Consciousness doesn’t defy the mundane once you understand what consciousness really is, at the foundational level. Sure, consciousness MIGHT be more than that – mystical, spiritual, supernatural, all those things. But we don’t really have any way of knowing that for sure other than by assuming it is probably the case in some way or another due to the extreme mass of anecdotal evidence over time. But that’s currently beside the point.
At the foundational level consciousness is nothing more than a system of reactive-action based in, you guessed it, the nervous system. Why the nervous system? Why is the brain the seeming center of consciousness, even though no one can point to one specific spot and go “ah there is the mind!”? Because nerves carry the impulses that cause reactive action via stimulus and response.
Imagine: you create a robot with senses able to detect aspects of its environment via things like soundwaves, EM waves, pressure changes against its body. Now you take all of that ‘sense’ information and feed it via nerves into a single central location as input data. Now you have another layer atop this which mirrors or copies in real-time the input data coming in over X number of seconds (before new input data enters and erases what was previously just there). Now this robot is mapping its environment and storing the information in terms of memories, memories that are used as a background against which to juxtapose current incoming sense stimuli. Add enough long-term neuronal storage to the second layer, as well as a third and fourth layer above that doing more copying-looping between layers. Soon you have a multi-tiered system of information as neuronal data based in sensory bits within the nerves themselves, all flowing and copying in multiple directions up and down.
What use is all that? Just make a million similar copies of that robot, give them the ability to reproduce themselves with degrees of gene randomization, throw them into the world and let natural selection do its thing. Those robots that better succeed at surviving given their abilities to accurately map the world around them will push subsequent generations to get even better at the whole environmental mapping thing over time.
So where is the ‘consciousness’ in all that? Simple: inside the neuronal system where all the data is pouring in constantly and being copied/relayed and stored-recalled across multiple tiers in real-time, a “perspective” forms. Why? Either because having a perspective is the more efficient way to organize all the data and react to it in the most survivably-advantagous ways, or just because this is a necessary outcome of this sort of structural arrangement of data. Consciousness is this “perspective”, the fact that so much data has amassed in one place and is constantly changing so much that a new, super-level organizational structure is imposed upon all that chaos in order to rationalize it in such a way as to allow data to be UNDERSTOOD relative to factors affecting survivability over time. Reacting on rote instinct is great for simple life, but as life gets more complex it needs higher levels of reactive-action that take note of facts and abstract factors, and as a way of value-prioritizing shifts in the data in novel ways not already encoded instinctually (within the neurological physical systems themselves) as a consequence of past evolution.
What we call consciousness is just the perspective that this whole data-mass takes as a consequence of this entire setup producing two extreme points: the inner data-mass itself as frenzied activity and change, and the more relatively stable unchanging world around itself to which the data is attributed via correspondence assumptions having arisen in order to accurately map physical space and time outside the organism itself (as a required ability to avoid falling into a fatal solipsism). Later this unchangingness of the external is mirrored in the unchangingness of memory. As the data-system grows and diversifies with new generations and new experiences the inner frenzied change increases, against which the background of the world beyond and all that remains stable within the neurological boundaries begins to separate more and more. Change-----stasis. This dynamic grows until what we call perspective is produced. The perspective is simply the relative differential between those more organized-summed aspects of the neurological data-system which are in continuous change and those which are relatively unchanging.
What is unchanging begins to contextualize and concretize, act as background, for that which is changing. Since change is only the measurement of other changes taking place, something relatively unchanging is needed to effect that measurement. Perspective or the “I” of neurology is a reified unchangingness-as-such against which immediate and longer-term changes via data-streaming reactivity-actions occur and are measured. So what is the nature of this perspective, this ‘consciousness’? Whatever its contents are at any given moment, in whatever varying degrees these contents act centrally or peripherally upon the sum total reactivity-action in the causal deterministic sense, that is the essence of that particular consciousness and what for it would be experienced as the contents of its consciousness, or those things which for that consciousness have become objects of consciousness, things that are there present to the system in undeniable ways.
Consciousness is the sum of its more salient contents in any given moment of time. That is “what we are conscious of”. And what we are conscious of, again at any given moment, is precisely the co-extensive definition of what consciousness IS in that moment. Change what you are conscious of and you are changing the nature of that consciousness. But as long as enough contents remain unchanged relative to those which are changing, the overall perspective can remain one of relative stasis-as-background against which changes are contextualized (measured and given relative meaning within the overall system).
Maybe all of that sounds complicated or not very mundane, but it is actually very simple and mundane. Computer scientists could easily create artificial life if they just understood how simple this entire setup is. But again, maybe there is more to consciousness beyond this basic mechanical level. I assume there is, but if we want to be rational and philosophical about this then we can see how easy it is to understand what consciousness is and why it has arisen naturally among living things.
