What is a Concept? A Philosophical Discussion

 A discussion of the many ways of answering the question, “What is a concept?”

Just one answer to the question, “What is a concept?”

Perhaps an answer to the question “What is a concept?” is at least partly normative, prescriptive and/or stipulational in nature. That is, the things various philosophers describe as being the true nature of a concept (or what it is to be a concept) may be real enough. However, there’s no necessity involved in deeming such things to actually constitute concepts.

So perhaps there’s no determinate answer to the question, “What is a concept?” (The same kind of thing can be said about consciousness, truth, wisdom, intelligence, etc.)

Concepts as Abstract Objects

Concepts can be seen, and have been seen, as abstract objects.

Are abstract objects things? Are concepts abstract objects and therefore things too?

So perhaps the things which are said about propositions, numbers and universals can also be said about concepts.

On a Fregean reading, specifically, concepts play their parts in what Frege called “Thoughts” — which are, basically, abstract atemporal propositions (see here). Thus such concepts (as parts) must themselves be equally abstract. (See Frege’s ‘The Thought’.)

That said, is it a Rylian category mistake to fuse concepts with, say, propositions, numbers and universals?

Of course there may be the danger of reifying (see reification) concepts when deeming them to be either abstract or concrete objects. Yet there’s also a danger of not reifying concepts.

Sure, concepts may not be like cups, dogs or planets. Concepts may not even be like theoretical particles. Nonetheless, they may be like numbers, propositions or universals. In other words, sometimes we reify because we have no (philosophical) choice but to do so.

That said, as Jim Hamlyn (in a personal correspondence) wrote :

“Treating concepts in this way reifies them when in fact possession of a concept is not the acquisition of any particular object at all.”

It’s easy to see the problems with reification. Some philosophers have spent their lives arguing against it. Others reject the existence of all abstract objects.

So let’s firstly just say that concepts aren’t only abstract objects.

Concepts may not only be brain states, “capacities”, “representations” or “dispositions” either.

But say that brain states are part of the story.

That story wouldn’t be complete without, say, capacities or human practices. Indeed that story wouldn’t be complete without concepts being abstract objects too.

All this means that we may not need a single underpinning for (or to) concepts.

Now take the phrase “the acquisition of a concept”.

Many Theories of Concepts

Some philosophers don’t distinguish concepts from various features which may be simply related to concepts: such as the criteria for the “possession” or “mastery” of concepts.

In these cases there’s the acquisition of something. Thus concepts can’t only be a matter of acquisition, capacity or use.

So if concepts have a being or a reality before their application or use, then what kind of of being or reality do they have?

The aforementioned Jim Hamlyn also wrote:

“To possess the concept green is to be capable of applying the concept in ways that other concept users would accept as viable and the only way that such application can be achieved is via representations."

That passage is about the use or “mastery” of concepts; which is a different issue and doesn’t seem to answer the question, What are concepts? That is, if we’re to “apply” concepts, then surely they must already have some kind of being or reality.

Are Concepts Mental Representations or Capacities?

In the philosophical literature, concepts are often deemed to be representations (see mental representation).

Yet in many discussions about representations (i.e., strictly in relation to concepts), it’s sometimes unclear what people mean by that word.

As Hamlyn puts it:

“Where many theorists take representations to be objects of fact I take capacities to represent to be instrumental. So I reject inner representation as such.”

This argument seems similar to Gilbert Ryle’s position on what are deemed to be (in what’s called “folk psychology”) “mental faculties”: such as the will, intelligence and even the mind itself. To put it simply, the will or intelligence isn’t a part of the brain. It is, to use a word used in the quoted passage above, a “capacity”.

Yet don’t concepts and representations both belong to different kinds to that of the will or intelligence? The word “intelligence” is really a collective or “bundle” term; whereas a representation or a concept is singular.

Another way of putting this (as Ryle himself did) is to say that one must display intelligence in order to be intelligent. On the other hand, must we also display concepts and representations in order for them to (as it were) have being or be real?

