Thomas Nagel on Panpsychism in 1979

 

The recent embrace of panpsychism in certain analytic-philosophy circles is said to have begun with — or, more correctly, to have been inspired by — Thomas Nagel’s ‘Panpsychism’ chapter in his book Mortal Questions. It must be made clear that in this chapter Nagel doesn’t completely commit himself to panpsychism. Rather, he believed that panpsychism “should be added to the current list of mutually incompatible and hopelessly unacceptable solutions to the mind-body problem”. Here Nagel was simply saying that panpsychism is no better nor no worse than the other solutions to the mind-body problem…

… After Nagel’s chapter, we need to jump to David Chalmers’ 1996 book, The Conscious Mind. (In that book, Chalmers speculates about — rather than fully embraces — panpsychism.) And then we must jump again to Galen Strawson’s 2006 article ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism’. This paper, at least partly, inspired today’s most popular panpsychist in the analytic tradition — Philip Goff.

“By panpsychism I mean the view that the basic physical constituents of the universe have mental properties, whether or not they are parts of living organisms.”

— Thomas Nagel (Source here.)

Nagel on Emergence

One important argument (or at least it seems to solve various problems) from panpsychists is on emergence. In basic terms, panpsychists argue that panpsychism doesn’t require a commitment to any kind of emergence.

Thomas Nagel stated the problem with emergence in the following passage:

“There are no truly emergent properties of complex systems. All properties of a complex system that are not relations between it and something else derive from the properties of its constituents and their effects on each other when so combined.”

That’s a categorical and clear statement against emergence. So why do so many philosophers and laypeople believe that there is such a thing? Nagel believed that this is an epistemological issue, not a metaphysical one. He continued:

“Emergence is an epistemological condition: it means that an observed feature of the system cannot be derived from the properties currently attributed to its constituents.”

This is about a limit on our knowledge of the constituents of a system. In many ways, this isn’t surprising, at least when it comes to complex systems. In basic terms, it means that scientists can’t derive an observed feature of the system from any single property of that system, or even from the entire set of properties of that system. Nagel then hinted at panpsychism as a solution:

“But this is a reason to conclude that either the system has further constituents of which we are not yet aware, or the constituents of which we are aware have further properties that we have not yet discovered.”

Of course, it’s possible that any given system does have further constituents of which we are not yet aware. However, it’s the second possibility which interested Nagel: those constituents of which we are aware and which have further properties that we have not yet discovered. One wonders about the word “discovered” here in that even panpsychists admit that the mental properties of constituents won’t be discovered in any scientific or empirical sense. Instead, they’re metaphysically postulated as a good explanation of the observed features of a system.

Nagel then technically laid out the precise situation we now find ourselves in. He wrote:

“If the mental properties of an organism are not implied by any physical properties but must derive from properties of the organism’s constituents, then those constituents must have nonphysical properties from which the appearance of mental properties follows when the combination is of the right kind.”

Here Nagel was staying clear of saying that such constituents actually have mental properties. Instead, he was saying that they are “nonphysical”. These nonphysical properties do bring about mental properties when the combination is of the right kind. Again, it’s a strong enough claim that there are nonphysical properties. However, Nagel wasn’t saying that they are, at this stage at least, mental properties. Instead, they become mental properties when the combination is of the right kind.

Nagel makes all this clear in the following passage:

“There would be properties of matter that were not physical from which the mental properties of organic systems were derived. This could still be called panpsychism.”

Again, nonphysical ≠ mental. Instead, mental properties can be derived from nonphysical properties. Despite all that, Nagel believed that his own position could still be called panpsychism.

It was here that Nagel stressed his proto-panpsychist view, which works against what he earlier called “panpsychism in the more familiar sense”. He wrote:

“Presumably the components out of which a point of view is constructed would not themselves have to have points of view. (How could a single self be composed of many selves?)”

Those words tackle what later came to be called the combination problem. (It was coined by William Seager in his 1995 book Consciousness, Information, and Panpsychism.) They also hint at an emergence when there isn’t supposed to be any emergence in the panpsychist position. After all, a point of view can be said to emerge from nonphysical components, which themselves don’t have points of view. That seems like some kind of emergence.

