PEL Presents Closereads: Galen Strawson on Panpsychism (Part One)

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1:31This is Close Reads, a philosophy podcast with Mark and Wes. I'm Wes Alwan. And I'm Mark Winsenmeyer.

1:40We are once again starting a new reading. And I had picked one. I'm going to be teaching a philosophy of mind class in the fall. People can sign up for that. Partiallyexaminedlife.com slash class. And I'm trying to get back in the mode. So some of the next partial exam in life activity is going to be on philosophy of mind stuff. And I was definitely interested in panpsychism. I know you were too, Wes. So I had found this paper, I think just searching like often cited philosophy of mind papers by Galen Strawson. Another, we just did one by him on narrativity

2:12called Realistic Monism. Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism from 2008. What are your preconceptions, Wes, about panpsychism? Well, you know, it's one of the, I think, I don't know if the word is plausible, but logical possible solutions to the problem of consciousness, to the mind-body problem. If we have trouble saying how something physical

2:43can give rise to subjectivity, is something that seems to be non-physical, then perhaps if we posit that consciousness is, right, a property of matter maybe, is the way to put it. I don't know how, I'm trying to think of how Philip Goff puts this. People can go look at his videos and read his books. He seems to be the leading proponent of panpsychism today. But I think the idea is that consciousness is a property.

3:16So physics tells us what, say, atoms and quarks do. But if we wanted to say what they are, this is Goff's analysis, we would have to say something about consciousness. All right, so I think we were hoping to, I know he's been on a number of podcasts. Maybe we'll ask him to be on with us or read some of his stuff in the fall, perhaps. So to kind of warm us up here, let's just, yeah, so the first section is called Physicalism. As always, the link to the paper

3:48will be on the blog post associated with this, or if you're watching it on YouTube, in the description. Although YouTube does not allow actual hyperlinks, you have to copy the whole thing and put it in the top of the browser. You can just Google. Yes, realistic modism, why physicalism entails panpsychism. People should, I know that our public feed, audio feed was being relocated or perhaps discontinued. All the episodes will forever be at patreon.com slash closereadsphilosophy.

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4:49All right, go ahead, Wes, please. Section one, physicalism. I take physicalism to be the view that every real concrete phenomena in the universe is dot, dot, dot, physical.

5:02Wait for it, physical. It is a view about the actual universe and I am going to assume that it is true. For the purposes of this paper, I will equate concrete with spatio-temporally, or at least temporally, located. And I will use phenomenon as a completely general word for any sort of existent. Plainly, all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena. All right, let's... And there are footnotes. Phenomenon for any existent,

5:33but atoms aren't phenomena.

5:36Yeah, phenomena seems to involve being a phenomena. An appearance. For someone, yes, an appearance. So this is a weird... I think it depends on what tradition you're talking in. If you say the cosmic phenomena, if you're talking about astronomy or something like that, I think there is a defensible... You know, so it's like entity. Yeah, but I don't know that physicists say... Right, atoms are models. You know, you have theories and models.

6:07I don't think the theories are called phenomena. And the phenomena are the experimental data. And the theories or models are posited, but we would want to say they posit something real, an entity that's non-phenomenal. So I don't know. And then we make this shift to all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena. And that seems to me to be not true.

6:38Right. The footnote... As well. The footnote about concrete says, not abstract in the philosophical sense of abstract, given which some philosophers hold that abstract object, for instance, numbers or concepts, exist and are real objects in every sense in which concrete objects are. So why say that all mental goings-on are concrete phenomena, if you want to say, like the number three in itself is not a concrete phenomenon. I mean, I guess that we're running into,

7:08well, obviously, the number three itself is not appearing. It's an instance of the number three. It's a concrete... So there is a thought which presumably is instantiated in a brain process. So even if I'm thinking an abstract object, that thought itself, that mental goings-on is a concrete phenomenon. So in that sense, I guess I don't object to this, but there are philosophers clearly that, you know, would take exception to this and say that, you know, Spinoza, when you are participating,

