Does Jim Al-Khalili Argue That “Quantum Tunnelling” Isn’t…Well, Tunnelling?

 

It can be argued that it is the interpretation of the mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics which makes the latter “weird” or “counterintuitive”.

Take theoretical physicist and broadcaster Jim Al-Khalili’s words (in his book Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology) on quantum tunnelling. He writes:

“Although it would be wrong to think that quantum tunnelling entails the leaking through barriers of physical waves; rather, it is due to abstract mathematical waves that provide us with the probability of instantaneously finding the quantum particle on the other side of the barrier.”

So, in the above, Al-Khalili explicitly states that

“it would be wrong to think that quantum tunnelling entails the leaking through barriers of physical waves”.

Does that mean that there is no literal tunnelling at all?

Alternatively and at the very least, Al-Khalili is stating that there is nothing equivalent to tunnelling (as it would occur at the “classical” scale) that’s going on at the quantum scale. In other words, there’s no equivalent of, say, tunnelling through a six-foot-thick gold wall with a wooden spoon in quantum mechanics — despite the hype! (Or, less dramatically, there isn’t even an equivalent of simply tunnelling through the ground into your next-door-neighbour’s living room.)

Having written the passage quoted above, however, elsewhere Al-Khalili also writes the following:

“Just as waves can flow around objects… they can flow through objects, like the sound waves that pass through your walls… But if you behave like an atomic nucleus then you would sometimes be able to pass, ghostlike, straight through a solid wall.”

It’s not being said that this second passage from Al-Khalili somehow contradicts the first. However, it does highlight the problems tackled in this piece.

Firstly, “sound waves” passing through bedroom walls may be compared to quantum tunnelling - but this is obviously not the same thing. In addition, “you” can never “behave like an atomic nucleus” because if you did behave that way, then you wouldn’t be you. This is like saying the following: “If x = y, then x would be like y.” Or: “x would be like y, if x = y.” That is, if “you” were a particle/wave, then you would “be able to pass, ghostlike, straight through a solid wall”. But, of course, it makes no sense to say that you could be like a particle/wave passing through a subatomic “barrier”.

Finally, Al-Khalili uses the words “solid wall”. There are no solid walls at the subatomic scale . And even when the words “solid wall” are used as an analogy, this usage may still not work. Or, at the least, the analogy needs to be taken for what it truly is — i.e., simply an analogy. (Who knows, perhaps no one takes it any other way.)

Probabilities

When tackling quantum tunnelling, what we’re mainly dealing with is probability — or what’s called a probability wave. Thus, on this reading at least, the “wave” is literally abstract — i.e., not a wave at all! That is, the word “wave” is simply a colourful way of describing an abstract mathematical function. So, in quantum mechanics, these particles or waves — unlike footballs — can, with a small probability, tunnel to the other side of a barrier.

The important point here is that we’re dealing with quantum waves and particles. Or, at the least, waves and particles as they’re seen in quantum mechanics. And, because we’re dealing with waves and particles (though perhaps not only because), then no probability of a particle/wave tunnelling across a barrier can ever be zero. Another way of putting that is to say that the probability of a given particle/wave being “found” on the opposite side of a given barrier is not zero. In other words, it could happen. In terms of the barrier itself, the wider and higher the barrier is, the lower the probability of a given particle/wave tunnelling “through” it. (It must be noted here that some physicists identify the simple penetration into the barrier — i.e., without it reaching the other side — as an example of tunnelling.)

Quantum Tunnelling is Real

Despite stating all the above, Al-Khalili did also say that there is a

“probability of instantaneously finding the quantum particle on the other side of the barrier”.

And if there’s a probability of x, then it’s possible that x could happen. So, in this case, we could find a quantum particle/wave “on the other side of the barrier”.

So quantum tunnelling most certainly occurs — a hell of a lot! And that’s primarily because a hell of a lot of particles/waves — over various timespans — are involved in this phenomenon.

Now take the following selected examples of quantum tunnelling.

Quantum tunnelling occurs in nuclear fusion. It’s also “used” in the scanning tunneling microscope, in the tunnel diode (when electrons tunnel into solids) and in quantum computing. In addition, quantum tunnelling may be one reason for proton decay. Added to all that is the fact that quantum tunneling has been known about since 1927 (even if the term “quantum tunnelling” was never used in the 1920s or for a long time after).

That said, perhaps Al-Khalili’s own more concrete and up-to-date biological examples of quantum tunnelling are far more interesting. (Interesting in the simple sense that the other examples above have been known about for decades.) For example, Al-Khalili writes:

“[T]unnelling [has] been detected in lots of biological phenomena, from the way plants capture sunlight to the way that all our cells make biomolecules. Even our sense of smell or the genes that we inherit from our parents may depend on the weird quantum world.”

Yet, as in the other examples, these quantum-tunnelling and other cases still occur at the quantum (or micro) scale — even though they all have classical (or macro) effects.

