Can Science Account for Consciousness? |
While many of my readers are philosophers, or have at least studied philosophy for a while at university, many are not. So I was reluctant to get into metaphysical debates within philosophy, fearing that they might get too high-brow, instead focusing on meta-philosophy, which I believe is fairly easy to communicate.
But my discussions here with nonnaturalist skeptics about consciousness science, such as with Philip Goff or Nino Kadic, inevitably get down to metaphysical arguments about intrinsic or categorical properties. Perhaps not surprising given that they are engaged in analytic metaphysics—a subdiscipline of philosophy that I’ve argued in a series of essays is a counter-Englightenment project not at all conducive to the central philosophical goal of understanding the world.
Due to repeated demand, let me respond to one of the only two main arguments for panpsychism listed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on panpsychism.
The so-called intrinsic nature argument.
(The other argument is the alleged inability for science to fully reduce conscious states to brain processes, which, as I’ve argued in a recent post, reflects a mistaken radical reductionism among panpsychists that isn’t met by any other special science or, for that matter, folk ontology either. But as we’ll see, this problem will come up again shortly.)
I’ve tried to make sure that it’s accessible to anyone without knowledge of analytic metaphysics.
To set the scene, let’s first look at a kind reply by Goff to my recent rebuttal of his arguments against the very idea that science could explain consciousness.
Thanks Walter. There are two aspects to my argument. One concerns what we know about consciousness “from the inside.” The other concerns the nature of physical science explanation. You put the two together to get my argument that we can’t completely explain consciousness via physical science explanation (although of course physical science has a crucial role to play). Let’s just focus on the first bit. You are ascribing to me two things I don’t think: (i) that our introspective beliefs about consciousness are infallible, (ii) we know from the inside the nature of consciousness in all creatures.
Thanks Walter. There are two aspects to my argument. One concerns what we know about consciousness “from the inside.” The other concerns the nature of physical science explanation. You put the two together to get my argument that we can’t completely explain consciousness via physical science explanation (although of course physical science has a crucial role to play).
Let’s just focus on the first bit. You are ascribing to me two things I don’t think: (i) that our introspective beliefs about consciousness are infallible, (ii) we know from the inside the nature of consciousness in all creatures.
Granted, the beliefs formed by introspection about consciousness can be mistaken. Otherwise, panpsychists and analytic metaphysicians could not possibly disagree, or at least such disagreement would ultimately reflect very different types of experiences. But there it is still a widely shared view among philosophers that rigorous philosophical reflection on our experiences is a reliable guide to the nature of consciousness itself. Even if untrained philosophers fail at this task. To be fair, I think that this is a bit of an arrogant view about the superior introspective abilities of philosophers. If you learn about the categories that analytical metaphysicians come up with to carve up this space, of course, one will start to think of one’s experiences in that way. But the same goes for, say, someone training to become a Buddhist monk. This is not at all unbiased, introspective philosophical discovery. It’s much more like scientists looking for evidence in nature to support their pre-existing theory.
For naturalistic philosophers, phenomenological experiences form part of the data set that helps us to explain the nature of consciousness. It is not put on a pedestal so high that any evidence from the sciences is irrelevant to discussions of this nature. Yet, panpsychists and opponents to naturalistic explanations of consciousness more generally often give off the impression that the science of consciousness ignores subjective experience, which is false.