Take an example from Philip Goff. He discusses “little subjects” actually “seeing” all the “colours of the spectrum” — individually. Then, when these little conscious subjects are taken together (as a single big conscious subject), Goff postulates that they may bring about “a visual experience as of seeing white”. In other words, we have little conscious subjects experiencing the various colours of the spectrum separately summing together to produce a big conscious subject which experiences the colour white. This big conscious subject’s experience of white is, therefore, over and above the many and varied experiences of all the little conscious subjects which constitute or (to use Goff’s term) “compose” it.

This is complicated even more when we move forward in time 34 years and quickly consider another similar Phillip Goff argument — this time about minds. He argued that there may be “little minds” (or seats of experience) in the brain, and all of them, on their own, are very simple. Yet now, of course, we have the problem of the “composition” (or “combination”) of all these little minds in order to make a big mind.

Nagel spotted an odd consequence of this distinction between components with no points of view and a whole being with a point of view. He said that the components

“would have to be recombinable to form different points of view, for not only can a single organism have different experiences, but its matter can be recombined to form other organisms with totally different forms of experience”.

This hints at a more religious and monist position in which, bizarrely, the matter of a dead animal can be reconstituted to form another being which has different forms of experience. This can go on indefinitely. It also shows that emergence hasn’t been erased from the panpsychist picture.

Nagel on Familiar Panpsychism

So which kind of panpsychism did Nagel have a problem with? Let him explain:

“Panpsychism in this [his] sense does not entail panpsychism in the more familiar sense, according to which trees and flowers, and perhaps even rocks, lakes, and blood cells have consciousness of a kind.”

To be rhetorical for a moment. It can be said that the kind of panpsychism that claims that trees, flowers, rocks, etc. are conscious gives panpsychism a bad name. Many people simply can’t make any sense of it. Nagel’s position works against certain kinds of panpsychism, such as Rudy Rucker’s and Philip Goff’s.

In his short essay, ‘Mind is a universally distributed quality’ (which can be found in the book What is Your Dangerous Idea?), Rudy Rucker says that “[e]ach object has a mind”. That is, “[s]tars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules” all have minds.

Now take this passage from Philip Goff:

“[W]e now know that plants communicate, learn and remember. I can see no reason other than anthropic prejudice not to ascribe to them a conscious life of their own.”

However, Nagel’s proto-panpsychism is a lot easier to digest. That said, Nagel immediately qualified himself when he wrote the following words:

“But we know so little about how consciousness arises from matter in our own case and that of animals in which we can identify it that it would be dogmatic to assume that it does not exist in other complex systems, or even in systems the size of a galaxy, as the result of the same basic properties of matter that are responsible for us.”

It’s not clear why Nagel stopped at the possibility of galaxies instantiating consciousness. Surely the next level up would be the entire universe… or at least a cluster of galaxies.

In any case, this is the bullet that people will need to bite if they accept panpsychism. In other words, if what is important in this metaphysical picture are the basic nonphysical constituents which give rise to consciousness, then those constituents exist everywhere. So why should they only give rise to consciousness in human beings and other animals? After all, a galaxy is almost as complex as a human being’s brain and body.

That said, in the panpsychist picture complexity doesn’t always matter — or matter at all. If we have proto-mental constituents from the very beginning, then perhaps only a minimal level of mentality is needed.

David Chalmers, for example, plays up simplicity. He writes that “one wonders how relevant this whiff of complexity will ultimately be to the arguments about consciousness”. Chalmers goes further when he says that

“[o]nce a model with five units, say, is to be regarded as a model of consciousness, surely a model with one unit will also yield some insight”.

At a prima facie level, it does indeed seem obvious that complexity matters. After all, many theorists have made a strong link between the complexity of the human brain and consciousness. Chalmers himself acknowledges the (intuitive) appeal of complexity. Yet he also writes:

“After all, does it not seem that this rich superposition of information is an inessential element of consciousness?”

So Chalmers rejects this requirement for complexity. An old-style (or familiar) panpsychist would say that no level of complexity is really needed, at least not for a minimal level of consciousness.

Nagel’s Panpsychist Universalism

Nagel then stated his universalist conclusion about the aforementioned nonphysical properties. He told his readers that “[s]ince any matter can compose an organism, all matter must have these properties”.

