The problem for physicalism (“materialism”) is not that the existence of consciousness would contradict the laws of physics. The problem is, rather, that physicalism has very high demands for what physics must explain. Physicalism says everything that exists must be logically implied by the laws of physics and the initial state of the universe, together with some sort of insubstantial “bridge laws”, which connect terms of fundamental to less fundamental theories. But so far there are no proposed physical laws which imply that consciousness exists, let alone that we are conscious.
And it doesn’t end here. Apart from mental objects, the second problem for physicalism are abstract objects. Like meanings and numbers. Current laws of physics presuppose the existence of several kinds of such abstract objects, numbers most notably. The theories currently cannot be formulated purely logically. For physicalism to be sustainable, all these abstract objects will somehow have to be analyzed away.
A third problem for physicalism is the fact that physical laws apparently do not imply the truth values of statements including indexical terms, like “here”, “now”, or “I”.
Because of its promised simplicity, physicalism is a very popular theory among philosophers (as surveys show), but the theory is also extremely difficult to defend. Most are just hopeful physicalists: They believe that one day, there will be a physicalist theory which completely and successfully accounts for mental objects, abstract objects, and indexical terms. No such theory exists to date.
Not his, but my personal view is that there are “degrees and dimensions of existence” and abstract object are an emergent concept when embedded agents try to predict the universe (which they have to in order to count as agents). That includes meanings, numbers, fairies and anything else that cannot be readily reduced to constituent atoms. It doesn’t make them any less physical, they emerge from a different substrate (agents, who are, in turn, reducible to atoms).
Physicalism says everything that exists must be logically implied by the laws of physics and the initial state of the universe, together with some sort of insubstantial “bridge laws”, which connect terms of fundamental to less fundamental theories. But so far there are no proposed physical laws which imply that consciousness exists, let alone that we are conscious.
I.. don’t think that is what is “implied” by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging “block” or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that’s not a great model, given relativity). I guess you can call the rules that determine how to calculate the next instance from the previous one “bridge laws”. In physics they are generally called equations of motion, such as F=ma or the Schrodinger equation.
The step I think you are missing is that for agents to exist the universe must be somewhat predictable from the inside by a small part of it (the agent), otherwise the universe would not support agency. Once you accept that the universe, whether as a block or as an evolving entity is not completely random, but (lossily) compressible, you can identify subsystems within it that have these compressed models on the whole inside them. At some point during evolution (the biological one) these inner models must include the model of the subsystem itself and of other subsystems around it. And that’s how you get self-awareness and consciousness. The universe just is. The known laws of physics are a human abstraction that helps us, as embedded agents to make sense of the world, starting from what we consider “fundamental” to progressively “less fundamental” (more emergent). One can trace the laws from the more emergent to less emergent step by step (analysis), though inventing emergent laws (synthesis) is much harder. But that’s a separate topic.
And that’s how you get self-awareness and consciousness
Consciousness has multiple meanings. An explanation of consciousness in the sense of self awareness says nothing about qualia/phenomenality.
In popular usage, “consciousness” is used both to mean a cluster of things to do with awareness, and another cluster to do with identity and personhood.
There is not necessarily a connection between them. For instance, it’s conceivable that the bundle theory of identity is true, so it’s conceivable that identity emerges from the contents of consciousness...and consciousness, absent contents, has no identity. Its plausible that infants have qualia, but no sense-of-self. In dreaming, one can experience vivid qualia, but the sense-of-self is absent or mutable.
The main rub here is the term “emergent”. “B emerges from A” just means “B reduces to A”, or “A reductively explains B”. But if B reduces to A, A has to logically entail B using nothing more than semantic “bridge laws” which map terms of the reducing theory to terms of the reduced theory. Otherwise it is perfectly possible that our nice physics theory is true but physicalism is false, since there may well exist non-physical things which it doesn’t entail or rule out.
For example, if you want to reduce thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, you need a bridge law like “if something has mean kinetic energy x, it has temperature y” because statistical mechanics doesn’t contain the term “temperature”. Which means laws from statistical mechanics logically entailing laws of thermodynamics would be ruled out from the start if we don’t also assume those bridge laws. But any bridge laws may only allow for insubstantial semantic implications, which is the case when it can be shown that, for example, having mean kinetic energy x has necessarily all observable consequences of having temperature y, or being H2O has all the consequences of being water. A supposed “bridge law” which states “everything which has brain state x experiences blue” would not be such a insubstantial bridge law as assuming it would just beg the question.