So if one assumes that representations exist in the brain, then they can have a reality which is separate from their being “manifested publicly”. (See also Michael Dummett’s “manifestation argument” for a related idea.) Yet representations, on a strict manifestation reading, must be their vocal or written expressions.

At an initial level, one can see why mental representations have to do some work in a theory of concepts. After all, even if someone claims that concepts are abstract objects like propositions (i.e., in that they’re “available to all” regardless of their particular natural-language expressions), it would still need to be the case that individuals have access to them via some medium — i.e., a mental or other kind of representation. And that representation, if mental, must surely must be encoded in the brain.

So now we can move from a brain state, to a representation and then to the vocal expression of a concept. Yet the same concept can still be deemed to be an abstract object in the strong sense that this x is available to all. (Anything that’s only a representation — at least as it’s encoded as a brain state — can’t be available to all.)

Concepts as Capacities

As already hinted at, one position on concepts is the following:

concepts = capacities

So just as it can be argued that concepts aren’t abstract objects, so it can also be argued that mental representations aren’t brain states.

Here again reification is rejected and “capacities” may enter the picture instead. In other words:

If concepts are capacities, then representations are also capacities rather than objects.

Yet there’s also a problem with the notion of concepts being capacities.

Isn’t it that concepts are displayed or used — and that constitutes human capacities? That is, we determine the nature of a concept through our (concept-using) capacities. However, that must mean that concepts themselves can’t be the same thing as any human capacities.

Moreover, Hamlyn also argues that “one learns of the concept itself and the capacity of what the concept relates in one fell swoop”.

But how does that work?

There must be something which pre-dates the capacity.

Concepts and Use

On a Wittgensteinian reading, a concept is learned (or acquired) through its use (see here).

But what is a concept before a particular person (or even an entire community) learned what it is by using it? In other words, the concept, say, [cat] or [atom] can only be used (or become part of a capacity) if it (somehow) already had some kind of being or reality and therefore also had some kind of prior nature or identity.

In other words, something (or some things) must predate both our use of concepts and also the capacities we develop by using such concepts.

The interesting thing is how this ties in with what’s said about concepts as “procedures”. In that sense, all reasoning about those issues needn’t concern itself with questions about the ontological nature or existence of concepts.

Now take the following passage (again, from Jim Hamlyn):

“Concepts are applied via procedures (hence the relevance of Wittgenstein’s insights regarding meaning and use).”

Isn’t it more a case that concepts (or words) gain their nature — or even their meaning — as a result of human procedures?

Again, in order for a concept to be applied, used or to become part of a procedure, it must already have a nature or identity which is separable from that nature or identity coming about entirely through its application or use. What is meant by this is that in order to use a concept within a certain human context (or set thereof) it must already have had a nature or identity of some kind otherwise how would an individual or community have known how to use it? It’s true that such a concept can gain a modified or new “meaning” as a result — or because — of particular examples of use. However, the concept must have had some kind of nature or identity before such acts of use.

So perhaps all this is an indirect argument against Wittgenstein’s use-theory position on words and terms — as it has just been applied to concepts.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]

David Chalmers’ Panpsychist Dualism?

Does naturalistic dualism lead to panpsychism?

David Chalmers being interviewed by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. See video here.

Introduction: What Hard Problem of Consciousness?

It’s worth stating — at the onset — what the Australian philosopher David Chalmers (1966-) hopes to achieve by advancing (his) naturalistic dualism.

Chalmers believes that panpsychism (or, more specifically, panprotopsychism) could be a solution to the “hard problem of consciousness”. (Chalmers himself coined that phrase.) That is, if everything (including the brain and all its parts) has — or instantiates — phenomenal properties, then perhaps there’s no (deep) problem with the link between the brain and the phenomenal. That’s primarily because every physical thing is — or instantiates — the phenomenal from the very start.

