Galen Strawson on Panpsychism (Part One)

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Introduction to Close Reads

0:30This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwyn. And I'm Mark Linsenmeyer.

0:39We are once again starting a new reading. And I had picked one. I'm going to be teaching a philosophy of mind class in the fall. People can sign up for that. Partiallyexaminedlife.com slash class. And I'm trying to get back in the mode. So some of the next Partially Examine Life activity is going to be on philosophy of mind stuff. And I was definitely interested in panpsychism. I know you were too, Wes. So I had found this paper. I think just searching like often cited philosophy of mind papers by Galen Strawson. Another, we just did one by him on narrativity called Realistic Monism.

1:14Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism from 2008.

Preconceptions of Panpsychism

1:19What are your preconceptions, Wes, about panpsychism? Well, you know, it's one of the, I think, I don't know if the word is plausible, but logical, possible solutions to the problem of consciousness, to the mind-body problem. If we have trouble saying how something physical can give rise to subjectivity to something that seems to be non-physical, then perhaps if we posit that consciousness is, right, a property of matter, maybe, is the way to put it.

1:58I don't know how, I'm trying to think of how Philip Goff puts this. People can go look at his videos and read his books. He seems to be the leading proponent of panpsychism today. But I think the idea is that consciousness is a property. So physics tells us what, say, atoms and quarks do. But if we wanted to say what they are, this is Goff's analysis. We would have to say something about consciousness.

Consciousness and Phenomena

2:27All right, so I think we were hoping to, I know he's been on a number of podcasts, maybe we'll ask him to be on with us or read some of his stuff in the fall, perhaps. So to kind of warm us up here, let's just, yeah, so the first section is called Physicalism. As always, the link to the paper will be on the blog post associated with this, or if you're watching it on YouTube, in the description. Although YouTube does not allow actual hyperlinks, you have to copy the whole thing and put it in the top of the browser. You can just Google, you can just Google.

2:58Yes, realistic monism, why physicalism entails panpsychism. People should, I know that our public feed, audio feed was being relocated or perhaps discontinued. All the episodes will forever be at patreon.com slash close reads philosophy. And the ones that are free, wherever you're listening to this are also free there. And in fact, there, the audio is ad free there. So that's maybe a reason to go there. But of course, we hope you will give us a few dollars and support us there.

3:32Assuming that the Apple podcast public feed is still operational in some form or another, we would love you to leave us a nice rating or review there. If you feel that you want to spread the word about this podcast. All right, go ahead, Wes, please.

Section One Physicalism

3:50Section one, physicalism. I take physicalism to be the view that every real concrete phenomena in the universe is dot, dot, dot physical.

4:01Wait for it. Physical. It is a view about the actual universe, and I am going to assume that it is true. For the purposes of this paper, I will equate concrete with spatio-temporally, or at least temporally located, and I will use phenomenon as a completely general word for any sort of existent.

Defining Physicalism

4:22Plainly, all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena. All right, let's. And there are footnotes. Phenomenon for any existent, but atoms aren't phenomena. Yeah, phenomena seems to involve being a phenomena for someone. Yes, an appearance. So this is a weird. I think it depends on what tradition you're talking in. If you say the cosmic phenomena, if you're talking about astronomy or something like that, I think there is a defensible, you know, so it's like entity.

4:59Yeah, but I don't know that physicists say, right? And atoms are models. You know, you have theories and models. I don't think the theories are called phenomena, and the phenomena are the experimental data. And the theories or models are posited, but we would want to say they posit something real, an entity that's non-phenomenal. So I don't know. And then we make this shift to all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena.

5:32And that seems to me to be not true. Right. The footnote. As well. The footnote about concrete says, not abstract in the philosophical sense of abstract, given which some philosophers hold that abstract object, for instance, numbers or concepts exist and are real objects in every sense in which concrete objects are. So why say that all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena, if you want to say, like, the number three in itself is not a concrete phenomenon?

6:04I mean, I guess that we're running into, well, obviously, the number three itself is not appearing. It's an instance of the number three. It's a concrete. So there is a thought which presumably is instantiated in a brain process. So even if I'm thinking an abstract object, that thought itself, that mental goings-on is a concrete phenomenon. So in that sense, I guess I don't object to this, but there are philosophers, clearly, that, you know, would take exception to this and say that, you know, Spinoza, when you were participating, when you were thinking a mathematical claim, you are thinking in the realm of the eternal, in the divine or something like that.

6:49But this maybe seems too woo-woo for Strauss. I think he's a part of a number of different claims. One is that the non-abstract claim, the idea that it's concrete, if concrete were to mean just particular as opposed to general, I think that's non-controversial. To say that it's spatiotemporally located, that's a typical claim of physicalism. It's not one that would be accepted by all philosophers for consciousness, but for physicalists, and usually because they're identifying consciousness with the brain,

7:21they're saying that consciousness is spatiotemporally located. But he says he has the qualifier, at least temporarily, okay? So he's open to the idea, I guess, that it's not located, consciousness is not located, or a particular consciousness is not spatially located. But I'm not even leaving that aside, right? Kant wouldn't say consciousness is temporally located because time is what consciousness supplies.

