This is a linkpost for https://stephenfoster.substack.com/p/cracks-in-the-wall-part-i-the-conscious
When we see something blue, we don't just "process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue", or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue. It's right there, right in front of our eyes. We can just look at it.
It's an understandable sentiment, and accepting that "seeing blue" is a part of one of many algorithms the brain runs, and not something external and special, is hard. But there is no contradiction between qualia and physical laws, even if it feels like it.
But there is no contradiction between qualia and physical laws, even if it feels like it.
There's no ability to predict qualia from.physics , either.
The problem for physicalism ("materialism") is not that the existence of consciousness would contradict the laws of physics. The problem is, rather, that physicalism has very high demands for what physics must explain. Physicalism says everything that exists must be logically implied by the laws of physics and the initial state of the universe, together with some sort of insubstantial "bridge laws", which connect terms of fundamental to less fundamental theories. But so far there are no proposed physical laws which imply that consciousness exists, let alone that we are conscious.
And it doesn't end here. Apart from mental objects, the second problem for physicalism are abstract objects. Like meanings and numbers. Current laws of physics presuppose the existence of several kinds of such abstract objects, numbers most notably. The theories currently cannot be formulated purely logically. For physicalism to be sustainable, all these abstract objects will somehow have to be analyzed away.
A third problem for physicalism is the fact that physical laws apparently do not imply the truth values of statements including indexical terms, like "here", "now", or "I".
Because of its promised simplicity, physicalism is a very popular theory among philosophers (as surveys show), but the theory is also extremely difficult to defend. Most are just hopeful physicalists: They believe that one day, there will be a physicalist theory which completely and successfully accounts for mental objects, abstract objects, and indexical terms. No such theory exists to date.
You might enjoy Sean Carroll's podcasts (and books). Here is one that goes in depth on indexicalism: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/06/200-solo-the-philosophy-of-the-multiverse/ (click on transcript if you prefer reading to listening). It deals with the issues of identity, SSA/SIA etc. in a very careful and thoughtful manner.
Not his, but my personal view is that there are "degrees and dimensions of existence" and abstract object are an emergent concept when embedded agents try to predict the universe (which they have to in order to count as agents). That includes meanings, numbers, fairies and anything else that cannot be readily reduced to constituent atoms. It doesn't make them any less physical, they emerge from a different substrate (agents, who are, in turn, reducible to atoms).
Physicalism says everything that exists must be logically implied by the laws of physics and the initial state of the universe, together with some sort of insubstantial "bridge laws", which connect terms of fundamental to less fundamental theories. But so far there are no proposed physical laws which imply that consciousness exists, let alone that we are conscious.
I.. don't think that is what is "implied" by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging "block" or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that's not a great model, given relativity). I guess you can call the rules that determine how to calculate the next instance from the previous one "bridge laws". In physics they are generally called equations of motion, such as F=ma or the Schrodinger equation.
The step I think you are missing is that for agents to exist the universe must be somewhat predictable from the inside by a small part of it (the agent), otherwise the universe would not support agency. Once you accept that the universe, whether as a block or as an evolving entity is not completely random, but (lossily) compressible, you can identify subsystems within it that have these compressed models on the whole inside them. At some point during evolution (the biological one) these inner models must include the model of the subsystem itself and of other subsystems around it. And that's how you get self-awareness and consciousness. The universe just is. The known laws of physics are a human abstraction that helps us, as embedded agents to make sense of the world, starting from what we consider "fundamental" to progressively "less fundamental" (more emergent). One can trace the laws from the more emergent to less emergent step by step (analysis), though inventing emergent laws (synthesis) is much harder. But that's a separate topic.
And that’s how you get self-awareness and consciousness
Consciousness has multiple meanings. An explanation of consciousness in the sense of self awareness says nothing about qualia/phenomenality.
In popular usage, "consciousness" is used both to mean a cluster of things to do with awareness, and another cluster to do with identity and personhood. There is not necessarily a connection between them. For instance, it's conceivable that the bundle theory of identity is true, so it's conceivable that identity emerges from the contents of consciousness...and consciousness, absent contents, has no identity. Its plausible that infants have qualia, but no sense-of-self. In dreaming, one can experience vivid qualia, but the sense-of-self is absent or mutable.
The main rub here is the term "emergent". "B emerges from A" just means "B reduces to A", or "A reductively explains B". But if B reduces to A, A has to logically entail B using nothing more than semantic "bridge laws" which map terms of the reducing theory to terms of the reduced theory. Otherwise it is perfectly possible that our nice physics theory is true but physicalism is false, since there may well exist non-physical things which it doesn't entail or rule out.