Materialism looks like a claim about substance: that THE substand is matter - and that we know what this is and isn’t, given that it’s been a monism (materialism). And for many materialists it is one. Just as other monisms make claims about substance - if, also, with their own potential miscommunications: idealism, neutral monism, physicalism…
From Stanford’s Encyc of Philosophy:
As the name suggests, materialists historically held that everything was matter — where matter was conceived as “an inert, senseless substance, in which extension, figure, and motion do actually subsist” Physicalism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
And many current people who identify as materialists have this conception of it.
I don’t think I said that they say consciousness is matter and sure, many would say something along the lines of what you said they think.
Materialists who accept the substance-attribute ontology certainly do claim that all substances are material/physical ones.
Contemporary materialism is the same as physicalism. It’s a physicalist “matter-energy-space-time-ism”. Actually, there are three versions (as mentioned in Charlie Broad’s classification):
If composition entails identity—if a whole is identical to the sum of its parts—, then an alternative name for 2 is compositional materialism; and if emergence means causation (production), then an alternative name for 3 is causal materialism. According to the latter, all mental entities are higher-level entities which are caused by and dependent (supervenient) on, yet nonreducible to lower-level physical (neural) entities.
There is nothing more to reality than the concrete matter-energy-space-time system (MEST).
This stance faces significant philosophical debate regarding consciousness and qualia (subjective experiences). Critics argue that materialism cannot fully account for the qualitative aspects of conscious experience (the “hard problem of consciousness”). There are also arguments about abstract entities like numbers or moral values, which some believe cannot be reduced to physical terms but nonetheless seem to have a form of existence or reality.
“As someone whose practice and research depends on science, I have only respect for its proper aims and ambitions. Science is an essential part of our enquiring nature, and brings the potential for much that has transformed our lives for the better. No scientist is more frustrated than I am by those who dogmatically disregard its findings, especially where, in my field of medicine, those findings have power to save lives; and no-one could be more conscious of, or grateful for, the interminable scientific labours of others, from which I have hugely benefitted, in my work, in my practice, and in my life.
Yet science cannot possibly fulfil the burdensome role of sole purveyor of truth.”
McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (p. 606). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.
All elements or fundamental entities of MEST are lifeless and mindless (nonvital and nonmental) concrete entities belonging to the ontology of physics.
In a mechanical universe, we are just part of a machine rather than organisms all the way down from a macro- to a micro-perspective.
Critics of this “mechanical universe” argue that it struggles to explain the emergence of consciousness from non-conscious matter or to account for how subjective experiences (mental states) can arise from purely physical processes. This is known as the “explanatory gap” or “hard problem” of consciousness.
“… the question ‘what is consciousness for?’ appears to be based on a false premise. Consciousness is nothing to our purpose; we are to the purpose of consciousness. We are part, more properly, of a purpose – that of self-knowledge – which lies fulfilled within itself, not requiring buttressing from without by any justification in terms of utility.”
McGilchrist, Iain . The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (p. 1680). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.
All chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological entities are fundamentally composed of or constituted by nothing but such concrete entities.
This implies a hierarchical reductionism:
Chemistry reduces to physics (e.g., chemical bonds explained by quantum mechanics).
Biology reduces to chemistry and physics (e.g., biochemical processes in living organisms).
Psychology reduces to biology (e.g., neural processes in the brain) and, therefore, ultimately, physics.
Sociology reduces to psychology and other sciences (e.g., social behaviour emerging from individual actions).
This is very tempting, and in my area of expertise, nursing, we often simplify complex issues to cope, but unfortunately, simplification is what it is, and the truth is far more complex.
“I believe that the whole is never the same as the sum of its ‘parts’, and that, except in the case of machines, there are in fact no ‘parts’ as such, but that they are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world. For this reason it is every bit as true that what we call the parts can be understood only by understanding the whole to which they belong. And with the reductionist outlook goes determinism, the belief that if we knew enough about the position and momentum of every particle in the universe we could predict everything that happens from here on in, including your every thought, desire and belief.
Even if contemporary physics did not demonstrate that this is an impossibility, there is a problem with this kind of argument. Reductionists and determinists unerringly fail to take account of the fact that their own arguments apply to themselves. If my beliefs are ‘nothing but’ the mechanical products of a blind system, so are all views, including those of the reductionist. If everything is already determined, the determinist’s tendency to embrace determinism is also merely determined, and we have no reason to take it seriously (since we are all determined either to believe it or not already).”
McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (pp. 13-14). Perspectiva Press. Kindle Edition.