Classical Pictures and Analogies

On this essay’s interpretation of Jim Al-Khalili’s words, there’s a stress on the mathematical formalism alongside literal physical interpretations of that formalism. Yet even though such physical events as quantum tunnelling occur, it may still be inadvisable to compare them to anything which occurs at the classical level. Thus not only may the words “wave” and “particle” create complications (at least for laypersons), so too may such words as “tunnelling” and “barrier”.

Again, obviously no one will question the fact that these physical things occur at the quantum scale. The question is whether the “classical” words or pictures accurately capture what actually happens. Indeed, as Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) argued some nine decades ago (if not about exactly the same thing), perhaps no classical words, descriptions or visualisations will ever accurately capture these quantum phenomena. Indeed, in stronger terms, this is what Heisenberg once wrote (in a 1926 letter) to Wolfgang Pauli:

“The more I think of the physical part of the Schrödinger theory, the more detestable I find it. What Schrödinger writes about visualization makes scarcely any sense, in other words I think it is shit.”

Yet, of course, as Niels Bohr (1885–1962) also argued that we have no choice but to use classical terms (or classical descriptions) in our interpretations of quantum mechanics. Bohr once wrote the following:

“It is decisive to recognize that, however far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical explanation, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. The argument is simply that by the word ‘experiment’ we refer to a situation where we can tell to others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the experimental arrangement and of the results of the observations must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics.”

The above seems to be a simple account of Bohr’s more technical correspondence principle; which states (broadly speaking) that the behavior of systems described by quantum mechanics reproduce classical physics when it comes to large (what’s called) quantum numbers.

So perhaps even trained physicists (i.e., those who’re adept at the mathematical formalism/s of quantum mechanics) also need such “classical pictures” in order to understand what’s going on. And that may be because in physics it’s almost impossible to rely entirely on the mathematical formalism/s. That said, many commentators have claimed that, for example, Paul Dirac (1902–1984) didn’t require any additional “classical pictures” or interpretations (see here). Indeed Dirac himself (more or less) said the same about his own stance on these matters. ( For example, he once wrote: “The interpretation of quantum mechanics has been dealt with by many authors, and I do not want to discuss it here. I want to deal with more fundamental things.”) Yet Dirac did class himself as “mathematical physicist”, not as a “mathematician”. (Incidentally, Dirac didn’t even class himself as a “theoretical physicist” — though most other physicists always saw things differently.)

Jim Al-Khalili himself tells us that he

“tr[ies]… to provide intuitive analogies wherever possible to explain quantum phenomena”.

So that surely means that the words “wave”, “barrier”, “tunnelling” — and especially “particle” — are analogical too.

But what are these words analogies of?

Basically, they must be analogies of (to use Philip Ball’s words) “what the maths tells us”.

But what does the maths tell us?

Perhaps the maths tells us nothing beyond itself.

Yet surely that can’t be the case!

Anyway, Al-Khalili also says that

“the reality is that quantum mechanics is utterly counterintuitive and there is a danger of oversimplifying for the purpose of clarity”.

Perhaps it’s the case that the “analogies” Al-Khalili refers to are almost entirely responsible for the “counterintuitive” or “weird” nature of quantum mechanics. That is, QM becomes weird the moment it’s interpreted using analogies or classical descriptions.

The other thing is that such analogies don’t actually (as Al-Khalili put it) “oversimplify[]” at all — they do the opposite. Perhaps the analogies are actually creating the complications (alongside the weirdness). That is, these analogies are effectively attempting to place round shapes in square holes. And, because of that, rather than analogies (or classical pictures) simplifying things, what we get are complications… And we most certainly get weirdness or counterintuitive scenarios.

So on the one hard we have the seeming clarity which everyday analogies or pictures provide (i.e., those analogies/pictures which help the laypersons who don’t know the mathematics of quantum mechanics). Yet, on the other hand, these analogies or pictures actually add to — or even complicate — the mathematics. More strongly, the analogies or pictures simply don’t work in that they don’t — and even in principle can’t — describe or express the mathematics.

All this should be obvious really.

Think about what we have here.

Particles, waves or events at the quantum scale are at a level that is fantastically smaller than, say, a football. In terms of detail, a sheet of paper is about six orders of magnitude thicker than an atom. Now think about how much “thicker” a football is to a sheet of paper. (100,000,000 atoms would stretch along the width of your fingernail.)

More relevantly to this piece, take the case of the barrier through which the particle/wave tunnels. Usually, this tunneling only happens when it comes to barriers of thickness around 1–3 nm (i.e., nanometres) or smaller. A nanometre is equal to one billionth of a metre.