For example, if you want to reduce thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, you need a bridge law like "if something has mean kinetic energy x, it has temperature y" because statistical mechanics doesn't contain the term "temperature". Which means laws from statistical mechanics logically entailing laws of thermodynamics would be ruled out from the start if we don't also assume those bridge laws. But any bridge laws may only allow for insubstantial semantic implications, which is the case when it can be shown that, for example, having mean kinetic energy x has necessarily all observable consequences of having temperature y, or being H2O has all the consequences of being water. A supposed "bridge law" which states "everything which has brain state x experiences blue" would not be such a insubstantial bridge law as assuming it would just beg the question.
You really need logical entailment for reduction, assuming merely insubstantial semantic bridge laws. Otherwise you are not logically guaranteed that the reducing theory accounts for all the facts of the reduced theory, and the reduction would not be complete. (Technically, our physicalist theory would also need to add a terminal clause "And nothing else exists", otherwise it would be still compatible with non-physical objects existing.)
Case in point:
"I.. don't think that is what is "implied" by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging "block" or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that's not a great model, given relativity)."
That by itself does not yet imply that everything is physical. It is logically perfectly consistent with assuming that mental or abstract objects, or indexical facts, are not reducible to physical ones. It does not by itself logically entail that mental states exist. And physical theories do not entail the existence of abstract objects, like numbers, from physical assumptions, they rather just presuppose some of them, and they fail to entail or presuppose others which they do not use. If we think that physicalism is true, i.e. everything is physical, then all existing abstract and mental objects have to be entailed by the correct theory of physics, without exception. (In the case of abstract objects, it would be also sufficient if the physical theory entails that no abstract objects exist, in which case it may also not use any numbers or the like. But it has to entail the existence of mental objects like experiences, otherwise such a theory would be immediately falsified by us having experiences.)
Just handwavingly using "emergence" here and there unfortunately does not help. One has to get into the gritty logical details of reduction. For abstract objects, the situation doesn't actually look so hopeless as for mental objects. There is apparently no corresponding "hard problem of abstractness" which physicalism needs to solve. Or at least it seems like the problem is somewhat less hard. There are attempts, albeit flawed, to eliminate numbers from Newtonian mechanics, notably in Hartry Field's famous book "Science Without Numbers". In which case we would analyze those abstract mathematical objects away using advanced methods from formal logic. But we are still far away from physics without any abstract objects, as it is not even clear whether it works for Newtonian mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics and the like.
Thanks for the Carroll reference. If you are interested, I can recommend some papers on reduction and physicalism. In any case, all I wanted to say with my previous comment is that creating a theory of physicalism is far less trivial than many people assume. To put it bluntly, it is ridiculously hard, if it is possible at all. It absolutely requires solving the hard problem of consciousness in a specific way, and even reducing all abstract objects used in science to physical ones is currently philosophical science fiction.
I don't get why reducing numbers to logic or whatever has anything to do with physicalist theory - if everything is a physical object then obviously physicalist theory is also a physical object - this specific piece of paper with attached human, for example. It does say that everything is a physical object - literally in the first sentence on the piece of paper. It does account for experience by saying "everything's experiences are described by" before equations. Why do we need anything else?
Of course you can simply say, without argument, "I believe everything is physical, including mental and abstract objects. I have no justification for this, like in form of a reductive explanation. I just intuitively believe it is true." But that statement alone would not be a theory of physicalism, and few philosophers would be interested in your belief. It is simply far from obvious, for most people, that abstract and mental objects are physical. They are not obviously located in space and time, and they do not obviously have causal powers, at least not in the standard picture of physics. Asserting physicalism therefore requires an argument.
So, considering that non-obviousness of physicality of mental objects is not grounded in rigorous argument, the real requirement is not logical reduction but just persuasion of philosophers, right? And there is enough argument in predicting physical world to a much higher precision than philosophers can discriminate their mental objects with, combined with using, for example, Strawson's arguments for panpsychism, for illustrating the possibility of identifying what people call the mental properties with physical objects at all. So the way I see it there is physicalist theory (with equations and all that) that predicts all things that physicalists want to call the mental properties, that also predicts that non-physicalist theories are less sure about specific mental properties, and there are arguments for why non-physicalists should identify their mental properties with physicalist mental properties. Which is enough to consider the problem solved.
there is physicalist theory (with equations and all that) that predicts all things that physicalists want to call the mental properties
Well...no, there isn't a physical theory or equation that predicts what red looks like. If there were, it would be unreasonable to dispute physicalism.
or example, Strawson’s arguments for panpsychism, for illustrating the possibility of identifying what people call the mental properties with physical objects at all.