Kant and Time

7:51So you couldn't call a particular consciousness temporally located, even though all the events of consciousness and the stream of consciousness occur within time. So I just want to put in that little quibble. But the thing that I'm actually worried about is not the concreteness, but just the phenomena. Because once again, phenomena would happen, you know, in the world or in the field of consciousness or in some hybrid of world consciousness, you know. But to say that consciousness is itself a phenomena, as if we could see consciousness from the outside, I would reject.

8:29So I don't know if he's trying to say something radical and new, or if this is just a different use of language, or if he's saying things that I don't like.

8:40We'll find out as we go on. Yes, perhaps we have been warped by too much Kant and Hegel at this point. But I think at least I would have, previous to spending this much time on this podcast, have said clearly, whatever consciousness is, it has to be something in the world, studiable by science, not essentially restricted to a first person perspective that would require some sort of, right? There might be an epistemic methodological point that you can only, you know, get at certain things by introspection or asking people, but that the fundamental thing that was being reflected, reported on was in a shared physical universe that can be studied generally.

9:27So that's, I would say naturalism rather than physicalism is a, is a, is a, yes, sure. But, but it's a weird thing. So it's not like studying something that's empirically available to us. Your consciousness is not a phenomenon for me. And I know, you know, I know you, right, there are arguments against that. And I think you, you've brought them to light on the show several times. So for instance, is it, you know, isn't it the case when you smile and I see your smile and I understand what that means?

9:59Isn't that in a sense, your consciousness being available to me? And I would say, well, there's something inferential about it, even if it's automatic and unconsciously inferential. So we could have all those sorts of arguments, but I don't think your consciousness is available to me as a phenomenon in the way that my water bottle is available to me as a phenomenon. I think they're very different. And I would say that regardless of whether we've been corrupted by the continental tradition or phenomenologists or German idealists or whatever.

10:29Sure. Fair enough. All right.

What is Physicalism

10:31What does physicalism involve? What is it really to be a physicalist? What is it to be a realistic physicalist or more simply a real physicalist? Well, one thing is absolutely clear. You're certainly not a realistic physicalist. You're not a real physicalist. If you deny the existence of the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of anything else. Experience, quote unquote, consciousness, consciousness experience, quote unquote, phenomenology, experiential, quote unquote, what it's likeness.

11:02Feeling, sensation, explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every waking moment. Many words are used to denote this necessarily a current, essentially non-dispositional phenomenon. In this paper, I will use the terms experience, experiential phenomena and experientiality to refer to it. All right. So for some reason, he doesn't want to use the word qualia. Maybe we'll find out later on. But here he's saying he's going to make a supposition against the limit of lists.

11:34So I guess we're going to get a brand of physicalism that's not in limitivism. In other words, it doesn't say, like maybe Dennett says that consciousness is some sort of illusion or that it can be, or not consciousness, but, well, no, he does say consciousness. But anyway, at the very least, qualia are not real in some sense or something like that. He doesn't, I guess he doesn't like that idea. I think the version that I was trying to get at was more like Searle, who says, of course, consciousness is real.

12:09It is something that is epistemically subjective. But I think he still thinks it's metaphysically objective, if I'm not confusing those words. So, you know, it can be studied. Yeah, I don't remember a lot. We don't want it to be a substance, probably, but who knows? Sure. But anyway, you know, it's got to be the brain, I guess, as a physicalist. Yes, yes. But what I'm finding interesting here is just that he, right, he's endorsing what Dennett, I mean, sorry, what Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness.

12:43He's saying you can't deny the qualia, because some people would. So he's coming down on that kind of, he's not going to argue for it, but he's going to say a real physicalist would never be an illimitivist, would never deny all this stuff. It's, you know, he's, I was going to say this before we started, but he's such a kind of firebrand in a way as a philosopher. It comes out with all these bold statements. Third paragraph. Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism.

13:21This is because it is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic, indeed any non-self-defeating, theory of what there is. It is the obligatory starting point for any theory that can legitimately claim to be naturalistic, because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact. It is a very old point that there is nothing more certain than the existence of experience. All right, so again, these are not uncontroversial claims, these anti-illimitivist claims.

13:54It follows that real physicalism can have nothing to do with physics-alism. So physics... Physics-alism. Physics-alism, except the S is capitalized. Physics-alism, the view, the faith, that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can, in principle, be fully captured in the terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything to do with physics-alism, unless it is supposed, obviously falsely, that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience.

14:28The footnote is just referring to another paper. It is unfortunate that physicalism... Physic... Yes, physicalism is today standardly used to mean physics-alism, because it obliges me to speak of real physicalism when I only mean physicalism. Realistic physicalism. I find him so entertaining. All right, real physicalism, then, must accept that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena.

14:57But how can experiential phenomena be physical phenomena? Many take this claim to be profoundly problematic. This is the mind-body problem. This is usually because they think they know a lot about the nature of the physical. They take the idea that the experiential is physical to be profoundly problematic, given what we know about the nature of the physical. But they have already made a large and fatal mistake. This is because we have no good reason to think we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea of that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena.

