Reading Notes: April 15th, 2022

“Panpsychism’s popularity stems from the fact that it promises to solve two deep problems simultaneously. The first is the famous “hard problem” of consciousness. How does the brain produce conscious experience? How can neurons firing give rise to experiences of color, sound, taste, pain and so on? In principle, scientists could map my brain processes in complete detail but, it seems, they could never detect my experiences themselves—the way colors look, pain feels and so on: the phenomenal properties of the brain states involved. Somehow, it seems, brain processes acquire a subjective aspect, which is invisible to science. How can we possibly explain this?” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 1) 

This is very interesting. If we venture back into the moth-eaten pages of periodical literature, we’d quickly notice that Frankish does not adhere to any semblance of the so-called “act-object” distinction. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that “my experiences” are just “the way colors look, pain feels and so on;” however, by identifying “my-experience-of-X” with “the-way-in-which-X-looks/sounds/tastes/feels-to-me,” Frankish (knowingly or unknowingly) commits the (alleged) “original sin” of Berkeley: failing to recognize the difference between the “perception-of-an-object” and the “object-of-perception.” 

Frankish insists that colors, sounds, tastes, and pains are real, and that our experiences of colors, sounds, tastes, and pains are also real (he simply qualifies this by saying that we mischaracterize our experiences as having properties which they don’t actually instantiate but only “seem” to). If we take the above passage at face value, then Frankish seems to be suggesting that my experience of a color, sound, taste, or pain is the way in which the color, sound, taste, or pain looks, sounds, tastes, or feels to me. Or, to simplify, “my-experience-of-a-color” is “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me,” “my-experience-of-a-pain” is “the-way-in-which-the-pain-feels-to-me,” and so on. 

This “way-in-which-the…to-me” talk—despite appearing to be as “neutral” and “non-partisan” as one can get—is rather sterile, empty, and misleading. For now, for the sake of argument, I won’t write it off completely; however, I think substituting that formula with “how-the…to-me” would do everyone a favor and steer us away from venturing even further down the path of vicious abstractionism. 

Frankish goes on to say that the ways in which colors, sounds, tastes, and pains look, sound, taste, and feel to me are “phenomenal properties.” For example, he says, “the way colors look, pain feels and so on: the phenomenal properties of the brain states involved,” “It seems obvious that phenomenal properties, such as the feel of pain,” etc. To Frankish, “phenomenal properties…seem completely inaccessible to science. They are wholly subjective features, which simply do not show up on the scientific radar.” Now, if “phenomenal properties” are real, and are instantiated in the world, then what would these “wholly subjective features” be properties of? Frankish states that these “phenomenal properties” (if they were instantiated in the world) appear to be properties of the brain states involved in our experiences of colors, sounds, tastes, pains, and so on. 

Confusion ensues. If “my-experience-of-a-color” is just “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me,” and “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me” is a “phenomenal property,” then we are faced with several inconsistencies. 

(I) Frankish denies that “phenomenal properties” are “real” and instantiated in the world. Since Frankish holds that “my-experience-of-a-color” is just “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me” (cf. “my experiences themselves—the way colors look, pain feels and so on”), and that “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me” are “phenomenal properties” (cf. “the way colors look, pain feels and so on: the phenomenal properties…”), it follows that Frankish is committed to the unreality of my experiences of colors, sounds, tastes, and pains. However, this conflicts with his insistence that “our lives are filled with conscious experiences—episodes of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, and of having bodily sensations of various kinds” and that these experiences are indeed real. 

(II) Furthermore, Frankish, being an Identity Theorist, is committed to the view that “my-experience-of-a-color” is identical to a process in my brain. However, Frankish asserts that “phenomenal properties” (if they were instantiated in the world) would be properties of the brain states involved in our experiences of colors, sounds, tastes, pains, and so on. (cf. “the way colors look, pain feels and so on: the phenomenal properties of the brain states involved.”) This is a manifest contradiction. Let me illustrate this. If “my-experience-of-a-color” is identical to “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me,” and “the-way-in-which-the-color-looks-to-me” is a “phenomenal property,” then it cannot be the case that the “phenomenal property” is a property of the brain processes involved in “my-experience-of-a-color.” Indeed, “my-experience-of-a-color” is ex hypothesi identical to that very brain process. A property (“phenomenal” or “non-phenomenal”) of the brain process cannot be identical to the brain process of which it is a property—an adjective cannot have itself as its own substantive! 

