All Things Are Full of Gods, page 34
HEPHAISTOS: Now, now, caricature isn’t an honorable dialectical method.
PSYCHE: All I mean is, if you’re willing to concede that matter is already in some sense mind, what then is your vaunted “naturalism” other than an arbitrary prejudice—an obstinate resolve to believe that the primordial ground of mind is not a mind, but only some mysteriously “physical” property? Why is this a more plausible position than a straightforward idealism, or than an Aristotelian picture of reality as a mindlike structure of inherently rational relations? What remains in this picture of matter, in the case of the first version of panpsychism you mentioned, that makes matter the most plausible candidate for the most basic of cosmic principles?
More to the point, as I think I’ve said, it doesn’t make any sense to speak of consciousness as a “property.” It isn’t one of an object’s various specifiable or measurable aspects, such as mass, spin, extension, liquidity, charge, and so forth; it’s not merely a fixed quality, mode, accident, disposition, or potency, which is perhaps expressed in differing degrees—as mass is, for instance, according to different magnitudes of gravity—but which otherwise is simply another way of describing that substance or event. A property is an invariant fact about something—what its potentials are, principally. Consciousness is at least conceptually severable from the substance with which it’s associated. Not so, say, mass. A croissant devoid of mass is simply a nonexistent croissant. A brain devoid of thought, by contrast, is easily conceivable—and often encountered. This is because consciousness is always a specific act. When I kiss my husband, that fact isn’t a physical attribute inhering in me, but is instead a very particular moment of agency, with a beginning and an end, possessing clear phenomenological contours. And we’ve already discussed what the contours of mental agency are: an indivisible apperceptive unity and intentionality, a logically prior and transcendental simplicity that organizes the many into one, a subjective vantage formally constitutive of the totality it perceives, particular movements of intentionality toward particular objects under specific aspects within the embrace of a transcendental movement of intentionality toward absolute values, subjective awareness in the form of self-awareness, abstraction and conceptuality, and so forth and so on.
Consciousness never exists in the abstract, much less as some kind of discrete physical property—any more than running across a garden or writing the libretto of Don Giovanni is a physical property. And, as it’s an act, it’s also always something accomplished by an agent, with a real private interiority. It’s not merely a pathological or affective disposition or potency in material things that may or may not be actualized. Even if there were such a potency, it still wouldn’t explain mental agency in all its indivisible dimensions; we’d simply have yet another story of “strong emergence” before us, no less fabulous and incredible than any other. Even if something inchoately disposed to consciousness could exist in the absence of the whole structure of mental agency, the arising of that structure from that mere affective potential would still be miraculous. I mean, none of us thinks matter is inherently contrary to thought; none of is a Cartesian, as we’ve already established ad taedium; so presumably we all assume that the potentiality for thought isn’t something extrinsic to the physical. Fine. But, for panpsychism to serve as a truly physicalist rather than classically idealist theory, it would have to posit the presence of real agency all the way down. Is every proton a kind of “micro-psyche” then, with some natural predisposition toward a horizon of transcendental values, and an intentional orientation toward other protons under specific hermeneutical aspects, and a unity of apprehension that composes the plurality of cognition into a unified and unique subjective vantage? I shouldn’t think so. But, if it were, this fact still answers none of our questions. We’re merely deferring the question of mind to the subatomic level without fundamentally qualifying it, in the vain hope that it may grow so very small that it will vanish away altogether. We’re left with the same paradox: one and the same atom, say, possesses two seemingly radically disparate aspects, each of which is the logical inversion of the other: to abuse those terms again, a “nomological” and a “pathological” dimension. One side of the thing (that bound by physical laws) is objective, deterministic, mechanical, and empirical, while the other (that possessed of qualitative awareness) is subjective, intentional, teleological, and transcendental. But the interaction between the two sides is no less mysterious for being atomized; the terms of unity remain as mysterious as they are at the macroscopic level. That’s a paradox I can barely tolerate when applied to myself—but to my breakfast?
HEPHAISTOS: Again, beware of caricature. Few naturalist panpsychists, if any, believe every brute amalgamation of matter to be conscious. There has to be some kind of systematic integration of the parts that’s capable of creating a distinct information-state.