A Final Word

So when we use the kind of words we use to describe the kicking of a ball to describe what happens at the quantum scale, no wonder things become weird. Doing so is roughly like using poetry to describe the internal workings of a cell phone. Or, alternatively, it’s like expecting a virus or lice to behave (entirely) like a cat or a human being.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Professor Philip Goff Opens the Floodgates of Panpsychist Woo

 

“[W]e should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true, not which view we would most like to be true.” — Philip Goff (in Galileo’s Error)

i) Introduction

ii) Passages from Galileo’s Error

iii) My Ad Hominems Against Philip Goff

iv) Galileo’s Error

v) Goff Opens the Floodgates of Panpsychist Woo

vi) What Philip Goff Wants to be True

vii) The Single Case of Goff’s Rainforest Realism

In late December 2019, I wrote an essay called ‘Philip Goff Offers Us Non-Philosophical Reasons to be Panpsychists’. This piece discussed Professor Philip Goff’s forays into what he himself calls the “New Age” and “hippie” aspects of panpsychism. (See also: Panpsychism is Not Just for Hippies: Philip Goff in conversation with Raymond Tallis — YouTube.) Indeed the British philosopher Colin McGinn (who, ironically enough, is often classed as a “mysterian”) has said that panpsychism is

“a complete myth, a comforting piece of utter balderdash. . . isn’t there something vaguely hippyish, i.e. stoned, about the doctrine?”.

(This passage from McGinn has been quoted many times — yet I haven’t been able to find the original source.)

I attempted to be very careful in that original essay; though I don’t deny there are small amounts of rhetoric within in. However, when I wrote it, I hadn’t read Goff’s book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, which was originally published in November 2019 (i.e., a month or so before my essay).

It seems that I was certainly on the right track. And, if anything, I was being far too kind to Philip Goff.

So I happily admit that Goff’s political and religious/spiritual motivations are being focussed upon in this current essay. That said, Goff must know where I’m coming from because, in Galileo’s Error, he too writes the following words:

“I once asked Chalmers if he has any spiritual beliefs or religious commitments. He answered, ‘Only that the universe is cool.’…”

Now it might have been the case that Goff didn’t have Chalmers’ religious motivations for his philosophies in mind here. It might simply have been general chitchat which Goff referred to. Of course that’s very unlikely to be the case for two reasons: 1) Why did Goff bring this subject up at all in his book? 2) David Chalmers’ “religious commitments” had indeed been brought up by some philosophers who were critical of his philosophical positions.

Passages From Galileo’s Error

So just to give a taster of what this essay has in mind, I’ll quote a few passages from Galileo’s Error by Philip Goff. But, firstly, it’s worth noting that Philip Goff often uses academic hedging in many of the statements which follow. (He uses phrases such as “if [x] were true”, “my hope is…”, “is likely to be true”, “has the potential”, “imagine if”, “I emphasise the if one last time”, “in a certain sense”, etc.)

Anyway, here goes:

“For a child raised in a panpsychist worldview, hugging a conscious tree could be a natural and normal as stroking a cat.”

“[] It entails that there is, in a certain sense, life after death.”

“The view of the mystics, in contrast, does provide a satisfying account of the objectivity of ethics… According to the testimony of mystics, it is this realization [“formless consciousness”] that results in the boundless compassion of the enlightened.”

“My hope is that panpsychism can help humans once again to feel that they have a place in the universe. At home in the cosmos, we might begin to dream about — and perhaps make real — a better world.”

“Could our philosophical worldview be party responsible for inability to avert climate catastrophe?”

“[] I also think that [panpsychism] is a theory of Reality somewhat more consonant with human happiness than rival views.”

“… if they were taught to walk through a forest in the knowledge that they are standing amidst a vibrant community: a buzzing, busy network of mutual support and care.”

“Panpsychism has a potential to transform our relationship with natural world.

“[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.”

“It is no surprise that in this worldview [“dualism” — Goff says almost identical things about “materialism” in these respects] the act of tree hugging is mocked as sentimental silliness. Why would anyone hug a mechanism?”

My Ad Hominems Against Philip Goff

In terms of my amateur psychology and ad hominems, I’m not arguing that motivations alone — or even at all — render Philip Goff’s actual arguments false. In addition, if my accounts of Goff’s motivations aren’t philosophy — then they aren’t philosophy. And? (I suspect that Goff’s academic friends will call this piece — if they ever read it — a “hatchet job” or some other cliché.)

In any case, Goff himself won’t have much ground to criticise what’s written in this piece. Take his words in Galileo’s Error:

“[] One can’t help wondering whether the Churchlands’ early courtship involved poetry expressing the strength of their neuronal activations for each other. []”

Goff also classes Patricia Churchland as a “fearsome firebrand preacher”. He then states that Daniel Dennett is “uncompromising”. We also have this little example of a sarcastic ad hominem:

“Like his fellow materialist, Patricia Churchland, Dennett has little time for thought experiments, unless they are thought experiments intended to debunk the confused and oversimplistic intuitions that he believes drive most philosophical theories. As you might imagine, he is not prepared to learn lessons about consciousness from the far-fetched tale of Black and White Mary.”