15:31If we reflect for a moment on the nature of our knowledge of the physical and of the experiential, we realize, with Eddington, that no problem of irreconcilability arises.

15:46Footnote 4, the thought was not new. In the background stood Arnold, Locke, Hume, Priestley, Kant, and many others. C. Strauss and blah, blah, blah. I don't know if he's referring to... He's probably referring to his father's papers here. Well, Eddington, 1928. So I don't know who Eddington is, but someone in his father's generation. But he's referring to A. Strauss, and let's just see if he's referring to his father. I just think that's interesting. 2003.

16:16Oh, no, it's his own paper. That's his own paper. C. Strauss in 2003. You're right, at the end. Okay, he doesn't refer to any of his father's stuff. Okay. I just saw the word Kant. I just thought, you know, since Strauss was a big... The father of Strauss was a big Kant guy. Anyway, go ahead. Again, as I try to put into words what I thought took to be Searle's view, I'm profoundly confused. Because I guess I was reading it sort of as Spinoza's, right?

16:46And which might be what Strauss is going to be getting at. That the nature of the physical is not such that it is merely what can be described in the language of physics, which is at least classically taken to be just matter and motion. Now, once you throw even just energy in there, I don't know what that does to it. When you throw quantum in there, then it gets really confusing. So, you know, when people talk about physics-alism, well, I've never actually heard that term before. But, you know, the descriptions of physics, they're usually thinking of Newton.

17:18And I agree so far with Strauss in here that probably that is not sufficient to exhaust the nature of the physical. And the nature of the physical might be that it irreducibly per Spinoza has sides that are epistemically available to different kinds of inquiry, right? So we don't see gamma rays, but gamma rays are part of the physical world.

17:50And we could get an appropriate detector to detect the gamma rays. And in the same way, maybe consciousness is something that, well, right now we only seem to have access to from the inside. Yeah. But, you know, who knows if ESP or you could get the equivalent of an X-ray machine or gamma ray detector or whatever and say, oh, yes, there are conscious rays flowing. I see your aura floating above you. Like none of this, I think, can be ruled out a priori.

18:21It's just that we haven't, we don't have any evidence. I think you would see little like cartoon balloons. Uh-huh. Yeah. Thoughts, thoughts.

18:28Well, what's interesting to me here is, is it the same thing to say that matter is mind as to say that mind is matter, right? Those may not actually be reversible. He's making the claim that mind is matter. Right. We've had idealists in the past say that matter is mind. If you're going to identify the two, you know, is it monism? Are they reducible to some other third thing that's the same? Or do we really want to make a reduction of mind to matter?

19:02And which is, you know, where do we put panpsychism in all of this? I'm not really sure yet, but we'll see. A very large mistake. It is perhaps Descartes, or perhaps rather quote unquote Descartes, greatest mistake. Footnote, I like to think that in his philosophical heart, he did not make it. He is certainly not a substance duelist as this expression is currently understood. Arnault saw the problem clearly. We really should read our some Arnault. Arnault and Hume diagnosed the mistake definitively in two lines with specific reference to the

19:33Cartesians, but the 20th century philosophical division wasn't listening. And he doesn't tell us what the two lines are. Oh, I guess he gives us a little reference. Okay. But still doesn't quote the two lines. Right. Because we're philosophical badasses who should just know. So Descartes, the greatest mistake imputed to Descartes, and it is funny that in the past 50 years, it has been the most fervent revilers of the great Descartes, the true father of modern materialism, who have made the mistake with most intensity.

20:05Some of them, Dennett is a prime example, are so enthralled to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they're prepared to deny the existence of experience more or less covertly covertly with the C in parentheses. So is he saying overtly or covertly? More or less covertly. I think that more or less does the job there anyway, because they're committed to- Yeah, exactly. Because they're- You go either way. Committed to physicalism, i.e.

20:36Physic-salism. And there's a very long footnote on Dennett. Well, let's look at that, because that's a specific critique of Dennett's, the limitivism. Sure. Read some of that. Dennett conceals this move by looking-glassing the word consciousness, this term for experience, and then insisting that he does believe that consciousness exists, to looking-glass a term, is to use a term in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means, see Strauss in 2005. As far as I can understand them, Dretzky, Tai, Lycan, and Ray are among those who do the

21:08same. It seems that they will still dream of giving a reductive analysis of the experiential and non-experiential terms that they still dream. This, however, amounts to denying the existence of experience, because the nature of real experience can no more be specified in wholly non-experiential terms than the nature of the real non-experiential can be specified in wholly experiential terms. Okay, do you mind if we just pause there? Sure. So, he sounds like the nature of the real, of real experience cannot be specified in non-experiential

21:44terms, right? So, this sounds like he doesn't simply want to, you know, he's a non-inlimitivist, so it's not that mind exactly is just going to turn out to be matter in the ordinary sense of matter as something, right, that is non-experiential. But he's also saying the non-experiential can't just be specified in wholly experiential terms, so he's not an idealist, but go ahead. Yeah, can we differentiate between metaphysical reductionism, eliminativism, and vocabularic?