That statement seems obviously false. It isn’t the case that any matter can compose an organism. It needs to be matter of a certain type.

Nagel himself said that the

“mental properties of all matter, therefore, would have to be not species-specific but universal, since they would underlie all possible forms of consciousness”.

Thus, in this panpsychist picture, these mental properties would be roughly equivalent to electrons and quarks in physics. They’d underpin literally all instantiations of consciousness on a universal scale.

It must be noted, however, that Nagel moved (in the quote above) from talking about “nonphysical properties” to talk of the “mental properties of all matter”. This seems to go against his earlier arguments.

Nagel’s Criticisms of Panpsychism

Nagel offered these words of warning:

“There is no reason to think that all possibilities have been thought of, so there is no reason to assume that a view is correct if all currently conceivable alternatives are even more unacceptable.”

Thus, panpsychism isn’t correct simply because all currently conceivable alternatives are even more unacceptable (i.e., “the argument of elimination”). Yet it can be seen that many panpsychists assume precisely this. In other words, panpsychism is often treated as a neat and tidy solution. It’s also — seemingly — new and very different to all the alternatives. Due to these very reasons, it has become popular in recent years.

So Nagel did tackle the problems with panpsychism. For example, he stated an intuitive one:

“[I]t is difficult to imagine how a chain of explanatory inference could ever get from the mental states of whole animals back to the proto-mental properties of dead matter.”

Wouldn’t that chain of explanatory inference work in the opposite direction: from dead matter to mental states? However, this difference may not make a difference. After all, Nagel is talking about explanatory inference, not any kind of physical or scientific reduction. In any case, this explanatory inference would need to be both speculative and metaphysical in nature.

Thus, it’s no wonder that Nagel acknowledged that this is “a kind of breakdown we cannot envision, perhaps it is unintelligible”.

Get Your Concepts and Definitions Right!

 

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To the American philosopher Theodore Sider, a concept or definition is correct if it captures reality. (That position may seem obvious and true… at first.) Thus, if a (in this case) definition doesn’t match reality, then he believes that “[w]e should instead reject the proposed definition”. Sider goes further and says that “[t]hose who accept that definition are in a sense conceptually confused”. The concepts which Sider tackles in the following essay include [man] and [free will]. Later, David Chalmers tackles [conscious experience].

A Boy’s Incorrect Definition of ‘Man’

Take Theodore Sider’s stance on “the concept of a man”. According to Sider,

“This boy thinks it is part of the definition of the word ‘man’ that men never cry.”

We can immediately ask if a young son would ever think about the definition of the word “man” at all. Similarly, would he ever think that part of the singular definition of “man” would include “men never cry”. The boy may have some kind of view about what makes a man a man without ever relying on definitions or even kind kind of strict criteria. Of course, Sider could argue that the definitions and concepts this boy has are tacit. [See tacit knowledge.] Yet even if tacit, Sider may still not be right here.

In any case, the story Sider concerns himself with is that this young boy has two beliefs about his dad: (1) “[H]is belief that his father is a man.” (2) “[H]is belief that his father is crying.” On the surface, there’s no conflict here. However, in the case of this boy, Sider says that there is because the son is supposed to believe that a man never cries too.

Sider concludes that the boy “should clear up his conceptual confusion about the nature of manhood”. Now, since Sider is concerned with the adherence of concepts to reality, is he saying that it is part of the nature of manhood that men do cry? Some men do cry. Some men don’t cry. Yet does it automatically follow that this boy is conceptually confused?…

Not really.

Concepts are partially normative. Thus, concepts aren’t completely determined by reality. After all, it surely can’t be the case that all the people who adhere to the boy’s — supposed — concept [man] have never seen a man cry. Similarly, is the concept [justice] or [sexy] completely determined by reality? Thus, the concept [man] may not be completely determined by reality either.

More broadly, Sider himself is being normative here. However, not in the same respect. Rather than admitting the normative nature of the concept, say, [justice] or [man], Sider takes a normative attitude toward the use of concepts. He believes that their job is to match reality.

Sider’s Correct Concept of Free Will?