This also means that in panpsychism there may be no (strong) emergence either. That is, surely the phenomenal can’t emerge from what is already (at least party) phenomenal. Indeed the phenomenal can’t be reduced to the phenomenal either — for the same reason. And, finally, the phenomenal can’t supervene on the phenomenal. (All that said, see the short discussion of the Combination Problem in the last section of this essay.)

Property Dualism is Dualism

David Chalmers’ philosophical position is one of property dualism.

This position has it that the world is composed of just one kind of substance. However, that (physical?) substance has two distinct kinds of property: physical properties and phenomenal (or mental) properties.

Yet there often seems to be various kinds of complication (or plain conflation) on this subject. What’s meant by that statement is that some property dualists argue (or simply imply) that firstly we have (a) substance, and only then do we have the two kinds of property of that substance. Other property dualists, on the other hand, argue that it’s the physical itself (i.e., without any talk of substance) which has two kinds of property.

This means that we’d need to know what substance is regardless of its “properties”. That said, substance is a philosophical term of art which tends to take us very far from anything known or accepted in physics or in any other science.

[It’s true that historically the term “substance” has been used in science — or at least in premodern science. Indeed the term is still used in chemistry. However, chemical substances bear little resemblance to the various and many substances of philosophy.]

More relevantly to this essay, we now need to know how two distinct kinds of property can exist (or can be instantiated) together in the same substance (or in the same x) and why they are so.

So is this joint existence (i.e., of two very-different properties) in the same substance (or x) any less problematic than the joint existence of “body and mind” (i.e., two other completely different substances) in substance dualism or, perhaps less accurately, in Cartesian dualism?

In addition, this position basically boils down to the very philosophical (or ontological) division of a given x into its having two other kinds of property: the intrinsic and the extrinsic. In this case, the intrinsic is taken to be phenomenal and the extrinsic is taken to be physical.

All this means that we have a singular (or even monistic) x which is (to use Wittgenstein’s phrase) “the substance of the world”. Yet that x still has two very different kinds of property.

This position, therefore, gives up on substance dualism in order to embrace a dualism of properties.

In substance dualism, the mind and body are (rhetorically) ripped apart. In property (or, as we shall see, panpsychist) dualism, on the other hand, we have a given x which just happens to have two very different types of property.

But why is property dualism any better than substance dualism?

It is different, sure; but why is it better or less problematic?

What’s more, why on earth should we buy this neat, tidy and — perhaps also — artificial philosophical (as it were) binarism of a given x and its having both physical and phenomenal properties? And, in parallel to that, why should we also buy the equally neat and tidy intrinsic-extrinsic binarism to which that former binarism is very tightly (or even essentially) linked?

It must now be said that David Chalmers himself sees his own position as dualist.

[See David Chalmers’ video presentation ‘What is Property Dualism?’. This puts the case for — or at least explains — property dualism. This position is also very much like the more strictly ontological dual-aspect theory.]

Naturalistic Dualism

Why does Chalmers see his own position as being a type of dualism?

Take Chalmers’ own words on this. He writes:

“[T]he fact that consciousness accompanies a given physical process is a further fact, not explainable simply by telling the story about the physical facts.”

The problem with saying (as Chalmers does elsewhere) that naturalistic dualism is “compatible with all the results of contemporary science” is that this is exactly what idealists (from Bishop Berkeley to Donald Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup) have also argued about their own (in the plural) idealisms. What’s more, panpsychists have argued the same about panpsychism. Indeed theists and many others — and even some of those who make specific religious claims (which are clearly not naturalistic) — have argued that their own positions/claims don’t (to use another phrase) “contradict science”.

Moreover, religious or spiritual people can argue that their views are examples in which (to use Chalmers’ words) “our picture of nature has [simply been] expanded” — i.e., not contradicted. (Deepak Chopra makes these kinds of claim all the time — see here.)

So perhaps the situation with all the philosophical and religious isms above jointly (as it were) owning the same (to use Chalmers’ words) “results of contemporary science” is a very direct consequence of the fact that theory is underdetermined by the data or evidence.

Now let’s move on and provide a little detail on Chalmers’ phenomenal properties and intrinsic properties.