“There are problems for panpsychism, of course, perhaps the most important being the combination problem. Panpsychists hold that consciousness emerges from the combination of billions of subatomic consciousnesses, just as the brain emerges from the organization of billions of subatomic particles. But how do these tiny consciousnesses combine? We understand how particles combine to make atoms, molecules and larger structures, but what parallel story can we tell on the phenomenal side? How do the micro-experiences of billions of subatomic particles in my brain combine to form the twinge of pain I’m feeling in my knee? If billions of humans organized themselves to form a giant brain, each person simulating a single neuron and sending signals to the others using mobile phones, it seems unlikely that their consciousnesses would merge to form a single giant consciousness. Why should something similar happen with subatomic particles?” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 2-3)

“A related problem [for panpsychism] concerns conscious subjects. It’s plausible to think that there can’t be conscious experience without a subject who has the experience. I assume that we and many other animals are conscious subjects, and panpsychists claim that subatomic particles are too. But is that it? Are there any intermediate-level conscious subjects (molecules, crystals, plants?), formed like us from combinations of micro-subjects? It’s hard to see why subjecthood should be restricted to just subatomic particles and higher animals, but equally hard to think of any non-arbitrary way of extending the category.” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 3) 

“I remain unpersuaded [by panpsychism], and I’m not alone in this. Even if we accept that basic physical entities must have some categorical nature (and it might be that we don’t; perhaps at bottom reality is just dispositions), consciousness is an unlikely candidate for this fundamental property. For, so far as our evidence goes, it is a highly localized phenomenon that is specific not only to brains but to particular states of brains (attended intermediate-level sensory representations, according to one influential account). It appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 3) 

“Moreover, panpsychism gives consciousness a curious status. It places it at the very heart of every physical entity yet threatens to render it explanatorily idle. For the behavior of subatomic particles and the systems they constitute promises to be fully explained by physics and the other physical sciences. Panpsychism offers no distinctive predictions or explanations. It finds a place for consciousness in the physical world, but that place is a sort of limbo. Consciousness is indeed a hard nut to crack, but I think we should exhaust the other options before we take a metaphysical sledgehammer to it.” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 3-4) 

“In principle, scientists could map my brain processes in complete detail but, it seems, they could never detect my experiences themselves [they are] invisible to science….I remain unpersuaded [by panpsychism], and I’m not alone in this. Even if we accept that basic physical entities must have some categorical nature…consciousness [or experience] is an unlikely candidate for this fundamental property. For, so far as our evidence goes, [experience] is a highly localized phenomenon that is specific not only to brains but to particular states of brains (attended intermediate-level sensory representations, according to one influential account). It appears to be a specific state of certain highly complex information-processing systems, not a basic feature of the Universe.” (Frankish, Why Panpsychism is Probably Wrong, 1-4) 

“[According to Yujin Nagasawa] if we take [the hard problem of consciousness] seriously, then panpsychism is worth a look. Now, as it happens, my own view is that we shouldn’t take the hard problem seriously. I believe it is a pseudo-problem, which is rooted in a misguided depsychologized conception of consciousness.” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 51) 

“I shall use the term phenomenal realism for the view that the phenomenal concept of consciousness is coherent and identifies something real (whether or not this thing is ontologically distinct from anything non-phenomenal). Phenomenal realism is widely taken to be self-evidently true, but it has been challenged. Daniel Dennett has made a powerful case for the incoherence of the concept, arguing that we cannot apply phenomenal concepts introspectively in the way phenomenal realists suppose.” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 53) 

“The phenomenal form of consciousness is supposed to constitute the subjective aspect of our mental lives—our sense that we have an inner life, that it is like something to be us. Yet suitable psychological processes could produce something of this sort. Take a very simplified example. Imagine a robot equipped with perceptual systems that provide it with high quality information about the world around it and make this information available to the systems controlling its behavior. The robot is aware of the world and has experiences in the psychological sense. It has a point of view on the world, a set of perceptual sensitivities that give it a particular take on how the world is. We might describe it as having a kind of subjectivity—perceptual subjectivity. Still, we would not be tempted to say that its experiences themselves have a subjective aspect to them—that it is like anything for the robot to undergo them. The robot does not have an inner life. But now suppose we equip the robot with internal introspective systems which monitor its own psychological states and their effects and make information about them available to control systems. Now the robot is aware of its own experiences, too, and has various abilities with respect to them. It can recognize its experiences when it has them, describe them, compare them with each other, and talk about their effects on the rest of its psychology. It might report that its experiences have a distinctive character, which it cannot easily describe (since the introspective information is limited) but which is real and powerful. It might further notice that it sometimes has an experience of this kind normally produced by a certain object when its other senses tell it that the object isn’t really there, and, reflecting on this (a further psychological process), it might conclude that it is acquainted with a private inner world of subjective experience that is better known to it than the outer world. In short, introspective processes might create a complex of internally directed attitudes and reactions that we might fairly describe as constituting an inner life.” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 53-54) 