Sider is pretty categorical about concepts being either correct or incorrect. For example, he says that, in some cases, “we misunderstand the concept of freedom”. In detail:

“If ‘free’ meant ‘uncaused’, then the conflict would be real. But that’s not what ‘free’ means.”

That’s not what ‘free’ means!

That statement is very categorical. Sider believes that there is one, and only one, correct definition of the word “free”. Even within this limited debate on free will, surely that can’t be right.

In terms of the debate on determinism.

It “seems to conflict with freedom only because we misunderstand the concept of freedom”. Thus, there’s always a correct concept waiting for us in the ether. If we discover it, then we have the correct concept. And in Sider’s metaphysically-realist picture, it’s correct because it matches reality.

This raises an obvious question. How does Sider, or anyone else, know that the former definition is false, or that it doesn’t capture reality? Now there are two further questions: 1) How does Sider know that his own metaphysical account is correct? 2) Even if Sider’s metaphysical account is correct, are concepts and definitions exclusively about matching reality?

Sider can’t argue that concepts simply describe the world — perhaps he doesn’t — because his entire metaphysics contains a strong normative dimension. Thus, even Sider’s (possibly) correct concepts and definitions tell us how we ought to reason and classify.

We can say that Sider’s position aligns with the “classical analytic view” of concepts. In that view, Sider believes that correct concepts are definable in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. Yet those conditions can still be taken to include criteria. Following on from that, they must have (or contain) normative force. [See note 1.]

Sider on Concepts

It’s not only that Sider believes that concepts are of vital importance in philosophy. It’s rather his take on concepts themselves. After all, he states that philosophy “investigates the essences of concepts”.

A good way of tackling Sider’s take on concepts is to investigate his strong position against what he sees as conventionalism. According to Sider, conventionalists believe that “these investigations ultimately concern definitions”. Not only that, according to the conventionalist, “[i]t seems to follow that one could settle any philosophical dispute just by consulting a dictionary!”.

Clearly, Sider doesn’t believe that metaphysical investigations ultimately concern definitions. Instead, reality should determine our definitions. Thus, investigations ultimately concern reality.

Sider also gets to the heart of the matter (at least in the debate between metaphysical realism and what he calls “deflationism”) when he states the following:

“Everyone faces the question of what is ‘real’ and what is the mere projection of our conceptual apparatus, of which issues are substantive and which are ‘mere bookkeeping’.”

Since the 1960s, and probably before, what is ‘real’ has indeed been deemed to be a projection of our conceptual apparatus by many philosophers. Sider is reacting against that tradition.

Sider on Conceptual Analysis

Sider is against any overstress on what came to be called conceptual analysis. Indeed, according to Sider:

“Today’s ontologists are not conceptual analysts; few attend to ordinary usage of sentences like ‘chairs exist’.”

Sider also comments on what he calls “ontological deflationism”. He writes:

“These critics — ‘ontological deflationists’, I’ll call them — have said instead something more like what the positivists said about nearly all of philosophy: that there is something wrong with ontological questions themselves. Other than questions of conceptual analysis, there are no sensible questions of (philosophical) ontology. Certainly there are no questions that are fit to debate in the manner of the ontologists.”

In terms of conceptual analysis and ontological deflationism being relevant to the composition and constitution of objects, Sider writes:

“[W]hen some particles are arranged tablewise, there is no ‘substantive’ question of whether there also exists a table composed of those particles, they say. There are simply different — and equally good — ways to talk.”

Obviously, Sider isn’t arguing that we should dispense with concepts. (How could he?) Instead, he’s arguing that concepts (or “ways to talk”) aren’t the entire picture. (This will seem obvious to laypersons.) More importantly, Sider believes that reality should determine our concepts.

Sider Against Stipulative Definitions?

In a sense, the only different between a stipulative definition and an ordinary definition is that the former says, “Let X mean Y”. The word “let” gives the game away here. The stipulator is being upfront about the normative nature of his definition. He’s telling us how we should use the term X. Yet the use of everyday definitions contain normative rules too — ones which aren’t explicitly stated.

In this case, then, the stipulative definition of X isn’t just reflecting a norm — it’s imposing it. (One may wonder, however, if anything can be classed as a norm if it’s just about a single stipulator saying, “Let X mean Y.”)

The following is an even more obvious stipulative definition:

For the purposes of this fight, define ‘atom’ as the word we must use to end the fight.