— Materialists are usually eliminativists (antirealists) rather than reductionists (reductive realists) about abstracta. However, some materialists think materialism is only about concrete, spatiotemporal reality, thereby staying neutral with regard to the question of the existence of abstracta. I’m not one of them, because my materialism is about reality simpliciter, and hence excludes abstracta from the realm of being.
— The hard problem of consciousness is a problem for everyone. Imagine Berkeley’s immaterialistic universe, where nothing exists but immaterial souls/spirits and their mental “ideas”. Can Berkeleyan spiritualists explain how consciousness arises from immaterial souls or '“mind-stuff”? – I don’t think so.
How and where could an immaterialistic science of consciousness even start, given that immaterial souls are invisible, intangible, and indissectible things? There are body/brain scans, but there will never be any soul scans.
“Compare now what the neuroscientist can tell us about the brain, and what she can do with that knowledge, with what the dualist can tell us about spiritual substance, and what he can do with those assumptions. Can the dualist tell us anything about the internal constitution of mind-stuff? Of the nonmaterial elements that make it up? Of the nonphysical laws that govern their behavior? Of the mind’s structural connections with the body? Of the manner of the mind’s operations? Can he explain human capacities and pathologies in terms of its structures and defects? The fact is, the dualist can do none of these things because no detailed theory of mind-stuff has ever even be formulated. Compared to the rich resources and the explanatory successes of current materialism, dualism is not so much a theory of mind as it is an empty space waiting for a genuine theory of mind to be put in it.”
(Churchland, Paul M. Matter and Consciousness. 3rd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. p. 31)
— “…Yet science cannot possibly fulfil the burdensome role of sole purveyor of truth.” (Iain McGilchrist)
What other reliable purveyors of deep truths about reality are there?
“Contrary to some opinion, we find that conscious experience serves a multitude of vital functions in the nervous system.”
(p. 345)
“[L]ike any biological adaptation, consciousness is functional. Many biological mechanisms serve multiple functions: The eyes pick up information in the light, but human eye contact also communicates social messages such as dominance, submission, affection, and plain curiosity. Consciousness, too, has apparently gathered multiple functions in its evolutionary history[.]”
(p. 347)
(Baars, Bernard J. A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.)
— Mechanisms, machines, and organisms are all dynamic systems, and to say that man is a physical mechanism or machine is by no means to belittle homo sapiens, its mind and culture. However, it is to say that there is no ghost in the machine, and that…
“Human beings are animals. We are sometimes monsters, sometimes magnificent, but always animals. We may prefer to think of ourselves as fallen angels but in reality we are risen apes.”
(Morris, Desmond. The Human Animal: A Personal View of the Human Species. London: BCA, 1994. p. 6)
Anyway, “the mechanical universe” as viewed from the perspective of modern science and modern materialism is not represented by a simplistic “cogwheels in a clockwork” sort of model. As for mechanistic explanations in contemporary science, see: Mechanisms in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
“The hypothesis that I shall put forward is an old one in that it goes back at least to La Mettrie’s L’Homme Machine, but it has been enormously strengthened by recent developments in cybernetics, the theory of self-regulating mechanisms.
…
My thesis is that man is a physical mechanism, and I frequently express this loosely in the form ‘man is a machine’.”
(Smart, J. J. C. Philosophy and Scientific Realism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963. p. 107)
“I shall be concerned to argue that there is nothing in the world over and above the entities of physics, and that everything operates according to the laws of physics. According to this view, living organisms (including human beings) are very complicated physical mechanisms and nothing more. Of course it is liable to cause misunderstanding if we say ‘human beings are only very complicated physical mechanisms.’ Stressing the ‘only’ may divert our audience from metaphysical contemplation to irrelevant questions of value judgement. In saying that humans are ‘only’ very complicated physical mechanisms I intend only to make an ontological point – a point about the make up of the universe. It is not to deny that some complicated physical mechanisms do very wonderful things. Some have written symphonies, others have erected gothic cathedrals, others have penetrated the secrets of the atom, and others yet again have erected beautiful edifices of pure mathematics. A physicalist metaphysics of course does not deny any of this. Indeed, to say that a leaf of a tree, or even a single living cell, is only a complicated physical mechanism can be taken wrongly. A physicalist is well aware of the extraordinary complexity of a living cell and even more of a whole leaf of a tree, orders of awesome complexity far and away above that of any human artefact of the sort that our aesthetic colleagues enthuse about.
The ‘only’ in ‘only a very complex physical mechanism’ is an ontological one, and neutral about value. It takes no sides about what we find most admirable: some may prefer to immerse themselves in contemplation of the leaf, others of the cathedral or symphony.”
(Smart, J. J. C. Our Place in the Universe: A Metaphysical Discussion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. pp. 79-80)
“The human body is a machine which winds itself up, a living picture of perpetual motion.”
