Physicalism and Panpsychism, Or what is evolutionary emergence?

[T_from_U]

ha... yes. you reminded me of that McKenna point; "Give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest"

[projectmalus]

After a superhuman effort I've managed to decode the very earliest information transmitted by the first elementary particles, as they started to oscillate in the evolving fields...the message is "STAY" and I believe it's the particles addressing the increasing oscillations.

[anubiuslandcaster]

there can be no possibility of a function without an ontological a priori that makes it possible for the function to emerge, which means that consciousness is embedded within the primordial substance/processes of Being.

[CoreyAnton]

I guess I am still confused by your positions, Matt. If you are willing to say that life emerged from non-life (i.e. life itself does not go all the way down), why not simply claim that consciousness, however tenuous, emerges with life. Said another way, does life not introduce something novel into the inorganic realm?

[johndavis]

There may be a time when it is appropriate to embrace failure and move on. I would warn you, Matt, that I don't sense that there is much point in revisiting the fortress that David Long and his cohorts defend. As you have written an intro to Mario Betti's book, I would invite you to relax your need to understand David better. I think you got the gist of him and his arguments already. There is nothing else going on. Surely, there are other dialogue partners that can be learned from and who can catch your vibe. David may not be that kind of guy.

[jimmyfaulkner]

What are your thoughts on dual-aspect monism?

[richardbrucebaxter]

What should be distinguished here is empirical consciousness (ie observed behaviour of an entity exhibiting what humans believe in their experience to be consciousness) and phenomenological consciousness itself (what philosophers are typically referring to - mental properties under property dualism, mind under substance dualism, an inherent subjective experience of possibly arbitrary arrangements of energy under panpsychism etc). Empirical consciousness can be viewed as an information processing adaptation in that an organism which values itself as a subjective being capable of experiencing pain/pleasure/etc is more likely to survive than an organism without such belief. It can be assumed that an encoding of the concept of a subjective self benefited intelligent agents. But there is no empirical demonstration that a natural or artificial system which declares itself to possess such being (subject) in fact does. Empirical science only makes claims with respect to observables, or hypotheses that can at least in theory be denied by observation (and any claim of phenomenological consciousness cannot be denied by experimentation/measurement).

Rather we project our beliefs onto nature; our self-assurance of existence following experience, and therefore the likely correspondence between organisms/CNS like our own and internal mind like our own. Non-reductive physicalism assumes a mapping between the belief, behaviour, or neural correlates of consciousness and the mental properties themselves, but it offers no explanation for why this mapping exists and the bounds of this mapping (its extension to rocks for instance or arbitrary subsets of space-time in which certain biological processes are occurring). Panpsychism deals with the apparent overdetermination of mental reality (its functional redundancy under physicalism/naturalism), by assuming it is an inherent property of all/most/many states of nature, but as yet offers no explanation for which physical subsets should be assigned a unified coherent conscious experience (the combination problem).

[ardaraith]

What about philosophies like non-dual shaivism which flip that, placing consciousness as the origin out of which form emerges?

[sunyata]

I found William James' "Essays in Radical Empiricism" to be most helpful in uncramping of my mind matter/mind conflict. I may not have understood it correctly, but he thinks we have one cognitive "thinking process" that has to categorize two different aspects of reality - essentially classing things as things (such as a room that we know exists when we are not aware of it) and experiences (illusions, the room when we close our eyes, etc). Materialism/idealism is just a mistaken impulse to take "one true side" of this strange double-natured aspect of consciousness, but there really are no sides - just a categorizing process classing different aspects of "pure experience." Very organic explanation, and takes us back to remember the answer is before the question. Apologize if this does not apply to the subject matter of the video, though.

[bquimby]

Yeah, the function gets at why it persists, not how it emerges. I don't know how people screw that up.

[tuhinbhattacharjee]

loved this! really making me think. would love to know what you think of deleuze and his theorization of the organism, both biological and political. a video would be great!