7:39when you're thinking a mathematical claim, you are thinking in the realm of the eternal, in the divine or something like that. But this maybe seems too woo-woo for... Let's tease apart a number of different claims. One is that the non-abstract claim, the idea that it's concrete, if concrete were to mean just particular as opposed to general, I think that's non-controversial. To say that it's spatiotemporally located,

8:10that's a typical claim of physicalism. It's not one that would be accepted by all philosophers for consciousness, but for physicalists, usually because they're identifying consciousness with the brain, they're saying that consciousness is spatiotemporally located. But he says he has the qualifier at least temporally. Okay? So, he's open to the idea, I guess, that it's not located, consciousness is not located, or a particular consciousness is not spatially located.

8:40But I'm not even leaving that aside, right? Kant wouldn't say consciousness is temporally located because time is a, you know, is what consciousness supplies. so you couldn't call a particular consciousness temporally located even though all the events of consciousness and the stream of consciousness occur within time. So, I just want to put in that little quibble. But the thing that I'm actually worried about is not the concreteness, but just the phenomena.

9:11Because once again, phenomena would happen, you know, in the world or in the field of consciousness or in some hybrid of world consciousness, you know. But to say that consciousness is itself a phenomena as if we could see consciousness from the outside, I would reject. So, I don't know if he's trying to say something radical and new or if this is just a different use of language or if he's saying things that I don't like.

9:41We'll find out as we go on. Yes, perhaps we have been warped by too much Kant and Hegel at this point but I think at least I would have previous to spending this much time on this podcast have said clearly whatever consciousness is, it has to be something in the world, studiable by science, not essentially restricted to a first person perspective that would require some sort of, right, there might be an epistemic

10:11methodological point that you can only, you know, get at certain things by introspection or asking people but that the fundamental thing that was being reflected, reported on was in a shared physical universe that can be studied generally. So that's, I would say naturalism rather than physicalism is a, is a, is a, you're a copy, yes, sure, but, but it's a weird thing. It's not like studying something that's empirically available to us.

10:41Your consciousness is not a phenomenon for me and I know, you know, I know you, right, there are arguments against that and I think you've brought them to light on the show several times. So for instance, is it, you know, isn't it the case when you smile and I see your smile and I understand what that means, isn't that in the sense your consciousness being available to me? I would say, well, there's something inferential about it even if it's automatic and unconsciously inferential. So we could have all those sorts of arguments but I don't think

11:12your consciousness is available to me as a phenomenon in the way that my water bottle is available to me as a phenomenon. I think they're very different and I would say that regardless of whether we've been corrupted by the continental tradition or phenomenologists or German idealists or whatever. Fair enough. All right, what does physicalism involve? What is it really to be a physicalist? What is it to be a realistic physicalist or more simply a real physicalist? Well, one thing is absolutely clear.

11:43You're certainly not a realistic physicalist. You're not a real physicalist if you deny the existence of the phenomenon whose existence is more certain than the existence of anything else. Experience, quote-unquote consciousness, consciousness experience, quote-unquote phenomenology, experiential, quote-unquote what it's likeness, feeling, sensation, explicit conscious thought as we have it and know it at almost every waking moment. Many words are used to denote this necessarily occurrent, essentially non-dispositional,

12:13phenomenon. In this paper, I will use the terms experience, experiential phenomena, and experientiality to refer to it. All right, so for some reason he doesn't want to use the word qualia. Maybe we'll find out later on. But here he's saying he's going to make a supposition against the illimitivists. So I guess we're going to get a brand of physicalism that's not in limitivism. In other words, it doesn't say, like maybe Dennett says

12:44that consciousness is some sort of illusion or that it can be, or not consciousness, but, well, no, he does say consciousness. But anyway, at the very least qualia are not real in some sense or something like that. He doesn't, I guess he doesn't like that idea. I think the version that I was trying to get at was more like Searle, who says, of course, consciousness is real. It is something that is epistemically subjective, but I think he still

