Dasein

Being-with others.
Being-without-others.
Being-in-bed.
Being-heavily-pregnant.
Being-nearly-dead.
Being-a-"beingager".
Beings-meanz-Heinz.
Being-in-these-times.
Being-the-Other.
Being-about-a-bit.
Being-full-of-shit.
Being-not-I.
Being-fast-and-loose.
And tied to untruth.

Don't Think

 

Don’t think. Don’t think.

What’s the point? There is no point.

Where’s it got me? It's got me nowhere.

So don’t think.

Don’t think about anything – big, small; profound or trite.

It simply don’t matter. Simply do not think.

Do not think at all.

That’s the only way.

The only way 'til now I’ve never tried.

Try it now.Try not thinking.

You know it makes sense.

To Know, or Not to Know?

To know, or not to know?

That is the question!
It don’t mean a damn thing to know many-a-thing.
Don’t make you feel good. A better person.
Perhaps it’s no bad thing to know no thing.

 

To know ten new things before each breakfast - is that a good thing?

It’s not how much you know;

It's the things you do know.

And how you came to know them.

 

What do you do with your knowledge?

What would happen if you woke knowing nothing?

Bad things?
Go on. Fill your head- knowing this, knowing that, and knowing the other.

 

Do you know what too much knowing can give you?
A big hurt in the 'ead.
You! There! Like a knowledge-junky, you crave for knowledge.
You escape from the Real World.
The world we hear so much about.
The world where only others live.
And you, somehow, evade.

Either/Or

Either this is the case, or that is the case.
Not neither this nor that.
LEM rules; okay?

The nature of the case is that it's clear, or it's unclear.
Not neither clear nor unclear.
Thus there's no link between x’s being the case,

Or x’s not being the case.
LEM rules; okay?
 

Truth ain't sullied by untruth.
Truth is pure, precious; when free from falsehood.
That claim is either true, or it is not true. See?
Not neither true nor untrue.
Bivalence rules!

There is no hesitant play in such cases.
There is no third value or option.

The nature of truth - I say again - is pure and precious.
Untruth’s ugliness is as pure as truth’s beauty.
But not in any way as precious.
The truth can only be seen by the naked mind.
Through acts of intuition or insight,
Its light fixes upon reality and the Real.

This man is a good man, or he is a bad man.
Not neither good nor bad.
Moral bivalence rules!
His mind is spoiled, or it's not spoiled.
Not neither spoiled nor unspoiled.

 

There is no Aristotelian mean
Between such binary opposites.
These oppositions are defined
By their want of gradation.

Now; doesn’t bivalence rule!

Chalmers, Conceivability, Zombies, Allah

David Chalmers' frequent uses of conceivabilities (as it were) or possibilities irks many scientists and not a few philosophers. What exactly are we getting from these “thought experiments”? All sorts of strange and bizarre possibilities, it seems.

David Chalmers, for example, argues that it's logically possible that zombies could exist. What do these claims amount to? Do they amount to much and should we be put-out by them? Bertrand Russell thinks not. He wrote the following about one well-known logical possibility:

"No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of nothing but myself… and that everything else is mere fancy. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the commonsense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations." [1912]

Thus, when I woke up this morning, it was logically possible that I was still asleep. When I moved over to the tap, it was logically possible that poison (not water) could have come out of the tap. If it was water, it was also logically possible that I might have choked on it. Then I looked out of the window and it was logically possible that the town I saw in front of me was a projected simulation of what I had seen the day before. And so on.

Still, logical possibility excites sceptics and philosophers like Chalmers. So should I conclude in the same way as Russell above? Should I say that 

"although [they are] not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that [they are] true"?

Put simply: something that's logically possible may not be actual (or the case). Indeed what's logically possible is often not the case. So why contemplate the logically possible at all - even philosophically? Where will it get us?

As I said, many people are bemused - and sometimes annoyed - by Chalmers' various “zombie” scenarios. Perhaps that's because they believe that they involve natural or metaphysical theses; whereas in fact they're often only about logical possibility.