But worse than all that, Goff treats many of his philosophical opponents as straw targets who’re also (seemingly) morally flawed in various ways. For example, he claims that Paul and Patricia Churchland “reject [the mind’s] very existence” and claim that “mental phenomena simply do not exist”. As I see it (even if I disagree with these philosophers), they don’t claim that the mind and mental phenomena don’t exist at all — they simply account for such things in ways that are at odds with Goff’s own philosophical positions. Now Goff may well believe that this effectively amounts to the same thing. Yet even then it’s still incorrect to claim that the Churchlands and Dennett deny the mind exists— they don’t!

Galileo’s Error

I quite enjoyed Galileo's Error. That is, apart from the chapter ‘Consciousness and the Meaning of Life’. That said, I don’t agree with much of the proceeding chapters either; but at least they’re well-argued.

So — on the whole — Galileo's Error is a successful popular-philosophy book with just the right mix of argument and (as it were) everydayness. And, at times, it’s even fairly technical. Yet despite all that, and like many other academic philosophers, Goff’s training and philosophical skills are very-quickly dropped once anything vaguely political or religious/spiritual is discussed. Then almost anything goes.

And it must also be said here that the chapter ‘Consciousness and the Meaning of Life’ isn’t at all like the speculation found in David Chalmers’ brilliant book The Conscious Mind (which Goff has clearly been inspired by). That is, no matter how speculative Chalmers is in that book (as elsewhere), he still provides convincing arguments and philosophical detail for his positions. In addition, Chalmers never indulges in rhetoric and poeticisms — as Goff does in the last chapter of his book (as well as, if to a much lesser extent, before that).

I suspect that Goff’s fellow academic (analytic) philosophers have been kind to Goff about Galileo’s Error because they’ve more or less ignored the last chapter. But is is the the themes in that chapter that have secured Goff his fame — or at least his relative fame.

What do I mean by Goff’s relative fame?

Well, for a start, there are well over 50 interviews with Philip Goff on YouTube alone (see here)! And that’s only to name the interviews in which he explicitly discusses panpsychism. Add to that the countless articles — many in mainstream journals and other media outlets — on Philip Goff and his panpsychism (see here).

Another display of Goff’s fame can be found in his own following words:

“The next stage was getting it accepted for publication, and I am indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, for helping me develop the proposal and securing a publisher. The only thing left t do then was to write it.”

In other words, unlike most writers (or at least the ones who aren’t already famous), Goff secured a book deal before he’d actually written his book! Indeed everything was in place before he actually wrote Galileo’s Error. 

In terms of Goff’s positions on New-Age themes.

All the analytic philosophers — and academics — who wrote the puffs in my own (Penguin) copy of Galileo’s Error have largely ignored these New-Age accretions. (That’s all except Susan Schneider, who briefly mentions Goff “mulling over our place in the larger universe”.) In fact they’re all written by Goff’s close and slightly-less-close friends (on Twitter and elsewhere). They include David Papineau, Nigel Warburton (who actually came up with the title Galileo’s Error), David Chalmers, Keith Frankish and Stephen Law. As stated, none of them even mention Goff’s infatuations with such New-Age themes . And that’s despite the fact that the last chapter is as long some of the others chapters. Not only that: almost every time time Goff is interviewed or written about, these New-Age additions (are they additions?) are the main feature.

Goff Opens the Floodgates of Panpsychist Woo

In terms of the essay mentioned at the beginning, I concluded that piece with these words:

“Finally, I can’t help thinking that Goff is helping to open the floodgates. (I just mentioned telepathy and ley lines.)”

So it now seems that Goff had indeed already opened the New-Age (panpsychist) floodgates. Indeed that (as already hinted at) mainly explains Goff’s sudden appeal and new-found (relative)fame as a philosopher.

In that essay I also wrote these words:

“[] Goff isn’t doing himself any favours in this video. In it he talks about telepathy (he accepts its possibility, which is fine as it stands), ‘value in the universe’, the ‘universal mind’, etc. Indeed it gets worse as the video goes on. (I was waiting for something on ley lines and astral travelling.) Of course it can be argued that the person interviewing Goff is egging him on.”

As can be seen in the quote above, the stress is put on Goff hinting at (i.e., not explicitly endorsing or discussing in detail) these New Age or “hippie” themes and the fact that the person who interviewed him might well have (as it were) egged him on to cover them. But, as stated, that was before I read Galileo's Error.

It seems, then, that after reading Galileo’s Error, Goff himself explicitly cites his religious/spiritual and political reasons for believing in panpsychism; rather than merely hinting at them.

More relevantly (especially now that I’ve read that book), I wrote the following words in that original essay:

“The hard analytical work may well come after the fact (as it were). That’s my own ad hominem, anyway.”

In other words, Goff already had spiritual/religious and political reasons for believing in — and advancing — panpsychism, and only then did he get to work on the hard analytical work.

