Podcast description: Materialism is dead. There are simply too many questions left unanswered after years of studying the brain. Now, people are scrambling for a new way to understand the mind-body relationship. Cartesian dualism has become a whipping boy in philosophy, but it has advantages over the alternatives. Dr. Joshua Farris discusses Cartesianism and philosophy with Dr. Michael Egnor.
The Churchland quote was literally a direct response to the central nugget of the Karstrup piece. I'm not sure what else I was supposed to take away from that. Maybe you should do what you're demanding from me and read the piece with your full attention.
This is a strawman. Physicalism leads to the conclusion that qualia are an emergent property of interactions of matter. It doesn't require self-similarity at every level of organization. Heck, Karstrup is the one making the panpsychist argument in his conclusion: "[consciousness] can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature."
I don't know how many times I'm going to have to copy-paste this but: Qualia can be associated with neuronal activity and can lead to observable changes in behavior. Literally what the Churchland piece says, and she's arguing against your position. From further down:
Qualia are associated with physical states of the brain. Whether they're an emergent property of something more fundamental is of no consequence to evolution.
Keep flailing, I think there's some straw that you missed there.
It's not a strawman, you've yet to explain how your entire framework doesn't rely on this miraculous coincidence that qualia corresponds so well to what our bodies are actually doing.
Churchland is right, physicalism doesn't explain why X = Y instead X = Z but it kinda should otherwise you end up with this absurd coincidence that just so happened against all odds.
You're avoiding the argument again.
Yes, what you just quoted is true about physicalism, it doesn't answer the why but in this particular case it should be doing that, because again, otherwise you end up with an absurdity of assuming something extremely unlikely. That's why I'm saying physicalism is an inadequate framework for explaining consciousness.
Okay, maybe I'm just lost on what you're asserting here. Why what does what? Why the brain is capable of producing an internal state that's connected to what's happening in the body? Because that's like, what it's for, man.
Alright let's do a though experiment.
Let's take your eyesight. Imagine that instead of your normal eyesight you have almost the same thing but a single "qualia pixel" in the upper right corner of your eyesight is colored bright pink for whatever unknown reason. Why is that image not your real eyesight instead of your actual one?
Now imagine a few more pixels changing randomly, then imagine all the possible permutations of all colors for each pixel. Why aren't any of those your real eyesight? It seems there is no reason why they wouldn't be any of those other configurations because your body would be acting in the exact same way as it did before since it's entirely controlled by what unconscious matter is doing.
Do you see the absurdity now? It seems highly unlikely that our qualia should be just as they are. So shouldn't we be trying to find out why X = Y instead of Z in this case?
Okay, I've spent a long time thinking about this and I'm concluding that we're doomed to talk past each other forever because we're starting from different priors. But here's my best effort:
To suppose the existence of a "qualia pixel" without some underlying physical explanation is to presuppose the existence of some form of Cartesian dualism because you're assuming that qualia have an existence independent of the brain and can be manifested by something other than the physical interaction of matter and energy. To not grant that makes answering your question easier - I can give my brain spurious inputs by staring at a lamp too long and getting an afterimage. In this case, I'd argue what I'm "seeing": the room, the afterimage superimposed on it, as my "real vision" because that's the signal my retina is sending my brain. Damage any parts of those systems - the retina, the optic nerve, the visual centers, etc., and the qualia disappear. The conclusion is that qualia have no independent existence outside of the architecture of the brain.
Now let's tackle the argument that qualia aren't necessary for cognition and therefore aren't subject to evolution. This is true insofar as we consider them independent of the brain. The lobster is capable of receiving, internalizing, and then reacting to stimuli but it probably doesn't experience qualia as such, and from that we can conclude that cognition - at least at some levels - is capable of existing without qualia. However, to extend that and say that all cognition is possible without it or that all cognition is possible without producing qualia as a byproduct is overextending the argument. It kind of reminds me of a reverse riff on Behe's irreducible complexity argument. Behe argues that if you take some functional structure, say a bacterial flagellum, and remove any one part, it stops functioning. Thus, Behe concludes, the flagellum must have been designed in situ by some intelligent force. Hopefully the flaws in this argument are obvious: the flagellum could have arisen from parts that developed for other purposes and by happy coincidence ended up working for propulsion (another example here is feathers. The first feathered animals couldn't fly and we can conclude that feathers didn't evolve "for" flight; they ended up suiting the purpose later). Yes, we can argue that that is one hella big coincidence, but the thing about dice is if you toss them enough times they'll all come up sixes. Monkeys and typewriters. Etc.