If you need to bring in a non-physicalist philosophical theory to identify physical and mental properties, then the physics isn't doing all the lifting, and you don't really have an argument for physicalism. If that's what you are saying.
I'm saying panpsychism/monism or whatever you want to call it is physicalist worldview. Because physicalists do say that things really exist and arguments for why "such and such neural processes" are equivalent to "I am seeing red" are not part of the theory - they're just explanation for intuitions. So yes, it's unreasonable to reject physicalism when it predicts neural processes that you describe as "I'm seeing red" because they are the same thing under panpsychist view as much as "it'a a rock" and "it's heap of atoms" describe the same thing.
I’m saying panpsychism/monism or whatever you want to call it is physicalist worldview
It isn't generally considered to be.
Because physicalists do say that things really exist
That isn't the central or characteristic claim of realism. You can't say that panpsychism is identical to physicalism just because they both agree on the real existence of external objects. If that's what you are saying.
and arguments for why “such and such neural processes” are equivalent to “I am seeing red” are not part of the theory
And that's a bad thing. Physicalism isn't absolved from explaining qualia on the basis that it isn't even trying to. The correct theory is the theory that explains all the evidence, not the one that only explains a subset.
There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
Intuitions as opposed to what?
because they are the same thing under panpsychist view as much as “it’a a rock” and “it’s heap of atoms” describe the same thing
But the identity is not itself physically explained! There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
Physicalism and reductionism are about explanation. Physicalism is the claim that everything is in principle predictable from physics. If there is one fact, entity or property that is not, physicalism is false. So if there is no explanation of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale, if it's a "brute fact" , then physicalism is false.
But the identity is not itself physically explained! There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
There are no strictly physical explanations of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock. Because rocks are human abstraction. Conversely, there are non-strictly physical (maybe sometimes hypothetical, because neuroscience is not yet there) explanations of how specific neural activation patterns amount to specific qualia. The only objection to this is "things you explaining can't possibly be real qualia, because zombies, and real qualia are obviously real". And that is solved by panpsychism - atoms can amount to qualia because everything has qualia/existence matches all intuitions about qualia - and weak illusionism about everything else - specific qualia are less obvious than current science can do about neural processes. So the only "brute fact" that is needed is "these equations describe reality" and this is a physical fact. Do you/philosophical consensus disagree with "existence matches all intuitions about qualia" or what?
It isn’t generally considered to be.
I mean there are certainly varieties that are not physicalist, but if it's just "these equations describe reality" and "existence matches all intuitions about qualia", why shouldn't it considered to be physicalist?
You can’t say that panpsychism is identical to physicalism just because they both agree on the real existence of external objects. If that’s what you are saying.
I'm saying that panpsychism doesn't describe anything additional to physicalism - existence is already a thing in physicalism, so, like any reduction of qualia to physical objects, panpsychism does not become unphysical just because it talks about physical things people call "qualia".
There are no strictly physical explanations of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock. Because rocks are human abstraction.
That's setting the bar rather high. Physicalism is usually only required to explain higher level concepts where they are a given.
I’m saying that panpsychism doesn’t describe anything additional to physicalism
Which gives you physicalist ontology at best. But physicalism also has an epistemological definition; all facts are physical facts. The idea that qualia amount to physics does not have a physical explanation, and is not predicted by physics.
The validity of the idea that qualia amount to physics is explained by the same kind of a physical explanation as in the case of an idea that a heap of atoms amounts to a rock - panpsychism is just a bridge law. Physics predicts existence the same way it predicts atoms, so we say that physics predicts qulia the same way it predicts rocks. What's the relevant difference between "what you called a rock is actually atoms" and "what you called consciousness is actually existence" that makes latter unphysical?
Your original claim was more like qualia are atoms. You seem to have switched to talking about consciousness in a more general sense, whilst also switching to saying it equates to existence in general. But neither claim is a prediction of physics, anyway.
Panpsychism standardly states that all entities have irreducibly mental properties. That's clearly in contrast to the physicalist claim that all properties reduce to physical properties.
Dual aspect theory theory asserts an equivalence between physical states and conscious states, but is unable to say which is fundamental , which is why "dual aspect" is generally coupled to "neutral monism".