22:19In other words, there might be, you might say, ultimately everything is physical, but it would be too complicated to describe some higher level, even biological things, in the terms of physics. So, we, as a matter of theory, right, you were saying before that atoms and quarks and things are not actually physical entities, they are theoretical terms. So, you're trying to ultimately relate the different level of theoretical terms so that they can be translated one to another.

22:50But maybe that's just impossible, and you want to say emergentism is a real thing. When you say emergentism is a real thing, are you really saying that there are fundamental new metaphysical levels that are just, you know, life? Is it just a fundamentally new metaphysical level that is born out of the inanimate? Or are you saying that it can be specified in a certain set of terms? So, right, we're using different theoretical apparatus to describe different levels of the

23:22same, ultimately, homogenous metaphysical reality, but we have to do so using different theoretical language, which cannot be, one cannot be reduced to the other. I mean, I would want to say that the quark, despite being an item in theory, would be considered physical, it's just not a phenomenon in the sense of something directly observable, so that if we, so we have to, at that point, we have to say, well, we might have to revise

23:56our notion of what the physical is, because the subatomic world is so weird, right? It's not operating on the assumptions of Newtonian mechanics, for instance, and we can't say that it looks like anything, right? Because what we think of as looks like involves light bouncing off things and going into our eyes, and light can't even bounce off these things. Light's too big to bounce off a subatomic particle. So, right, this kind of feeds into the whole idea of secondary qualities.

24:29So the question is, you know, you could say, well, everything is material, everything is physical, but then what does it mean to say everything is physical? Maybe we're going to, you know, as a panpsychist, obviously, he's going to have to revise what it means to be physical. It sounds like he doesn't want, he wants to say that whatever we get, it can't be reduced to non-experiential terms. So it seems to me that he's going to have to say the physical includes something experiential as part of it or as a property, we'll have to see.

25:01But let me finish up the footnote here. In the normal case, of course, reductive identification of X with Y is not a denial of the existence of X. The reductive claim is X exists, but it is really just this Y. In the case of experience, however, to say that it exists, but is really just something whose nature can be fully specified in wholly non-experiential functional terms is to deny its existence. Quote, but what is this supposed thing that we are denying?

25:34Unquote. Say the deniers. It's the thing to which the right reply to the question, what is it, is, as ever, the Louis Armstrong block reply. If you got to ask, you ain't ever going to get to know. Block 1978. So yes, David, David Armstrong is what he's referring to is, but he puts Louis in parentheses because he's making a joke about something that I guess is from Louis Armstrong song. Yes. Yeah.

26:06I suppose that David Armstrong would be among the villains in his story. Yes. He's a straight up physicalist. Yeah. Or a limitivist as well. Right. So it's okay. Not a real physicalist, as Strasson would say. It's the thing whose deniers say that there is no non-question begging account of it, to which the experiential realist's correct reply is, it's question begging for you to say that there must be an account of it that's non-question begging in your terms. Such an exchange shows that we have reached the end of argument, a point further illustrated

26:44by the fact that reductive idealists can make exactly the same claim. Quote, you have no non-question begging account, unquote, objection to reductive physicalists that reductive physicalists make to realists about experience. Quote, by taking it for granted that the physical is something that can only be specified in non-mental terms, you, reductive physicalists, simply beg the question against reductive idealists. It's striking that the realist notion of the physical that present-day physicalists appeal

27:17to was thought to be either without warrant or unintelligible by many, many of the leading philosophers of the 20th century. Many were reductive idealists about the physical, and Quine famously compared belief in physical objects to belief in the gods of Homer. Yes, they are theoretical entities that we patch together through a number of appearances. So, you know, once you find out that what we call physical objects are mainly space, right? And that they're little particles flying around, I guess, but even that becomes a metaphor.

27:52Then you have to wonder if there are physical objects in our intuitive sense of physical objects and then you can go to Kant, you know, the idealist route, the German idealist route, right? Is it all, are they basically like secondary qualities? They exist no more than red exists, blah, blah, blah. But there's so many complicated syntactical things in there, I don't want to parse it. But I think he's broadly right that there's no argument here in a way. They just, there's question begging on and going either direction between the physicalists

28:27that he opposes and the idealists. Well, maybe not. I'm not sure. I mean, there are arguments for idealism, obviously. And Barclays is pretty ingenious. And there are arguments for physicalism in the sense that he doesn't like. So what is he, you know, what's, is he saying that there's no question begging argument between them? Non-question begging argument? In the case of experience, to say that it exists, but it's really just something whose nature cannot be, can be fully specified in wholly non-experiential functional terms is to deny existence.

29:00But what is the supposed thing we're denying, say deniers? You know, it's the, it's the, what is it, right? So if you're doing this inquiry in the first place, you have to acknowledge the existence of the phenomenon you were. Yeah. Which I'm not sure if that's true. I mean, like, well, what are witches? Can't the end result of that inquiry be, oh, actually, we thought there were witches, but there are no witches. Witches are the sociological phenomenon of identifying women who threaten you and, you know, putting them through this judicial process.