[mrnibelheim]

Matt, when I read and listen to Donald Hoffman I keep being reminded of your questions. His book The Case Against Reality deals in some detail with evolution theory and consciousness, and spacetime seems to be the casualty of his analysis. But I haven't followed you for long, so maybe you've already dealt with his views? And thank you for yours - much appreciated!

[evoLveAllone]

2:18-2:54
Ok, so Matt, you say here "In order to understand this evolutionary history, we need to presuppose some sort of experiential interiority, some desire or feeling; some modicum of subjectivity must be present from the very beginning of this evolutionary process in order to understand how it could arrive, through a continuous process of iteration, at something like us." Now I believe that I agree with you, but I am not sure we both see this the same way. You have said things in past videos that lead me to infer that you see things a bit differently when we look back in imagination to attempt to envision how Kosmos occurred. So I'd like to try again to get you to answer the questions I have at this point of your worldview. I think that I can put it simply: Are you or are you not positing Mind or Consciousness as being there from the very beginning? As I see it, it makes no sense for one to claim that experiential interiority, desire or feeling, telos, value, meaning, or creativity could exist independently of a Mind, Consciousness, Intelligence, or Being. What do you say?

[plainjane]

My argument to materialists: Let us accept, for the sake of argument, your position that life and consciousness simply emerge from increasingly complex interactions of matter and energy. But then, does this not imply that life and consciousness are intrinsic properties of matter and energy, that manifest under the proper conditions? To me, the answer is yes, obviously. But I don't suppose I'll convince anyone else.

[PrafulGagrani]

Here is my opinion on your video partly informed by research in complex systems and origin of life and partly by reading into advaita vedanta and personal spiritual practices and insights. I think pansychism is definitely in accordance with the vedic tradition where the 'I am' or consciousness is universal (an understanding/experience of this oneness is liberation) and this experience of is-ness is common to all of space time. Now the vedic tradition actually goes further, and Matt I think this might be something you will find value in. It actually deems the world of changing name and form as illusory or a product of the mind (maya). From this view, saying that consciousness arises so that an organism move around so that it can eat is actually backward. The correct view will be consciousness is and in the modern setting one can say that the universe playing out mathematical rules or all parts of space time computing and transmuting information is the consciousness. Now the rules of math allow for self organization to happen, and as and when they do new rules emerge as the whole can be more than the sum of it's parts and in this way consciousness evolves with the universe (I hope I'm saying 'consciousness evolves' consistently with your usage, at least that's the intention).

You are very right to point out, in my opinion, that the fact that there is behavior or changing phenomena is the result of consciousness but the converse is not true. I would say a stone is computing being a stone, i.e. is affected by gravity and so on in the right way. Although in the case of a stone, we know it is a composite made out of molecules and such who have not assembled into a whole that is bigger than the sum, but something like the earth with it's geological time scales is definitely to be seen as computing very complex functions. To summarize, we know changing phenomena is always the case, since the big bang, and we want to attribute the information theoretic rules by which rules can change itself to consciousness. Paraphrasing a line from upanishads, not that which the eye sees, but that BY which the eye CAN see, that is consciousness. So if we attribute the source of changing name and form to consciousness, then it must be a part of the universe since the beginning of time, again, as you said.

[CoreyAnton]

I remain unconvinced that admitting that life (as studied by biology) is not reducible to matter (as studied by physics and chemistry) makes one a "dualist." There seem to be different levels of analysis and explanation, not a dualism. Said most simply, life never leaves the inorganic realm behind, as if escaping from it, but it, life, is not reducible to the level of inorganic chemistry and non-metabolic processes.

[jonlots]

If I were to make a robot copy of me, I can't imagine how I am conscious (having interior experience) while the robot is not. Thus, I am inclined to believe consciousness is a thing that fills into any and every body/container. Therein, rocks and star systems alike must also involve this captivity for interior experiences.

[projectmalus]

Try separating out intelligence into cleverness (evolved) and awareness (embedded, or that which we are embedded into).