For me, these are all good questions. Questions that I contemplate now and then as I accrue more experiences about the nature of nature.

True since we understand living entities to be interacting with non-living environments and to be continuously absorbing, and actually "composed" of, non-living "stuff".

Hi Phillip, welcome, I hope you stick around!

My question is this: if experience is the intrinsic nature of brains, then wouldn't it be just as simple, and certainly more parsimonious, to say that elementary particles have no intrinsic nature?

We either suppose that the intrinsic nature of fundamental particles involves experience or we suppose that they have some entirely unknown intrinsic nature. — Philip Goff

This would seem to be a false dichotomy; "nothing" is neither experience nor entirely unknown.

How does my experience of being a human, in a world, emerge from individual particles (that have experience as part of their nature). Is my conscious experience physically located throughout the particles within my brain, only some of them, or is it an emergent entity and exists somewhere else entirely? — dukkha

And also, why isn't my foot conscious? Or is it, and my brain just isn't aware? But then why I am I located with my brain and not my foot?

On your third question -- Epicurus believed the mind to be located in the chest -- where we tend to have a two-part mind, one in the head and the other in the chest. So, presumably, the body-part identification of your mind is a cultural phenomena.

I don't know if 'foot' would be a possible body-part to genuinely feel you are identified with, but I don't see a reason to exclude it either if, in fact, body-part identification is something you learn from the culture you're born into.


On the first question -- I think, insofar that we believe such-and-such to be an entity at least, that panpsychism would call it conscious. But I'm not sure that the parts of entities would be conscious.

So, an electron can be identified with 4 numbers -- principal number, orbital angular momentum, magnetic number, and spin. But the orbital angular moment of an electron is not posited to have consciousness, whereas the electron is.

So I think it would depend on what we admit as an entity. If we believe there is no self, for instance, then perhaps your conscious life just happens to include the conscious life of your foot too. Or, if we believe there is an ontological self, then that would be the reason your foot is not conscious -- it's just a part of you (your second question).

If we can only know experiences through having them, then we can't attribute them to others. But clearly we can attribute experiences to others,so why not to electrons?

I wonder whether there's a conflation here of different senses of 'subjective'. Experiences are 'subjective' in the sense that they're attributes of a subject. But facts about experiences are still perfectly objective facts about reality. — Philip Goff

Instead of applying the knowledge argument to Mary, let's apply it to a robot. The robot has been programmed with all knowledge of light, but is unable to detect red due to a loose connection. During routine maintenance, the loose connection is spotted, and the robot can now detect red. The "red" signals are now fed via various circuits to the CPU where they are processed and the robot acts accordingly.

We know that the robot, as a robot, does not possess subjectivity because we programmed it that way. Perhaps more importantly, because it is a robot, we have a lesser tendency to anthropomorphise it and impute properties that are absent. We now decide to program the robot with "what it is like to see red" knowledge. How do we do that? The electrons the robot is made from may have subjectivity, but that doesn't help us. We can't even express "what it is like" for ourselves, and certainly can't predict it for a robot.

The only way to get the robot to discover "what it is like to see red" is for us to program it to create that knowledge for itself. This seems to be true, whether panpsychism is true or not. So we must program the robot with a general ability to create a particular type of knowledge.

While it might be possible to program a robot in such a way that it becomes capable of knowing what it is like to see a colour, the idea that knowledge creation can be restricted, even in this scenario, seems at odds with the very notion of knowledge creation. Since we cannot predict the knowledge, how could we predict where to place the restriction?

It seems that in order to endow the robot with the ability to create knowledge of "what it is like to see red", we must endow it with a general ability to create knowledge of any kind. In doing so, what have we altered? The robot is physically the same apart from certain bits scattered about its memory and registers being at a different voltage, and some electrical currents being different. I don't see that panpsychism offers anything to help us understand this situation or help us reach this goal.

The hard problem may indeed be hard, but I think the problem of how to create knowledge - of any kind - is the fundamental problem.