29:32Maybe combined with a certain aesthetic that they had, you know, that there could be something that's being latched on. We are burning you to death for your aesthetic.

29:45It's, uh, should have dressed better. Yeah. I mean, typically in science, right, we are, we're going from the phenomenal properties of something like water to H2O. H2O, that's the transition that we're making to, to, you know, quote unquote essence of some sort. But you're pointing to the fact that we might find out, you know, it's like finding out that there's H2O, but that what we call the phenomenal properties of water is some kind of illusion. Which, which, which, right, again, the idealists would say, uh, yeah, in a, in a, in a, right, space and time are provided by consciousness.

30:22So it's an illusion from the standpoint of things in themselves. But anyway. Right. It just seems like there's a, right, this William Wackham simplicity thing that is one of the regulative ideas behind science. And so if you can, if you think that there's something just fundamentally confused about having a substance dualism or just more than one kind of fundamental substance in the universe, more than one kind of vocabulary that's irreducible to another kind of vocabulary, then you will, you know, make the attempt to reduce one to the other and say, even if we don't know how it works, it simply must be that way sort of as a, as a methodological assumption.

31:04Yeah, I mean, I think this is, this kind of strong reduction is widely rejected by philosophers now, you know, in a typical examples, biology, if we were to reduce all biological talk to, you know, about species and, and are even the organs in relation to larger bodies, right? If we were to reduce all that to talk about subatomic particles, we would lose something. Where is the zebra in all our subatomic particle math? But yeah, all right, shall we move on?

31:34Sure. Quote, unquote, they are prepared to deny the existence of experience. At this point, we should stop and wonder. I think we should, should feel very sober and a little afraid at the power of human credulity. The capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith. For this particular denial is the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought, not just the whole history of philosophy. It falls, unfortunately, to philosophy, not religion, to reveal the deepest woo-woo of the human mind. Some philosopher actually used the word woo-woo in their paper.

32:07I find this grievous, but next to this denial, every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green. Oh, my gosh. And then there's another whole footnote on Dennett. We can, you know, if you agree, we can just leave that aside. I think we should do it because we're going to do Dennett. I'm going to purposely do Dennett. I've been listening to the audiobook of Consciousness Explained, and we're doing it when you're on vacation because I know that you would just be furious about it. And I'm not as furious these days, and I think because Dennett, you know, is such a brilliant guy and, you know, which I kind of, I guess I only, I've read Consciousness Explained, and I hated it when I was 17 years old.

32:52And because it's, to me, it's scandalous to, you know, just like Strawson here, but, you know, now that I'm older and I see this, instead of going rah, rah, rah, I think, well, why don't you calm down, Strawson, you know? But, yeah, I have a positive impression of Dennett, mainly from his arguments with Sam Harris, where he very carefully tried to explain compatibilism to Sam Harris, and Sam Harris wouldn't get it. But, you know, you can see what a great thinker and teacher Dennett was just from those exchanges.

33:26But so that makes me want to take his point of view more seriously. I just can't, I can't comprehend it. I don't, yeah, but, you know, like Strawson, I guess maybe my prejudice towards the irreducible existence of qualia and experiential consciousness is so strong that I just, I can't wrap my head around this. Kind of a limitivism and denial of consciousness, but do you want to, do you want to read it? Yeah, this is a footnote. Dennett has suggested that, quote, there is no such thing as phenomenology, that any appearance of phenomenology is somehow wholly the product of some cognitive faculty, the judgment module or semantic intent module that does not itself involve any phenomenology.

34:09Quote, there just seems to be phenomenology, he concedes, does not follow from this undeniable universally attested fact that there really is phenomenology. I think this is from consciousness explained.

34:21And this is what, this is what seemed to me to be self-contradictory because, right, the word seems already seems to imply phenomenology unless he can work out a different meaning of the word seems, but go ahead. It is unclear what Dennett means by phenomenology, but whatever he means, this move fails immediately if it is taken as an objective to the objection to the present claim that we can be certain both that there is experience and that we can't be radically in error about its nature. It fails for the simple reason for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience just is for there to be phenomenology or experience.

34:56All right. That's just what I was saying. For there to seem to be means there is. To say that it's apparently sensory aspects say, I mean, I can say so far in getting through consciousness explained, I was reading this into the purse that we just read for partial exam in life that, yes, there are undeniably qualia, but that they play no causal role. That he's an epiphenomenalist, that consciousness is something, what we take to be phenomenology, what we take to be consciousness is something after the fact and this multiple drafts model and multiple like that it's sort of like you only, we might think that there is this constant steady stream going on.

35:39But we find through various behavioral tests that there just couldn't be because there are multiple ideas going on in the same time. I think we had the same idea from our interview about Buddhism, not Buddhism naturalized, but the one with Robert Wright, where he was. Why Buddhism is true. Why Buddhism is true, where he was talking about the model of there being sort of the multiple mind theory, that there are multiple things going on at any given time that you could take to be sort of processing of consciousness, but it's only right.

