a very strong metric. You can’t really imagine quantum physics, after all.

First off, it’s a pattern of electric impulses within neurons and of chemical diffusion across synapses. Second, one presumes that if you understood the entire network you would indeed know what each bit meant. It’s just that we are unlikely to be able to gain that degree of precision, at least without a potentially impossible improvement in technology. Still, it seems as if the “in principle” requirement is covered. Again, where is the evidence of any other source of the phenomenon?

I don’t really see the difference between a bunch of cells interacting to assemble a frog and a bunch of other cells interacting to communicate the sensation “red”. Tell me what I’m missing here?

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What? And put David Chalmers out of a job?! Silly philosophizing indeed. More like being seduced into a mad house…

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I tend to agree that red, as one example of subjective experience, is difficult to explain in material terms or predict from first principles. If consciousness did not evolve in the universe, it seems to me that red simply would not exist. Math might pre-exist by logical necessity, but why colors?

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Interestingly, in the video I posted, Chalmers says that is what he is looking for in a solution to the problem of consciousness. A set of “beautiful” mathematical equations that can predict, from a given physical state, a particular mental state. If and when we achieve that, what is left to understand about consciousness? Could we not then say we understand it as well as we understand the charge of an electron?

I agree that is a very strong intuition. But let me suggest that, at one point, many held an equally strong intuition that life could not be reduced to physical phenomena.