The argument Kastrup makes is the inverse of this; let's call it the argument from reduceable complexity. He argues that because we can imagine a philosophical zombie, consciousness is unnecessary and therefore cannot have been produced by evolution. But evolution produces weird, "unnecessary" crap all the time. Take peacocks, for example. Males have those large showy tails that make it harder to move around and easier to get spotted by predators. So why did it evolve? Enter the "handicap hypothesis": a form of sexual selection where a feature that reduces survival is an honest signal of fitness because only the most vigorous males can manage to cope with it. Testosterone in humans might be an example; higher levels of testosterone suppress the immune system. The brain itself might be another given the huge energy demand that it imposes. At any rate, we can envision a species of bird that doesn't rely on a survival-reducing feature for sexual selection. Should we conclude from this premise that the peacock's tail cannot have evolved? I don't think so - evolution just seeks a local maximum from whatever was there before, and that can produce some pretty counterintuitive outcomes.
So to deal with Kastrup's central premise (i.e., consciousness/qualia could not have evolved), he would have to demonstrate the following:
Now, suppose he's correct and qualia play no role in behavior etc. and are not a byproduct of processes that are subject to selection, then how do we explain their existence? I'm still not a huge fan of Kastrup's last line that consciousness is "can only have been there from the beginning as an intrinsic, irreducible fact of nature." Seriously, how does this enrich our understanding and get us closer to understanding the nature of consciousness? Does it indicate that consciousness is somehow a law like gravity and is simply 'baked in' to the boundary conditions of the universe? How is that different from a materialist/determinist point of view wrapped up in a Deepak Chopra-ism? Does it posit the existence of a "consciousness field" that ordinary matter taps into once it's reached a certain level of complexity? Does it propose the existence of some intangible Mind that is capable of manipulating matter in the brain to produce behavior in a way that's completely consistent with our current understanding of chemistry and physics? Does it propose some realm of the hyperreal where causality works differently and all ordinary matter is just a lower-order reflection of hyperreal phenomena? How are we supposed to investigate any of these possibilities?
Karsten's argument is superficially more sophisticated than "flagellum therefore the Abrahamaic god" but it follows the same format: "Science cannot explain thing X, therefore it will not be able to explain thing X, therefore unfalsifiable claim Y." His conclusion doesn't follow from the premise because he doesn't have - and cannot provide - any positive evidence to support it.
Probably but I'll give it one last shot.
You're right we're starting from different priors, I'm saying reductive physicalist priors don't really make that much sense and should be reconsidered. You're also right that reductive physicalism is more or less internally consistent and your conclusions that you made within this framework are valid, and who know maybe against all odds it turns out to be true but I find that extremely unlikely. What I'm saying is the whole framework is almost certainly doomed to be a dead end when it comes to finding out the truth about consciousness.
You said you're fine with believing consciousness is a coincidence but I don't think you completely understand what kind of a coincidence we're really talking about here. It's not 1 in a million or 1 in a billion, it's 1 in damn near infinity. For every configuration of neurons in the brain you can imagine them resulting in nearly infinite variations of qualia, including no qualia at all (philosophical zombie) as I hope I've demonstrated with the qualia pixel thought experiment. If you assume the null hypothesis (which you probably should in a physicalist framework) there is no reason at all to expect one configuration over the other, so IMO it should be pretty baffling to the researcher that we just so ended with our particular set of qualia that just so seems to fit so well with what's going on with the body.
I don't think handwaving this remarkable coincidence away as just a byproduct of the universe being huge is a good counter argument either. Does this mean there are other planets/galaxies/universes where consciousness evolved in a more unfortunate way and there are billions of conscious beings screaming internally in horrible pain from all the seemingly random input they're getting while their bodies do their thing on their own without the beings willing it? Or are we to assume a yet grander coincidence where consciousness always just so coincidentally evolves as a spandrel "the right way" everywhere in the universe? That almost feels like an "intelligent design" type argument.
However you look at this coincidence the more you think about it the more absurdities you have to be okay with.