36:17Yeah. It's like a split brain patient. I don't think all of that works. Yeah. Anyway, I'm bringing up a bunch of stuff. We'll have to consider more carefully. But his claim right now is that, yeah, to seem is just to be in this, right, from the standpoint of the experience. If you say consciousness is an illusion, but an illusion to who and to what does it mean to be an illusion? It just means to be conscious in the sense of someone like Strasson. Right.

36:47To deny that quali exists is not to deny that there is an appearing of some sort. It is to deny that the thing that appears is a consistent, coherent thing, right? That there is a phenomenal space in which phenomenal objects appear. That's what he's arguing against. If you want to just say, as Purse, I think, did that there is like an immediate something, but that actually you can't say anything about it, because as soon as you try to say something about it, you're bringing in experiences from different points of time. You're bringing in concepts, you're connecting things, like that is to say that quali themselves can have no role.

37:26Yeah, I mean, I'd be overstating things here. Yeah, I'd read a little more about Pierce on that stuff. You're right, because it is the material part of the sign. Yeah. It's kind of, so it gets in as a complicated sign theory, but yeah. All right, do you want to? It fails for the simple reason that there, for there to seem to be rich phenomenology or experience is just for there to be such phenomenology or experience. To say that it's apparently sensory aspects, say, are in some sense illusory, because they are not the product of sensory mechanisms in the way we suppose, but somehow are generated by merely cognitive processes, is to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism of this rich seeming that we call experience or consciousness.

38:06It is in no way to put in question its existence or reality. Whatever the process is by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as even Dennett agrees, at least this, that it seems as if one is having phenomenally rich experience of Beethoven's Eighth Quartet or an Indian wedding. And if there is seeming, then once again, there is just phenomenology or experience. Yeah, this seems to me to be the case, but maybe Dennett has worked out some different meaning for quote-unquote seeming.

38:41I don't know. Oh, there's more to this. Sorry. In denying that experience can be physical, Dennett and his kind find themselves at one with many religious believers. This, it seems at first ironic, but the two camps are deeply united by the fact that both have unshakable faith in something that lacks any warrant in experience. That said, the religious believers are in infinitely better shape epistemologically than the Dennettians.

39:06I don't want to bother to respond to that. Yeah. I'll take up Dennett later. He's being his firebrand self. I mean, ultimately, we're hoping that he's going to give us some actual arguments here for his position. All right. Second paragraph.

Realistic Physicalism

39:19Go west.

Realistic Physicalism

39:20Realistic physicalists, then, grant that experiential phenomena are real concrete phenomena, for nothing in life is more certain, and that experiential phenomena are therefore physical phenomena. It can sound odd at first to use physical to characterize mental phenomena, like experiential phenomena. And many philosophers who call themselves materialists or physicalists continue to use the terms of ordinary everyday language that treat the mental and the physical as opposed categories.

39:54It is, however, precisely physicalists, real physicalists, who cannot talk this way, for it is, on their own view, exactly like talking about cows and animals, as if they were opposed categories. Why? Because every concrete phenomenon is physical according to them. So, all mental experiential phenomena are physical phenomena, according to them, just as all cows are animals. So, when physicalists, real ones, talk as if the mental experiential and the physical were entirely different, all they can really mean to be doing is to distinguish within the realm of the physical, which is the only realm there is, according to them, between mental experiential features of the physical,

40:43and non-mental, non-mental, non-experiential features of the physical. All right, we have one big category, the physical, which is like animals. And then the mental and the non-mental are subcategories within the physical and his, you know, and his redefinition of the physical. I don't know that just redefining the physical is helpful, but we'll find out. Right, and there was a footnote in there. For the purposes of argument, I make the standard assumption that while all experiential phenomena are mental phenomena, the converse is not true.

41:20Right, so there are mental phenomena that are about, you know, that are unconscious or about keeping your balance and stuff like that. But would we call those mental phenomena? I mean, if you're Freud, you do. I guess the, you know, keeping your balance, in other words, it involves the parts of the brain, the cerebellum. Probably you wouldn't call that a mental phenomena, even though it has to do with the brain, even though it's brain processing. Peirce would call it a mental phenomenon because all the physical ends up being mental and symbolic. You know, the fact that chemicals passing in parts of the brain are, in a sense, symbolizing something, right, in that, I don't, maybe I don't want to open this box of worms here.

42:00Yeah, for a depth psychologist or cognitive science, to say that there are sub-experiential mental phenomena, I don't think is controversial, right? So just say, well, take the feeling of the chair on your leg right now. You weren't paying attention to it, so it wasn't experiential in the rich sense of being attended to. But when you pay attention to it, you realize it was there all along. It's still mental without, so Freud would call this pre-conscious as opposed to unconscious.

42:30But anyway, shall I keep going? Sure. As a real physicalist, then, I hold that the mental experiential is physical, and I am happy to say, along with many other physicalists, that experience is really just neurons firing, at least in the case of biological organisms like ourselves. But when I say these words, I mean something completely different from what many physicalists have apparently meant by them.

43:01I certainly don't mean that all characteristics of what is going on in the case of experience can be described by physics and neurophysiology, or any non-evolutionary, non-revolutionary extensions of them. That idea is crazy. It amounts to radical illimitivism with respect to experience, and it is not a form of real physicalism at all. Sorry. Footnote 9. And this follows from the fact that current physics contains no predicates for experiential phenomena, and that no non-revolutionary extension of it, no currently conceivable extension of it, could do so.