I guess "atoms can amount to qualia" was misleading, but I meant that you can describe human qualia using atoms, and that description would be as correct, as describing rock as heap of atoms would, and more complete than "I am seeing red". The switch to "consciousness" was to prevent conflating specific qualia, that are not fundamental, with quale of universe.
But neither claim is a prediction of physics, anyway.
Only in the same sense that "rocks are atoms" is not a prediction of physics.
Panpsychism standardly states that all entities have irreducibly mental properties.
Panpsychism that works (Russelian monism or whatever you want to call the one from http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf) states that all entities have one property that you can call mental - existence - and there is only one entity, because that is how actual physics works. And that property is also implicitly present in physicalism.
If dual aspect says that physical description is complete, even though you can describe things differently, then physics predicts that and you don't need dual aspect. Is it says that physical description is incomplete, then I disagree and want to know what's its objection to the kind of panpsychism I'm talking about.
you can describe human qualia using atoms
Well, no, in practice you can't describe a specific quale by describing a specific configuration of atoms (as in Mary's Room). If you could, there would be no hard problem.
and that description would be as correct, as describing rock as heap of atoms would,
You can give microphysical explanation of a rock , once you input "rock" as a human concept. The same does not work for "red".
The switch to “consciousness” was to prevent conflating specific qualia, that are not fundamental, with quale of universe.
Whats the quale of the universe?
states that all entities have one property that you can call mental—existence—and there is only one entity, because that is how actual physics works.
I didn't notice either idea being mentioned in the paper you linked.
Also, Chalmers seems conflicted about whether panpsychism is physicalism.
"In particular, constitutive Russellian panpsychism is incompatible with narrow physicalism, but it is a form of broad physicalism. "
If dual aspect says that physical description is complete, even though you can describe things differently, then physics predicts that and you don’t need dual aspect
For what? Physics can allow you to predict external.events, but predicts nothing about how things seem to you. Dual aspect theory allows you to account for consciousness, without dismissing it ,and without embracing full dualism with its attendant problems.
“In particular, constitutive Russellian panpsychism is incompatible with narrow physicalism, but it is a form of broad physicalism. ”
How is that conflicted when broad physicalism is physicalism?
I didn’t notice either idea being mentioned in the paper you linked.
Right, sorry, it was another one where it's called cosmopsychism: http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf.
You can give microphysical explanation of a rock , once you input “rock” as a human concept. The same does not work for “red”.
It does work if on the last step where someone will say "but these firing neurons are not actually my seeing of red!" you also input arguments for panpsychism. They are the same kind of explanation, so panpsychism can in principle solve the hard problem. So if you disagree you have to disagree with something specific about panpsychism.
Well, no, in practice you can’t describe a specific quale by describing a specific configuration of atoms (as in Mary’s Room). If you could, there would be no hard problem.
So now that you can, yes, the hard problem is solved.
Whats the quale of the universe?
I mean that actual physics doesn't include fundamental division of universe into parts, so the most precise description of qualia is description of the quale of the universe. And that description is the same as physical description of the state of the universe. Or do you want me to say things that would result in non-verbal thoughts/feelings in you that you would judge as similar to the state of universe? Because that would depend on your judgement.
I think it's rather absurd that the hard problem made you... become a Christian, of all things. What a non sequitur! I've always thought panpsychism was the obvious solution. Consciousness is just what information processing feels like from the inside.
Something like panpsychism would also satisfy his requirement of neither the physical nor the mental being more fundamental. But there is currently no such scientific theory. It would be a physico-mental theory, which means the physical theory would also contain mental terms as primitives, similar to mass or force.
I've failed to parse your specific disagreements with materialist account consciousness, but anyway:
How can they exist when the equations that we claim describe everything seem to leave no room for them whatsoever?
They leave the room in that part where we additionally say "these equations describe what exists" - panpsychism solves the hard problem in a way compatible with materialism.
When we see something blue, we don’t just “process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue”, or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue.
They are the same thing. Stated differently, anything that processes incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes it to report having seen blue, will see blue. Whether it's the same blue is a matter of arbitrary drawn concept bounds. And if you asking "how can you be sure", then the key thing to realize is that you also can't be precisely sure you yourself have seen blue - maybe your memory from a second ago was artificially constructed.
When we see something blue, we don't just "process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue", or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue. It's right there, right in front of our eyes. We can just look at it.
The materialist picture predicts you saying these exact words - there's no causal anomaly happening inside your brain (if you can prove otherwise I know some Swedes who would like to give you a prize).