13:15thinks it's metaphysically objective, if I'm not confusing those words. So, you know, it can be studied. Yeah, I don't remember a lot. We don't want it to be a substance probably, but who knows? Sure. But anyway, you know, it's got to be the brain, I guess, as a physicalist. Yes, yes. But what I'm finding interesting here is just that he, right, he's endorsing what Denet, I mean, sorry, what Chalmers calls the hard problem of consciousness. He's saying you can't deny

13:46the qualia because some people would. So he's coming down on that, he's not going to argue for it, but he's going to say a real physicalist would never be an eliminativist, would never deny all this stuff. It's, you know, he's, I was going to say this before we started, but he's such a kind of firebrand in a way as a philosopher. He comes out with all these both statements. Third paragraph. Full recognition of the reality of experience, then, is the obligatory

14:16starting point for any remotely realistic version of physicalism. This is because it is the obligatory starting point for any remotely realistic, indeed any non-self-defeating, theory of what there is. It is the obligatory starting point for any theory that can legitimately claim to be naturalistic because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact. it is a very old point that there is nothing more certain than the existence of experience.

14:48All right, so again, these are not uncontroversial claims, these anti-limitivist claims. It follows that real physicalism can have nothing to do with physics-alism. So physics... Physics-alism. Physics-alism, except the S is capitalized. Physics-alism, the view, the faith, that the nature or essence of all concrete reality can, in principle, be fully captured in the terms of physics. Real physicalism cannot have anything

15:19to do with physics-alism, unless it is supposed, obviously falsely, that the terms of physics can fully capture the nature or essence of experience. The footnote is just referring to another paper. It is unfortunate that physicalism, yes, physicalism is today standardly used to mean physics-alism, because it obliges me to speak of real physicalism when I only mean physicalism, realistic physicalism.

15:48I find him so entertaining. All right, real physicalism, then, must accept that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena.

15:58But how can experiential phenomena be physical phenomena? Many take this claim to be profoundly problematic. This is the mind-body problem. This is usually because they think they know a lot about the nature of the physical. They take the idea that the experiential is physical to be profoundly problematic given what we know about the nature of the physical. But they have already made a large and fatal mistake. This is because we have no good reason to think we know anything about the physical that gives us any reason to find any problem in the idea

16:28of that experiential phenomena are physical phenomena. If we reflect for a moment on the nature of our knowledge of the physical and of the experiential, we realize, with Eddington, that no problem of irreconcilability arises.

16:46Footnote 4, the thought was not new in the background stood Arnold, Locke, Hume, Priestley, Kant, and many others. C. Strassen, blah, blah, blah. I don't know if he's referring to, he's probably referring to his father's papers here. Well, Eddington, 1928. So I don't know who Eddington is, but someone in his father's generation. But he's referring to A. Strassen. Let's just see if he's referring to his father. I just think that's interesting. 2003.

17:17Oh, no, it's his own paper. That's his own paper. See Strassen 2003. You're right, at the end. Okay, he doesn't refer to any of his father's stuff. Okay. I just saw the word Kant. I just thought, you know, since Strassen was a big, the father of Strassen was a big Kant guy. Anyway, go ahead. Again, as I try to put into words what I thought took to be Searle's view, I'm profoundly confused because I guess I was reading it sort of as Spinoza's, right? And which might be what Strassen

17:48is going to be getting at, that the nature of the physical is not such that it is merely what can be described in the language of physics, which is at least classically taken to be just matter and motion. Now, once you throw even just energy in there, I don't know what that does to it. When you throw quantum in there, then it gets really confusing. So, you know, when people talk about physics-alism, well, I've never actually heard that term before, but the, you know, the descriptions of physics, they're usually thinking of Newton.

