The Argument from Psychophysical Harmony w/ Dustin Crummett

Dr. Dustin Crummett joins me to discuss a new argument from consciousness for theism. Though psychophysical harmony is evidence for theism, it may be equally good evidence for non-theistic hypotheses that I find interesting, like axiarchism and natural teleology.

**In the initial presentation of the argument (the first ten minutes or so), we assume that epiphenomenalism—the idea that consciousness has no physical effects—is true, but this is just for convenience, as psychophysical harmony is a puzzle for all (or nearly all) metaphysical views of the mind.

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@waldenpod @OnPanpsychism

/ Counter Apologetics /

/ Walden Pod /

/ Timestamps /

00:00 Introduction

01:26 The Argument in a Nutshell

12:57 God of the Gaps

15:54 Multiverse

17:37 Natural Selection I

18:55 Non-epiphenomenalist views don't escape the problem

36:12 Natural Selection II

47:17 Spooky Naturalism & “Theism-adjacent hypotheses”

50:18 Error theory doesn't solve the problem

55:36 Contingent normative roles objection

1:00:36 Low priors & Bayes

1:10:34 God's Mind: The Revenge Problem

1:14:38 Theism vs. "Theism-adjacent hypotheses" / Spooky Naturalism

1:24:00 Why panpsychism is (maybe) better off

1:27:04 What about disharmony?

1:42:57 A *new* argument for theism?

1:49:29 Other arguments from consciousness & fine-tuning

1:55:40 Final thoughts on the paper and Dustin's other work

[MajestyofReason]

Wonderful video! I quite like Dustin’s argument.

[ParkersPensees]

Really great convo. It's obvious that Emerson knows what he's talking about here too which makes the convo way better and allows him to ask better questions and offer informed push back.Thanks for this, using it to prep for my convo with Crummett

[philster]

Question for Dustin and Brian - do they feel like plantinga’s EAAN influenced them much in outlining their argument? This idea, that the content of our conscious states mapping onto our physical states in just this way is extremely fortunate, seems so closely tied to plantingas EAAN. If you go back and watch some of his discussions with tooley on the EAAN, it’s basically the same dialectic.

[melchiordeduser]

In the begining Dustin gave and example of hedonistic harmony "if something feels good you do it again if something feels bad you probably don't do it".
If "bad feeling" is not identical to "undesirable feeling" or "a feeling to avoid" then I have no idea what it means for a feeling to be "bad". Violation of this identity seems impossible.
37:48 "if you imagine the world where pain and pleasure are inverted and their causal profiles are inverted so not only does pain occur under the
conditions where pleasure currently occurs but it has the same impact causal impact on the physical that pleasure currently has then that's not going to make any difference to natural selection"
So, if pain is "a feeling i want to avoid" and pleasure "a feeling I want to have" then it looks like pain must have this causal profile and this scenario is impossible.
E.g.
1). X causes pain.
2). I want to avoid pain.
3). To avoid pain I should avoid X.
You can place any word in place of "pain" here. But in case of pleasure it's semantic content ("a feeling I want to have") would contradict 2.

[Nontradicath]

Wait, so, Dustin's push back to Natural Selection selecting for this harmony was that Natural Selection wouldn't disallow the inversion of pain and pleasure - ie, the pain pleasure situation / causation switch. My question is: wouldn't the only change in pain and pleasure by a linguistic change if we change both the situations in which they arise and the causal input of those feelings? Like, "pain" simply is "the feeling that was selected for avoidance behavior", and so if pain felt like pleasure and pleasure was the "avoidance feeling", then the only thing that we decided to do is to swap the words that we use, right? I feel like I am wrong, but I can't figure out why I am yet haha

[jamesmarshel]

The pleasure I get from eating bacon is due to things which are good for me in small proportions (fat and salt) but bad for me in bacon proportions over time; I, nevertheless, always find eating bacon pleasurable. Weight lifting is a kind of muscle destruction—which is painful but would be more harmonious if it were pleasurable.For me, this motivates the question: How are ambiguous cases addressed by a nomological model of psychophysical harmony? How many ambiguous cases to harmonious cases are there? Lastly, pain and pleasure do not seem symmetrical. Pain seems less limited than pleasure, to me: i.e. My body’s capacity to generate pain, surpasses my bodies capacity to produce pleasure. Does the argument run the same way given different physiological limits to pleasure and pain?