So the first concerning question should be - why the duplication of work? Why is there a brain that processes light and activates memories and language centers to eventually send out the words "I see blue, no, really, it's right there. I can just look at it," and then some mysterious consciousness-slash-soul that also does its (mysterious) work and eventually sends out the words "I see blue, no, really, it's right there. I can just look at it."?
Why do the work twice?
And when your physical brain reads my argument and then does some processing and then sends out the words "no, my consciousness doesn't feel like rote processing of information at all," where is it getting the idea?
So the first concerning question should be—why the duplication of work?
The first question should be: whether the duplication of work.
Physics is a set of theories and descriptions...a map. Usually, the ability of a map to explain and is not exlusive of another map's ability to do so. We can explain the death of Mr Smith as the result of bullet entering his heart, or as the result of a finger squeezing a trigger, or a a result of th einsurance policy recently taken out on his life, and so on.
So why can't we resolve the epiphenomenal worry by saying that that physical causation and mental causation are just different, non rivalrous, maps? "I screamed because my pain fibres fired" alongside -- not versus -- "I screamed becaue I felt a sharp pain". It is not the case that there is physical stuff that is doing all the causation, and mental stuff that is doing none of it: rather there is a physical view of what is going on, and a mentalistic view
According to current physical theories, the laws of physics together with the initial conditions of the universe presumably do indeed imply that he says "I have the experience of a blue sky". But they do not seem to imply that he indeed has these experiences. That's the problem. If everyone was a zombie, there would be no problem, since there would be no experiences to explain, just behavior. But I'm not a zombie, and I assume you aren't either.
My comment is already a reply to this comment. If your consciousness is separate from your body, why do you do the same work twice? And seriously consider why your brain might send out the words "but surely the laws of physics don't imply that my conscious experience has to be like it so obviously is."
I was nerd sniped by the genie intro and didn't read the rest of the post. I wish there was a way to ask for the solution to aligned AI in three words. Best I can come up with is "Is scale enough?" but that leaves so many stones unturned. Do we get to ask more than one question?
I.
Imagine a genie appears before you and makes you a simple offer: you can ask him any question you want, and he'll answer it. No tricks - genie society has seen sweeping reforms and made great moral progress, and the days of the malicious trickster genies have been left long behind. No, this genie is entirely benevolent: if your question turns out to have been ill-formed, he'll explain exactly why it was ill-formed, and then answer the question you intended to ask. No matter what question you pose to him, you'll find yourself completely satisfied with the answer he gives.
However, genies being genies, he still feels the need to follow ancient tradition and impose some kind of a ternary restriction on his gift. So he stipulates that the question can only be three words long.
What question do you ask him?
Even with only three words, there seems no shortage of good options to pick from. You might, for instance, ask him: Why am I? That is, for what reason do I exist? What, if anything, is my purpose in life? Where can I find meaning, what ought I to do with my time?
Or perhaps: How am I? How, by what means, did I come to be, and do I persist in being? What are the mechanisms and operations of creation and existence?
Or maybe it's wisest to ask: Who am I? How do I fit into the world, how does my life relate to the lives of others? What is the truest story I can tell about the person that I am?
All excellent nominations, and a case could be made for any of them. For myself, though, I find that I stumble long before I reach anything nearly so lofty. My confusions are more basic than that, my lack of understanding more fundamental. No, I'd be happy getting the answer to a much simpler question: What am I?
What, exactly, am I? If I can't answer that then it's hard to see how I can make much sense of the other questions, or really any question at all. And troublingly, I find that I can't, in fact, answer it.
What do I mean by that? Is it not obvious what we are? I worry some of you might think I'm being deliberately obtuse here, in service of some ultimately irrelevant philosophical point I'm trying to make. Not my intention at all. I mean what I say: at a basic level, I really have no idea how to think about what kind of thing it is that I am. My confusion runs deep. And far from being an irrelevancy, it was confronting this mystery in full that forced me to rethink much of what I knew, and eventually led me down a completely different path in life.
So let's talk about materialism, consciousness, and the self.
II.
My younger self would have had an answer at the ready, although he would have admitted it was not yet complete. It would have been a materialist answer through and through, rooted in biology, physics, and ultimately math.
He would have started by saying that whatever else we are, we are biological creatures: human beings, who are born, who live, and who die. We came to be as we are via evolution, that special process that allows replicators (and replicators alone) to amass and accumulate complexity in an entropic world, through the ratchet-like workings of random variation combined with non-random selection.
He would go on to say that through evolution we came to have certain values and desires, corresponding ultimately to preferred states of the universe. As agents in the world, we evolved to take actions to try to steer reality towards those states that we prefer, and away from those that we disprefer.