That basically means that they're about possibilities - not actualities or realities. Then again, people already know that there are no zombies. Thus the logical nature of these thought experiments should already be apparent.

Zombies and Conceivability

Prima facie, conceivability (as Chalmers sees it) isn't as strange or broad as may be presumed. Chalmers himself says that “a claim is conceivable when it is not ruled out a priori”. Put simply, there'll be an indefinite (infinite?) number of scenarios (or claims) which can't be “ruled out a priori”. Even the existence of shark with legs or mushrooms with a sense of humour can't be ruled out a priori. In other words, the only things which can be ruled out a priori are claims/scenarios which break known logical laws or which contain contradictions. Thus the conceivable universe (as it were) could be highly populated with strange and bizarre entities, conditions, events, etc.

Chalmers offers his own example of the conceivable. He says that it's “conceivable that there are mile-high unicycles”.

Again, what are we supposed to gain or achieve by saying that mile-high unicycles are conceivable and therefore possible? Where does it take us?

Conceivability is strongly tied to Chalmers' scenarios of possibility. Thus:

Zombies are logically possible because they're conceivable.

Or contrawise:

If zombies are conceivable, then they're logically possible.

Of course that leaves us with questions about this supposedly strong tie between conceivability and logical possibility.

Kripke

Kripke said that he was working with his own “Cartesian intuitions” when he tackled the mind-body problem. It's also fairly clear that Chalmers has Kripkean intuitions on the same subject.

Kripke is an interesting philosopher to bring into this debate because, prima facie, he seems to hold two mutually-contradictory positions on conceivability (or on the philosophical use of the imagination).

In the first instance, Kripke tell us about an act of imagination which misleads us (metaphysically speaking). He writes:

“... we thought erroneously that we could imagine a situation in which heat was not the motion of molecules. Because although we can say that we pick out heat contingently by the contingent property that it affects us in such and such way...” [1971]

Imagination (or what we can conceive), on the other hand, can also tell us something important (as well as true) about the world. In Kripke's words:

“[J]ust as it seems that the brain state could have existed without any pain, so it seems that the pain could have existed without the corresponding brain state.” [1980]

Thus Kripke stresses our ability to imagine a pain state without its correlated brain state (usually characterised as the “firing of C-fibres”). Thus Kripke concludes:

If we can imagine mental states without their correlated brain states,

        then such states are possible.

Or, alternatively, Kripke is saying that there's no necessary identity between mental states and brain states.

Kripke, on the other hand, also claims that those who imagine heat being caused by something that's not “molecular motion” aren't really imagining heat at all. They just think that they are because they've based their act of imagination on a contingent property of heat – its affect on persons.

Zombies and Qualia in Practice

Chalmers believe that zombies are worth discussing because “there seems to be no a priori contradiction in the idea” of zombies. There's also no a priori contradiction in a human having 26 legs; though such a thing won't tell us much. So it's not just the bare possibility that zombies exist. It's that the possibility can tell us something about the world.

What's the link between possibility and actuality? Clearly possibilities can be a thousand miles away from actualities and the zombie scenario appears to be a good example of this. However, Chalmers' possible zombies tell us something about the limits of physicalism.

In more detail, zombies are, in Chalmers' words, “microphysically identical to us without consciousness”. Thus:

If zombies are identical to human beings physically and behaviourally (yet they don't have consciousness),

        then consciousness must be something over & above the physical.

In addition, Chalmers explains this disjunction between logically possibility and actuality (in relation to qualia) in the following way. 

Firstly he says that “absent qualia” and “inverted qualia” are “logically possible”. However, they're still “empirically and nomologically impossible”. In terms of science and the problem of consciousness, it can be intuitively said that if an x is “empirically and nomologically impossible”, then why should we care that it's also “logically possible”? What do we gain (philosophically and perhaps scientifically) from cogitating about scenarios which involve logical possibility yet, at the same time, empirical and nomological impossibility?

Chalmers supports his conceivability arguments by arguing thus:

“If P & ~Q is conceivable, [then] P & ~Q is metaphysically possible [as well as being] supported by general reasoning.”