[jimmyfaulkner]

Doesn’t idealism avoid this new argument for the same reason (but inverted) that type-a physicalists avoid it? Essentially, there is not even an epistemic gap between phenomenal-experiential states and physical-behavioural states

[danegustafson]

Awesome stuff. Is is true that Thomists don’t conceive of God as a conscious mind? I know a lot of them don’t believe God has propositional knowledge, and I wonder if this is related.

[Oskar]

55:15 Please talk to Lance Bush about morality. There is this concept of normative entanglement that he explains really well.

[anthonyspencer]

Late to the party, but I would rather comment on Emerson's video than one of Dustin's more recent interviews on this topic from a non-Emerson channel.

I'm not a naturalist. I am usually arguing against naturalism, but I do not find this argument convincing. Granted, I haven't watched the interview in its entirety. I plan to do that, but at this stage, which is a fair way in, I don't expect an ace to be played. It seems to me that Darwinism, much to my chagrin, gives an adequate explanation for this so-called harmony, in spite of its other failings.

To the extent that this argument is something of a Frankenstein's monster, seeming to have parts from a host of foregoing dualistic arguments in the history of phil. of mind, I'm inclined to resist this sort of implicit cumulative case and instead opt for a more particular case, like Ross's argument re: determinate concepts.

[clashmanthethird]

This is a very interesting argument, buf I think it risks proving too much. If this argument is meant to significantly raise the probability of theism, and it's succeeds, shouldn't it also raise the probability of Type-A materialism by a roughly similar amount?

I personally think consciousness is fundemental, yet the minor amount of credence I give for Keith Frankish style illusionism is probably a bit higher than my credence for traditional theism. So, if the argument is actually successful at massively raising the probability of theism, I don't see why it shouldn't equally raise the probability of Type-A Materialism. So for some people, this argument would push Illusionism over the edge as the most probable option... which seems like a pretty strange side effect of an argument for God.

[Hiya]

Good content.

At like 50 mins he talks about something like a subjectivist take on 'bad'. So the term 'bad' is attitude dependent. He then says that semantic harmony is untouched by this, but I'm thinking he might be wrong. Language has stimulus functions. That is well established. Hearing the word 'truth' feels like something in the same way talking about food feels like something. Since this is the case couldn't you develop as case that if you'll give me hedonic harmony I'll get semantic harmony from hedonic harmony? Steve Hayes has research about the reinforcing value of perceived coherence that feels like it might be relevant. IDK...

[Oskar]

Is there a point where we go through the reverse solution?

Your feeling of stress isn't inherently "stressful". It's just the feeling connected to being stressed.

If evolution would have given you the stress feeling when good stuff happened instead. That very same feeling would have felt good.

Feelings would work like words on this account. Why does me writing the word truck make you think of a truck?

It's not something inherent about the letters "t r u c k". Rather the other way around. The word could have meant anything. If all your life people would have pointed to lemons and said "truck" you would have thought about a lemon when you read truck.

[ovrclocked]

How can we possibly assert that our psychophisical harmony is "really good"? I can agree it's "adequate": it could be worse in many ways, but it could also be better in many ways. For example, if it was perfect for all of us, would we ever have things like sleep paralysis or a sleeping arm or leg? Or would we be cheated by stereoscopic or holographic images? Or would we see ghosts? (or maybe I'm not quite understanding what psychophisical harmony is?) In any case, perhaps there are better examples that we can't even imagine simply because we don't know any better? So if all we can say, for sure, is that our phychophisical harmony is "adequate": wouldn't that be perfectly aligned with evolutionary predictions? As in: I'd 100% expect any form of life that survives for long enough to find itself adequately in harmony with the physical world around it (otherwise it would have not survived).