You really need logical entailment for reduction, assuming merely insubstantial semantic bridge laws. Otherwise you are not logically guaranteed that the reducing theory accounts for all the facts of the reduced theory, and the reduction would not be complete. (Technically, our physicalist theory would also need to add a terminal clause “And nothing else exists”, otherwise it would be still compatible with non-physical objects existing.)
Case in point:
“I.. don’t think that is what is “implied” by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging “block” or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that’s not a great model, given relativity).”
That by itself does not yet imply that everything is physical. It is logically perfectly consistent with assuming that mental or abstract objects, or indexical facts, are not reducible to physical ones. It does not by itself logically entail that mental states exist. And physical theories do not entail the existence of abstract objects, like numbers, from physical assumptions, they rather just presuppose some of them, and they fail to entail or presuppose others which they do not use. If we think that physicalism is true, i.e. everything is physical, then all existing abstract and mental objects have to be entailed by the correct theory of physics, without exception. (In the case of abstract objects, it would be also sufficient if the physical theory entails that no abstract objects exist, in which case it may also not use any numbers or the like. But it has to entail the existence of mental objects like experiences, otherwise such a theory would be immediately falsified by us having experiences.)
Just handwavingly using “emergence” here and there unfortunately does not help. One has to get into the gritty logical details of reduction. For abstract objects, the situation doesn’t actually look so hopeless as for mental objects. There is apparently no corresponding “hard problem of abstractness” which physicalism needs to solve. Or at least it seems like the problem is somewhat less hard. There are attempts, albeit flawed, to eliminate numbers from Newtonian mechanics, notably in Hartry Field’s famous book “Science Without Numbers”. In which case we would analyze those abstract mathematical objects away using advanced methods from formal logic. But we are still far away from physics without any abstract objects, as it is not even clear whether it works for Newtonian mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics and the like.
Thanks for the Carroll reference. If you are interested, I can recommend some papers on reduction and physicalism. In any case, all I wanted to say with my previous comment is that creating a theory of physicalism is far less trivial than many people assume. To put it bluntly, it is ridiculously hard, if it is possible at all. It absolutely requires solving the hard problem of consciousness in a specific way, and even reducing all abstract objects used in science to physical ones is currently philosophical science fiction.
I don’t get why reducing numbers to logic or whatever has anything to do with physicalist theory—if everything is a physical object then obviously physicalist theory is also a physical object—this specific piece of paper with attached human, for example. It does say that everything is a physical object—literally in the first sentence on the piece of paper. It does account for experience by saying “everything’s experiences are described by” before equations. Why do we need anything else?
Of course you can simply say, without argument, “I believe everything is physical, including mental and abstract objects. I have no justification for this, like in form of a reductive explanation. I just intuitively believe it is true.” But that statement alone would not be a theory of physicalism, and few philosophers would be interested in your belief. It is simply far from obvious, for most people, that abstract and mental objects are physical. They are not obviously located in space and time, and they do not obviously have causal powers, at least not in the standard picture of physics. Asserting physicalism therefore requires an argument.
So, considering that non-obviousness of physicality of mental objects is not grounded in rigorous argument, the real requirement is not logical reduction but just persuasion of philosophers, right? And there is enough argument in predicting physical world to a much higher precision than philosophers can discriminate their mental objects with, combined with using, for example, Strawson’s arguments for panpsychism, for illustrating the possibility of identifying what people call the mental properties with physical objects at all. So the way I see it there is physicalist theory (with equations and all that) that predicts all things that physicalists want to call the mental properties, that also predicts that non-physicalist theories are less sure about specific mental properties, and there are arguments for why non-physicalists should identify their mental properties with physicalist mental properties. Which is enough to consider the problem solved.
there is physicalist theory (with equations and all that) that predicts all things that physicalists want to call the mental properties
Well...no, there isn’t a physical theory or equation that predicts what red looks like. If there were, it would be unreasonable to dispute physicalism.
or example, Strawson’s arguments for panpsychism, for illustrating the possibility of identifying what people call the mental properties with physical objects at all.