43:39All right. My claim is different. It is that experiential phenomena just are physical, so that there is a lot more to neurons than physics and neurophysiology record, or can record. No one who disagrees with this is a real physicalist in my terms. All right. So it sounds like the way I was putting it is that the mental has to be a property of the physicalist, of the physical in the broad sense, right?

44:13He's calling it a subcategory, so that we take physical in the broad sense, which sounds like some kind of modest view, right? And then the non-experiential physical is what we're acquainted with in, say, physics, but physics isn't recording anything from the experiential physical. So one way that would make sense is if the subsection of physical phenomena that are mental phenomena are the ones that are in some sense symbolic.

44:48So whenever you have a nerve transmitting a message or something, an actual signal on a telephone wire transmitting itself, then there is something about that signal that cannot be fully explained per Searle's Chinese Room experiment in physical terms. So you need to refer to the information that is, there's nothing about qualia about that, but that at least introduces a dualism that is still ultimately reconcilable with physics.

45:24Yeah. And if we wanted to be, say, platonic idealists, we would just say, you know, we might say something like the, without even talking about experience, that there's something about the formal per se or the structural per se, which is not physical. It involves the arrangement of physical things. Yes. The DNA encodes these qualities about, yeah. Yeah. So the DNA goes even farther, right? Because it's not just about the structure of the helix or whatever.

45:54It's about all the functions and the way all that stuff unfolds in time. It becomes information in a dynamic sense and the way it produces proteins and all that stuff. And you're using function there, I think, right? Functionalists are a part of the physicalists that he is objecting to. So maybe that's not going to be sufficient, but at least it gives us an opening here. Yeah. Maybe if they were Aristotelian functionalists, teleologists, maybe that would work. I don't know. All right.

46:24In a paper called Real Materialism, I considered some objections to the claim that the position I have just outlined can really be called a physicalist position. I did my best to answer them and ended concessively, allowing that one might better call the position experiential and non-experiential monism rather than real physicalism. This is what I was wondering. Okay. It is in any case the position of someone who, A, fully acknowledges the evident facts that there is experiential being in reality, B, takes it that there is also non-experiential being in reality, and C, is attached to the modest idea that there is in some fundamental sense only one kind of stuff in the universe.

47:04I wish he had taken this approach from the start, because it just seems clear to me. Yeah. Right? To say there's like the broad physical and then the narrow physical, or right, the non-experiential physical and the experiential physical, it's too complicated. So it seems like he is describing Spinozism. Does sound like that. Yep. Which nobody would then say, oh, that's Spinoza is the real physicalist. Who, like, no, that's, no. He was accused of being a panpsychist, but I don't think he's categorized that way by contemporary, right, historians of philosophy from my, is what I remember from my last go around with this.

47:49But anyway, let's not get off track here. A pantheist. Right. Pantheist. Yep. Which we haven't really talked about, the relation between panpsychism and pantheism, but let's not. Yeah, Goff does in his book and on his videos. So, and, but yeah, so we'll have to read some Goffs in, but go ahead. The objectors then picked on the word monist, and I consider further concession. You can call my position experiential and non-experientialism, and if you like, if you like, and opt out of the monism, dualism, pluralism oppositions of classical metaphysics.

48:20Perhaps you can simply call it question markism. Great, great. That's going to clarify things. Then you'll have to allow the existence of experiential being at least is certain and is not put in question by the question mark. So that would be better to call it experiential question markism. And if you then want to insist, in line with all standard conceptions of the physical, that non-experiential being also exists, then you will also need to signal the fact that non-experiential is not put in question by the question mark, in which case you may as well go back to calling the position experiential and non-experiential question markism.

48:55I think you should have just called it clicking sound, clicking soundism. Just get rid of that whole paragraph. That is not helpful at all. All right. No. Yeah, all of this.

49:06Yeah. I persist in thinking that physicalism, real physicalism, is a good name for my position in the current context of debate. But it's already time to admit that in my understanding, real physicalism doesn't even rule out panpsychism. Which I take to be the view that the existence of every real concrete thing involves experiential being, even if it also involves non-experiential being. If this seems a little colorful, then it's time to read Locke on substance again.

49:38Losers. Idiots. Sorry.

49:42Okay. And he's just giving us some little numbers. Some citations for Locke. He's not going to read it for us or with us. He's just going to say, you go read it. Surely I've pushed myself over the edge. How can I say that physicalism is an acceptable name for my position? Because I take physical to be a natural kind term whose reference I can sufficiently indicate by drawing attention to tables and chairs and, as a realistic physicalist, experiential phenomena. Footnote. It's striking that analytic philosophers and psychologists have talked so much about natural kind terms, but have failed to see that physical is a paradigmatic example of such a term in every sense in which gold is.