PSYCHE: But there’d also have to be some kind of combination of discrete subjectivities as well, wouldn’t there? As I say, it’s meaningless to speak of consciousness as anything other than mental agency, in all its glorious intentionality and subjectivity and so forth, so we can’t simply be talking about the integration of diverse material things into enclosed systems. If a thermometer is in some sense conscious, however dimly, it must also have some unified vantage from which to experience information. Wouldn’t that require that higher integrations of information must somehow involve some strange, magical merging of countless private vantages into a single private vantage? Integration? Well, a brick wall is an integrated composite of bricks; but composition isn’t combination, and combination (as far as we know) doesn’t produce indivisible simplicity and unity. Isn’t this the same thing as the idea of “mind-dust” that William James once considered, and doesn’t it suffer from the same deficiencies? James himself used the wonderfully apt metaphor of a hundred distinct feelings arranged together like a deck of cards: no matter how often the cards are shuffled and rearranged, they never admit of any violation of their several privacies. How could all those incommiscible interiorities be fused into some organism’s interior self? How can all those micro-psyches become a single soul?8 Diverse agencies can, of course, produce a unified effect—as when, say, forty voices are gorgeously blended and interwoven in the polyphonic totality of Tallis’s Spem in alium—but the agencies producing that unity remain obstinately plural and discrete. And there’s really no way around this. If my consciousness is the product of the accumulation of something really like consciousness in each particle of matter, then there are only two possibilities for how this works, both of which are incoherent. Either my consciousness is the fusion of all those lower “minds” or my consciousness is a kind of supervenient effect produced in addition to all those combined “minds.” In the former case, the privacy and unified integrity that makes consciousness what it is would be entirely violated and “mind” would vanish from the physical ingredients upon which my mental agency supposedly relies. In the latter, my mind would be an instance of strong emergence, and so something like magic.9 No, as ever, mental unity and simplicity can’t arise from physical plurality and divisibility; that unity must be the prior reality—the formal cause, the radical source—that imposes a single perspective upon the material aggregate. And this “combination problem,” as I believe it’s known, seems to me an absolutely insuperable barrier to any physicalist version of panpsychism.
HEPHAISTOS: Perhaps. But the very term “integration” is ambiguous.
IV
Integration and Neutral Monism
HEPHAISTOS: Look, I suppose you’ve adequately made your case that a purely mechanical integration of the physical constituents of the brain wouldn’t yet constitute mental unity, and also wouldn’t seem to account for the mind’s natural states and operations. But IIT isn’t a theory about mechanistic matter, and the combination of the inner pathos within one material thing with the pathos within another needn’t work according to the logic of mechanism. After all, the supervenient level of mind in this theory is arguably something that occurs at the level of the information-state of a system, not at the level of its material composition. That integration of inner states of consciousness could operate by degrees not of complexity but rather of intensity, in the way that an increase in the sheer number of photons in a closed room increases the illumination of the room.
PSYCHE: Oh, that’s a dreadful analogy. The intensity of the light in the room is still a third-person, physical, quantitative effect—and one that’s composite rather than combinatorial. Photons don’t blend into larger photons. By the same token, an increase in the number of persons in a room may quantitatively increase the total amount of consciousness present, but it still doesn’t combine their minds into a single yet more intense consciousness. Don’t mistake aggregation for real integration. And, anyway, we aren’t talking about photons; we’re talking about instances of mental agency, each of which depends upon a subjective simplicity and unity more radical than the mere physical indivisibility of a photon, and one that’s also indivisible from all the other features of mentality. This is why the claim that the most complex instance of integration in any given system subsumes lower levels of consciousness into itself is essentially absurd; it’s a magical notion. None of this gets us past the division between the nomological and the pathological, or between quantity and quality, nor is it any more plausible than tales of brute emergence. Not that this matters very much. The most basic flaw in Integrated Information Theory, understood as a theory of mind, isn’t its failure to overcome the combination problem (though it certainly does fail), but chiefly its dependence on an elementary verbal confusion.
HEPHAISTOS: [With a placid scowl:] How so?
PSYCHE: It seems fairly obvious. The very notion that there’s some sort of necessary concomitance between “information-states” and consciousness is just a category error occasioned by an enticing homonymy. It’s a venerable rule of predication, you know, that certain words—or certain homonymous terms—admit of univocal, equivocal, and analogical acceptations. And, if one fails to make these distinctions properly, one’s liable to arrive at fairly specious conclusions. I know the word “information” is in great currency these days—in physics, the life-sciences, philosophy, computational theory, and so on—and many of its uses are remarkably nebulous. But at least two senses of the word can easily be isolated: sometimes “information” means simply “data,” objective facts given “out there” concerning things, processes, events, and so forth; at other times, it means the cognitive contents of subjective knowledge “in here” about those things, processes, events, and so on. If there’s any analogy between these two uses, it’s of only the most tenuous kind. Really, they’re probably equivocal. In nature, structure, and logic, objective “information” and subjective “information” are radically distinct, but IIT depends upon their tacit conflation in one largely undefined concept. This isn’t a meaningful theory; it’s just a bizarre amplification upon a trivial lexical happenstance.