Yet Goff has sometimes claimed that it was — in fact — the other way around (i.e., that he was led to panpsychism purely by the arguments).

Yet isn’t it a bizarre coincidence that the political and spiritual aspects of panpsychism which Goff has now drawn out almost perfectly square with his politics and spiritual positions as they existed before he fully endorsed panpsychism? In other words, Goff’s philosophical panpsychism is almost tailor-made to go alongside (or simply back up) his prior political and spiritual beliefs.

In Galileo’s Error, Goff more or less admits all this. That is especially so because Goff claims to have been attracted to panpsychism from very early on — from the beginning of his postgraduate studies. (Goff did his undergraduate work at the University of Leeds during “the dying embers of the 20th century” — i.e., when panpsychism wasn’t fashionable.) For example, in one place Goff states that “[i]t was during this time [as a postgraduate] that I came across Thomas Nagel’s classic 1972 article ‘Panpsychism’”. This, of course, isn’t Goff saying that he was immediately bowled over by panpsychism.

Goff also writes:

“But the new professor at the University of Reading, Galen Strawson, was busy defending panpsychism… This seemed like the place for me.”

This suggests that Goff was sympathetic to panpsychism even before his postgraduate studies at the University of Reading.

Goff also says that because he was (as it were) scared of propagating panpsychism when a postgraduate, he kept his beliefs to himself. Add to that another autobiographical passage from Galileo’s Error:

“I cannot exaggerate the profound effect learning about panpsychism had on me… In panpsychism I found intellectual peace; I could live comfortably in my own skin. Moreover, I suddenly had a renewed enthusiasm for philosophy, and decided to take up graduate study the following September.”

So it can safely be said that Philip Goff was a panpsychist even before his postgraduate studies. And this fact somewhat clashes with his claim (which he’s expressed in various ways) that it has been the arguments which have led him to panpsychism.

In terms of his academic work, Goff wrote his first paper on panpsychism in 2006 (‘Experiences Don’t Sum’). Despite that, he still hasn’t tackled these New-Age additions in his academic papers. He has (kinda) done so when it comes to the various chapters (in various books) he has written — but even that had to wait until 2020 with his ‘Universal consciousness and the ground of logic’ and ‘Cosmopsychism, micropsychism and the grounding relation’.

And since only (on my count) 3 or 4 papers by Goff are explicitly on panpsychism, and none at all is on all these New-Age accretions, then one wonders why all this stuff features so extensively in his interviews and in Galileo’s Error.

(There is one slight complication for my position and that’s Goff’s paper from 2009: ‘Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help Us Explain Consciousness’. Judging by the title and abstract, it appears to be critical of panpsychism. Yet I can’t download a copy and I won’t purchase one from the academic publishers. In any case, perhaps, in 2009, Goff simply fluctuated in his position on panpsychism or the paper may not deliver exactly what the title appears to offer.)

What Philip Goff Wants to be True

In my original essay I quoted Goff stating the following (which can be found in this video interview):

“When we’re doing science or doing philosophy, then we should certainly be thinking about not which view we’d like to be true; but which view is most likely to be true.”

And, in Goff’s Galileo's Error, (more or less) the same words can be found again:

“But we should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true not which view we would most like to be true.”

The basic point, then, is that Goff isn’t practising what he’s preaching.

It’s almost as if he hopes that people will believe that his own motivations are (as it were) pure because he uses phrases like

“we should be trying to work out which view is most likely to be true not which view we would most like to be true”.

That’s plainly false.

A thief/sexist may repeatedly make critical statements about stealing/sexism and, at the very same time, be a serial thief/serial sexist. This is a common phenomenon. Indeed it’s clear that the thief/sexist may come out with such grandstanding phrases precisely because he knows that he himself is a thief/sexist.

More specifically, take the following passage from the original essay:

“i) Philip Goff often claims that the ‘good things’ of panpsychism are simply its by-products.

ii) But what if Goff’s panpsychism is a byproduct of his believing in these good things?”

After now reading Galileo’s Error, I now know that I’ve even more reasons to believe that I’m right about this. That said, after i) and ii) above I did conclude with the following words:

“Philosophically, it may not matter either way [i.e., about these biographical details, etc.]. Well, most analytic philosophers wouldn’t care either way. Though psychologically and sociologically, surely it is of some interest.”

The Single Case of Goff’s Rainforest Realism

In terms of the technicalities of Philip Goff’s (as it were) New Ageism, let’s quote these following words:

“Imagine if children were raised to experience trees and plants in the same way, to see the movement of a plant toward the light as expressing its own desire and conscious drive for life, to accept the tree as an individual locus of sentience.”

This is incredible stuff.

Goff knows full well that even non-biological objects display “movement” in response to their environments. Even computers or electronic devices move or change in response to that which is external to them. Yet Goff doesn’t seem to believe that computers are — or even can be — conscious. Indeed he spends some time in Galileo’s Error saying so. (At the very least, Goff seems to be sympathetic to John Searle’s well-known Chinese Room argument.)