If you need to bring in a non-physicalist philosophical theory to identify physical and mental properties, then the physics isn’t doing all the lifting, and you don’t really have an argument for physicalism. If that’s what you are saying.
I’m saying panpsychism/monism or whatever you want to call it is physicalist worldview. Because physicalists do say that things really exist and arguments for why “such and such neural processes” are equivalent to “I am seeing red” are not part of the theory—they’re just explanation for intuitions. So yes, it’s unreasonable to reject physicalism when it predicts neural processes that you describe as “I’m seeing red” because they are the same thing under panpsychist view as much as “it’a a rock” and “it’s heap of atoms” describe the same thing.
I’m saying panpsychism/monism or whatever you want to call it is physicalist worldview
It isn’t generally considered to be.
Because physicalists do say that things really exist
That isn’t the central or characteristic claim of realism. You can’t say that panpsychism is identical to physicalism just because they both agree on the real existence of external objects. If that’s what you are saying.
and arguments for why “such and such neural processes” are equivalent to “I am seeing red” are not part of the theory
And that’s a bad thing. Physicalism isn’t absolved from explaining qualia on the basis that it isn’t even trying to. The correct theory is the theory that explains all the evidence, not the one that only explains a subset.
There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
Intuitions as opposed to what?
because they are the same thing under panpsychist view as much as “it’a a rock” and “it’s heap of atoms” describe the same thing
But the identity is not itself physically explained! There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
Physicalism and reductionism are about explanation. Physicalism is the claim that everything is in principle predictable from physics. If there is one fact, entity or property that is not, physicalism is false. So if there is no explanation of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale, if it’s a “brute fact” , then physicalism is false.
But the identity is not itself physically explained! There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
There are no strictly physical explanations of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock. Because rocks are human abstraction. Conversely, there are non-strictly physical (maybe sometimes hypothetical, because neuroscience is not yet there) explanations of how specific neural activation patterns amount to specific qualia. The only objection to this is “things you explaining can’t possibly be real qualia, because zombies, and real qualia are obviously real”. And that is solved by panpsychism—atoms can amount to qualia because everything has qualia/existence matches all intuitions about qualia—and weak illusionism about everything else—specific qualia are less obvious than current science can do about neural processes. So the only “brute fact” that is needed is “these equations describe reality” and this is a physical fact. Do you/philosophical consensus disagree with “existence matches all intuitions about qualia” or what?
It isn’t generally considered to be.
I mean there are certainly varieties that are not physicalist, but if it’s just “these equations describe reality” and “existence matches all intuitions about qualia”, why shouldn’t it considered to be physicalist?
You can’t say that panpsychism is identical to physicalism just because they both agree on the real existence of external objects. If that’s what you are saying.
I’m saying that panpsychism doesn’t describe anything additional to physicalism—existence is already a thing in physicalism, so, like any reduction of qualia to physical objects, panpsychism does not become unphysical just because it talks about physical things people call “qualia”.
There are no strictly physical explanations of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock. Because rocks are human abstraction.
That’s setting the bar rather high. Physicalism is usually only required to explain higher level concepts where they are a given.
I’m saying that panpsychism doesn’t describe anything additional to physicalism
Which gives you physicalist ontology at best. But physicalism also has an epistemological definition; all facts are physical facts. The idea that qualia amount to physics does not have a physical explanation, and is not predicted by physics.
The validity of the idea that qualia amount to physics is explained by the same kind of a physical explanation as in the case of an idea that a heap of atoms amounts to a rock—panpsychism is just a bridge law. Physics predicts existence the same way it predicts atoms, so we say that physics predicts qulia the same way it predicts rocks. What’s the relevant difference between “what you called a rock is actually atoms” and “what you called consciousness is actually existence” that makes latter unphysical?
Your original claim was more like qualia are atoms. You seem to have switched to talking about consciousness in a more general sense, whilst also switching to saying it equates to existence in general. But neither claim is a prediction of physics, anyway.
Panpsychism standardly states that all entities have irreducibly mental properties. That’s clearly in contrast to the physicalist claim that all properties reduce to physical properties.
Dual aspect theory theory asserts an equivalence between physical states and conscious states, but is unable to say which is fundamental , which is why “dual aspect” is generally coupled to “neutral monism”.