[jeremyhansen]

I kind of feel like I'm spamming your video, but I feel like we've had somewhat similar philosophical journeys. Every single one of your videos have been incredibly interesting.

Anyway perhaps the paper explains it better when but I don't know if I can see his reasoning behind the error objection. He states that there must be some mental state that must correspond to "desirabilness" but that's not at all obvious to me. I don't think it's like illusionism. The way I see it to desire something is kind of like being compelled towards that thing. First off it's not obvious to me that such compulsion could even be a mental or conscious state like fear, happiness, hunger things like that. Secondly it's not difficult to imagine how things to be compulsory physically speaking. After all physical things have physical cause. In this manner the mental states that correspond to the compelled physical states would kind of go along for the ride. Finally if desire was truly a conscious state, it's not clear to me how that relates to the other states. Why wouldn't I just desire desire and avoid avoidance, instead of desire pleasure and avoid pain.

Also I don't think error theory is inherently reductive, but that's another discussion.

All that said he did touch on a general problem I find interesting. That being why are we capable of developing understanding. After it seems atleast conceivable that physical zombies could have evolved instead of us. Now I think we can rule out creatures that lack any conscious experience what so ever via the anthropic principle, but it seems at least somewhat possible that we could have evolved in a universe where conscious states are randomly correlated to our physical ones, making the understanding we have impossible. From a panpanpsychist point of view most things that possess some level of consciousness live in that kind of world already. I guess the question is is there something about the process of natural selection that invokes understanding?

[spacedoohicky]

Clams! We may not have qualia inversion, but we do have clams. According to me I do not want to be a clam. If I had the choice between being me, and being a clam I would choose being me. Being a clam would be horrible in my opinion. Yet we still have clams. Clams would obviously have a different qualitative experience which is enough, if not complete inversion.

Even our own qualia is not entirely straight forward. We are constantly making errors to receive immediate pleasure for long term suffering. If we imagine a more advanced extraterrestrial who has a better ability to not make the same long term errors this also presents a similar problem. That E.T. may view us as having an inversion of its version of qualia because we make these decisions that hurt us by degrees that would be unacceptable to the E.T.. From the E.T.'s point of view we are psychophysically disharmonious, and that E.T. would want to not ever be hypothetically human.

Psychophysical harmony can't explain clams. Clams are an example of something someone would avoid becoming if given the choice. Yet clams exist.

Keep in mind this isn't an argument for the question of suffering. Maybe clams do enjoy being clams, as the E.T. may assume humans enjoy being humans.

50:00 That was TJump. I'm pretty sure he got it.

[heresa_notion_]

Given no descriptive model of consciousness is on offer, statements like this (from the paper) have no argumental force: "On ordinary naturalistic atheism, it’s very hard to see what could explain psychophysical harmony. On theism, it’s easy.". How should I know something as easy or not, if I haven't a clue on what you mean by consciousness (in terms of a scientific theory), where "clue" just means giving a general idea on how to attempt "conscious" computers?

[Oskar]

Could the laws determining the match between God's intention and God's action have been different?

Such that God intended to create world Y, but that intention makes him create some other world X.

What governs the match between these aspects.

What we need is a super-God that laid down the psycho-divinial laws.

[hiker-uybi]

I guess I fail to see why this is something that needs a philosophical explanation—or why it would point to theism for that matter. That we fail to see this argument picked up by mainstream apologists (e.g., W.L. Craig) is somewhat telling. It’s just not a very intuitive argument, and has some built in assumptions about consciousness that I don’t think many people outside of academic philosophy make.