Phenomenal Properties are Intrinsic Properties

In David Chalmers’ philosophical scheme, there’s a very tight (or even necessary) link set up between phenomenal properties and intrinsic properties. That is, Chalmers deems phenomenal properties to be intrinsic properties.

Chalmers accepts what he also calls “the physical”. (He’s not an idealist.) However, he believes that the physical has phenomenal properties. In his own words:

“If one allows that intrinsic properties exist, a natural speculation given the above is that the intrinsic properties of the physical — the properties that causation ultimately relates — are themselves phenomenal properties.”

It’s clear that Chalmers is being speculative about intrinsic properties here, not speculative about phenomenal properties. This seems to be an acceptance — or even assumption — on Chalmers’ part that such properties exist… and only then do we need to speculate about their nature.

So here we need to note the importance of the intrinsic-extrinsic binary in Chalmers’ philosophy.

The physical obviously isn’t being factored out of Chalmers’ philosophy (i.e., as it would be if he were an idealist). And neither is the phenomenal (or consciousness/experience). Instead, we have one thing (i.e., the physical — Chalmers doesn’t use the term “substance”) with two kinds of property: the physical and the phenomenal.

Of course that grammatical formulation doesn’t work in that it can hardly be said that the physical is a property of the physical. On the other hand, it’s fine to say — at least grammatically - that the phenomenal is a property of the physical.

So instead of saying that both the physical and the phenomenal are properties of the physical, we can say that the physical and the phenomenal are properties of x — where x is a symbol for some kind of noumenon, substance or simply something before it’s described or accounted for in ontological (or in any) terms.

Does the physical have any other properties other than the phenomenal? Yes; but none of them is intrinsic.

This means that Chalmers is arguing that the physical property of x is extrinsic; whereas the phenomenal property (of the very same) x is intrinsic.

Now just as property dualism can be tied to panpsychism, so it can also be tied to (or be an example of) non-reductive physicalism.

Non-Reductive Physicalism

Non-reductive physicalism has it that “the mental” (or a phenomenal property, in Chalmers’ case) isn’t ontologically reducible to the physical (or to the brain).

Yet non-reductive physicalism also has it that mental states (or phenomenal properties) are physical in that they’re caused by physical states. However, on this non-reductive picture that doesn’t mean that mental states (or phenomenal properties) are also ontologically reducible to such physical states.

Yet if mental states (or phenomenal properties) literally are physical states, then why aren’t they ontologically reducible to physical states?

That said, if any given x (literally) is y, then surely that x can’t also be reduced to y. That’s because x is y. So x can’t be reduced to x.

[Loosely, one “mode of presentation” or “sense” of a given x can be reduced to another mode of presentation of that very same x. This issue can’t be tackled here.]

Now let’s concentrate on Chalmers’ phenomenal properties — rather than the “mental states” usually referred to in this debate.

To repeat. If phenomenal properties are physical states, then phenomenal properties can’t be reduced to physical states because phenomenal properties are physical states.

There is a similar problem here.

As already stated, in the non-reductive picture it’s argued that mental states are physical in that they are caused by physical states. However, mental states aren’t ontologically reducible to such physical states. Yet here again if Chalmers’ phenomenal properties literally are physical, then how can they also be caused by physical states? Does this mean that such physical states are causing themselves? Alternatively, is this a case of one set of physical states causing another set of physical states?

To repeat. On the non-reductive physicalism picture, we have a seeming contradiction. Firstly, we have this position:

mental states (or phenomenal properties) are physical

Yet we have the following position too:

a mental state (or phenomenal property) isn’t the same thing as some physical state

This means that although a mental state (or phenomenal property) is physical, it’s not the same thing as a physical state. Yet how can it be physical if it’s not the same thing as something physical? Unless, as just stated, we have the mental state (or phenomenal property) which is physical, and then we have another physical state which is something else. In that case, why is the mental state (or phenomenal property) physical at all?…

… Of course the panpsychist and/or property dualist (if not all non-reductive physicalists) attempts to get around this by arguing that the physical has two “aspects” — the physical and the phenomenal.