(p. 7)
“But since all the soul’s faculties depend so much on the specific organisation of the brain and of the whole body that they are clearly nothing but that very organisation, the machine is perfectly explained! For after all even if man alone had received the law of nature as his heritage, would he be any less of a machine? Some wheels, a few springs more than in the most perfect animals, the brain proportionately closer to the heart and thus receiving more blood, the same gift of reason or—how do I know?—unknown causes would always have produced that delicate conscience which is so easily wounded, that remorse which is no more foreign to matter than is thought, and in short all of the differences that are supposed here. So does the organisation suffice to explain everything? Once again, yes. Since thought clearly develops with the organs, why should the matter which composes them not also be capable of remorse once it has acquired, with time, the faculty of feeling?
Thus the soul is merely a vain term of which we have no idea and which a good mind should use only to refer to that part of us which thinks. Given the slightest principle of movement, animate bodies will have everything they need to move, feel, think, repent and, in a word, behave in the physical sphere and in the moral sphere which depends on it.”
(p. 26)
“To be a machine and to feel, to think and to be able to distinguish right from wrong, like blue from yellow—in a word to be born with intelligence and a sure instinct for morality and to be only an animal—are thus things which are no more contradictory than to be an ape or a parrot and to be able to give oneself pleasure. For since here we have an opportunity to say so, who would ever have guessed a priori that a drop of liquid ejaculated in mating would provoke such divine pleasure and that from it would be born a little creature that one day, given certain laws, would be able to enjoy the same delights? I believe thought to be so little incompatible with organised matter that it seems to be one of its properties, like electricity, motive power, impenetrability, extension, etc.”
(p. 35)
(La Mettrie, Julien Offray de. “Machine Man.” 1748. In Machine Man and Other Writings, translated and edited by Ann Thomson, 1-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. p. 35)
Right, according to compositional materialism, all chemical, biological, psychological, and sociological “higher-level” systems are mereologically and thus ontologically reducible to base-level physical systems and elements.
Note that…
“Physicalism may be characterized as a reductionist thesis. However, it is reductionist in an ontological sense, not as a thesis that all statements can be translated into statements about physical particles, and so on.”
(Smart, J. J. C. Our Place in the Universe: A Metaphysical Discussion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. p. 81)
“In taking the identity theory (in its various forms) as a species of physicalism, I should say that this is an ontological, not a translational physicalism. It would be absurd to try to translate sentences containing the word ‘brain’ or the word ‘sensation’ into sentences about electrons, protons and so on. Nor can we so translate sentences containing the word ‘tree’. After all ‘tree’ is largely learned ostensively, and is not even part of botanical classification. If we were small enough a dandelion might count as a tree. Nevertheless a physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms.”
—J. J. C. Smart: The Mind/Brain Identity Theory (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
— If determinism is true, then that is a very good reason to take it seriously, isn’t it?
— Materialism needn’t be deterministic, and spiritualism can be deterministic! Sequences of mental events in an immaterialistic universe might be governed by deterministic laws.
“As various sorts of mentalism can be thoroughly mechanistic, so conversely a materialism is compatible with any amount of vital spontaneity, from the palest tychism, through diverse shades of organicism, to the rosiest teleology.”
(Williams, Donald Cary. “Naturalism and the Nature of Things.” In Principles of Empirical Realism: Philosophical Essays, 212-238. Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1966. p. 223)
— When McGilchrist says that “[parts] are an artefact of a certain way of looking at the world,” this seems to be an expression of mereological idealism (antirealism), according to which there are no objective mereological facts about what is part of what. I beg to differ, but that’s a complicated issue for another thread.
— The statement that a whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts needs to be clarified and precisified. An integral whole such as a living organism is not just a heap or jumble of elementary particles; so their dispositional properties (powers) and their spatial, temporal, and causal relations (connections/interactions) must be counted among the parts too.
David Lewis helpfully distinguishes between standard mereological sums and augmented (relation-including) ones:
"[T]here is such a thing as a + b, the mereological sum of a and b and nothing more. For there’s a mereological sum of anything and anything. But a + b is not the whole of c, because it leaves out R. The whole c is more than the sum of its parts a and b. Not because it’s more than the sum of all its parts – nothing is that – but because a and b aren’t all its parts. As for a + b, that is what you call an abstract particular. It’s c in abstraction from some but not all its universals, since R is left out but a and b remain. It’s less than thick c, more than the thin particularity of c.
Let me distinguish the standard mereological sum from the augmented mereological sum. The standard sum is defined by (5) [x is the sum of y and z iff, for all w, w overlaps x iff x overlaps either y or z]. The augmented sum is defined in terms of a standard sum:
In general, the augmented sum of x and y is the standard sum of x and y and whatever external relations obtain between them.
