Neil is one of our experts. In 2012, he gave us an excellent interview on complexity theory, and we've stayed in touch ever since. We do have some serious differences, however, in how we view consciousness. I am a strict materialist and he is an Idealist. This conversation began after I had revised the video I had made from Neil's interview.
https://vimeo.com/44013533
I informed Neil about the changes, and this conversation happened.
omg! I don’t agree with everything quite this way anymore. Lol. Less emphasis on sentience than back then. More emphasis on Godel’s Incompleteness Theorems. Lol. But thank you! Mostly I still love this. What made you go back to it?
Oh: and I think I’m now an idealist not a panpsychist.
I am curious about your current stance, if you care to elaborate. What do you mean by Idealist vs. Panpsychist?
At that time I was still positing that space-time was the foundational stuff of the universe. Working with Menas Kafatos we both now agree that non-dual Fundamental Awareness emanates Space-time. Panpsychism: the universe is suffused by consciousness in some fashion. Idealism: the universe arises from consciousness. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27489576/
😲
did i shock you!??!? lol
Shock me? Yes. A little! I have so much respect for you, Neil. The interview you gave me was so powerful, so instrumental in helping me shape my own thoughts about complexity! I even have deep dreams of creating a complexity theory feature-length documentary, about the Darwinian concept of 'Fit', to help explain self-developing systems, the evolution of the universe, and autobiogenesis.
Your testimony has always been so powerful to me, and yet, with all due respect, I draw opposite conclusions from it! I see complexity theory as leading in the opposite direction of panpsychism, and even more, the opposite of idealism. For example, if a paramecium figures out its behavior based upon calcium channels, then panpsychism should only create more complex beings, which also base their decisions on calcium channels. But, instead, we base our decisions upon things like probability and risk and social approbation. None of these things are fundamental perceptions. They are all informational structures, purely context-based. That's the opposite of panpsychism. What we perceive has ZERO to do with what small matter interacts with. 100% divorce. Our perceptions are clearly based upon evolutionary needs. Therefore, perception is not fundamental. It is contextual. It is virtual. It is informational. These truths seem self-evident and obvious to me, and panpsychism doesn't pretend to explain any of them. Do you think Idealism explains anything? Or predicts anything? Or maps onto reality in any way? Because I haven't seen anything that is convincing in that direction. Sorry, that's a little harsh, but yes, that's why I was shocked.
Complexity theory, to my understanding, says we should expect to see the ILLUSION of conscious choice in all kinds of systems. But, if we look deeper, there is no such thing as consciousness. There are only calcium channels.
to be honest, Matt, I think you aren’t confronting the issues raised by quantum physics and by Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. If you don’t find ways to address the Copenhagen interpretation and what Godel did for platonic mathematical idealism and the (to me, and to Whitehead) inescapable explanatory limits of formal logic and empirical science, then you are necessarily, stuck with an emergentist point of view. I think you are left with a big explanatory gap. (Currently chapter 9 of the book I’m writing. Lol).
And yes; there is explanatory power to idealism. Your position erases data, a priori, from methods of self inquiry - what the Vienna Circle dismissed as merely “metaphysics”. You have no explanations of different conscious states other than the ordinary. Godels demolirion of the Vienna Circle’s materialist position leaves the door wide open to consider such experiences as data. Emergentist positions can’t explain the vast body of experiential knowledge and don’t bother to try because they are simply dismissed. That’s chapter 8. Lol
Chapter10 - only an idealist position accounts for QM, implications of godels incompleteness, and the wealth of experiential data, verified through second person investigation (as per Varela) regarding substrata of the mind that are rarely experienced without, for example, long, deep meditative practices or good careful systematic use of entheogens, etc.
I hear that you have a well-constructed rationale for your beliefs. But to me, neuropathologies demonstrate clearly that mind is an emergent phenomenon. As brain parts get destroyed, the functions they perform also vanish. That's simple emergence. I don't see how idealism deals with that.
that’s association not causation. Like all the “neurological associations”. Thinking they represent changes of causation is “belief”. It could be that specific parts of brain are required to transduce global consciousness into specific qualia. The lost parts weren’t generating qualia, they were transducing them from something else, Fundamental Awareness.
Have you considered Godel? Do you reject the data available from meditative states? If no to the first or yes to the second, then you are not testing your hypothesis fully.
Do you have a reason to reject alternative causative changes for neurological associations? Or have proof of causation?
Same problem. These are areas where your working hypothesis is incomplete.
It’s not that emergence doesn’t have a powerful essential role to play (I clearly think it does), but emergence alone is insufficient, I think.
I don't think incompleteness is a fault of materialism; it's just the necessary state. We will never know the COMPLETE truth. But the entire evolution of science has been away from us being something special, and toward being just ordinary matter. It's been about demystifying man's place in the universe. Idealism seems to just insist that we hold on to the mystery, by declaring that magic is at the fundamental level. But there's no need for magic. Complexity theory shows us that what we call 'decision-making' is really ion channels, right? It's just matter, doing matter stuff. No magic, at any level in the system.
I’m not invoking magic. I’m explaining data that you dismiss as magic. Why do you reject that kind of data? For a reason other than materialist bias? If you exclude it without any reason other than it doesn’t fit with your instincts then your theory, as I said, is limited, incomplete (not in Godelian terms of course)
As for Godel, he was essentially proving mathematical Platonism, a form of idealism. So you cant just wave him away. Math doesn’t exist to count electrons or sheaves of wheat. We didn’t invent it. Math exists to be discovered in a realm beyond space/time/matter/energy. That’s where Godel points and minds greater than ours have found no way to squirm away from that.