This also shows that perhaps the prime motivation for Goff believing that trees or plants have “desire[s]” and a “conscious drive for life” is political — or at least spiritual/religious. (Again, Goff uses academic hedging in most of these statements.) That is, Goff is showing us what he’d (to use his own words) “like to be true”, not what is “most likely to be true”. But, of course, Goff was aiming these words of warning about wanting things to be true at others — primarily at physicalists, materialists and (some?) evolutionary theorists.

Goff goes further when he writes:

“But accepting the consciousness of plant life means at the very least accepting that plants have genuine interests, interests that deserve our respect and consideration.”

And elsewhere:

“[I]f they were taught to walk through a forest in the knowledge that they are standing amidst a vibrant community: a buzzing, busy network of mutual support and care.”

Yet how do those words square with this other passage from Goff? -

“[P]anpsychists do not believe that consciousness like ours is everywhere.”

Yet it seems that Goff does believe that trees and other plants have “consciousness like ours”. So perhaps he doesn’t have the same position as these other panpsychists. Alternatively, perhaps only plants and animals (i.e., not rocks or computers) have consciousness like ours in Goff’s scheme. That said, Goff is far from clear about this. Indeed he stresses that consciousness goes all the way down to electrons and even to spacetime itself. It is true that Goff claims that there may be different levels of consciousness — but he isn’t clear about this when he’s talking about trees or plants. And using words like “vibrant community”, “mutual support and care”, “genuine interests”, etc. to refer to plants certainly shows us (despite the academic hedging) that Goff believes that plants have consciousness like ours. That is, there’s not even a hint from Goff that he’s being poetic or speculative here. Indeed he explicitly states that he’s not. For example, he also writes:

“[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.”

So it’s ironic that Goff mentions “anthropic prejudice” when he himself is clearly indulging in the most crude forms of anthropomorphism imaginable. (Many people have a problem with anthropomorphism even when it comes to animals — never mind plants.)

So why is anthropomorphism somehow better that anthropocentrism (or Goff’s “anthropic prejudice”)? Don’t they both share the same (as it were) ánthrōpos (i.e., “human being”)? And so aren’t both positions equally suspect?

***************************************

Note: More Passages From Galileo’s Error

“My hope is that panpsychism can help humans once again to feel that they have a place in the universe. At home in the cosmos, we might begin to dream about — and perhaps make real — a better world.”

“Could our philosophical worldview be party responsible for inability to avert climate catastrophe?”

“[] I also think that [panpsychism] is a theory of Reality somewhat more consonant with human happiness than rival views.”

“Panpsychism has a potential to transform our relationship with natural world. If panpsychism is true, the rain forest is teeming with consciousness. As conscious entities, trees have value in their own right: chopping one down becomes an action of immediate moral significance.”

“[I]t’s reasonable to suppose that children raised in a panpsychist culture would have a much closer relationship with nature and invest a great deal more value in its continued existence.”

“It is no surprise that in this worldview [i.e., “dualism” — yet Goff says almost identical things about “materialism” in these respects] the act of tree hugging is mocked as sentimental silliness. Why would anyone hug a mechanism?”

My other essays on Philip Goff’s panpsychism:

(1) Against Philip Goff’s (Panpsychist) “Phenomenal Bonding” | by Paul Austin Murphy | Medium

(2) .: John Horgan and Philip Goff on Panpsychism & Geocentrism (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

(3) .: Philip Goff on Big/Little Minds, “Composition” and Emergence (3) (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

(4) .: Can You Conceive of a Philosophical Zombie… or a Million-Sided Object? (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

(5) .: Philip Goff’s Panpsychist Conceivability-to-Possibility Argument (2) (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

(6) .: The Problem with String Theory & Panpsychism: the Aesthetics of Theory-Choice (3) (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

(7) .: Neutral Monism, Panpsychism and Intrinsic Noumena (paulaustinmurphypam.blogspot.com)

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

Define Your Terms and Explain Your Concepts

 

(Note: The quote in the image directly above is a paraphrase of Voltaire’s actual words. The full passage — which does, however, state the same idea in more detail — can be found in his Dictionnaire philosophique , from 1764.)

i) Introduction

ii) Conceptual Analysis?

iii) Debate?

iv) D.M. Armstrong on the Analysis of Concepts and the Analysis of Things

v) Problems With Definitions and Analysis

Philosophers can use the same words or (technical) terms in very different ways. What’s more, not all philosophers define or explain their terms. Nor do they explain how and why such words or terms almost entirely flow from their very particular philosophies. (This is especially true of academic philosophers who write only for those few fellow academics “in the know”.)

The situation is even worse when philosophical subjects are discussed and (technical) philosophical terms are used on social media or in other everyday contexts.