I guess “atoms can amount to qualia” was misleading, but I meant that you can describe human qualia using atoms, and that description would be as correct, as describing rock as heap of atoms would, and more complete than “I am seeing red”. The switch to “consciousness” was to prevent conflating specific qualia, that are not fundamental, with quale of universe.
But neither claim is a prediction of physics, anyway.
Only in the same sense that “rocks are atoms” is not a prediction of physics.
Panpsychism standardly states that all entities have irreducibly mental properties.
Panpsychism that works (Russelian monism or whatever you want to call the one from http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf) states that all entities have one property that you can call mental—existence—and there is only one entity, because that is how actual physics works. And that property is also implicitly present in physicalism.
If dual aspect says that physical description is complete, even though you can describe things differently, then physics predicts that and you don’t need dual aspect. Is it says that physical description is incomplete, then I disagree and want to know what’s its objection to the kind of panpsychism I’m talking about.
Well, no, in practice you can’t describe a specific quale by describing a specific configuration of atoms (as in Mary’s Room). If you could, there would be no hard problem.
and that description would be as correct, as describing rock as heap of atoms would,
You can give microphysical explanation of a rock , once you input “rock” as a human concept. The same does not work for “red”.
The switch to “consciousness” was to prevent conflating specific qualia, that are not fundamental, with quale of universe.
Whats the quale of the universe?
states that all entities have one property that you can call mental—existence—and there is only one entity, because that is how actual physics works.
I didn’t notice either idea being mentioned in the paper you linked.
Also, Chalmers seems conflicted about whether panpsychism is physicalism.
“In particular, constitutive Russellian
panpsychism is incompatible with narrow physicalism, but it is a form of broad physicalism. ”
If dual aspect says that physical description is complete, even though you can describe things differently, then physics predicts that and you don’t need dual aspect
For what? Physics can allow you to predict external.events, but predicts nothing about how things seem to you.
Dual aspect theory allows you to account for consciousness, without dismissing it ,and without embracing full dualism with its attendant problems.
You can give microphysical explanation of a rock , once you input “rock” as a human concept. The same does not work for “red”.
It does work if on the last step where someone will say “but these firing neurons are not actually my seeing of red!” you also input arguments for panpsychism. They are the same kind of explanation, so panpsychism can in principle solve the hard problem. So if you disagree you have to disagree with something specific about panpsychism.
Well, no, in practice you can’t describe a specific quale by describing a specific configuration of atoms (as in Mary’s Room). If you could, there would be no hard problem.
So now that you can, yes, the hard problem is solved.
Whats the quale of the universe?
I mean that actual physics doesn’t include fundamental division of universe into parts, so the most precise description of qualia is description of the quale of the universe. And that description is the same as physical description of the state of the universe. Or do you want me to say things that would result in non-verbal thoughts/feelings in you that you would judge as similar to the state of universe? Because that would depend on your judgement.
The problem for physicalism (“materialism”) is not that the existence of consciousness would contradict the laws of physics. The problem is, rather, that physicalism has very high demands for what physics must explain. Physicalism says everything that exists must be logically implied by the laws of physics and the initial state of the universe, together with some sort of insubstantial “bridge laws”, which connect terms of fundamental to less fundamental theories. But so far there are no proposed physical laws which imply that consciousness exists, let alone that we are conscious.
And it doesn’t end here. Apart from mental objects, the second problem for physicalism are abstract objects. Like meanings and numbers. Current laws of physics presuppose the existence of several kinds of such abstract objects, numbers most notably. The theories currently cannot be formulated purely logically. For physicalism to be sustainable, all these abstract objects will somehow have to be analyzed away.
A third problem for physicalism is the fact that physical laws apparently do not imply the truth values of statements including indexical terms, like “here”, “now”, or “I”.
Because of its promised simplicity, physicalism is a very popular theory among philosophers (as surveys show), but the theory is also extremely difficult to defend. Most are just hopeful physicalists: They believe that one day, there will be a physicalist theory which completely and successfully accounts for mental objects, abstract objects, and indexical terms. No such theory exists to date.
You might enjoy Sean Carroll’s podcasts (and books). Here is one that goes in depth on indexicalism: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/06/06/200-solo-the-philosophy-of-the-multiverse/ (click on transcript if you prefer reading to listening). It deals with the issues of identity, SSA/SIA etc. in a very careful and thoughtful manner.