It’s also not a project for scientific research. Really, the equivocity here at the level of what the sciences can investigate is absolute, and goes well beyond the difference between objective and subjective knowledge. In physics and the sciences generally, integrated “information” doesn’t as a rule refer just to data; it means also any negentropic order able to maintain the past and constrain the future, which is to say, structural systems capable of persisting by temporarily resisting entropy and functioning with some kind of circumscribed internal coherency in controlling the exchange of internal order for external disorder. In matters cognitive, however, “information” is intentional meaning, aspectual perception, semeiotic content, private experience, and so forth. Now, admittedly, both kinds of information can be attributed to one and the same phenomenon, but never—as the schoolmen used to say—in unica voce. A bound volume of Paradise Lost can be described as a physical integration of materials and molecules, with a certain structure that can be measured in terms of such properties as mass or charge; in that sense, its “information” as a physically integrated system is objectively constant and uncomplicated. The letters on the page can even be quantified as a kind of physical “syntax”—at least, in the problematic information-theory sense of that word. Then, however, there’s the very different subjective knowledge not just of those facts, but of the purely intentional and semeiotic “information” that constitutes the actual book as a book and poem as a poem in a hermeneutical space. There’s absolutely no point of connection, real or possible, where these two meanings of “information”—the negentropic and the epistemic—achieve identity with one another; and neither of them explains subjective knowledge as such. When David Chalmers or the champions of Integrated Information Theory suggest that every information-state might be accompanied by some kind of consciousness, they’re really saying nothing except that negentropic arrangements of matter are also instances of mental agency. That’s simply not a rational intuition, or even an assertion with any intelligible content; it seems to be to them only because they’ve confused the objective and subjective senses of the word “information,” collapsed an equivocity into a univocity, then simply failed to see the disjunction that their theory has obscured. Yet it’s precisely that intractable difference in meaning that, in a sense, is the philosophical problem of mind, and it can’t be conjured away by a supposed “science” based on a verbal confusion. No information theory can be also a theory of consciousness. To think you can get from the one to the other is, yet again . . .
HEPHAISTOS: Let me guess: the pleonastic fallacy. It’s so good to meet old friends again.
PSYCHE: There is, of course, a radically different kind of integration, one that doesn’t simply give rise to conscious mind, but that’s actually identical with it.
HEPHAISTOS: Let me guess: life.
PSYCHE: Even so.
HEPHAISTOS: See? You’ve been singing this song for so long that I’ve learned all the lyrics. [Breathing deeply and momentarily gazing up into the now darkening sky:] Look, I can see how the specter of an unresolved dualism in any physicalist theory of mind—emergence, supervenience, even the kind of panpsychism that talks about consciousness as a property or that posits an integration of discrete quanta of consciousness—makes your preference for the language of formal causality reasonably defensible. I accept all that.
HERMES: Then you’ve come a long way.
HEPHAISTOS: Exactly what “form” is, of course, is as unclear as what “information” is. Even so, I also mentioned neutral monism. Why can’t we say that what we identify as the material and the mental are only apparently different orders of being, and that the properties we ascribe to them are in fact, respectively, the exterior and interior aspects of a single reality?
PSYCHE: It’s an attractive alternative in some ways, but one that seems to me still to be hampered by an unreflectively materialist prejudice.
HEPHAISTOS: In what sense?
PSYCHE: Just that it’s still an attempt to resolve the difference between the mental and the material by way of a metaphysics of “stuff”—of some kind of element or basic, extended cosmic constituent—which is a strategy already incompatible with any plausible account of mental states. In a sense, every attempt at a unified philosophy of mind involves some kind of monism. I mean to say, unless one really embraces substance dualism, one’s likely to be either an idealist or a materialist, and yet what does either metaphysics really mean in regard to our normal understandings of either matter or mind? The idealist must believe in a concept of mind and of mental experience vastly unlike our usual concepts of such realities, one that probably erases our commonsense distinctions between the physical and the mental, and even our sense of what qualifies as “real.” The materialist, by the same token, implicitly advocates an understanding of matter that’s anything but genuinely “materialist” in the modern sense, however he or she might resist that conclusion, inasmuch as no truly mechanistic materialism can explain the generation of mental phenomena out of mindless extension and energy. But let’s set all of that to one side. The truth is that I’ve come to think that neutral monism is more an evasion than a serious proposal, and probably just another unresolved dualism concealed. It’s also a strategy for rescuing something like materialism—that is, again, a metaphysics of “stuff”—from the seemingly inescapable immateriality of mental phenomena. It’s still a theory about the “properties” of some extended substrate of reality. But it doesn’t work. The unity of mental agency, for instance, is just as repugnant to fusion in some hazy intermediary substance poised meaninglessly between matter and mind as it is to straightforward materialist reduction. Mind can have no basis that isn’t simply mind itself, and trying to get around that fact by a retreat to some undefined and intrinsically undefinable quasi-material something gets us nowhere. Here again, a restatement of the problem of mind masquerades as its solution. We may want to say that outward, measurable physical properties just are mental properties in their essential, inward nature—that, say, this much mass at this velocity just is this kind of experience—and yet we can’t describe either in terms proper to the other, so we still have to ask how their unity is grounded, and in what, and whether that ground is simple or complex, subjective or objective . . . I mean, which side of the seeming antithesis is better able to accommodate the other? Or, failing that, what could possibly accommodate both?