So here are a few examples of the kind of terms or words this essay has in mind. (The relevant words or terms are in bold. I’ll leave it to readers to decide if they were written by philosophers or by laypersons.) Here goes:

“What was the most relevant philosophy in the 20th century?”
“The statement ‘God exists’ (or ‘God doesn’t exist’) is meaningless.”
“His theory has been debunked.”
“Pegasus exists but is not actual.” 
“There are facts which can never be known.”
“Consciousness is an energy which pervades the universe.”
“No one as proved that there is such a thing as evolution.”

Of course some of those terms or words have those have been defined; though still rarely. Others are virtually never defined — especially by most of the people who use them.

Conceptual Analysis?

It’s not that conceptual analysis (sometimes simply called philosophical analysis), specifically, ever completely went away. That said, as D.M. Armstrong hints later in this piece, it did come under severe criticism during and after the demise of “linguistic philosophy”. So at one point there was much talk of “pedantry”, “irrelevance” and a “petty focus on minutia” (at the expense of focussing on meaty, deep and heavy stuff). Sure, not all these criticisms were aimed specifically at conceptual analysis — yet even this fundamental and basic part of philosophy was deemed suspect by some (or even many)philosophers and laypersons at one point — and it still is today. (This is especially the case when it come to some of those academics who specialise in continental philosophy; as well as a number of continental philosophers themselves.)

D.M. Armstrong was mentioned a moment ago. In the late 1960s (when he wrote the following words) he argued that

“philosophers in the ‘analytic tradition’ swung back from Wittgensteinian and even Rylian pessimism to a more traditional conception of the proper role and tasks of philosophy”.

And the “proper role and task of philosophy” was

“to give an account… of the general nature of things and of man”.

It must now be said that the words “conceptual analysis” are used in an extremely broad way in the following piece. In other words, there are no references to specific movements or positions within philosophy — either past or present. Rather, this essay is mainly about what’s prosaically called defining your terms. Yet that must surely — at least in part — involve the analysis of concepts.

So, for example, the following has nothing to say about Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction. And neither does it argue that one can “give necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of the concept” one uses. (Demanding necessary and sufficient conditions for the concepts we use is both a — hidden - normative stance and it also seems to reify concepts.) In other words, with Wittgenstein it can be accepted that there are different ways in which the same words, terms or concepts can be used. Yet the acceptance of all this still allows for — and still demands — the definition of terms within any philosophical debate or context you like.

Following on from all that, while many (analytic) philosophers accept that conceptual analysis, explanation and definition are fruitful tools of philosophy, they still don’t believe that these things are all that there is to philosophy. (See later comments on — and quotes from — D.M. Armstrong.)

Debate?

In basic terms, if a philosopher or layperson doesn’t define his terms, then what he’s saying — or stating — may turn out to be confused, banal or simply false (i.e., after a definition is given or guessed at). Thus if the vague use of terms and the rhetoric (or poetry) is stripped away, then there may be nothing much underneath. Indeed vague and undefined terms are often simply part of a general display of verbalised (or written down) emotions and biases designed specifically to appeal to other people’s emotions and biases.

The problem here is that if people engaged in an exchange are using the same term in very different ways, then we can hardly say that there’s any debate occurring at all. What’s more, this situation is confounded by the fact that the debaters (if that’s an appropriate word to use in such extreme cases) assume — or simply believe — that his/her opponent is using the same word or term in the same way. That’s the case even when it’s clear to some on the outside that this isn’t happening. Thus, again, how can we even say that there is a debate (or dialogue) going on here if the debaters are talking about different things even when they’re using exactly the same words or terms?

In fact using the same words or (technical) terms in different ways is worse than having a fellow debater who keeps on changing the subject. At least then there’s an obvious problem. However, when people bandy around and share the words “consciousness”, “existence”, “truth”, “fact”, “free will”, “knowledge”, “prove”, etc. and mean very different things by those words, then that situation is far worse than one in which a debater simply makes a statement which is followed by a largely unrelated counter-statement (though not a counter-argument) from his fellow debater. In this former case, there’s the seeming situation that the debaters are talking about the same thing. Yet if they’re using their primary terms in very different ways, and those terms are born of very different philosophies, then that’s even worse than a simple shouting match between two rival debaters. At least in this latter case the debaters are talking about the same thing — even if they strongly disagree with each another.

Take the case of a boxing match in which instead of the two boxers punching each other at the same time, one boxer punches the other boxer (who has his hands down) for a couple of minutes, and then that other boxer does the same thing to him. In that sense, we don’t have a mutual fight: we have one set of punches from one boxer being followed by another set of punches from the other boxer. Of course this isn’t boxing at all. Similarly, perhaps we don’t have a debate (or dialogue) at all when the people are using the same word or term in very different ways and yet neither person is aware of that fact.