Not his, but my personal view is that there are “degrees and dimensions of existence” and abstract object are an emergent concept when embedded agents try to predict the universe (which they have to in order to count as agents). That includes meanings, numbers, fairies and anything else that cannot be readily reduced to constituent atoms. It doesn’t make them any less physical, they emerge from a different substrate (agents, who are, in turn, reducible to atoms).
I.. don’t think that is what is “implied” by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging “block” or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that’s not a great model, given relativity). I guess you can call the rules that determine how to calculate the next instance from the previous one “bridge laws”. In physics they are generally called equations of motion, such as F=ma or the Schrodinger equation.
The step I think you are missing is that for agents to exist the universe must be somewhat predictable from the inside by a small part of it (the agent), otherwise the universe would not support agency. Once you accept that the universe, whether as a block or as an evolving entity is not completely random, but (lossily) compressible, you can identify subsystems within it that have these compressed models on the whole inside them. At some point during evolution (the biological one) these inner models must include the model of the subsystem itself and of other subsystems around it. And that’s how you get self-awareness and consciousness. The universe just is. The known laws of physics are a human abstraction that helps us, as embedded agents to make sense of the world, starting from what we consider “fundamental” to progressively “less fundamental” (more emergent). One can trace the laws from the more emergent to less emergent step by step (analysis), though inventing emergent laws (synthesis) is much harder. But that’s a separate topic.
Consciousness has multiple meanings. An explanation of consciousness in the sense of self awareness says nothing about qualia/phenomenality.
In popular usage, “consciousness” is used both to mean a cluster of things to do with awareness, and another cluster to do with identity and personhood. There is not necessarily a connection between them. For instance, it’s conceivable that the bundle theory of identity is true, so it’s conceivable that identity emerges from the contents of consciousness...and consciousness, absent contents, has no identity. Its plausible that infants have qualia, but no sense-of-self. In dreaming, one can experience vivid qualia, but the sense-of-self is absent or mutable.
The main rub here is the term “emergent”. “B emerges from A” just means “B reduces to A”, or “A reductively explains B”. But if B reduces to A, A has to logically entail B using nothing more than semantic “bridge laws” which map terms of the reducing theory to terms of the reduced theory. Otherwise it is perfectly possible that our nice physics theory is true but physicalism is false, since there may well exist non-physical things which it doesn’t entail or rule out.
For example, if you want to reduce thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, you need a bridge law like “if something has mean kinetic energy x, it has temperature y” because statistical mechanics doesn’t contain the term “temperature”. Which means laws from statistical mechanics logically entailing laws of thermodynamics would be ruled out from the start if we don’t also assume those bridge laws. But any bridge laws may only allow for insubstantial semantic implications, which is the case when it can be shown that, for example, having mean kinetic energy x has necessarily all observable consequences of having temperature y, or being H2O has all the consequences of being water. A supposed “bridge law” which states “everything which has brain state x experiences blue” would not be such a insubstantial bridge law as assuming it would just beg the question.
You really need logical entailment for reduction, assuming merely insubstantial semantic bridge laws. Otherwise you are not logically guaranteed that the reducing theory accounts for all the facts of the reduced theory, and the reduction would not be complete. (Technically, our physicalist theory would also need to add a terminal clause “And nothing else exists”, otherwise it would be still compatible with non-physical objects existing.)
Case in point:
“I.. don’t think that is what is “implied” by physicalism. Rather, the universe exists and, depending on the interpretation, is either an unchanging “block” or an evolving entity, where the next instance is determined by the previous instance (that’s not a great model, given relativity).”
That by itself does not yet imply that everything is physical. It is logically perfectly consistent with assuming that mental or abstract objects, or indexical facts, are not reducible to physical ones. It does not by itself logically entail that mental states exist. And physical theories do not entail the existence of abstract objects, like numbers, from physical assumptions, they rather just presuppose some of them, and they fail to entail or presuppose others which they do not use. If we think that physicalism is true, i.e. everything is physical, then all existing abstract and mental objects have to be entailed by the correct theory of physics, without exception. (In the case of abstract objects, it would be also sufficient if the physical theory entails that no abstract objects exist, in which case it may also not use any numbers or the like. But it has to entail the existence of mental objects like experiences, otherwise such a theory would be immediately falsified by us having experiences.)
