Q&A: Integrated Information Theory Proves Panpsychism
Integrated Information Theory Proves Panpsychism
Question
Hello. I already discussed this with you here a bit in the past, but not long ago an important article was published in Haaretz, and this is how it opens: “Consciousness is nothing but electrical activity in the brain? Ladies and gentlemen, there are signs of a revolution. More and more thinkers have recently been rejecting the materialist approach, turning it on its head, and embracing panpsychism — is everything matter? Everything is consciousness!”
Link:
https://www.haaretz.co.il/magazine/the-edge/.premium-MAGAZINE-1.8995807?utm_source=App_Share&utm_medium=Android_Native&utm_campaign=Share&fbclid=IwAR2yNcF7JbTA88g5Q5TH-cp4XbWjluZ2ljf-jjwjvdATw8TgFurmTucSegg
Among other things, it says there: “Christof Koch, one of the world’s leading neuroscientists, who serves as president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, said that IIT offers a scientific and detailed version of panpsychism, which is ‘the most elegant explanation there is for the universe in which I find myself.’ The theory of ‘constitutive panpsychism,’ as he calls it, is, in his words, ‘a giant step on the way to solving the riddle of consciousness.'”
For quite some time I’ve been thinking about panpsychism as a solution to these puzzles. It obviously answers the complexity argument. Buddhism and Taoism raised similar ideas. Among the philosophers who supported this were Spinoza and Leibniz, who said that matter and mind are one and the same thing. Science ‘proves’ panpsychism, that matter is conscious of itself. At the end of the article it says: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts,” says Isaiah in brief, “the whole earth is full of His glory.” Or perhaps: the whole earth is full of her glory. Consciousness. But really it’s all the same. In short: what do you think of the article?
Answer
A bunch of confused people. I don’t have much to add to that.
1. The thesis they are fighting against is not that consciousness is electrical currents. That is a meaningless sentence, characteristic of materialists with an especially low level of intelligence (though there are quite a few of them). It’s just conceptual confusion. They are fighting against a materialist thesis that argues for emergence: that the mental emerges from the material (not that it is the material itself). But this is not dualism, because the claim is that the mental is not another substance (spirit, soul), but a property of matter.
Panpsychism does not offer an explanation for anything. It makes do with proposing a name for a strange thesis that may not even have any meaning. It solves nothing, and contains no explanation for the two riddles the writer presents. This is simply nonsense. And the fact that he quotes a few confused people who say these nonsensical things does not really change the picture.
The experiment they propose as well, which ties consciousness to complexity/connectivity, actually assumes matter as the basis or as an indication of consciousness, and therefore does not change the direction of thought. Does it claim that consciousness is connectivity? But connectivity is a property of our matter, and then once again he returns to the idea that consciousness emerges from matter. And if consciousness is the basis and matter emerges from it, where exactly did you see any explanation there for that strange thesis?
I have already written several times in the past that Descartes’ cogito proves the existence of thought and not of the body, and in fact it follows from it that the existence of spirit is a more basic claim than the existence of matter. With that I completely agree. But that does not mean that matter emerges from spirit or is created by it. That is just a slogan which, in my opinion, even they themselves do not understand.
In short, when scientists start dealing with philosophy, things look bad. The problem is that some philosophers do not understand any more than they do.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t see any solution here. Even without panpsychism I understand what matter is. Matter is those things I know from my everyday life. I don’t see any problem. I also don’t see that panpsychism offers any solution whatsoever apart from declarations (which in my eyes are almost meaningless, and not only invalid). To put it in a nutshell: here, instead of consciousness emerging, matter emerges. In short, these are just words.
In fact, is the problem with panpsychism something like the composition fallacy? That even if every particle has consciousness, one still cannot explain the unity of our consciousness?
The advantage of panpsychism, as I understand it, is that whereas in pure materialism they speak of a certain arrangement creating something *essentially* different from it, like emotions in a kind of emergence, panpsychism claims that the possibility of consciousness already exists in the basic components, because each one is conscious in and of itself.
Panpsychism offers a solution to two problems: 1. What matter is. 2. How consciousness arises from matter. And it is summed up like this: 1. There is only matter, except that matter in its essence is conscious (on its own level). 2. Consciousness already exists and does not need to emerge (not that matter was created by it). This does explain to me the regularity in nature (what breathes life into it?) and how it happened that I’m corresponding with you here.