Is Consciousness Everywhere?

On the pseudophilosophy of panpsychism and its parallel to creationism

Is consciousness everywhere? In every rock and atom? That is what panpsychists like the philosopher Philip Goff believe. They urge us to revolutionise/abandon physics itself to accommodate consciousness as a fundamental feature of reality.

This view will sound absurd to most readers, yet it has gained surprising attention over the past decade. The attention panpsychism receives puzzles me, until I remember that we have seen this pattern before.

Consciousness in every cell and atom? A downright romantic and beautiful idea. But that doesn’t make it true.

When progress in Darwinian biology threatened cherished beliefs about human uniqueness and about our special place in nature, creationists urged us to reject Darwin rather than accept that we are continuous with nature. The fact that science slowly unearths more details about our evolutionary origins, rather than revealing them in one simple stroke, as if our history could be told on a single page, was taken as a reason to reject evolutionary biology wholesale. Of course, this is unfortunately not too surprising.

We know that scientific evidence is frequently discounted when it conflicts with cherished beliefs. Panpsychism, unfortunately, follows the same logic as earlier creationism. Consciousness is treated as something magical, to be admired rather than explained, lest scientific reduction rob it of the spiritual significance that draws people to popular books on consciousness, meditation retreats, and even psychedelic drugs. The observation that consciousness is still an ongoing scientific issue, rather than a completely resolved one, is taken to imply that science cannot explain consciousness at all…

If I am right about this parallel, it becomes less surprising that the philosopher Thomas Nagel, known for his resistance to the very idea of a science of consciousness, came to reject modern evolutionary biology itself, for which he received an enormous amount of justified flak. Or take Philip Goff, who has now turned to defending his own version of Christianity. We see the same pattern.

The evolution of consciousness was the central topic of my book, A Philosophy for the Science of Animal Consciousness, in which I argue that consciousness evolved to help animals navigate difficult trade-offs in decision-making. Recently, the journal Adaptive Behavior featured nine articles by scientists and philosophers on my book, along with my replies. In my previous posts, I summarized my arguments against critics who thought that consciousness cannot be studied in an evolutionary manner, and that we should abandon the language of feelings entirely. But I also discussed panpychism in my academic article and argued that much of the metaphysical literature on consciousness fails to advance our understanding and may even obstruct it.

These debates rely too heavily on questionable thought experiments designed to support predetermined conclusions. Philosophers would contribute more by guiding scientific research on consciousness. It was also the perfect opportunity to put an anecdote Frankish shared in a podcast after Dennett’s death featuring an exchange between him and Goff into the academic literature. Let me quote the cleaned up version from my article here:

Philip Goff: “Look, panpsychism doesn’t contradict anything that you believe or that you want to say about how the physical world works, or about evolution, or about the kinds of evolutionary explanations you give. All of that’s perfectly compatible with panpsychism. Panpsychism doesn’t say it doesn’t work like that. It just says there’s an extra dimension, the intrinsic nature of all these processes that you talk about. So there are these evolved brain mechanisms which achieve all the effects, but there’s also this intrinsic nature to them as well. So really, all I’m doing is seeking to expand on the kind of work that you do. And you could join us and still do everything you’re doing, but you’d have this extra bit as well.”

Dan Dennett looked a bit mischievous and said: “Well, tell me is there any money for doing this extra work you’re talking about? Is there any grant money available for panpsychism?”

Philip Goff: “Well yeah, it’s becoming quite popular. There’s quite a lot of funding available for this.”

And Dan Dennett said, “Well then, it sounds quite attractive… because there’s no work to do!”

Even if panpsychism were compatible with my evolutionary explanation of different kinds of subjective experience, I ultimately argued that theories of consciousness like panpsychism amount to little more than what Dennett called “chmess”: a random variation on the rules of chess, that has its own mathematical truths that might be interesting to discover, but is of no practical relevance. Scientific progress has largely made theories like panpsychism irrelevant theoretical exercises. Yet panpsychists point to the absence of a final resolution in consciousness science as evidence that science must fail. But this is absurd. No one should have expected scientists to solve consciousness completely after just 50 years, simply hang up their coats, and move on to new problems. Biology is much messier and more complex than the calculation of a physicist for how long it would take for a ball thrown off a building to hit the floor. Even something as simple as a single neuron, is not yet fully understood. We continue to learn new things.

(You might also enjoy this interview I did with Dan not too long before he died:)

Next time I will discuss how our current best science should help us to understand the metaphysical nature of the experience of pleasure and pain.

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