Just handwavingly using “emergence” here and there unfortunately does not help. One has to get into the gritty logical details of reduction. For abstract objects, the situation doesn’t actually look so hopeless as for mental objects. There is apparently no corresponding “hard problem of abstractness” which physicalism needs to solve. Or at least it seems like the problem is somewhat less hard. There are attempts, albeit flawed, to eliminate numbers from Newtonian mechanics, notably in Hartry Field’s famous book “Science Without Numbers”. In which case we would analyze those abstract mathematical objects away using advanced methods from formal logic. But we are still far away from physics without any abstract objects, as it is not even clear whether it works for Newtonian mechanics, let alone quantum mechanics and the like.
Thanks for the Carroll reference. If you are interested, I can recommend some papers on reduction and physicalism. In any case, all I wanted to say with my previous comment is that creating a theory of physicalism is far less trivial than many people assume. To put it bluntly, it is ridiculously hard, if it is possible at all. It absolutely requires solving the hard problem of consciousness in a specific way, and even reducing all abstract objects used in science to physical ones is currently philosophical science fiction.
I don’t get why reducing numbers to logic or whatever has anything to do with physicalist theory—if everything is a physical object then obviously physicalist theory is also a physical object—this specific piece of paper with attached human, for example. It does say that everything is a physical object—literally in the first sentence on the piece of paper. It does account for experience by saying “everything’s experiences are described by” before equations. Why do we need anything else?
Of course you can simply say, without argument, “I believe everything is physical, including mental and abstract objects. I have no justification for this, like in form of a reductive explanation. I just intuitively believe it is true.” But that statement alone would not be a theory of physicalism, and few philosophers would be interested in your belief. It is simply far from obvious, for most people, that abstract and mental objects are physical. They are not obviously located in space and time, and they do not obviously have causal powers, at least not in the standard picture of physics. Asserting physicalism therefore requires an argument.
So, considering that non-obviousness of physicality of mental objects is not grounded in rigorous argument, the real requirement is not logical reduction but just persuasion of philosophers, right? And there is enough argument in predicting physical world to a much higher precision than philosophers can discriminate their mental objects with, combined with using, for example, Strawson’s arguments for panpsychism, for illustrating the possibility of identifying what people call the mental properties with physical objects at all. So the way I see it there is physicalist theory (with equations and all that) that predicts all things that physicalists want to call the mental properties, that also predicts that non-physicalist theories are less sure about specific mental properties, and there are arguments for why non-physicalists should identify their mental properties with physicalist mental properties. Which is enough to consider the problem solved.
Well...no, there isn’t a physical theory or equation that predicts what red looks like. If there were, it would be unreasonable to dispute physicalism.
If you need to bring in a non-physicalist philosophical theory to identify physical and mental properties, then the physics isn’t doing all the lifting, and you don’t really have an argument for physicalism. If that’s what you are saying.
I’m saying panpsychism/monism or whatever you want to call it is physicalist worldview. Because physicalists do say that things really exist and arguments for why “such and such neural processes” are equivalent to “I am seeing red” are not part of the theory—they’re just explanation for intuitions. So yes, it’s unreasonable to reject physicalism when it predicts neural processes that you describe as “I’m seeing red” because they are the same thing under panpsychist view as much as “it’a a rock” and “it’s heap of atoms” describe the same thing.
It isn’t generally considered to be.
That isn’t the central or characteristic claim of realism. You can’t say that panpsychism is identical to physicalism just because they both agree on the real existence of external objects. If that’s what you are saying.
And that’s a bad thing. Physicalism isn’t absolved from explaining qualia on the basis that it isn’t even trying to. The correct theory is the theory that explains all the evidence, not the one that only explains a subset.
Intuitions as opposed to what?
But the identity is not itself physically explained! There is a physical explanation of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock, but there is not of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale.
Physicalism and reductionism are about explanation. Physicalism is the claim that everything is in principle predictable from physics. If there is one fact, entity or property that is not, physicalism is false. So if there is no explanation of how a neural activation pattern amounts to a quale, if it’s a “brute fact” , then physicalism is false.