Standard sum is a topic-neutral notion; appropriately part of mereology understood as a generalisation of the logic of identity. Augmented sum is a more theoretically loaded notion.
(Lewis, David. “Letter to D. M. Armstrong, 8 June 1983.” In Philosophical Letters of David K. Lewis, Volume 1: Causation, Modality, Ontology, edited by Helen Beebee and A. R. J. Fisher, 506-509. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. p. 507)
“Wholes, I argue, are nothing over and above the organization of their parts in all of their interrelations and inter-reactions with one another and with whatever might exist externally to them.”
(Martin, C. B. The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. xv)
"It is a truism that the whole counts for more than the summation of individual parts taken in their separateness. As constituents of the whole, they are not individually separate. It is not as if the brick of the building’s foundation has only the weight of the bricks immediately above it or presses only with its own weight on the earth below it. The interrelatednesses and interreactivenesses of parts as reciprocal partners bring a congeries of dispositions into mutual manifestation; those parts that could not be manifested if they existed separately and without such interrelatednesses. An obvious example is a particular part coming to be the apex, corner, or fulcrum in its interrelatings with other parts. These interrelatednesses, interreactivenesses, and the dispositionalities among the parts themselves and whatever might exist externally to them for which they might be reciprocal disposition partners—all of these concerning the parts—make up the whole without remainder.
To give the parts a less impoverished description is only to give them their due as interactive parts. When this is done, having levels of being and speaking of the whole (or system) as having supervenient and emergent properties and causality between parts and wholes no longer remains plausible."
(Martin, C. B. The Mind in Nature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. p. 36)
“The key to understanding the model is to consider wholes not merely as simple aggregates, collections that cease to exist with the addition or subtraction of a single element. Instead, think of a particular kind of whole as comprising its constituents in all their interrelations and interactivities (actual and potential) for one another and for whatever might be external to them (with varying degrees of stability of all of these), while at the same time allowing for degrees of addition, subtraction, alteration, configuration, and even qualitative transformation, within whatever rough limits pertain to wholes of that kind.”
(Martin, C. B., and John Heil. “The Ontological Turn.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXIII (1999): 34-60. p. 41)
This doesn’t show that consciousness has a purpose, it just shows that experience affects the organism. I shudder to get into the all the various zombie arguments, but we’re on the edge of them.
It’s already there. The mind-stuff is conscious. Perhaps there is an evolution or shifts in the mind-stuff and individual minds arise or clump in the shifting mind-stuff, but the consciousness is already there.
If “purpose” means “the action or fact of intending or meaning to do something; intention, resolution, determination” (Oxford English Dictionary), then conscious agents have purposes, but consciousness as a state of agents certainly doesn’t.
The “mind-stuff” is consciousness—each soul/spirit is a consciousness, and their mental “ideas” are the contents of consciousness. So for idealism (immaterialism), the hard problem of consciousness is not how consciousness arises from immaterial souls or “mind-stuff”, but how individual minds (consciousnesses) “arise or clump” in the mind-stuff, like you say. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) solves both problems, by uniting them: consciousness is simply what it’s like to be a certain kind of material structure (or even a most basic “building block” of matter—a quantum, say)…
The concept of mind-stuff (or mind-dust, as William James calls it later) goes back to William Clifford (1845–1879). However, there doesn’t seem to be anything mental about his so-called “mind-stuff”, given that he writes that “a moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff.”
If the presence of mind-stuff doesn’t entail the presence of mind or consciousness, it is a non-/pre-mental stuff, whose elements collectively constitute kinds of mind or consciousness without themselves being individually minded or conscious. So, actually, Clifford’s mind-stuff theory is not a form of panpsychism but of panprotopsychism. (See the Chalmers quote below!)
"Mind-stuff is the reality which we perceive as Matter.
That element of which, as we have seen, even the simplest feeling is a complex, I shall call Mind-stuff. A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff. When molecules are so combined together as to form the film on the under side of a jelly-fish, the elements of mind-stuff which go along with them are so combined as to form the faint beginnings of Sentience. When the molecules are so combined as to form the brain and nervous system of a vertebrate, the corresponding elements of mind-stuff are so combined as to form some kind of consciousness; that is to say, changes in the complex which take place at the same time get so linked together that the repetition of one implies the repetition of the other. When matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, the corresponding mind-stuff takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition."
"The universe, then, consists entirely of mind-stuff. Some of this is woven into the complex form of human minds containing imperfect representations of the mind-stuff outside them, and of themselves also, as a mirror reflects its own image in another mirror, ad infinitum. Such an imperfect representation is called a material universe. It is a picture in a man’s mind of the real universe of mind-stuff.
