We have good empirical ways of determining the presence of a significant amount of gold and we also have good empirical ways of determining the absence of a significant amount of gold.
Not so with consciousness. While I can tell that some chunks of matter exhibit significant consciousness (especially, the chunk that I am made of), to tell that a chunk of matter—say, a rock or a tree—does not exhibit significant consciousness relies very heavily on pre-theoretical intuition.
This makes it very hard to study consciousness scientifically. In science, we want to come up with conditions that help us explain why a phenonenon occurs where it occurs and doesn’t occur where it doesn’t occur. But if we can’t observe where consciousness does not occur, things are apt to get very hard.
Consider panomnipsychism: every chunk of matter exhibits every possible conscious state at every moment of its existence. This explains all our observations of consciousness. And since we don’t observe any absences of consciousness, panomnipsychism is not refutable by observation. Moreover, panomnipsychism is much simpler than any competing theory, since competing theories will have to give nontrivial psychophysical laws that say what conscious states are correlated with what physical states. It’s just that panomnipsychism doesn’t fit with our intuitions that rocks and trees aren’t conscious.
One might object that panomnipsychism incorrectly predicts that I am right now having an experience of hang gliding, and I can tell that I am not having any such experience. Not so! Panomnipsychism does predict that the chunk of matter making me up currently is having an experience of hang-gliding-while-not-writing-a-post, and that this chunk is also having an experience of writing-a-post-while-not-hang-gliding. But these experiences are not unified with each other on panomnipsychism: they are separate strands of conscious experience attached to a single chunk of matter. My observation of writing without gliding is among the predictions of panomnipsychism.
It is tempting to say that panomnipsychism violates Ockham’s razor. Whether it does or does not will depend on whether we understand Ockham’s razor in terms of theoretical complexity or in terms of the number of entities (such as acts of consciousness). If we understand it in terms of theoretical complexity, then as noted panomnipsychism beats its competitors. But if we understand Ockham’s razor in terms of the number of entities, then we should reject Ockham’s razor. For we shouldn’t have a general preference for theories with fewer entities. For instance, the argument that the world will soon come to an end because otherwise there are more human beings in spacetime is surely a bad one.
I think there is nothing wrong with relying on intuition, including our intuitions about the absence of consciousness. But it is interesting to note how much we need to.
7 comments:
What happens to our moral judgments on panomnipsychism? I normally think that one of the reasons it is bad to torture someone is that doing so brings about a conscious state of intense pain. But on panomnipsychism, the conscious state of intense pain is already there. Or even apart from moral judgments, what happens to our causal judgments? The fact is that you were not hang gliding when writing your post but you were writing your post. Do we wind up saying that the fact that you were writing your post did not play a causal role in your having the conscious experience of doing so?
I am curious to know, then, why *do* you "think there is nothing wrong with relying on intuition, including our intuitions about the absence of consciousness?"
You could argue that our intuitions about the absence of consciousness in certain objects (like rocks and trees) are based on extensive empirical observations where consciousness appears to be correlated with certain complex structures and behaviors (like those found in humans and animals).
But inductive reasoning is only as strong as its sample size and the diversity of observed cases. While we observe that animals and humans exhibit behaviors associated with consciousness, this alone does not warrant concluding that entities not exhibiting these behaviors (like rocks) lack consciousness. There could be forms or degrees of consciousness we are not yet able to recognize or measure.
Could we take a page from Kolmogorov and appeal to Kolmogorov complexity? We can say that simple structures are less likely to host complex phenomena like consciousness.
If I'm not mistaken, Josh Rasmussen gives an abductive inference as to why rocks aren't conscious: we can explain all properties of a rock without needing to appeal to first person properties. (We cannot do the same for me; we must appeal to first person properties to explain what I am.) A very good explanation for why it is we can describe a rock without needing to appeal to first person properties is that rocks don't have first person properties. Because we can use abduction here, we're not overly relying on intuition.
Ben:
Doesn't that just push things back to the question of whether we *can* explain what a rock is without positing first person properties?
estejpg:
I think the intuitions are based on prior probabilities built into human nature, and to avoid skepticism we need to go with human nature's prior probabilities.
I think the complexity argument requires at least two assumptions: (a) consciousness arises from the structure, and (b) consciousness is complex. I think both are questionable. And in any case both require intuition to support.
Matthew:
Yeah, ethics largely falls apart on panomnipsychism. And, yes, we lose the correlations with the external world. Skepticism follows quickly. It's not an attractive theory--but not for empirical reasons!
> I think the intuitions are based on prior probabilities built into human nature, and to avoid skepticism we need to go with human nature's prior probabilities.
Ah yes, the famous intuitions built into human nature that aren't found in most humans and that strikingly correlate with induction into Western analytic philosophy
I suspect that the intuition that living organisms are much more likely to be conscious than rocks is pretty universal, but I could be wrong.
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