I don't know if 'foot' would be a possible body-part to genuinely feel you are identified with, but I don't see a reason to exclude it either if, in fact, body-part identification is something you learn from the culture you're born into. — Moliere

Reason we learn to identify consciousness with our heads is because all the evidence correlates with the brain and not the foot. But if panpsychism is true, then neurons (and only neurons in certain regions) in the skull shouldn't be special when it comes to consciousness.

Strictly speaking, they are just as special. Experience emerges from feet just as it does the brain-- and the same is true each atom, protons and electron, neutron, etc., In this context, there isn't just one "mind" to a body, but billions upon billions, where everything from a single electron to the whole body syestem has a mind of its own. In one person, there are more experiencing individuals than humans on Earth.

Strictly speaking, they are just as special. Experience emerges from feet just as it does the brain-- and the same is true each atom, protons and electron, neutron, etc., In this context, there isn't just one "mind" to a body, but billions upon billions, where everything from a single electron to the whole body syestem has a mind of its own. In one person, there are more experiencing individuals than humans on Earth. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Why is my subjectivity unaffected when I have a hair cut?

Reason we learn to identify consciousness with our heads is because all the evidence correlates with the brain and not the foot. — Marchesk

Let's back up a bit here. In this particular discussion the distinction between consciousness and where I am located at within my body is important, since the original article is talking about the hard problem of consciousness and pan-psychism, which is not the same as the self.

The part of our body which we identify with as the seat of our "true being", or the location of the mind, or the self, or some such, does not have evidence in favor of it. It's an act of identification in the sense of "to identify (with)". Even if the self exists, it doesn't make much sense to say that there is evidence in favor of the self -- it's not the same sort of thing as, say, dinosaurs, for which we have evidence for.

So it is hazardous to begin describing consciousness based upon our conception of the self because, 1, that's not what consciousness is in the first place, and 2, while there is something that it's like to be our self (and are thereby there is consciousness of the self, ala the hard problem), there is plenty of things which we are conscious of (hard problem definition) which our self is not aware of, such as PTSD. You still feel the affects of PTSD even when your self does not identify with said condition.

Now, neurons are a common cause posited for consciousness. But that has little to do with the seat of the self, considering that our neurons do, in fact, run to our foot, yet we do not identify our self with the foot.

But if panpsychism is true, then neurons (and only neurons in certain regions) in the skull shouldn't be special when it comes to consciousness.

Not when it comes to consciousness, no. Though when it comes to human experience pan-psychism wouldn't exclude the importance of neurons.

It's not... you lose hair, feel the person cutting, etc.

If you mean why is it that you don't feel terrible fear or pain when your experiencing hairs are lost, that question has a number of different answers.

Firstly, your mind is not that of the individual hair. Each hair has its own subjectivity.

Secondly, assuming each hair has its own subjectivity, we don't know what that entails. It might be hairs don't feel pain or are rendered unconcious by the approach of cutting tools. It might well be hairs are, in terms of a manifestation in their own experience, unaffected by being cut.

Each hair has its own subjectivity. — TheWillowOfDarkness

Here, you are advocating panpsychism.

The nature of volition is unclear. If a bacteria or virus evolves there is most probably some impulse somewhere that is creating that change. — Rich

I am tending to think of evolutionary processes in terms of the appearance of subjective states. I don't know if any other schools of philosophy see it like that, perhaps it is something like what Henri Bergson thought, but I must confess never to having studied him.

However I did notice in an obituary of Timothy Sprigge, an idealist philosopher who was a leading advocate of panpsychism, that:

Panpsychism (as he argues in his major work, The Vindication Of Absolute Idealism, 1983), has an ethical upshot - enabling, and requiring, us to empathise with other humans and animals. It "bids us recognise that what looks forth from another's eyes, what feels itself in the writhing of a worm . . . is really that very thing which, when speaking through my lips, calls itself 'I'."

That actually corresponds with something C S Lewis said, which is that 'the soul is anything capable of calling itself 'I''.

But I still don't think that this means sub-atomic particles are conscious, as I see them as devoid of subject-hood. (However Sprigge might have disagreed - see this passage.)