He would stress that our values need not be simple values, nor our desires necessarily selfish ones. As social creatures, it would be perfectly possible, he would insist, for us to evolve to exhibit genuine altruism. And there would be nothing to stop initially simple drives - say a desire to model the world, or a preference for symmetry over asymmetry - from exploding into vast and beautiful spandrels - say a need to do philosophy, or a love for creating art. He would also take care to emphasize that, though our drives may have come about because they once maximized genetic fitness, that does not mean they are about maximizing fitness - that our values, once created, are meaningful in and of themselves.
He would readily and calmly accept that we are best described as collections of atoms (or collections of subatomic particles, or collections of excitations of quantum fields, or collections of whatever more fundamental entities we might discover in the future). But he would bristle at any attempt to prefix such a description with the word "mere". There is nothing mere about us, he would steadfastly maintain.
He would proclaim above all else our utter uniqueness as biological creatures: how we evolved to have a capacity for self-reflection, allowing us to model and reason about ourselves in a way that no other animal can. How this amounted to an unprecedented new light of comprehension dawning in the world. How we alone became, in the words of Carl Sagan, "a way for the universe to know itself".
Finally, as to how it all came to be, he would note - speculatively - that reality didn't just seem to be described by math, it seemed in some sense to be made of math. The laws of physics left little room, it appeared, for objects to have additional properties beyond the mathematical ones they detailed. So perhaps, he would venture tentatively (and only tentatively), we consist of nothing but math. We don't follow equations, we are equations. And perhaps as math we therefore don't need anything to make us exist - perhaps all mathematical structures (including our universe, and us within it) simply exist in some platonic sense.
This last he would have offered up only as a speculative guess. He would be the first to admit that here, he had reached the limits of his understanding - that this was as far as he had gotten, and that in truth he couldn't say much about why there was something rather than nothing.
But as to the claim that we have "no idea" how to think about what we are? Ridiculous, he would say. We may not have figured everything out yet, and indeed, he would allow, we may never will. But we most certainly do not have "no idea".
That, more or less, would have been my younger self's answer to my question.
Is it a good answer? It's certainly got some compellingness to it - even now I feel the tug of it. But however skillfully weaved it is, there are certain questions it simply cannot address, and behind those lie fatal flaws. So let's pick at some of the loose threads it leaves hanging, and see to what extent the whole thing starts to unravel.
III.
As I said, my past self would have acknowledged that his answer was incomplete. He knew it had holes. But looking back now, it seems to me that he took pains to avoid thinking about just how big the holes were, and how intractable the problems they created really were.
The issue is consciousness, of course. Always consciousness. The trouble is, it's an inescapable fact about the world that it somehow gives rise to subjective experiences. When we see something blue, we don't just "process incoming light of a certain wavelength in such a way as to create a pattern of mental activity that causes us to report having seen blue", or whatever materialist story you want to tell. We see blue. It's right there, right in front of our eyes. We can just look at it. Consciousness is, you might say, "that which is undeniable".
And this is a problem. It's a big problem. Because it's very, very difficult to fit this kind of subjective experience into the fundamentally materialist description of the world put forth above. If my past self's view could reasonably be summed up as "physics is all there is" (or perhaps "math is all there is"), then we can ask: what, exactly, are these subjective experiences? Where do they come from? How can they exist when the equations that we claim describe everything seem to leave no room for them whatsoever? In consciousness we seem to have run into an entirely new kind of thing - something not just undescribed by physical laws, but indescribable by them.
Worse, consciousness does not, as we might hope, merely piggyback on the material world - it can't be treated as some kind of idealized documentarian, silently recording experiences while leaving the proceedings of reality undisturbed. It talks back. When I have the experience of seeing the colour blue and I start waxing poetic about it, the atoms in my tongue undergo some very real, very physical movements. And unless I want to suppose that my talking about having experienced blue is completely unrelated to the fact that I did, in reality, experience blue, I have to conclude that the movement of those atoms is in some sense caused by my experience. So consciousness becomes part of the dance - plugged in, so to speak, to the web of causality. It must be included in the network of action and reaction that defines what exists.
In other words: we can't explain it, and we can't ignore it.
My younger self knew all this, of course. In philosophy it's called the hard problem of consciousness, and far from ignoring it, he devoted unhealthy amounts of time to trying to make sense of it. Perhaps precisely because it seemed so fatal to materialism, he spent hours and hours reading and thinking about the problem, trying to see if there wasn't some way of resolving the apparent contradictions.