Thus a phenomenal property is only one aspect of something physical. And, because it’s only one aspect of a given physical x, then it can’t also be identical to that physical x. That is, something which is more-than-x can’t be entirely identical — or reduced — to that x. That’s mainly because that more-than remainder (whatever it is) will be left out of the identity or the reduction.

Now David Chalmers’ position is somewhat complicated by his introduction of a term which is (in his case at least) essentially borrowed from contemporary physics: information. (This isn’t, of course, to say that the word hasn’t been used in many other contexts.)

Information is Physical

Panpsychism offers us a necessary and vital link between the physical and the phenomenal. Chalmers writes:

“This informational view allows us to understand how experience might have a subtle kind of causal relevance in virtue of its status as the intrinsic aspect of the physical.”

Here Chalmers talks about an “intrinsic aspect of the physical”, rather than the earlier phenomenal aspect (or property) of the physical. And this is Chalmers doing so again in the following passage:

“[A] natural hypothesis: that information (or at least some information) has two basic aspects, a physical aspect and a phenomenal aspect.”

And elsewhere he writes:

“We might say that phenomenal properties are the internal aspect of information.”

Put simply, then, Chalmers links the phenomenal to the informational.

So instead of talking about any given x (or the physical) having “two basic aspects”, it’s now being argued that it’s “information” which does so.

Importantly, the two passages above must now be related to Chalmers’ earlier highly-relevant comment that “[w]here there is [] information processing, there is [] experience”.

Thus we now need to tie information to the physical (or the physical to information).

Chalmers fully accepts that information needs to be implemented — that is, to be physically (to use a term analytic philosophers seem to prefer) “realised”. And because information is physically realised, then we now also have “properties that causation [can] ultimately relate[]”.

Again, Chalmers concedes that such information is — or even must be — “embodied in physical processing”. That is, information is physically implemented, embodied or realised. (In this case, in the human brain.) In this picture, then, information never runs free of the physical.

[Many — perhaps almost most — theorists in artificial intelligence believe that the right algorithms can bring about not only intelligence and mind, but also consciousness. See my ‘Roger Penrose on Algorithms and Consciousness’.]

Thus, if information processing is physically realised, embodied or implemented, and the physical also instantiates phenomenal properties, then we “could answer a concern about the causal relevance of experience”. On the other hand, if the phenomenal has no strong tie to the physical (as well as “the physical domain [being] causally closed”), then what role can the phenomenal play if it’s merely “supplementary to the physical”?

To recap. Chalmers firstly tied the phenomenal to the physical, and then he tied the phenomenal to the informational. Added to that is the idea that information itself is tied to the physical.

Now take the notion (or reality) of emergence.

Chalmers’ Broader Take on the Phenomenal-Informational Link

All the above helps us tackle the issue of emergence.

Arguably, in panpsychism emergence is no longer (as) problematic as it is for many other philosophical theories.

Chalmers himself continues with some grander conclusions in the following passage:

“This [informational view] has the status of a basic principle that might underlie and explain the emergence of experience from the physical. Experience arises by virtue of its status as one aspect of information, when the other aspect is found embodied in physical processing.”

It’s certainly true that if we have the problem of “the emergence of experience from the physical”, then that experience (or phenomenal property) actually being an “aspect” of the physical — i.e., in the first place — is certainly neat and tidy. In what sense, then, can it even be said that experience emerges at all if it’s already an aspect of the physical?

To repeat. In panpsychism (at least at first glance) there doesn’t seem to be any emergence…

… Except when it it comes to what’s called the Combination Problem. In that case, panpsychists argue (if sometimes implicitly and without always using the word “emergence”) that there can be different kinds of phenomenal properties or entities which emerge from prior phenomenal properties or entities…

… But that’s a big issue which can’t be tackled here.