Now, if experience also involves self-awareness, then the jury is out. What we can say is that humans have self-awareness as a general rule, some more than others. Beyond that it is simply a guess probably based upon some brain bias of some sort. — Rich

I tend to see the emergence of rational self-awarness - the ability to reflect on the question of the nature of experience - as being a hallmark of the emergence of human intelligence, as distinct from other forms of intelligence. I think that is at least part of the symbolism of the 'myth of the fall', in which Adam eats the fruit of the 'tree of knowledge of good and evil'. It is the 'knowledge of good and evil', which brings about the sense of self-consciousness, leading to shame (and the sense of being a separate person, which is lacking in animal consciousness).

Why is my subjectivity unaffected when I have a hair cut? — tom

I think there's a 'principle of holism' at work. I mean, an individual is a unitary being (under the heading of 'subjective unity of the self'.) The individual can loose many things - like limbs and organs - and still adapt; Jim is still Jim even after a limb has been removed. But that only works to a point; some injuries or illnesses might be so severe that 'the person we knew as Jim no longer exists'.

However, it's amazing how adaptive the being is in keeping itself whole. I suppose the famous example is Phineas Gage, who had a crowbar blown through his skull and survived, albeit with many permanent changes. But he was still recognizably 'Phineas Gage'. There was another story from recent history, a film producer who suffered absolutely catastrophic brain damage after his car was T-boned in Los Angeles, but nevertheless became rehabililtated to the point of being able to live a reasonably normal life (story here). Such cases are scientifically baffling and I don't think too much ought to be read into them, but I think they suggest the sense in which the body-mind is able to restore itself to 'wholeness' even after catastrophic injury.

Secondly, assuming each hair has its own subjectivity, we don't know what that entails. It might be hairs don't feel pain or are rendered unconcious by the approach of cutting tools. It might well be hairs are, in terms of a manifestation in their own experience, unaffected by being cut. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I we want to give a robot subjectivity - i.e. "what it is like" knowledge, we have to program it that way. Swapping out a hard-drive, or adding more memory is not going to affect the running of the program that achieves this. What particular hardware constitutes the robot is irrelevant, but panpsychics clain it is relevant!

You might also be interested in panprotopsychism. This is as Chalmers summarises:

...roughly, the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious, that is, that they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems...' — Chalmers"

I think this is a more attractive view, in that it allows for an evolutionary 'moment', as it were, when hominids 'became' conscious, without landing every fragment of fallen hair with a complex intrinsic nature.

Here's the paper by Chalmers.

I think this is a more attractive view, in that it allows for an evolutionary 'moment', as it were, when hominids 'became' conscious, without landing every fragment of fallen hair with a complex intrinsic nature. — mcdoodle

Doesn't seem to get round the "robot problem" - i.e. to grant a robot qualia requires a change in its programming, not its matter.

First of all, 'panpsychism' is the belief that 'everything has mind' in some fundamental sense - electrons , other particles, material objects, and so on, have mind, or are in some sense capable of intentional action. This is proposed to solve, or dissolve, the fundamental dichotomy between 'mind and matter' by saying that mind is 'everywhere' (one meaning of 'pan'). All we're seeing with conscious beings is a highly differentiated form of matter, but matter itself is intrinsically conscious.

I guess if you are a monist then "everything has mind [even though I am not quite sure what "mind" means] seems appropriate, I am not sure this entails that everything is "in some sense capable of intentional action." I think anything that can be defined as living can in some sense demonstrate intentionaly (even if minimally), but I do not think any inert matter can or has demonstrated similar intentionality. If so then for the monist's inert matter's is unintentional, and the question is again what does "mind" mean if this is the case.

All things, living and inert have a history, even if on the micro level it can be very short. If all matter can (in some combination) accommodate life, then mind in some sense must be a potential state of matter, part of matters natural progression or history.

I actually dislike his approach, here, because it seems to me to be committing the very mistake that generates the hard problem of consciousness in the first place. We wonder, how are we able to feel when matter is naturally inert? And proto-conscious properties are just a way of making consciousness something which is inert and analysable, when in fact consciousness is not well described as either. (I'm going from memory of The Conscious Mind here in this response. Let me know if I'm off base in saying this with respect to the paper) ((And there is an epistemic sort of drive, from myself, in saying this -- it seems to me that consicousness, by its very nature, is not analysable in the way that materials are into atomic units which tell us why they are as they are. We can break it apart, but something changes in so doing, and in fact the same 'parts' can feel differently from instance to instance, yet still be important to understanding how something feels. proto-consciousness just defers the explanatory gap from where it already is in current science.))