I think he knew, deep down, that there was no such way. You can try, but it's ultimately a futile quest. No matter what argument you make, no matter what sequence of words you string together to try to explain consciousness in materialist terms, at the end of the day they'll still only be words. And to any words a skeptic can always give the same reply: "Yes, but just look."
Quite literally, our arguments are refuted at a glance. Maybe through some emergent process, complex physical interactions give rise to - stop. Just look. Perhaps the Goedelian paradoxes of self-reference and self-reflection in some way - stop. Just look. Evolutionarily speaking, we can see how a belief in consciousness might be advantageous for - stop. Just look.
No, consciousness holds the ultimate trump card. And as far as I can tell, our only way forward is to make peace with that.
IV.
Here I imagine my younger self would be starting to feel uncomfortable, but I think he would soldier on.
I imagine he might say something like: Okay, yes. All that seems true. It really does appear to be impossible to reconcile consciousness and materialism.
But I'm still not convinced that means I should totally abandon materialism. As far as I can tell, no matter what view of the world I settle on, it's going to leave something unexplained. It's simply inherent to the kind of endeavour that philosophy is that it admits no complete solutions. Perfection isn't an option here. So given that I can't eliminate all mystery, isn't my best bet to try to find a worldview that at least minimizes it? And viewed in this light, doesn't materialism still seem like a pretty good deal? Yes, we have to accept consciousness as a brute fact of the world, unexplained and unexplainable. But in return for that one small concession we get a framework with incredible explanatory power, one that seems able to answer almost any other question we could ask of it.
Moreover, the mystery that's left over seems a relatively...contained kind of mystery. A tolerable one. Tongue-wagging about our blues aside, consciousness rarely intrudes into our lives and demands that we actively reason about it. For the most part, consciousness is simply there: it slips into the background (or perhaps rather the foreground), and can more often than not be forgotten about. It's a constant. A baffling and inexplicable constant, yes - but still a constant.
So given all that, why shouldn't I stick with materialism as my least bad option?
There are a number of things I'd say to him in response to this.
For starters I'd say: sure, the position you've settled on might be a defensible one. But see it for what it is: it's not a materialist position anymore. Not even a little bit. You may have taken your non-materialist terms and put them in a very small box labelled "mystery" and shoved that box far under your bed, but they're still there. There's just no such thing as "mostly materialist", and you'll save yourself a lot of grief and confusion in the coming years if you accept that.
I might also say: how can you possibly know that the concession you're making is a small one? Contained within that "tolerable" mystery of yours is every experience that you've every had, along with all the joys and sorrows of every person that you've ever loved - in other words, pretty much everything in the world that you care about. That's a heck of a constant.
But the problems really run deeper than either of those things.
My past self is making more assumptions than he realizes here. He knows he's making one: he assumes that the external world we see around us exists. But without realizing it he's also making a second: he assumes in addition that the external world is the primary thing that exists - the most fundamental.
It's this second assumption that stops him from seeing any alternatives to materialism. Within the framework he's adopted, consciousness is, and can only be, something that inexplicably gets "associated with" or "attached to" certain physical events. It is fundamentally secondary, something to be explained only after we've figured out what's going on with the external world. And in fact I agree with him that, under this view, it's hard not to arrive at something like materialism with a mystery box.
But we're not forced to look at things that way. In fact, we have a natural alternative: why not take consciousness as our starting point, and look at the external world as something secondary?
If that sounds at all strange to you, take a second to play the same game as before: look out at the world around you, and become aware that you're experiencing it. This time, though, notice how your consciousness extends not just to sight, but to all your sensations: touch and smell and sound, yes - but even more nebulous things, like thought and emotion. Anything that you could possibly feel, it would seem, is included as part of consciousness. In fact, when you really start to pay attention to it, consciousness seems to include...well, everything.
What isn't consciousness? That's a question that would have given my past self pause. Is there anything at all that we could say is not part of consciousness? When I try to come up with such a thing - an example of something that is other than my subjective experience - I find I can't do it. In fact the idea seems almost ridiculous: how could it possibly have come into my awareness in order for me to talk about it, if I hadn't experienced it? No, just as much as it is undeniable, consciousness seems to have an all-encompassing quality to it as well. Looked at in a certain way, there appears to be nothing but experiences.
And so we arrive at a second picture of reality - a second story we might tell about ourselves. In this story, consciousness becomes not merely something that we have, but something that we are. We switch from being biological things - collections of atoms - to, fundamentally, collections of experiences.
I ask again: what am I?
Worryingly, our answers - far from getting pruned down - appear to be multiplying.