Is there such a link between conceivability and possibility? If so, what kind of link is it? In other words, just as there are arguments about certain claims being conceivable and therefore possible, is that link itself grounded in conceivability or possibility (or both)? What is the nature of the link between conceivability and possibility?

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

Case Study: Andalusi Conceives of Allah

Asadullah Ali al-Andalusi (a philosopher at The Andalusian Project) says that the 

“mind is capable of imagining and conceiving of possibilities that the external world does not offer through direct experience”.

What does it mean to “imagine” the possibilities in Andalusi's argument? When people imagine such things, what, exactly, are they imagining? Is it the case that this psychological feat means virtually nothing until we find out what it is Andalusi is imagining? We also need to know why he takes it to be an imagination of something real/actual (or even possible), rather than simply free-standing imaginative act.

There are naturalist (as well as plain old empiricist) explanations as to why the mind is “capable of imagining and conceiving of possibilities that the external world does not offer through direct experience”. The thing is that the mind doesn't really move beyond experience in these instances (though it may in others). It simply plays with experiences and juxtaposes them to create something that doesn't itself exist in experience.

All sorts of philosophers have tackled this issue.

Take D.M. Armstrong's paper 'The Nature of Possibility' (1986). Armstrong sums up what happens with a single technical word: 'combinatorialism'. He states, for example, that “all mere possibilities are recombinations of actual elements”. Thus we can ask two questions:
 

i) What does it mean to imagine "Allah existing in a place beyond time and space"?

ii) What constitutes that act of imagination? Was it its content? What is being imagined?

Andalusi himself expresses a possible limitation with the combinatorialist position. He writes:

“The idea of something being beyond is not the result of direct experience from the natural world -- rather it is a projection.”

If by “going beyond” Andalusi means that such composite entities don't actually exist in the world, then that's correct. However, what makes up the composites isn't beyond... anything. The word 'composite' itself suggests that such an x doesn't actually exist in the natural world (or perhaps anywhere else).

Empiricists or naturalists have no reason to reject composites or combinatorialism.

We can simply say that Andalusi doesn't imagine or conceive such things in the first place. Sure, he conceives something. Though what he conceives is not an x "outside time and space".

In a similar vain, Andalusi writes:

“We can think of Allah being outside time and space (to an extent) and being beyond merciful and beyond kind, etc."

Whatever goes on in this writer's (or mystic's) mind when he says he can imagine “Allah outside time and space”, it doesn't mean that he has literally imagined Allah and his being outside time and space. His might have simply imagined what he deems to be Allah outside time and space.

No one conceives or imagines Allah beyond time and space. That which they do imagine will be proxies for Allah and a place beyond time and space. And those proxies may well be derived from our experiences of the natural world.

Andalusi also makes a distinction between the words 'conceive' and 'imagine' He writes:

“Let's not reduce my argument to only one of the terms I used: 'imagination'. I also used the word 'conceive'.”

They may not be synonyms. However, everything that's just been said about Andalusi's use of the word 'imagination' can also be applied to his use of the word 'conceive'. Exactly the same problems arise.

Despite that, Andalusi explains a distinction which can be made between conceiving and imagining. He writes:

“Imagination is the the result of experiences and the minds ability to mold them into different forms or to conclude connections between them. It takes two to tango in this regard. Conception is more abstract and doesn't require external experiences at all.”

Nonetheless, imagination may still be required to juxtapose (or 'tango' with) one's 'conceptions'. Even if conceptions (does Andalusi mean concepts?) are abstract entities, it will still require the imagination to juxtapose or use them. Allah and a place outside of space and time aren't themselves deemed to be merely abstract entities or concepts.

References

Al-Andalusi, Asadullah Ali. (2015) 'Understanding Atheism'.

-- (Summer 2015) Some of the quotes from Andalusi came from an online Facebook debate.
Armstrong, D.M. (1986) 'The Nature of Possibility'.
Chalmers, David. (1995) 'Absent Qualia, Fading Qualia, Dancing Qualia'.
-- (1997) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory.
Kripke, Saul. (1971) 'Identity and Necessity'.
-- (1980) 'The Identity Thesis', in his Naming and Necessity.
Russell, Bertrand. (1912) The Problems of Philosophy.