The two chief points of this doctrine may be thus summed up:—
Matter is a mental picture in which mind-stuff is the thing represented.
Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex which is made up of elements themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious."
(Clifford, William Kingdon. “On the Nature of Things-in-themselves.” [1878.] Reprinted in Lectures and Essays, Vol. 2, edited by Leslie Stephen & Frederick Pollock, 71-88. London: Macmillan & Co., 1879. pp. 85+87)
"The view Clifford arrived at was a form of Spinozan parallelism that incorporated elements of LaMettrie’s and Diderot’s vitalist materialism. Clifford regarded the human body as “a physical machine,” but “not merely a machine, because consciousness goes with it” (57). In making his case for panpsychism, he applied the Continuity argument: As we move down the chain of living organisms,
—
it is impossible for anybody to point out the particular place in the line of descent
where [absence of consciousness] can be supposed to have taken place. … Even in the very lowest organisms, even in the Amoeba … there is something or other, inconceivably simple to us, which is of the same nature with our own consciousness, although not of the same complexity. [Furthermore] we cannot stop at organic matter, [but] we are obliged to assume, in order to save continuity in our belief, that along with every motion of matter, whether organic or inorganic, there is some fact which corresponds to the mental fact in ourselves. (60–61)
—
Echoing Fechner, Clifford then notes that his doctrine “is no mere speculation, but is a result to which all the greatest minds that have studied this question in the right way have gradually been approximating for a long time.”
Four years later, Clifford expanded on his views in the journal Mind, advocating a monist philosophy in which the basic constituent of reality is “mind-stuff.” Mind-stuff is neither mind nor consciousness, but rather the elements that combine together to form “the faint beginnings of Sentience.” Mind is viewed as composed of “mental atoms” that exist in parallel with physical atoms and which combine in an analogous manner. “A moving molecule of inorganic matter does not possess mind, or consciousness; but it possesses a small piece of mind-stuff.” (1878: 65) Intelligence and volition emerge only in higher-level complexes of mind-stuff, but a kind of proto-consciousness seems to be present in all things.
Clifford’s mind-stuff theory was vulnerable to the combination problem. He offered no answer, and his untimely death a year later precluded any chance for resolution. This unresolved issue led certain philosophers to “reject decisively every form of mind-stuff.” Others, including William James, were fascinated by it. James dedicated an entire chapter of his 1890 book Principles of Psychology (“The Mind-Stuff Theory”) to it. After acknowledging the power and attraction of such a theory, he rejected it for essentially the same reason: Mental atoms cannot combine, because to do so they would have to be combined “upon some entity other than themselves” (158)—i.e., something non-mental."
(Skrbina, David. Panpsychism in the West. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. pp. 174-5)
Footnote:
“The concept of a mind-stuff theory did not originate with Clifford. It was anticipated as far back as Democritus and his idea of the soul-atom. Leibniz’s monads are another, more developed precursor. And in Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Psychology (1855) we find this: “There may be a single primordial element of consciousness, and the countless kinds of consciousness may be produced by the compounding of this element with itself … in higher and higher degrees.” (1855/1897: 150) Clifford was, however, the first to explicitly promote a panpsychist mind-stuff theory.”
(Skrbina, David. Panpsychism in the West. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. p. 174n1)
“Panprotopsychism: 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.”
(p. 20)
"Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental physical entities are protoconscious. In more detail, let us say that protophenomenal properties are special properties that are not phenomenal (there is nothing it is like to have a single protophenomenal property), but that can collectively constitute phenomenal properties, perhaps when arranged in the right structure. Panprotopsychism is then the view that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties.
One might worry that any non-panpsychist materialism will be a form of panprotopsychism. After all, non-panpsychist materialism entails that microphysical properties are not phenomenal properties and that they collectively constitute phenomenal properties. This is an undesirable result. The thought behind panprotopsychism is that protophenomenal properties are special properties with an especially close connection to phenomenal properties. To handle this, one can unpack the appeal to specialness in the definition by requiring that (i) protophenomenal properties are distinct from structural properties and (ii) that there is an a priori entailment from protophenomenal properties to the phenomenal properties that they constitute. This excludes ordinary type-A materialism (which grounds phenomenal properties in structural properties) and type-B materialism (which invokes an a posteriori necessary connection). From now on I will understand protophenomenal properties this way, and will understand panprotopsychism accordingly."
(p. 31)
“It is true that we do not have much idea of what protophenomenal properties are like. For now they are characterized schematically, in terms of their relation to phenomenal properties. A fuller account will have to wait for a full panprotopsychist theory, though I will speculate about one sort of protophenomenal property toward the end of this chapter. But our ignorance about protophenomenal properties should not be mistaken for an objection to the truth of panprotopsychism.”