V.
It seems we must confront two different ways of looking at the world.
In one, we put our trust in the reassuringly stable, law-like consistency of external reality. We look at the order we see around us and say: this must be real. Here lies truth. Whatever mysteries consciousness might entail, I have to consider them to be secondary ones. The material comes first, experience second.
In the other, the sheer undeniability of consciousness takes precedence. We say: it doesn't matter how much order I see, the fact that I see it must be my first truth. I can do nothing but accept that, and then try to account for the regularities of the world in whatever way I can. Experience comes first, the material second.
Both seem compelling. But both can't be true. So which should we believe?
My answer might disappoint, but shouldn't surprise: as I said from the outset, I have no idea.
I really don't. The second I start thinking one story might be true, the other comes along and upends it. Consciousness seems undeniable, yes - but then it too must bend the knee to certain truths. For surely there is no such thing as the experience of a logical contradiction - surely there can be nothing it feels like to perceive both P and not P at the same time. In this way logic holds its own trump card over consciousness, even as it can be trumped in turn. And so it goes, in endless loops - I find myself getting nowhere, lost in an ouroboreal forest.
No, the only honest thing I can say is that somehow, in some impossible way, the whole thing seems like a tie. Which makes no sense, of course - surely the Supreme Court of the Self can't have an even number of sitting members. And yet that's how it feels. As far as I can tell, neither consciousness nor the material world can lay claim to being more fundamental than the other. I have to accept both, somehow, as equal pillars of my reality.
Which makes us - what? Some kind of incomprehensible centaur? Both material and non-material at the same time?
I don't know. Countless hours spent thinking about and debating the question, and that's all I can really say: I just don't know.
And as far as I can tell, no one knows. Not really. Many a philosopher and guru have claimed to know, but as my past self pointed out, it's not really the kind of question that admits certainty. All any of us are really doing is guessing.
Maybe it's just me, but I can't help but find that a little funny. It sometimes seems like the great joke of the world - like everyone is playing dress-up, and no one wants to admit it. We're all just so damn sure of ourselves - unfailingly, alarmingly, endearingly sure. But none of us - not a single one among us - could answer the most basic question that we could be asked. Mountains of unquestioned and unquestionable truths, all of them built on guesses.
No, I'll never tire of pointing it out: we don't know what we are.
We don't know what we are.
We don't know what we are.
VI.
But maybe this still strikes you as useless philosophizing. What, really, is the point?
Well, in part it's a call for humility: we could consider, perhaps, being slightly less sure that we are right and our opponents wrong, when such foundational questions are still up in the air.
But ultimately I'm telling this as part of the story of my religious awakening. I'm telling it because it was here that some of the first seeds of doubt were planted.
As an atheist I had built up a fortress against religion. The fortress went by many names: "priors", or "occam's razor", or "this is just silly". It was what I used to deflect all religious arguments so that I didn't have to really consider them.
Consciousness was the first real crack in the fortress wall. It was the first thing that made me stop and say: I don't know what's going on here. I can't know what's going on here. With consciousness I knew I faced something I would never be able to explain.
It took me a long time to accept that. Though the problems with materialism were almost literally staring me in the face, I stubbornly ignored them. I boxed up the mystery, trying to contain it by giving it a name. "The hard problem of consciousness" - it sounds reassuringly official, no? Whenever consciousness started to seem a bit too unexplainable, I could invoke it in almost talismanic fashion: "Well yes, that's just the Hard Problem," I'd say. Known issue. No need to worry.
But the problems could only be ignored for so long, and worry I eventually did. There was no grand revelation, no single moment where all my beliefs came crashing down around me. It was much less dramatic than that. All I was aware of was a growing sense that I could be less and less sure I understood how things really worked at the deepest level. A creeping realization that my foundations might not be as solid as I had thought. Until one day I found, to my surprise, that I wasn't a materialist anymore.
And just like that, the box was opened: mystery had been loosed upon the world again.
From there, the seeds sprouted quickly. I found myself pulled in a spiritual direction, and then soon a religious one. Not a necessary turn - from here one could head towards the lands of panpsychism, or dualism, or any of a number of non-materialist philosophies - but it was the only turn I found I could take.
And so the seeds grew, new cracks in the wall appeared, and the fortress started to crumble. Works of Christian apologetics appeared on my desk. Before I knew it I was a church-going man. A whole new world was opening up before me.
I still didn't know what I was. I still couldn't explain consciousness. But slowly and almost imperceptibly, it was starting to seem less like a mystery, and more like a miracle.