Panpsychism in 1970: Keith Campbell on the Continuity Argument for Panpsychism

Keith Campbell stated that “continuity shows that men and one-celled organisms have the same basic nature”.

The Australian philosopher Keith Campbell (who was born in 1938) is one of the founders of what came to be called Australian materialism. He was a professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.

Keith Campbell

This essay is primarily based on Campbell’s chapter ‘Dualisms’, from his 1970 (second edition, 1985) book, Body and Mind.

This chapter has been chosen because it’s a (relatively) early reference to panpsychism by an analytic philosopher. That is, it occurred some time before the recent interest in — or fashion for — panpsychism.

This new interest in panpsychism can be said to have begun around in 1996, with David Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind. That said, “analytic panpsychism” partly gained inspiration from Thomas Nagel’s 1979 chapter ‘Panpsychism’ (in his book Mortal Questions). This interest in panpsychism didn’t fully kick in until around 2006, with Galen Strawson’s paper ‘Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism’.

It must now be said that although the word “fashion” was used a few moments ago, it can of course be argued that being against panpsychism was also fashionable for a long period of time (at least within analytic philosophy).

When Did Consciousness Arise?

Even though Keith Campbell didn’t begin with the word “panpsychism”, the following passage expresses the broad gist of what has been called the Panpsychist Argument For Continuity. Campbell wrote:

“If minds are spirits they must have arrived as quite novel objects in the universe, some time between then and now [man and his remote descendants]. But when? We see only a smooth development in the fossil record. Any choice of time as the moment at which spirit first emerged seems hopelessly arbitrary. ”

This seems like an argument that a panpsychist would be happy with.

Of course it’s usually stated that consciousness didn’t just “arrive[]”. It arrived as a gradual process — a result of evolutionary processes and the increased complexity of brains and central nervous systems (among many other things).

In a sense, then, this evolutionary view also parallels the panpsychist argument that not all levels of consciousness are the same. That is, a simple “system” needn’t have the same level of consciousness as a complex system. Nonetheless, that simple system still instantiates consciousness (or, as it’s called by some panpsychists, “proto-consciousness”).

Yet, unlike evolutionists, it’s not only biological systems that panpsychists have in mind: it’s any or every system. Thus if a rock — or even a particle — has (proto)consciousness, then the evolutionary argument (about increasing biological complexity, genetic mutations, environments, etc.) simply doesn’t apply.

In any case, Campbell then applies the same argument not to homo sapiens (or to “man”) as whole, but to an individual human person. He wrote:

“The initial fertilised cell shows no more mentality than an amoeba. By a smooth process of division and specialization the embryo grows into an infant. The infant has a mind, but at what point in its development are we to locate the acquisition of a spirit? As before, any choice is dauntingly arbitrary.”

[It must also be assumed that Campbell’s word “spirit” isn’t really meant in the strictly religious sense. His word “spirit”, therefore, must simply a synonym or cognate for “mind” or “consciousness”.]

The panpsychist will — or must — argue that the “initial fertilised cell” — as well as “an amoeba”! — does indeed instantiate at least a rudimentary level of consciousness. Sure, that fertilised cell (or amoeba) won’t instantiate self-consciousness, cognition or any other higher levels of consciousness (whatever we take them to be). More importantly, it will not think. (Hence the common anti-panpsychism position in which it’s stated that panpsychists believe that, for example, electrons think — see here and here.) In that case, then, there simply is no single “point” at which there’s an “acquisition of a spirit”. Thus, there is no “dauntingly arbitrary” choice we (or at least the panpsychist) need to make either.

Campbell then concluded by putting the somewhat obvious panpsychist conclusion (though without using the word “panpsychism”) to all the above. He wrote:

“Continuity shows that men and one-celled organisms have the same basic nature [].”

Of course we need to know what exactly this “basic nature” is. That is, Campbell merely saying that “all matter shares with man his more-than-material nature” doesn’t tell us much. And it can also be supposed that because this more-than-material is deemed by most (or even all) panpsychists to be basic and fundamental (as well as “intrinsic”), then that’s not a surprise.