Of course it’s true that any given philosopher or layperson might well have defined his terms elsewhere — even in great detail. And you can’t expect a philosopher or layperson to define his term every time he uses it (see last section). That said, even if he has defined his terms elsewhere, the chances that the reader or fellow debater has read those definitions may be — and usually are— very slim indeed.

D.M. Armstrong on the Analysis of Concepts and the Analysis of Things

In his paper ‘The Causal Theory of Mind’ (1968), the Australian philosopher David Malet Armstrong (1926–2014) was right to argue that

“[Gilbert] Ryle was wrong in taking the analysis of concepts to be the end of philosophy”.

Armstrong himself believed that

“the analysis of concepts is a means by which the philosopher makes his contribution to great general questions, not about concepts, but about things”.

It must now be said that Armstrong wasn’t only discussing “the analysis of concepts” here. He also believed that “the philosopher” has “certain [other] skills” which

“include the stating and assessing of the worth of arguments, including the bringing to light and making explicit suppressed premises of arguments, the detection of ambiguities and inconsistencies”.

That said, I’ll stick to conceptual analysis and defining terms here.

So let’s take it as true that Ryle believed that “the analysis of concepts [is] the end of philosophy”. Yet if he did, then that hardly makes sense. After all, are concepts, words or terms about (or do they refer to) other concepts, words or terms? How could Ryle have believed that? (Unless he was a “linguistic idealist”.)

Armstrong clearly rejected the terrible “binary opposition” between “the analysis of concepts” and the analysis of things. Yet surely we can only (as it were) get to things through our concepts. Of course that still doesn’t mean that the analysis of concepts is “the end of philosophy”.

The situation is that when we discus things, events, facts, theories, conditions… or anything, we use words, terms and/or concepts to do so. So it seems that it’s almost inevitable that philosophers should scrutinise the words, terms and concepts we use in such discussions.

It can also be argued that almost everything will flow from people’s own personal definitions (even if tacit or very vague) of the philosophical words or terms they use. In other words, it’s not as if there are determinate and fixed definitions of the words or terms used by philosophers and laypeople when discussing philosophical issues.

Of course a person may also claim that he defines a word in a particular way because he believes that his own personal definition unequivocally follows from what the x he’s referring to actually is… But that’s only the case if he defines his terms at all!

Again: is all this about words (or technical terms) and how we define them? Not at all. As Armstrong argued above: it’s also about things. So if definitions are very important, then once someone defines his word or term (say, “consciousness”, “existence”, “free will”, “fact”, “prove”, etc.), then we can move on from there. And that’s the case even if we’re using those words to talk about Armstrong’s things — concrete things, events and even facts.

Problems With Definition and Analysis

There may be at least a couple of responses (either in words or in thought) to this essay which cite my “self-referential inconsistency”. After all, this piece never defines the word “define”. And neither does it define “concept”, “analysis”, “explanation”, etc. That isn’t a big problem. It isn’t being argued here that every term or word one uses should be defined and that it should be defined every time one uses it. That would lead to the pedantry mentioned in the introduction — not to advancing genuine debate. In any case, certain terms or words are less in need of definition than others. And, of course, definitions themselves depend on conversational and other kinds of context.

This also means that we are — in some senses — free to define our words in any way we wish. This is especially the case if there’s no consensus definition of the philosophical term under dispute. So this makes it even more acceptable to take a (as it were) stipulational position on philosophical terms.

And there is also a problem with over-stressing the importance of definitions — or even with simply emphasising their importance at all. Indeed the Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) summed up this problem with a joke. He wrote:

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

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 addition, analytic philosophers have often prided themselves on their “conceptual clarifications”. However, these clarifications don’t always —at least not only in themselves — bring about clarity. Indeed they often do the opposite. That is, they can also encourage a degree of pedantry and academese.

It can also be said that the words “explicit explanation” and “explicit definition” will themselves need defining and explaining. What’s more, their usage and definitions may simply be relative to specific analytic philosophers and what they take these things to mean. In other words, much (or some) analytic philosophy may only be clear to other (professional) analytic philosophers. Thus the explicit explanations and explicit definitions found in analytic philosophy may only work as explanations and definitions when it comes to other analytic philosophers. This means that those on the outside (including highly-educated people) may not appreciate (or even recognise) that supposed clarity or take such explanations and definitions to be explanations and definitions.

Defining terms and the analysis of concepts also tie in with the issue of obscurity.

So, finally, let’s finish with some detail on what the word “clarity” may mean within a philosophical context.

Take the following passage from the American philosopher Gary Gutting (1942–2019). Gutting wrote:

“My concern [] is about the obscurity that arises because authors do not make a sufficient effort to connect their novel concepts to more familiar (even if technical) concepts that would allow an informed and conscientious reader to make an assessment of their claims. The result is writing that is hermetic in the sense that it cuts itself off from the very issues of common concern that it is trying to address.”

The words above were aimed at a handful of continental — more specifically, French — philosophers. However, they can also be aimed at some analytic philosophers and many other targets too.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]