50:23Okay. I haven't thought about that. Yeah. Something to think about. The physical is whatever general kind of thing we are considering when we consider things like tables and chairs and experiential phenomena. It includes everything that concretely exists in the universe. If everything that concretely exists is intrinsically experience involving, well, that is what the physical turns out to be. It is what energy, another name for physical stuff, turns out to be. This view does not stand out as particularly strange against the background of present-day science and is in no way incompatible with it.

50:54Whatever. All of this could have been avoided by just doing the monism route.

51:00Take the next one. I don't define the physical as concrete reality, as concrete reality, whatever it is. Obviously, I can't rule out the possibility that there could be other non-physical and indeed non-spacio-temporal forms of concrete reality.

51:18Okay. I simply fix the reference of the term physical by pointing at certain items and invoking the notion of a general kind of stuff.

51:28Yeah. Right. Monism. Don't have to call it physical. It is true that there is a sense in which this makes my use of the term vacuous. For relative to our universe, physical stuff is now equivalent to real and concrete stuff and cannot be anything to do with the term physical that is used to mark out a position in what is usually taken to be a substantive debate about the ultimate nature of concrete reality. Physicalism versus immaterialism versus dualism versus pluralism versus et cetera. But that is fine by me.

52:00If it's back to Carnap, so be it.

52:04And it's just a reference to Carnap. Yeah. Have I gone too far? It seems to me that to go this far is exactly the right thing to do at this point in the debate. It's worth it if it helps get us back to a proper realistic open-mindedness. But anyone who prefers to call my position realistic monism instead of real physicalism should feel free to do so.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

52:28Yes.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

52:29And you should have done that from the start. Fourteen, footnote, it is less certain that there is non-experiential stuff than that there is experiential stuff. And in most ears, real physicalism signals commitment to the existence of non-experiential stuff in a way that realistic monism does not. Exactly. So don't stop using this term.

52:53It seems like a good place to stop. Yeah. Do you have any closing comments on just overall observations on the tone? Yeah. I didn't even hear the last part because I was looking up what Carnap 1950 was, which is empiricism, semantics, and ontology. So, of course, Carnap's Aufbau project was a project of reductionism. And he tried this. To sense data. Well, he tried this in a phenomenalist way. And maybe that was in that one that we read. Yeah, I think. Yeah.

53:24He also then, I think, tried it in a physicalist way, sort of in a different stage. And so this was influential, right? The context of us reading it was Chalmers, famously a duelist of sorts. You know, he's not a limitative. He's the hard problem of consciousness. Qualia. He's a, he might, is he calling, he calls himself a property duelist, maybe Chalmers. Yes. Yes. So that, you know, that if we want to say we can't base everything on phenomenal qualia,

53:54there have to be a basic set of facts, some of which are physical, some of which are qualia, some of which are modal. There were four categories anyway. But then there was another Carnap that we read, which might've been this one, which just said, look, just use the vocabulary of the domain that you're talking about. And there is no metaphysical fact beyond the vocabulary you need to talk in that area.

54:27So if you're talking about, you know, this is getting into Wittgenstein almost, right? If you're talking about a particular game, you know, the game of soccer, then these social fictions of what is a goal and what is offsides, like these have reality. So you could talk about the ontology of soccer and, and there's no, you know, then you could talk about the ontology of physics, the ontology of biology, the ontology of psychology, and there is no master ontology that is underneath all of those things.

54:57And so I don't, I'm not, Carnap obviously had a very rapid, you know, a very long evolution between those two very extreme views. Like, yes, it's really important to reduce everything to one kind of thing versus no, no reductionism at all. So yeah, which one is, it makes a lot of difference, which one he's referring to here.

55:22I'll check whether that's the one we actually read in the past Partially Examined Life episode that I'm thinking of. We read along with Davidson, I believe, who is somebody that we're also at least tentatively going to get back to very soon. All right. So we've now, uh, just entering the fifth of, it says 21 pages, but it's the last couple are always, you know, 19 pages. So I'm. Yeah. I want to do the whole thing. I mean, it's, this is very, his style is very entertaining, even though it's curmudgeonly

55:55and fire brandy and all that stuff. But yeah, I think we'll learn something about panpsychism by the time we get to the end of this. And, uh, you know, we'll have at least the two of us will have the background after reading two of his papers. Maybe we'll want to, well, three of his papers, right? Because free will.

56:11Maybe we will want to, uh, you know, get him on the show at some point. I don't even, I don't know what he's doing now, but he's young enough and active enough and has been on podcasts or at least interacted with the very bad wizards guys. As I know before berate us for not having read enough lock, we could make him fill in the gaps with his vast history of knowledge of the history of philosophy. All right. Well, thanks again for folks for sticking around again, the, uh, part two, part three, part four, part five, whatever we need to finish.

56:43This will only be available to the Patreon folks. So patreon.com slash close reads philosophy. Uh, we will have a new public episode, a new video, probably a month from now. So we'll, we'll see you sooner or later. Bye. Bye. Bye.

57:20Close Reads is a partially examined life podcast. See partially examined life.com. We're distributed through the evergreen podcast network. See evergreenpodcast.com slash close reads philosophy. And you can also find us at close reads philosophy.com or just look up close reads on your favorite podcast listening platform. Bye.