There are no strictly physical explanations of how a heap of atoms amounts to a rock. Because rocks are human abstraction. Conversely, there are non-strictly physical (maybe sometimes hypothetical, because neuroscience is not yet there) explanations of how specific neural activation patterns amount to specific qualia. The only objection to this is “things you explaining can’t possibly be real qualia, because zombies, and real qualia are obviously real”. And that is solved by panpsychism—atoms can amount to qualia because everything has qualia/existence matches all intuitions about qualia—and weak illusionism about everything else—specific qualia are less obvious than current science can do about neural processes. So the only “brute fact” that is needed is “these equations describe reality” and this is a physical fact. Do you/philosophical consensus disagree with “existence matches all intuitions about qualia” or what?
I mean there are certainly varieties that are not physicalist, but if it’s just “these equations describe reality” and “existence matches all intuitions about qualia”, why shouldn’t it considered to be physicalist?
I’m saying that panpsychism doesn’t describe anything additional to physicalism—existence is already a thing in physicalism, so, like any reduction of qualia to physical objects, panpsychism does not become unphysical just because it talks about physical things people call “qualia”.
That’s setting the bar rather high. Physicalism is usually only required to explain higher level concepts where they are a given.
Which gives you physicalist ontology at best. But physicalism also has an epistemological definition; all facts are physical facts. The idea that qualia amount to physics does not have a physical explanation, and is not predicted by physics.
The validity of the idea that qualia amount to physics is explained by the same kind of a physical explanation as in the case of an idea that a heap of atoms amounts to a rock—panpsychism is just a bridge law. Physics predicts existence the same way it predicts atoms, so we say that physics predicts qulia the same way it predicts rocks. What’s the relevant difference between “what you called a rock is actually atoms” and “what you called consciousness is actually existence” that makes latter unphysical?
Your original claim was more like qualia are atoms. You seem to have switched to talking about consciousness in a more general sense, whilst also switching to saying it equates to existence in general. But neither claim is a prediction of physics, anyway.
Panpsychism standardly states that all entities have irreducibly mental properties. That’s clearly in contrast to the physicalist claim that all properties reduce to physical properties.
Dual aspect theory theory asserts an equivalence between physical states and conscious states, but is unable to say which is fundamental , which is why “dual aspect” is generally coupled to “neutral monism”.
I guess “atoms can amount to qualia” was misleading, but I meant that you can describe human qualia using atoms, and that description would be as correct, as describing rock as heap of atoms would, and more complete than “I am seeing red”. The switch to “consciousness” was to prevent conflating specific qualia, that are not fundamental, with quale of universe.
Only in the same sense that “rocks are atoms” is not a prediction of physics.
Panpsychism that works (Russelian monism or whatever you want to call the one from http://consc.net/papers/panpsychism.pdf) states that all entities have one property that you can call mental—existence—and there is only one entity, because that is how actual physics works. And that property is also implicitly present in physicalism.
If dual aspect says that physical description is complete, even though you can describe things differently, then physics predicts that and you don’t need dual aspect. Is it says that physical description is incomplete, then I disagree and want to know what’s its objection to the kind of panpsychism I’m talking about.
Well, no, in practice you can’t describe a specific quale by describing a specific configuration of atoms (as in Mary’s Room). If you could, there would be no hard problem.
You can give microphysical explanation of a rock , once you input “rock” as a human concept. The same does not work for “red”.
Whats the quale of the universe?
I didn’t notice either idea being mentioned in the paper you linked.
Also, Chalmers seems conflicted about whether panpsychism is physicalism.
“In particular, constitutive Russellian panpsychism is incompatible with narrow physicalism, but it is a form of broad physicalism. ”
For what? Physics can allow you to predict external.events, but predicts nothing about how things seem to you. Dual aspect theory allows you to account for consciousness, without dismissing it ,and without embracing full dualism with its attendant problems.
How is that conflicted when broad physicalism is physicalism?
Right, sorry, it was another one where it’s called cosmopsychism: http://consc.net/papers/combination.pdf.
It does work if on the last step where someone will say “but these firing neurons are not actually my seeing of red!” you also input arguments for panpsychism. They are the same kind of explanation, so panpsychism can in principle solve the hard problem. So if you disagree you have to disagree with something specific about panpsychism.
So now that you can, yes, the hard problem is solved.
I mean that actual physics doesn’t include fundamental division of universe into parts, so the most precise description of qualia is description of the quale of the universe. And that description is the same as physical description of the state of the universe. Or do you want me to say things that would result in non-verbal thoughts/feelings in you that you would judge as similar to the state of universe? Because that would depend on your judgement.