“Phenomenal properties do not integrate naturally into our picture of the physical world. It is not just that they have no conceptual connections with physical states; they seem completely inaccessible to science. They are wholly subjective features, which simply do not show up on the scientific radar.” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 56) 

“It seems obvious that phenomenal properties, such as the feel of pain, affect our behaviour. Yet there is reason to think that all our behaviour can be explained in terms of neurally realized psychological processes.” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 56) 

“[Phenomenal properties] are supposed to be directly observable—perhaps the only things that are truly so. Yet each instance of them can be observed by only one person and only from a specific, introspective viewpoint. They are publicly unobservable observables!” (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 58-59) 

“It is impossible to directly identify correlations between neural states and phenomenal states, since phenomenal states are not publicly detectable. The best we can do is to identify correlations between neural states and responses we take to be symptomatic of phenomenal states—either voluntary ones, such as reports or button presses, or automatic ones, such as eye movements.”  (Frankish, Panpsychism and the Depsychologization of Consciousness, 59) 

“Science does not find qualitative properties inside the brain any more than it does outside it.” (Frankish, Galileo’s Real Error, 1) 

“[Goff] proposes a form of panpsychism, according to which conscious experience is the intrinsic nature of all matter and the qualities we experience are constructed from the primitive qualities of the particles that constitute our brains. In effect, Goff keeps qualities in the mind but distributes minds throughout the world….I agree with Goff that it is a mistake to treat sensory qualities as either identical with, or emergent from, neural ones….It is not a datum that we are immediately acquainted with mind-located sensory qualities, but a theory….The moral, then, is that the starting point for thinking about consciousness is not an introspective datum—the existence of mind-located sensory qualities (or “phenomenal” properties). Rather it is a problem: how to reconcile our everyday image of the world as arrayed with sensory qualities with a scientific image of the world that has no place for them.” (Frankish, Galileo’s Real Error, 3) 

“Maybe what’s happening is something like this. As well as tracking features of the world, our brains also track the complex reactive patterns these features evoke in us and misrepresent these reactive patterns as simple qualitative aspects of the tracked features. Thus, when we conceptualize an object as having a certain sensory quality—redness, say—we are in effect conceptualizing it as affecting us like this—where the demonstrative gestures at the complex reactive pattern triggered by red things. We are representing worldly features as ones that have a certain significance for us….Am I really denying that the blue of the sky through my window is not real, that is not instantiated in all its dazzling blueness? I am denying it, though there’s a sense in which I still can’t help taking the blueness to be real. It is part of my subjective “take” on the world—the huge set of automatic psychological reactions to stimuli constructed by brain systems over which I have no control. This take is a psychological condition, and a thing is part of it if my brain produces reactions indicative of the thing’s reality. I cannot bypass these reactions and encounter the world raw—though I can, of course, learn to distrust them and reflectively correct my beliefs about what the world really is like. This goes for sensory qualities as much as for any other aspect of the world. They seem undeniably real because our brains produce psychological reactions strongly indicative of their reality, and when we tell ourselves a story about what we are experiencing, they figure in it as peremptory presences. I should stress that I am not suggesting that it is a fault in our brains systems that they construct a quality-suffused take on the world….If we ask where sensory qualities are actually located, then the answer is that it’s in the same place as Hamlet’s indecision and Anna Karenina’s intelligence.” (Frankish, Galileo’s Real Error, 5) 

“Arguments for materialism are few….I believe my own faith in materialism is based on science worship.” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 552) 

“Functionalism, the reigning materialism of the past 35 years or so, does not strictly entail materialism, but has been held largely because it is the least bad way of remaining a materialist. The only functionalist dualist I have ever known or heard of was that late Roland Puccetti…” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 552) 