I think you have to kind of commit all the way. There is a first-person side for every existing entity. Adding "proto-properties" adds nothing to this explanation, at least in a scientific sense.

I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences. — Wayfarer

Hi Wayfarer. I’ve seen you write paragraphs like the above several times and am always struck by the ironic nature of the fact that in order for what you claim to have any force it must be possible to do the very thing you claim to be impossible – namely, objectify experience. If experience can’t be the object of knowledge, then you can’t make any claims about it. Full stop. There’s no middle ground here that I can see, but perhaps you could take a stab at explaining how your claims about experience are possible if experience literally can’t be known.

it seems to me that consicousness, by its very nature, is not analysable in the way that materials are into atomic units which tell us why they are as they are — Moliere

I should have made it clearer that although I think panprotopsychism is 'more attractive' than panpsychism, I don't endorse it at all. I agree with your fundamental point about phenomonology not being assimilable to the Chalmers view. By 'more attractive' I only meant that the proto business is curious about an interesting place - what a Darwinian analysis might make of the notion of an evolution into something like consciousness from something like pre-consciousness. I'm hoping some future or even near-future may conjure up a better vocabulary than we have so far, which will enable us to focus on what this so-called problem actually consists of.

Doesn't seem to get round the "robot problem" - i.e. to grant a robot qualia requires a change in its programming, not its matter. — tom

I agree. I went to an interesting talk the other week about morality and ai. One sideline area that interests me is how we read other minds. At the outer limit, we - people mostly - tend to assign something like qualia to the behavior of machines, as if they had some mind-quality. The indifference of the robot is, to the human being, an indifferent stance - and we take indifference in our fellow-creatures to be a sort of emotive position. 'How dare you be so indifferent?' But I'm drifting off the point.

Your missing the point. Under panpsychism, it's not only the entire system from which conciousness emerges. It does so from every state. Each hard drive and memory stick, for example, has their own subjectivity.

Regardless of whether replacing a hard drive or memory affects the experience of the entire system (would depend on whether either caused different experiences to emerge from the robot system), all its particular parts have their own subjectivity as well.

In the given robot, there is not one instance of an experiencing subjectivity, but billions (the entire system, each hard drive, each memory stick, each atom that makes up every part, every electron, etc.).

I guess if you are a monist then "everything has mind [even though I am not quite sure what "mind" means] seems appropriate, I am not sure this entails that everything is "in some sense capable of intentional action." — Cavacava

But the essay says

According to panpsychism, the smallest bits of matter – things such as electrons and quarks – have very basic kinds of experience; an electron has an inner life.

So I'm guessing, you don't agree with it.

There’s no middle ground here that I can see, but perhaps you could take a stab at explaining how your claims about experience are possible if experience literally can’t be known. — Aaron R

What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person'. That is not the same as saying that it can't be known tout courte.

When I first studied philosophy formally, I was struck by the profoundity of Socrates' encounter with the Oracle of Delphi, on the entry to which the aphorism was inscribed Man, Know Thyself. Not that much was said in the courses I was studied about this topic, but I formed the view that self-knowledge is quite a hard thing to come by, and that many don't have it, even including some very famous and accomplished people.

And indeed one can have all kinds of technical expertise and prowess, and yet be 'a stranger unto oneself'. I happen to think a paradigmatic example of that is Hugh Everett. (If you do take the time to read this article, the last sentence is the kicker.)

Here, you are advocating panpsychism. — Wayfarer

I know, my point was about it's position. Personally, I don't agree that everything has subjectivity. Though, I do like the panpsychist argument for demonstrating how deeply prejudiced towards anyone but ourselves.

Quite a few struggle with panpsychism not because of the wild speculation everything has subjectivity, but rather because it knocks our sense of superiority as the "only" conscious entities. Since everything has subjectivity, particular bodies and behaviours begin to struggle as a justification of levels of experience belonging to other lifeforms. If apparently inert rocks have subjectivity, how can we be sure higher level thinking is limited to life that behaves like humans or has some similar bodies?