And yes I understand the universe doesn't all that often work in accordance with our first intuitions about it but if you're so adamant about keeping physicalism as the only One True framework you've made it unfalsifiable because you're always gonna be able to handwave all discrepancies as just strange coincidences we shouldn't really think about that hard. Saying "it is how it is" when your scientific framework doesn't have a coherent answer isn't the slam dunk argument you think it is. At that point it's not at all different from religious belief.
Just because physicalism as a tool got us pretty far in other sciences doesn't mean it's gonna get us to the finish line in every single scientific question we have. I don't see why I should consider physicalism to be the be all end all of ontologies when it clearly leads to some quite strange conclusions.
Why can't we keep it when doing physics and chemistry and choosing a more appropriate framework for other scientific disciplines? Actual empirical evidence isn't at all clear about an entirely physicalist account of consciousness being true, we have damn near no clue what really goes on in the brain except on a very high level so I don't see a reason to be so adamant about using it here. It's definitely something to consider but I don't see why alternative theories that assume a different ontology should be automatically discredited.
Maybe, maybe not. It's something to consider, and I'm not sure why we should be completely refraining from considering it just because your intuition tells you it's ridiculous. I'm not claiming I have particularly good or satisfying answers to the question of consciousness but neither does physicalism no matter how hard it pretends it does.
With the scientific method, same as we always do. Nothing in science necessitates an entirely physicalist ontology, we are very much free to pick another one if it fits better. We already have social sciences that don't deal with just matter and only matter like for example psychology. Why should neuroscience be a hardnosed physicalist science?
Take for example this hypothesis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reduction
What's exactly stopping you from testing it scientifically given you have good enough measuring equipment?
There's a psychological experiment where the researchers had participants watch a video of two teams playing basketball, one with white shirts and one with black shirts. Half of participants were asked to count passes only made by players in white shirts. The other half were just told to watch the video. Midway through the video a guy in a gorilla suit walks behind the players, waves to the camera, and then walks off. After watching the video, participants were asked whether they had seen anything unusual. Participants in the first group said no; participants in the second mentioned the gorilla.
Now the question: Did participants in the first group see the gorilla or not? On the one hand, they were presented with the exact same video as the second group. Gorilla photons entered their eyes and were presumably detected by their retinas, and the corresponding signals were sent up the optic nerve. On the other hand, the higher-order processing necessary for the brain to identify that particular stimulus as a gorilla and file it into memory to be retrieved later were not activated because they were otherwise engaged with counting passes and the workload that machinery can take on is finite. The first group may have seen the gorilla, but they didn't experience the gorilla on a qualitative level.
A materialist interpretation would include that, while they are themselves intangible, qualia can only arise if presented to the consciousness by lower order machinations of the brain that are tightly linked to physical phenomena, and those machinations are very much subject to natural selection. Presumably whatever mechanisms that cause us to experience the gorilla are also involved in things important to survival, like assessing whether the gorilla presents a threat and deciding to fire up the fight-or-flight response. If the gorilla were deadly, it's possible the ball-watching group would have experienced a delayed reaction and been more likely to end up gorilla chow. While we can assume that a lobster doesn't act in the same way - its threat determining and fight-or-flight machinery activate in the absence of qualitatively experiencing the gorilla, in humans, as far as we can tell, those processes are sine qua non for the qualitative experience to occur. Thus, I don't think the "pink pixel" experiment is particularly illuminating, because it presumes that because qualia may not play a role in natural selection, all qualitative experiences should be equally likely. Even our limited understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness shows that that isn't true. My argument isn't that our particular experience of consciousness just dropped out of the sky the way it was, I said it worked out the way it did predicated on lower-order physical phenomena. The "pink pixel" thought experiment seems like it purports to ask what the odds are of producing a completely ordered deck of cards by shuffling; but, in reality, it suggests we should be asking why shuffling a deck of cards doesn't produce non-existent combinations like the ace of queens or a 6 of spade-clubs.
The problems with assuming that evolution could not have produced consciousness because, if that were the case, we could just as easily have been metaphysical screaming pain ghosts trapped in bodies otherwise programmed to go about their lives and argue with each other on the internet is that (a) it's not a parsimonious outcome (the "screaming pain ghost" hypothesis doesn't coexist harmoniously with our accumulated understanding of consciousness), (b) it leads to epistemological nihilism. There's no way we can't say we aren't screaming pain ghosts right now because we'd have no way of expressing that fact. The idea that qualia can be empirically determined based on personal testimony, and arise from physical stimuli (with the requisite exceptions), is a prior in even the so-called "soft sciences" like psychology. Kastrup (and presumably by extension you) concludes that these are problems inherent in evolution, but they aren't; they're problems associated with assuming qualia aren't subject to any physical restrictions, which isn't something that any scientist that deals with the brain endorses, as far as I can tell. Your presentation of physicalism/materialsm is defined so narrowly that I don't think anyone actually subscribes to it.