David Chalmers' Panprotopsychism (2)

Consciousness is Fundamental and Elemental

It's possible that David Chalmers came to the speculative conclusion that experience/consciousness is elemental and omnipresent because only that could satisfactorily explain (at least in part) the reality of experience/consciousness. In other words, if consciousness/experience is everywhere at all times, that that makes consciousness easier to explain. Thus, according to Sandra Blakeslee, Chalmers argues that “scientists need to come up with new fundamental laws of nature”.

Chalmers himself said:
 

"My approach is to think of conscious experience itself as a fundamental property of the universe. Thus the world has two kinds of information, one physical, one experiential. The challenge is to make theoretical connections between physical processes and conscious experience.” [1996]

 

 

David Chalmers was also explicit about his position during a conference in 1994. This is how Barbara McKenna tells that story:
 

“Over the millennia scientists have concluded that there are a handful of elemental, irreducible ingredients in the universe--space, time, and mass, among them. At a national conference in 1994, philosopher David Chalmers proposed that consciousness also belongs on the list.” [1997]

At first glance it's hard to even comprehend how consciousness/experience is (or could be) an elemental and fundamental aspect of the universe, on par with space, time, mass, etc.

In any case, Chalmers comes clean as to how philosophically massive it would be if experience or 'information' were seen to be everywhere. Chalmers himself says that

“[o]nce a fundamental link between information and experience is on the table, the door is opened to some grander metaphysical speculation concerning the nature of the world”.

Thus we aren't just talking philosophy of mind here; or even about the nature of human consciousness. We're essentially talking about ontology or some “grander metaphysical speculation”.

What and Where is Experience?

The first trick is to explain experience in terms of something else – something which isn't (initially) deemed to be experience. That something else is the processing of information.

Thus firstly Chalmers talks only in terms of processing. He tells us that “changes in experience correspond to changes in processing”. A process is itself seen as a functional property of the brain-mind. Thus if such mind-brain processes actually are experience (rather than causing experience), it follows that “any two functionally isomorphic systems must have the same sort of experiences”.

To recap. A mental process is a mental function and such functions determine – or actually are – experiences.

So what's being processed in the mind? According to Chalmers, it's “information” which also works as an “organizational property”.

Thus we can ask if experience is a functional process which is, as it were, getting to work on information; or is that getting to work itself information? Does information go in (as input) and only then do processes (therefore experience) make sense of that informational input? Or, at the least, is information the content of experience?

In fact Chalmers does talk about information as if it's input and not itself an aspect of the mind-brain. That is, input-as-information goes in, and then processing (therefore experience) follows. That's the case because Chalmers himself says that “experience is much more widespread than we might have believed, as information is everywhere”.

Thus not only is information external to the mind - so is experience. That's not a surprise as we've only just stated that experience is information.

To repeat. From the following, it would seem that “information processing” is experience because, to quote Chalmers in full, he says that

“[w]here there is simple information processing, there is simple experience, and where there is complex information processing, there is complex experience”.

Minds and Mental States

Chalmers also appears to make a strong distinction between minds and mental states. Every object or thing may not have a mind; though they may still have mental states. Or as Chalmers puts it:

“Instead, we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. For example, if quarks or photons have mental states, that suffices for panpsychism to be true, even if rocks and numbers do not have mental states. Perhaps it would not suffice for just one photon to have mental states.” [2013]

Prima facie, it's hard to grasp the distinction between mental states and mind. That's not because I can't see the difference. It's because saying that a photon has a mental state is as problematic as saying that it has a mind.

The other problematic thing in Chalmers' quote above are the words “just one photon to have mental states”. Surely if one photon has mental states, then all photons must have mental states. Photons are fundamental and elementary enough as they are without saying one photon may have mental states and all the other photons may not. How could that be?

In any case, since Chalmers makes a distinction between mental states and minds, now we need to know what it means to say that, say, a photon has mental states. According to Chalmers, if photons have mental states, then

“there is something it is like to be a quark or a photon or a member of some other fundamental physical type”. [2013]

From that one could say that photons can (or could) experience different qualia. Isn't it qualia, after all, that makes a mental state (or experience) “like something”?