And you haven’t explained the hard problem yet, have you?
Meanwhile please take note that I don’t disagree with many of the mechanisms you describe and posit: there’s plenty of room for How Does All This Happen, even if I’m an idealist. I still believe in chemistry. In complexity. In biology, in neuroscience even! But I think they are more descriptive than determinative for explaining qualia.
How do I explain qualia? If the fundamental reality is pure awareness, then there is nothing but qualia. Space time matter energy are all qualia. Qualia don’t require explanation. That’s all anything is.
Actually, I do think I have an answer to the hard problem, depending upon how you define the HP. If the HP is 'why is there experience?', the answer is that experience is a movie the brain creates for the future. It is a memory. It creates the experience movie so that the future brain can re-experience the event, and learn from it, thereby. My favorite example is a rat, which finds a novel berry. The rat doesn't know whether the berry is poisonous or safe, so it goes into exploratory phase, sniffing and taking small bites. During this phase, the rat's hippocampus is revved up, because it's trying to create a memory movie of the taste, smell, etc. of the berry, just in case it needs to remember it. For the sake of our example, let's say that the berry ends up being toxic to the rat, and a few hours later, the rat feels very nauseous. The neocortex is very bad at linking cause and effect over long time spans, but episodic memory can handle that fine. The rat uses its hippocampus to link the qualia of the berry's taste and smell, to the qualia of feeling ill. Months later, the rat encounters a similar berry. Again, the rat goes through exploratory phase, but now the qualia of the berry elicit the memory of the previous encounter, which elicits the memory of the nausea. The rat, because of this qualia-matching, is able to avoid making the same mistake twice. Qualia are just the sensory components of a memory, for the sake of learning from that memory later. Qualia are especially important mnemonics for pre-language species, like rats, whereas humans can remember a lot purely through language and concepts.
so essentially the “movie” is replaying the experience? That explains the informational aspects, but not the experience of having the experience, which is what Chalmers labeled the Hard Problem. And does that mean that newborns have no experiences of qualia? And adults have none when an experience is novel? And if they have an experience of “novelty” at least, are we hardwired for a “movie” of novelty?
I think relying on neural correlates doesn’t get you the whole way. “It depends on what you call the Hard Problem”. I define it as Chalmers did: how to explain conscious experience, not what the mechanism for information processing might be for sense experiences.
Both are needed snd you know I think your model is smart as that kind of mechanism. But it doesn’t get at the “real” HP as Chalmers stated it. It doesn’t explain the actual “awareness” of the sensations being experienced. In your model, how do you generate the actual awareness of the movie being replayed?
I guess comes to this: what is the screen upon which your movie plays?
that’s where I think there’s a problem for you. The movie doesn’t explain the awareness of a movie. Only the data that make the movie. I think you haven’t accounted for the screen on which the movie plays. That’s why it’s a “hard” problem. That’s always the issue that materialist theories can’t get past.
Again: doesn’t mean your theory isn’t an important mechanism for information processing. The movie projector is half the story and you have an exceptional model for how the projector is built (and the movie camera in the first place). But you have no screen. You have mechanisms for the contents of awareness, but not for the awareness itself.
The experience = the movie. There is no 'experiencer', per se. The movie contains a fictional character, called "I", and within that movie, the I seems to have experience, but it is just a character in the movie. So, I do not become aware of the world, rather this brain creates a movie of me becoming aware.
Subjectivity exists to give memories context. The perceived but fictional 'I' frames the memory's feelings, behaviors, etc. There is a reason why there is a time lag before 'awareness', because that is how long it takes for the information to be put together in the hippocampus. Libet's experiments were showing how long it took the premotor signal to enter into the memory, giving the subjective fringe sense that 'I' chose to move.
Behind the scenes, what's really happening is a dialogue between three networks. The Immediate Action Network (IAN) is mostly the neocortex, all inputs and outputs (i.e. senses and motor/speech), and the decision-making areas (like premotor) that connect the two.
This network was the first of the three to evolve, and can handle most tasks in life. But it has a hard time navigating or learning from single-exposure events, so a second network evolved to help the IAN learn better. That network is the hippocampal one, and made movies of events that happened, for the sake of later learning.
And those two networks needed a third network, the Core or Default Mode Network, to evolve alongside the hippocampal one. The IAN would create codes, based upon its interaction with the outside world. Those codes were sent to the hippocampus, which stitches them together into a master code, the new episodic memory.
That master code is sent back to the neocortex, and it is that reciprocal activation of the neocortex by the hippocampal code that = subjective experience now, and later, = a recalled memory.
So, who experiences it? The Core Network does. The experience itself is the activation of the IAN, but the 'observer' of the experience is the Core Network. The IAN evolved to make sense of the outside world, but didn't evolve to make sense of memories. So the Core Network evolved to do that. It drives the recall process, and tries to learn lessons from the memory.
The Core Network further evolved, not just to make sense of the past, but also the future. The Core Network is in charge of planning for the future.
It uses memory to give the organism psychological continuity, connecting present events to past memories.
And even more important to the HP, the Core Network is constantly receiving information both from the hippocampus and the neocortex about the brand new memory, the subjective experience.
The Core Network uses the information about the new memory to help extrapolate beyond the scene. For example, it's in charge of Theory of Mind, trying to figure out what other people are thinking.
So, there is no 'screen' per se, but the neocortex is as close as we come to a screen. It is the instrument upon which subjective experience plays out. And the observer of that screen is the Core Network, which is our inner watcher.