(pp. 31-2)
(Chalmers, David J. “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism.” In Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, 19-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.)
"Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental physical entities are protoconscious. In more detail, let us say that protophenomenal properties are special properties that are not phenomenal (there is nothing it is like to have a single protophenomenal property), but that can collectively constitute phenomenal properties, perhaps when arranged in the right structure. Panprotopsychism is then the view that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties.
One might worry that any non-panpsychist materialism will be a form of panprotopsychism. After all, non-panpsychist materialism entails that microphysical properties are not phenomenal properties and that they collectively constitute phenomenal properties. This is an undesirable result. The thought behind panprotopsychism is that protophenomenal properties are special properties with an especially close connection to phenomenal properties."
(Chalmers, David J. “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism.” In Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, 19-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 31)
Here’s Colin McGinn’s critique of panprotopsychism:
"But what about [panpsychism] in the weak sense [= panprotopsychism]? Granted that atoms do not have full-blown mental states, might they not have mental states in a degraded or attenuated sense? The trouble is that it is hard to know what this sense is supposed to be. It cannot mean just faint and fleeting conscious states, the kind you might have when going off to sleep, because that approach is really just the strong version of the theory again, and has all the same problems as before. We can hardly suppose that rocks are (sometimes? always?) in mild pain and thinking hazily about dinner, while we feel intense pain and have sharply focused thoughts. No, the idea must be that rocks have what are sometimes called protomental states, states that can yield conscious states while not themselves being conscious states. This convenient label contrives to suggest that the states in question are both mental and also premental. They are not quite fully mental, but they are such that they produce mentality when combined appropriately. A protomental property is defined as one that is capable of giving rise to mental properties without being actually mental—fully, properly, literally. These properties have the potential for mentality in them, the germ. The rock does not then feel pain, literally, but it has the right properties to give rise to pain if and when its materials take up residence in a real brain. If an atom from a potato finds its way into your brain after being digested, then it will trigger consciousness in you in virtue of properties it had before it became part of cerebral tissue. The picture thus created is this: matter from the inanimate world finds its way into the brain of an organism, and it produces consciousness in that organism in virtue of the protomental properties it had before ending up there, where protomental properties are defined as whatever properties of matter make consciousness possible.
The problem with this theory should now be obvious. It is empty. We knew where we were when presented with the strong version of panpsychism: the pervasive mental properties are just ordinary mental properties. It is not credible that all matter is thus mentally endowed. But the weak version merely says that matter has some properties or other, to be labeled ‘protomental,’ that account for the emergence of consciousness from brains. But of course that is true! It is just a way of saying that consciousness cannot arise by magic; it must have some basis in matter. But we are not told anything about the nature of these properties. Nor are we told how they produce consciousness. Of course matter must have the potential to produce consciousness, since it does it all the time. But to state that truism is not to provide a theory of consciousness; it simply restates the problem. In fact, weak panpsychism of this kind is virtually indistinguishable from the mysterianism I have been defending. I hold that there are unknown properties of matter that explain consciousness; weak panpsychism says much the same thing, except that it erroneously uses the word ‘protomental’ to pack some explanatory punch. Whether these properties are knowable is a further question, which panpsychism can answer either way. What both theories agree on is that consciousness depends upon heretofore unidentified properties of matter. That’s fine, but let’s not dress up this admission of ignorance into a pseudo-theory."
(McGinn, Colin. The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World. New York: Basic Books, 1999. pp. 98-9)
I take IIT’s panpsychistic implications as a reductio ad absurdum of that theory.
As for the famous phrase “what it is like” as used in contemporary philosophy of mind, here’s someone who doesn’t like it—and I tend to agree with him:
“What, then, of ‘what it’s like’? That phrase is now ambiguous, as between phenomenal character, i.e., a quale in the strict sense, and the conscious experience of such a quale, or rather what one knows in virtue of having such an experience. (And like the plural ‘qualia’ itself, ‘what it’s like’ has a deplorably more general use, as an umbrella term for whatever one find puzzling about consciousness, subjectivity, etc.) It is long past time to recognize (…) that the phrase ‘what it’s like’ is now worse than useless: it is positively pernicious and harmful, because nothing whatever is clarified or explained by reference to it, and its tokening as a buzzword typically sends the struggling mind of even the most talented philosopher into yet another affect-driven tailspin of confusing a welter of distinct issues. So, please, just say no.”