Thus we've rejected minds and accepted mental states. And now it's said that some fundamental physical entities are conscious.

Qualia?

Firstly, what do the words “proto-experiential properties” mean? And how can we grasp the thought that such properties are “inside of the entities characterized by physics”?

Chalmers also introduces the term “phenomenal (or experiential) properties” . Qualia must constitute what it's like to be an object. Chalmers, on the other hand, says that

“phenomenal (or experiential) properties are properties characterizing what it is to be a conscious subject”.

It can now be said that the words “qualia” and “phenomenal properties” are virtual synonyms here since they appear to be playing the same role.

This leads to another point. Experience is made up of qualia. In that sense, a particular experience is a particular set of qualia. Or, at the least, an experience is made up of a given set of qualia, even if/though that set doesn't always exhaust that experience's content. (It's problematic to talk about a single experience when, like William James's “stream of consciousness', we may actually have a constant stream of experiences, none of which are discrete and neatly circumscribed.)

Either way, it's such qualia or phenomenal properties which problematise physicalism/materialism. After all, if we are physicalists then we must believe (as Chalmers puts it) that “all phenomenal truths [must be] grounded in microphysical truths”.

References

Chalmers, David. (2013) 'Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism'.

(2010) The Character of Consciousness.

• (1995) 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness'.

Blakeslee, Sandra. (1996) 'The Conscious Mind Is Still Baffling to Experts of All Stripes'.

McKenna, Barbara. (1997) 'UCSC Review Winter 1997'.

David Chalmers' Panprotopsychism (1)

Let's firstly state how literal the panpsychical idea can actually be. Take David Chalmers saying that “we can expect a quark’s experience to be much simpler than an experience of redness”. Yes, Chalmers is saying that quarks may well experience things. He mitigates that by saying that “[w]e are not in a position to say much about what microexperience is like”. He adds that a quark's experience is “much simpler than an experience of redness”. Chalmers also says that microphysical experience “is almost certainly much simpler than human experience”.

So at first glance there's no doubt at all that panpsychism is a bizarre theory. It just seems so intuitively unbelievable.

On the positive side, one can argue (perhaps ironically) that Chalmers' panprotopsychism is more naturalistic (or scientifically kosher) than many of the physicalist alternatives. After all, if panpsychism is the position that consciousness/experience is as elemental and irreducible as space, time and mass (and therefore can found in single-celled organisms and even in inanimate matter), then panpsychists have a better explanation of why consciousness 'emerges' from the brain than many of their rivals. There's a big problem, however. And that is that there's no reason to believe that consciousness/experience is elemental. This basic panpsychist assumption is thoroughly speculative.

Experience is Everywhere

The most counterintuitive aspect of Chalmers' position is that he doesn't take experience to be only an aspect (or part) of human minds or even of animal minds generally. He believes that experience is something to be found outside of minds – or “everywhere” (as he puts it).

Take a mouse. Chalmers writes:

“A mouse has a simpler information-processing structure than a human, and has correspondingly simpler experience.” [2010]

So at least we're still talking about minds here (if the mind of a mouse).

What about, say, a thermostat? Chalmers says that

“perhaps a thermostat, a maximally simple information processing structure, might have maximally simple experience?”

On this reading, inanimate objects may have experiences (or have experience).

Perhaps none of this should be a surprise if we see experience as a “fundamental property” - which is just how Chalmers himself sees it. Experience-as-a-fundamental-property is, by definition, “everywhere”. That's partly why the word “fundamental” is used in science. Thus because experience is (or may be) a fundamental property, Chalmers concludes by saying that

“it would be surprising for it to arise only every now and then; most fundamental properties are more evenly spread”. [1995]

Tiny Minds?

Clearly a distinction has to be made here between that which is necessary for experience/consciousness and experience/consciousness itself. The panprotopsychical position is that what may be responsible for minds can be found right down the line to basic matter. However, why should we also say that such things are minds or that they display “experiential properties”? That's like saying that an individual brick has something in common with the house it is part of. Or, alternatively, it's like saying that each brick somehow "contains" the house in miniature. A better example may be to say that each neuron is a miniature mind. That is, experience or mind can be found at the level of the individual neuron.