18:19And I agree so far with Strassen here that probably that is not sufficient to exhaust the nature of the physical. And the nature of the physical might be that it irreducibly per Spinoza has sides that are epistemically available to different kinds of inquiry, right? So, we don't see gamma rays, but gamma rays are part of the physical world and we could

18:51get an appropriate detector to detect the gamma rays and in the same way, maybe consciousness is something that, well, right now, we only seem to have access to from the inside. Yeah. But, you know, who knows if ESP or you could get the equivalent of an x-ray machine or gamma ray detector or whatever and say, oh, yes, there are conscious rays flowing. I see your aura floating above you. Like, none of this, I think, can be ruled out a priori.

19:22It's just that we haven't, we don't have any evidence. I think you would see little, like, cartoon balloons for people's thoughts.

19:29Well, what's interesting to me here is, is it the same thing to say that matter is mind as to say that mind is matter, right? Those may not actually be reversible. He's making the claim that mind is matter. Right. We've had idealists in the past say that matter is mind. If you're going to identify the two, you know, is it monism? Are they reducible to some other third thing that's the same? Or do we really want to make

19:59a reduction of mind to matter? And which is, you know, where do we put panpsychism in all of this? I'm not, I'm not really sure yet, but we'll see. A very large mistake. It is perhaps Descartes or perhaps rather quote unquote Descartes greatest mistake. Footnote, I like to think that in his philosophical heart, he did not make it. He is certainly not a substance dualist as this expression is currently understood. Arnold saw the problem clearly. We really should read our some Arnold. Arnold and

20:30Hume diagnosed the mistake definitively in two lines with specific reference to the Cartesians, but the 20th century philosophical division wasn't listening. And he doesn't tell us what the two lines, oh, I guess he gives us a little reference, okay, but still doesn't quote the two lines. Right. Because we're philosophical badasses who should just know. So Descartes, the greatest mistake imputed to Descartes, and it's funny that in the past 50 years it has been made, it has been the most fervent revilers of the great Descartes, the true father

21:01of modern materialism who have made the mistake with most intensity. Some of them, Dennett is a prime example, are so enthralled to the fundamental intuition of dualism, the intuition that the experiential and the physical are utterly and irreconcilably different, that they're prepared to deny the existence of experience more or less covertly, covertly with the C in parentheses. So is he saying overtly or covertly? More or less covertly. I think that more or less does the job there anyway because they're committed to

21:31physicalism, i.e. physicsalism. And there's a very long footnote on Dennett. That's a specific critique of Dennett's limitivism. Sure, read some of that. I'm Hannah. I've lost 75 pounds in 20 months with GLP-1s plus diet and exercise. On Roe, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to roe.co

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23:03and assigned in seconds. No binders, no Excel, no scramble. Companies on Maintain X have cut unplanned downtime by over 30%. Try it free at maintainx.com. Dennett conceals this move by looking-glassing the word consciousness, this term for experience, and then insisting that he does believe that consciousness exists to looking-glass a term, is to use a term in such a way that whatever one means by it, it excludes what the term means. See Strauss in 2005.

23:34As far as I can understand them, Dretzky, Tai, Lycan, and Ray are among those who do the same. It seems that they will still dream of giving a reductive analysis of the experiential and non-experiential terms that they still dream. This, however, amounts to denying the existence of experience because the nature of real experience can no more be specified in wholly non-experiential terms than the nature of the real non-experiential can be specified in wholly experiential terms. Okay, do you mind if we just

24:05pause there? Sure. So he sounds like the nature of the real, of real experience cannot be specified in non-experiential terms, right? So this sounds like he doesn't simply want to, you know, he's a non-inlimitivist, so it's not that mind exactly is just going to turn out to be matter in the ordinary sense of matter as something, right, that is non-experiential. Can we differentiate? But he's also saying the non-experiential

24:36can't just be specified in wholly experiential terms, so he's not an idealist, but go ahead. Yeah, can we differentiate between metaphysical reductionism, eliminativism, and vocabularic? In other words, there might be, you might say, ultimately everything is physical, but it would be too complicated to describe some higher level, even biological things in the terms of physics. So we, as a matter of theory, right, you were saying

25:06before that atoms