Thus because most (or all) panpsychists deem consciousness (or experience) to be fundamental, then, in a strong sense, they don’t need to explain or describe what it is. After all, any description or explanation would be an admission that consciousness isn’t fundamental after all. (To quote the idealist Bernardo Kastrup: “Mind is an irreducible aspect of nature which itself cannot be explained in terms of anything else.”)

So both panpsychists and evolutionists believe in continuity.

So who doesn’t believe in such a thing?

What about dualists?

Dualism

Campbell spots the “scientific difficulty for any form of dualism”. It’s that “the continuity of nature leads a dualist inexorably on to panpsychism”.

To dualists, the “soul” (or perhaps Campbell’s “spirit”) isn’t a result of complexity (as with some forms of materialism and evolutionary theory). And, as already stated, dualists also reject continuity (which panpsychists and evolutionists stress).

Thus Campbell picked up on the fact that panpsychists find dualism just as problematic as they find materialism when he wrote the following:

“The scientific difficulty for any form of dualism is therefore this; the continuity of nature leads inexorably on to panpsychism [].”

So one thing we can’t class panpsychists — as well as idealists — as is dualists.

In any case, René Descartes (1596–1660) himself certainly rejected any continuity from animals to human persons. (This isn’t that surprising in Descartes’ pre-Darwinian age.) That said, it can be argued that not all dualists need to be Cartesian dualists. (David Chalmers classes himself as a “naturalist dualist”; and, to take just one more example, see E. J. Lowe’s paper ‘Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism’.)

Again, panpsychists have no problem with such continuity. That is, if stones — and even particles and spacetime — are deemed to instantiate consciousness in the panpsychist picture, then (as it were) allowing mice and birds — and most most certainly cats and dogs — consciousness is no problem at all.

Campbell Against Panpsychism?

Keith Campbell does put a position against panpsychism when he mentions the lack of “direct evidence of mentality” in, say, particles or even cells. Of course there’s no “direct evidence” that non-human animals are conscious either. Indeed, so the arguments go, there is no direct evidence that our fellow human beings instantiate consciousness! (Hence the possibility of zombies, the “problem of other minds”, behaviourism, etc.)

Campbell also argued that panpsychism

“is a speculation which extends the field of the mental far beyond anything warranted”.

That’s okay. Not many (or at least not all) panpsychists would deny panpsychism’s speculative nature.

The Recent Rise of “Analytic Panpsychism”: 1996 to 2022

A personal and historical take on the recent rise of panpsychism.

[The term “analytic panpsychism” is in quotation marks because it crops up a few times in the philosophical literature. See here, here and here.]

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

To start this essay on a personal note.

I don’t recall a single reference to panpsychism at university in the early 2000s from either my fellow students or from the professors who taught there. And this situation remained the case right up to 2007/8.

Indeed the panpsychist philosopher Philip Goff also acknowledges this situation in his book Galileo’s Error.

Goff points out that in the early 2000s he had to (as it were) seek out a panpsychist to teach him. He writes:

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

Goff also says that because he was (as it were) worried about propagating panpsychism when a postgraduate, he (as I read it) kept his beliefs to himself.

In terms of academic work, Goff wrote his first paper on panpsychism (‘Experiences Don’t Sum’) in 2006 . Indeed even here there’s one slight (or possible) complication: Goff’s paper from 2009, ‘Why Panpsychism Doesn’t Help Us Explain Consciousness’. Judging by the title and abstract (e.g., “the paper argues that panpsychism cannot help us to explain consciousness”) of that paper, it appears to be critical of panpsychism.

Yet, despite all the above, it’s often said that panpsychism dates back to various ancient civilisations (see here and here).

And, if we jump forward many centuries, panpsychism is also dated back to what some people call its “heyday” in the 19th century (see here). And then we had such (scare-quoted) “panpsychist” philosophers as Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead in the early 20th century.

Yet not all these historical positions replicate what’s expressed by many contemporary panpsychists — at least those philosophers within the tradition of analytic philosophy.