“But then Smart did advance a real argument; he appealed to mind-brain correlations: It is reasonable to think that every mental state or event has at least a corresponding type of brain state or event. The best, because most parsimonious, explanation of those correlations is that the mental states/events just are the “corresponding” brain states/events. (In general: When Xs are invariably accompanied by Ys and you can find nothing to distinguish Xs from Ys, the best explanation is that Xs just are Ys.) I firmly agree that parsimony or simplicity is a reason for preferring one hypothesis to another. But it is a very posterior reason. That is, not only does it always carry the qualification “other things being equal,” but many, nearly all, other things must be equal before parsimony is called in to break the tie. And no party to the mind-body dispute will deny that dualists have found plenty of features that seem to distinguish mental states/events from neurophysiological ones—even if, as materialists contend, all those differences are ultimately specious. To anyone uncontaminated by neuroscience or materialist philosophizing, the mental does not seem physical in any way at all, much less neurophysiological. The parsimony argument does not even come in the door until it is agreed that we can find nothing to distinguish mental states from neurophysiological ones. And the latter will not be agreed anytime soon.  More decisively, Smart’s alleged [type] correlations have never materialized….There may be a few type-correlations holding within particular species, but if so they are very few.” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 552-553) 

“Matters improved when, independently of each other, David Lewis and D.M. Armstrong offered their respective causal arguments for identifying mental states and events with neurophysiological states and events. Their common idea was that mental concepts are causal role concepts, and so their afford role-occupation identifications (as in the case of genes and segments of DNA molecules)….This was an important development, because the argument was deductive and obviously valid. But is either premise true? Premise 1 was counter-exampled early on by Keith Campbell and others: A state of a creature, or for that matter of an assembly of Tinkertoys or beer cans, could occupy the commonsense role of pain but without being mental at all, much less feeling like a pain. Remember, 1 is a conceptual or at least a priori claim; fantastical imaginary cases are fair play….1 does not formally beg the question, but it comes close. The dualist should never and would never accept 1 in the first place….Turning to the Lewis-Armstrong premise 2: it seems fine until one realizes that its first word is “the.” 2 begs the question against the dualist view that role P is causally overdetermined….” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 553)

“For the record, I think intentionality is a much greater obstacle to materialism than is anything to do with consciousness, qualia, phenomenal character, subjectivity, etc. If intentionality itself is naturalized, those other things are pretty easily explicated in terms of it. But in my view, current psychosemantics is feeble: it treats only of concepts tied closely to the thinker’s physical environment; it addresses only thoughts and beliefs, and not more exotic propositional attitudes whose functions are not to be correct representations; and it does not apply to any thought that is even partly metaphorical. More on these failings in a subsequent paper.” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 553) 

“Arguments for materialism are few….[Proceeds to show that all of the arguments for materialism are either question-begging or rest on false or implausible premises]….I know of no other arguments for materialism…Have a nice day.” (Lycan, Giving Dualism Its Due, 552-562) [The text in brackets is my own]

“The relational ideas denoted by like, different, similar, etc., are less intuitable. Here the reference to something else is not given with the intuition itself, but is added by our thought, which can, at will, bring together the most remote objects for its purpose of comparison. Two things which are alike or different do not, apart from my reflection, form a single whole, which can be resolved into its constituents parts; the unity in which they are placed by the relational judgement arises from my consciousness of mental activities having reference to the content of the objects of thought. The immediate and evident certainty with which we apprehend and recognizes likeness, difference, and similarity, in the simplest cases, is apt to make us look upon these determinations as if they were something sense-given, and to overlook the particular functions through which we become conscious of them—functions which always presuppose that several objects are presented and compared as to their nature. Here also the relational ideas, when taken also, are quite without significance; it would be meaningless to say A is like, A is different. Like and different are really predicates only when combined with a definite point of reference.” (Sigwart, Logic, Vol. I, 69-70) 

“Here we see clearly the peculiar difficulty which this concept of Being brings with it. On the one hand, it cannot be spoken of at all without presupposing a relation to me, the person who thinks of it. I have an idea of the object because it has entered into some relation to me; that is, is my thought. But by this very thought I set aside this mere relativity and declare that the existent is, apart from its reference to me or any other thinking creature; that its being does not wholly consist in the relation of being thought as an object of my consciousness.” (Sigwart, Logic, Vol. I, 74)