Despite saying all that, it's clear that Chalmers himself has a pretty deflationary view (hence the 'proto' in 'panprotopsychism'!) of what it means to say consciousness/experience pervades the fundamental levels of matter. He writes:

“There needn't be anything like 'minds' as we usually think of them at the fundamental level, for example -- I'm not suggesting that electrons are having deep thoughts about the protons they're revolving around!”

[1998]

So what is Chalmers suggesting? He's suggesting the following:

“It's just some sort of very simple, primitive analog of experience, going all the way down.” [1998]

The above begs the question: What does Chalmers mean by “primitive analog of experience”? Does it mean (as in my house and brick example) something that's necessary for experience or something that is itself experience?

Of course stating that “experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world” seems counterintuitive and even eccentric. That's primarily because most people hold the view that consciousness is a consequence of something that's highly complex – i.e., the brain. Thus to be told that a stone or even a lump of shit can have (or contain) experience seems unfathomable. Again, a stone or lump of shit can contain experience because experience itself, according to Chalmers, is in the same ballpark as mass, charge and space-time.

In Chalmers' panprotopsychism we move away from the general view that consciousness is a result of some kind of complexity. Panprotopsychism, on the other hand, is partly about special fundamental entities. Chalmers says that

“the view that fundamental entities are protoconscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems.” [2013]

From the above we can conclude that consciousness is a question of fundamental entities as well as as question of complexity. After all, it's not being said here that an atom or rock is conscious. There's talk, instead, of “properties that are precursors to consciousness” which “collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems”. The use made of the word “collectively” hints at the importance of complexity. That is, these fundamental protoconscious entities aren't conscious themselves. Instead, they are “the precursors to consciousness”.

Thus arguing that everything has a constituent that is necessary for consciousness/experience isn't the same saying that everything has a mind. On this reading, then, Chalmers isn't actually a literal (or true) panpsychist. Chalmers himself puts that point in the following way:

"In practice, people who call themselves panpsychists are not committed to as strong a doctrine. They are not committed to the thesis that the number two has a mind, or that the Eiffel tower has a mind, or that the city of Canberra has a mind, even if they believe in the existence of numbers, towers, and cities." [2013]

Emergence and Complexity

It's clear that an emergentist can hold the position that experience (or consciousness) emerges from the physical. As it stands, though, this isn't a very informative position.

However, various philosophers have given reasons for such emergence. They've argued that new fundamental physical principles came into being at certain levels of physical complexity. It's those new fundamental physical principles which may be responsible for consciousness or experience.

Chalmers, on the other hand, says that panpsychism is the “view on which the novel properties are somehow inside the microphysical network from the start”. That statement in itself can be seen as an indirect argument against emergentism in that if “novel properties” exist “from the start”, then nothing truly novel can be said to emerge from complexity (or from anything else). Higher degrees of novelty (to carry on using Chalmers' word) may well occur; though since novelty exists from the very beginning it's hard to say that novelty suddenly emerges from complexity. (As with Leibniz's 'monads'?)

This idea is put in another way by Chalmers when he says that “constitutive panpsychism holds that microexperiences somehow add up to yield macroexperience”. So here again we have the idea that complexity may be necessary; though it is “microexperiences” in addition to complexity which are required for human consciousness.

Despite saying all that, there's still a hint at emergence when Chalmers says that we “can allow that macroexperience is not wholly grounded in microexperience”. However, instead of referring to complexity-in-the-abstract, Chalmers says that macroexperience “might be grounded in microexperience along with certain further structural or functional properties”. Again, it's not only microexperiental properties which “ground” macroexperience, we need to take on board “further structural or functional properties” as well.

References

Chalmers, David. (2013) 'Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism'.

(2010) The Character of Consciousness.

• (1995) 'Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness'.
• (1998) 'Much Ado About Consciousness', Chalmers interviewed by Andrew Chrucky.