(Lycan, William G. Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. p. 77)
Footnotes: I. One thing is clear: Saying e.g. that “there is something it is like to smell coffee” is not meant as a comparison: “Smelling coffee is like smelling x.” II. There is a perfectly acceptable and intelligible ordinary-language use of “what it is like”, where it is used to refer to the “hedonic quality” or “valence” of an experience. An experience (sensation, emotion) has a positive valence if it is pleasant or enjoyable, and it has a negative valence if it is unpleasant or unenjoyable.
What is it like to have a toothache? It’s highly unpleasant!
Note that experiential valence comes in different degrees, i.e. experiences are more or less (un)pleasant or more or less (un)enjoyable. It’s not simply a binary matter of maximal pleasantness versus maximal unpleasantness.
IIT does not really have panpsychistic implications:
“[P]er IIT, single cells may have some intrinsic existence, but this does not necessarily hold for the microbiome or trees. Animals and people exist for themselves, but herds and crowds do not. Maybe even atoms exist for themselves, but certainly not spoons, chairs, dunes, or the universe at large.” https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/is-consciousness-everywhere/
No. There is no phenomenal character without the conscious experience thereof, and there is no conscious experience without a phenomenal character. In other words, there is no content of consciousness without consciousness and no consciousness without content. Indeed, as for “what one knows in virtue of having such an experience”:
“We may regard rational apprehension as a projection of Truth in dualistic form; so that he who possesses any given Truth has only to symbolise its image in the form of Knowledge.
This conception is difficult; an illustration may clear its view. An architect can indicate the general characteristics of a building on paper by means of two drawings—a ground plan and an elevation. Neither but is false in nearly every respect; each is partial, each lacks depth, and so on. And yet, in combination, they do represent to the trained imagination what the building actually is”. (Aleister Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, “Knowledge”.)
Phenomenal character and conscious experience are like the ground plan and the elevation of consciousness. In Crowley’s words, Mr. Lycan errs because he mistakes Knowledge for Understanding.
“Then shall ye understand what is Truth, [when] ye shall understand your Selves, [for] YE ARE TRUTH!” (op.cit., final sentence.)
Actually, the comparison would be: “Smelling coffee is like x.” And it is.
Not sure what your point is, but I agree that an experience can have no neutral valence.
You are right insofar as with “pan-” taken literally, IIT is not panpsychistic; but it does have strongly counterintuitive psychistic implications regarding the distribution of consciousness in nature.
By the way, most contemporary philosophers seem to take “pan-” nonliterally. But if panpsychism is redefined as the view that “some fundamental physical entities have mental states” (Chalmers), then they’d better use another prefix.
Galen Strawson uses “archepsychism” to refer to the view that (phenomenal) consciousness “must in some manner be at the bottom of things,” that “it must be among the fundamental qualities of concrete reality.” (Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, 2nd ed., Imprint Academic, 2024)
“Panpsychism, taken literally, is the doctrine that everything has a mind. In practice, people who call themselves panpsychists are not committed to as strong a doctrine. They are not committed to the thesis that the number two has a mind, or that the Eiffel tower has a mind, or that the city of Canberra has a mind, even if they believe in the existence of numbers, towers, and cities.
Instead, we can understand panpsychism as the thesis that some fundamental physical entities have mental states. For example, if quarks or photons have mental states, that suffices for panpsychism to be true, even if rocks and cities do not have mental states. Perhaps it would not suffice for just one photon to have mental states. The line here is blurry, but we can read the definition as requiring that all members of some fundamental physical types (all photons, for example) have mental states.”
(Chalmers, David J. “Panpsychism and Panprotopsychism.” In Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla, 19-47. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. p. 19)
Lycan’s point is that defining phenomenal consciousness aka subjective experience in terms of “what-it-is-likeness” doesn’t really clarify its nature but, on the contrary, obscures it.
Phenomenal consciousness consists in subjective experiential content (experiences), so there cannot be any experientially contentless or empty phenomenal consciousness. And its experiential content is necessarily experienced by its subject.
However, it is a highly contentious issue whether or not the experiencing of an experience necessarily involves an inner perceiving or cognizing of it. Is there any phenomenal consciousness without any cognitive consciousness (awareness) of its experiential content? Can one have/undergo an inner experience without being aware/conscious of it? Can there be phenomenally conscious/experiential states which are totally uncognized, unperceived, unnoticed, unattended by their subjects? (I don’t think so.)
I didn’t mention the possibility of neutral valence, but I actually seem to have experiences which don’t strike me as pleasant or unpleasant.
I thought the disagreement there was over the, shall we say, usefulness of consciousness to organisms. It seemed to me the quote was demonstrating, to some degree, that experiencing things was useful for the organizing, for example for its nervous system. I didn’t see it supporting the use of consciousness. Yes, experience affects the nervous system, but this doesn’t show that an experiencing I awareness is necessary.