So I'm guessing, you don't agree with it.

It's not that I don't agree with it...it is that I am not sure what "mind" means given this interpenetration. If "mind" is some sort of potential latency in matter, I think how that could be is worth exploring, but I don't understand what the inner life of an electron could possibly mean without anthropomorphization. It may well be that all matter entails the possibility of "mind", I don't disagree with that possibility, but I think intentionality remains only a possibility, and not actual, in inert substances.

If consciousness is inherent in matter, and is just a fundamental aspect, like space and time, then it solves a lot of problems, but it just doesn't seem to be so, it's so counter-intuitive, and annihilates any supposed notion of what consciousness might actually be experientially to us. If we take away our reasons for excluding anything as conscious, then we also remove our ability to include anything as conscious. It's just the polar opposite of solipsism, and based pretty much on the same rationale. That the inner personal experience is all that matters, and no experiential, or empirical evidence ever counts for anything at all.

If experience can’t be the object of knowledge, then you can’t make any claims about it. Full stop. There’s no middle ground here that I can see, but perhaps you could take a stab at explaining how your claims about experience are possible if experience literally can’t be known. — Aaron R

Isn't it possible to make subjective claims about experience? So I wouldn't go so far as to say "you can't make any claims about it". That conclusion is uncalled for. Would you agree that we can have subjective knowledge concerning experience?

If "mind" is some sort of potential latency in matter, I think how that is worth exploring, but I don't understand what the inner life of an electron could possibly mean without anthropomorphization. — Cavacava

Agree! That is what is troubling me too.

If consciousness is inherent in matter, and is just a fundamental aspect, like space and time, then it solves a lot of problems, — Wosret

But the question of whether time and space really are objective realities is a deep philosophical problem in it's own right. Recall that Kant saw both as part of the 'conditions for experience' rather than 'objects of experience'.

Would you agree that we can have subjective knowledge concerning experience? — Metaphysician Undercover

Subjective, yes.

But the question of whether time and space really are objective realities is a deep philosophical problem in it's own right. Recall that Kant saw both as part of the 'conditions for experience' rather than 'objects of experience'. — Wayfarer

Not really. See Kant is an empirical realist, and transcendental idealist, which can be seen as drawing an epistemological, and ontological cut through the noumena. His transcendental idealism is affirming the ontological reality of the categories, but denying that they can be known through experience, since they are the conditions for experience themselves. Which is the distinction between "the nouemna", and "the thing in itself". The noumenon is the idea, the ideal, the category, and the "thing in itself" is actually the feature of reality.

So, the "thing in itself" exists independently of the categories and the mind.

If consciousness is inherent in matter, and is just a fundamental aspect, like space and time, then it solves a lot of problems,... — Wosret

Really? We have one problem - how to explain consciousness - which panpsychism actually doesn't help us with, plus it causes a whole host of other problems:

How do all the fundamental particle consciousnesses combine to create a unified consciousness, and why does that require a brain? i.e. how does a single unified consciousness emerge? This is the same question we have without panpsychism!

Are atoms more conscious than fundamental particles? How about mobile phones?

Why are there no semi-conscious things. Or rather, there must be semi-conscious things, how do we identify them?

Why do I lose consciousness when I'm asleep, given that I am physically the same? Do my fundamental particles also sleep?

Panpsychism simply is not weird enough. Emergent consciousness from underlying physics is much weirder, simpler, and it has a large active research program!

Your missing the point. Under panpsychism, it's not only the entire system from which conciousness emerges. It does so from every state. Each hard drive and memory stick, for example, has their own subjectivity. — TheWillowOfDarkness

I think it is you that is missing the point. It is a well known problem for panpsychism - the combination problem.

In the given robot, there is not one instance of an experiencing subjectivity, but billions (the entire system, each hard drive, each memory stick, each atom that makes up every part, every electron, etc.). — TheWillowOfDarkness

Even if you insist that each electron, atom, transistor is conscious, the robot is not.