Indeed so many dead philosophers and scientists are classed as panpsychists nowadays that one doesn’t know where to start.

Of course many of these classifications are entirely retrospective in nature (i.e., written mainly by 21st-century panpsychists). That can be seen because it only takes a few minutes to realise that all these historical “panpsychists” actually held very-different views.

(For example, simply reading the abstract of Anand Jayprakash Vaidya’s paper ‘Analytic Panpsychism and the Metaphysics of Rāmānuja’s Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta’ will make that very clear.)

All this basically means that we have — if anything at all — a plurality of panpsychisms, rather than a singular panpsychism.

Take as an example of all this the British philosopher Timothy Sprigge, who wrote a book called A Vindication of Absolute Idealism (1983). Despite the title, this book is deemed (at least by some) to advance a form of panpsychism! (The book is seen to be a “synthesis of panpsychism and absolute idealism”.) Yet this is at odds with, for example, the philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s own “analytic idealism” and the fact that Kastrup has strong and negative words to say against panpsychism. (See Kastrup’s ‘The threat of panpsychism: a warning’ and ‘The irony of Philip Goff’s arguments’. ) Similarly, Philip Goff — Kastrup’s main target — returns the favour by arguing against (though without Kastrupian rhetoric and rudeness) Kastrup. (See Goff’s ‘Response to Bernardo Kastrup’ and here.)

Added to the problem of certain kinds of idealism being classed as “panpsychism” are the multiple varieties of (pure or not so pure) panpsychism itself.

Take Goff’s Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on “Panpsychism”. In that piece Goff cites eleven different kinds of panpsychism. Admittedly, some of the panpsychist isms which Goff cites may be either virtual synonyms or subsets of each other.

[Goff’s long list of panpsychisms: micropsychism, cosmopsychism, constitutive cosmopsychism, panprotopsychism, constitutive panpsychism, non-constitutive panpsychism, constitutive micropsychism, emergentist panpsychism, panexperientialism, pancognitivism and Russellian Monism… And they’re just the recent versions of panpsychism within analytic philosophy!]

All these panpsychist isms, however, may be not that unlike the many different forms of idealism, materialism, Marxism, dualism, etc.

To admit to my own bias or limited knowledge, I’d never heard of many of the contemporary “big names” connected to panpsychism. And, when I did become aware of them, they were named only with exclusive reference to panpsychism itself. (These people include the American philosophers David Ray Griffin, David Skrbina and Gregg Rosenberg.)

To display my bias again: the recent embrace of panpsychism in analytic-philosophy circles can be said to have begun with — or, more correctly, to have been inspired by — Thomas Nagel’s (a philosopher many people have heard of) 1979 chapter ‘Panpsychism’ . But then you have 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.

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Note: Integrated Information Theory

Although not “analytic panpsychism”, what about Integrated Information Theory, which has been (as it were) linked to (analytic) panpsychism?

It’s hard to see how a theory — IIT — which often seems to emphasise complexity and does emphasise integration, and which focuses almost entirely on biological brains, can help panpsychism. Thus linking IIT to panpsychism seems — at least at first sight — to be all wrong.

For one, the neuroscientist and psychiatrist Giulio Tononi (who formulated IIT) himself has little time for the purely philosophical theories of consciousness and has said that they “lack predictive power”. (He even keeps well away from such terms as “qualia”.)

That said, IIT has it that even basic objects have a nonzero degree of Φ, which is Tononi’s unit of measurement for consciousness (see here). This would mean that consciousness is everywhere — if only to a rudimentary level (as with the “proto-experience” of panpsychists).

In any case, this not-panpsychism position is at odds with the philosophers David Chalmers and John Searle, who do take IIT to be a form of panpsychism (see here and here). And, what’s more, the German-American neurophysiologist and neuroscientist Christof Koch (Tononi’s co-worker) has even claimed that IIT is a “scientifically refined version” of panpsychism.

[I can be found on Twitter here.]