My problem with Kastrup's article, which I haven't yet been able to get you to engage with directly, is that Kastrup doesn't demonstrate an alternative method of inquiry. His whole article is just dedicated to tearing down the current methods - it doesn't propose anything to fill the hole. We just grandly conclude that consciousness is an ineffable, irreducible, and inaccessible component of reality without any meaningful implications. If the nature of reality is such that our only avenue of accumulating knowledge about something is by examining its physical footprint and that there are whole swathes that remain fundamentally inaccessible and unknowable, that kinda sucks from a philosophical perspective but doesn't really provide any alternatives to what we're already doing and the epistemologies we're already using. But Karstrup asserts that his way will produce a better understanding. What's wrong with demanding him to pony up some evidence this is the case? It's also not intuitively ridiculous, it's epistemologically ridiculous. If something is, by its nature, intangible, incorporeal, incapable of interacting with physical reality and any methods of inquiry we might use, real or imagined, why would we bother going looking for it even if it's there? It might as well not exist. We can come up with equally impossible models all day with no way of choosing from among them. I say Plato is right and there is some conceptual realm of forms that only our minds can access. Now what?
Kastrup argues that consciousness cannot have evolved. Cannot involves a different level of certainty and a higher burden of evidence than "didn't." He's not arguing that consciousness could have arisen by evolution but he has evidence that there's an alternative origin, he's arguing that it's impossible for it to have arisen by evolution at all. Any semi-plausible explanation for consciousness that still adheres to what we know about evolution should be sufficient to dispense with the "cannot" claim, and I feel like I keep providing those. As for the "did not" claim, Kastrup doesn't provide any positive evidence or even propose an alternative mechanism or means by which we can search for an alternative mechanism. Unless he's willing to provide one of those things, I don't see why he's worth listening to.
Also, quantum physics is definitely not my bag, but I don't see how OOR departs from existing models of what we know about the universe and how it operates. It appears to be more targeted at addressing the problem of determinism, which isn't something that seems particularly relevant here.
Honestly I think you're yet again sidestepping the core of my (and Kastrup's) argument and instead choose to meander around with explaining how physicalism works. I understand how it works and what conclusions it makes, I'm trying to point out other also valid conclusions within physicalism that should be raising an eyebrow and making you question if physicalism really makes that much sense.
Also Kastrup doesn't just assume a priori that consciousness cannot have evolved, the point of that article is to show that it almost certainly didn't by using just the physicalist framework. It's a conclusion, not an assumption. He maybe should have been a bit more specific and said "our particular experience of consciousness co-evolved with our bodies" rather than the mainstream line "our bodies evolved consciousness in of themselves", he himself doesn't at all believe that the exact consciousness as we experience it today was around forever like ghosts or souls or whatever.
I've explained multiple times that, while yes it is conceivable that under physicalism consciousness evolves exactly like it did in you or me it is extremely unlikely if you don't give the subjective qualities of consciousness in of themselves any causal efficacy (which physicalism doesn't, it considers them either equivalent to or a product of configurations of matter). You keep outright ignoring this quite specific argument and focus on more general philosophical points. You are yet to address that rather extreme unlikelihood other than handwaving it away as "it just is" which is IMO completely unscientific and is close to religious belief itself.
Kastrup also doesn't deny that the content of our qualia is heavily correlated with the material world, he's just claiming that it's not wholly caused by the material world on an ontological level.
I'm sorry he wasn't able to present to you an entire alternative scientific framework in a 15 minute article, I'll write him a stern email to do better next time. He's written multiple books, essays and did a bunch of lectures, here's a series of lectures about what exactly he's proposing and he goes way more in depth why he's proposing what he's proposing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDbCTxm6_Ps&list=PL64CzGA1kTzi085dogdD_BJkxeFaTZRoq
It does because it touches on the problem of what's the valid interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is definitely not a solved problem in mainstream science and can most definitely involve other ontologies other than physicalism depending on what interpretation you choose.