To recap. Let’s be explicit about the implicit normativity in Sider’s metaphysical analyses of concepts. Sider is implicitly stating the following:

This is how you ought to use the term ‘free will’.

Sider is being normative because he’s criticising — or even excluding — the misuses of certain concepts.

Let’s now side-track a little.

David Chalmers on Stipulation

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers often mentions what he calls “stipulation”. The basic point is that if we stipulate what we mean by a particular word, then the answers to any questions about facts, data, what x is, etc. must — at least partly — follow from such stipulations. Of course, some people will be horrified by the argument that acts of stipulation are decisive when it comes to what we take to be matters of fact…

But it’s not that simple.

There is a problem with over-stressing the importance of stipulation, or even with simply emphasising the importance of stipulation at all. Chalmers sums up this problem with a joke. He writes:

“One might as well define ‘world peace’ as ‘a ham sandwich.’ Achieving world peace becomes much easier, but it is a hollow achievement.”

As it is, Chalmers only applies his joke to a single case: consciousness. So perhaps it can be applied to other cases (such as free will, man, etc.) too. Clearly, even someone who argues that stipulation is important won’t also accept that we can define the words “world peace” as “a ham sandwich”. In turn, some philosophers and laypersons will feel just as strongly about claiming that a, say, “computer virus is alive” or that “bacteria learn”.

Here’s another question from Chalmers:

“Does a mouse have beliefs?”

If we stipulate what we mean by the word “belief”, then the answer to that question must — at least in part — follow from the stipulation.

To simplify, if x, y and z constitute what it is for something to be a belief, then if a mouse displays x, y and z, then it has a belief. Of course, this is a simplified story. That’s because agreement will have to be made on x, y and z, and then on whether not x, y and z are necessary and sufficient for belief. But however complicated this story turns out, stipulation will still remain part of it.

Chalmers is keen to accept the importance of stipulation when it comes to such decisions. He believes — at least as I see it — that much that passes for metaphysics is merely verbal dispute too. However, it’s still the case that in some examples (or in one example!) at least there’s a fact of the matter which makes some statements, concepts or theories just plain wrong.

Take Chalmers’ own final question:

“Does a mouse have conscious experience?”

In this case, it isn’t all about stipulation or verbal dispute. That is:

“Either there is something that it is like to be a mouse or there is not, and it is not up to us to define the mouse’s experience into or out of existence.”

So it’s not always a case of all the debaters agreeing on the facts, data, evidence, etc. though still disagreeing on what they say about them. This time — at least according to Chalmers — the debaters are also disagreeing about the facts. In this example, it’s about whether or not “a mouse [actually has] conscious experience”. Chalmers believes that “we cannot stipulate [] away” whether or not the mouse has conscious experience or not.

Conclusion

Sider states the following:

“If conventionalism is true, philosophy turns into nothing more than an inquiry into the definitions we humans give to words. [ ] Conventionalists are typically up front about this: they want to reduce the significance of philosophy.”

That is strong stuff! But, again, Sider isn’t against definitions. (How could he be?) Instead, he believes that definitions must adhere to reality.

Is conventionalism really that extreme? (At first blast, Sider’s passage above sounds more like a description of 1930s and 1940s logical positivism!)

Do conventionalists (if they exist at all) really argue that philosophy is “nothing more than any inquiry into the definitions we humans give to words”? Or do conventionalists simply stress the importance of our words and our conventions when it comes to philosophy?

Moreover, surely the conventionalist doesn’t believe that it’s only a question of the definitions of words: he also stresses our concepts. In other words, he asks questions about how our concepts determine how we see, conceive of, or interpret the world. Indeed, if it were all just a question of the definitions of words, then conventionalists would be little more than linguists or even lexicographers.

Perhaps conventionalists, on the other hand, don’t give up on the world at all. They may simply argue that our words, concepts, conventions, and indeed our definitions are important when it comes to our classifications, descriptions, analyses, etc. of reality or the world.

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Note:

(1) Perhaps Sider would rely on physics to establish that correct concepts are definable in terms of the necessary and sufficient conditions of what is is that the concept applies to. He certainly wouldn’t limit his position to conceptual truths.