Edited by: Riccardo Manzotti, Università IULM, Italy
Reviewed by: Rafael Malach, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel; Donald Matthew Mender, Yale University, United States; Ignaz Knips, Universität zu Köln, Germany
This article was submitted to Consciousness Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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Some materialists believe that physics is rich enough to bridge Levine's Explanatory Gap
In the first five sections, I seek to present the ingredients of the aforementioned approach, while in the sixth section, I will apply this approach to three specific examples.
Sec. 1. Naturalism and Neo-Naturalism.
1a. Naturalism.
1b. Setting the limits from within 1c. Neo-Naturalism.
Sec. 2. Chalmers's A–F classification of theories of mind and the meta-problem of consciousness.
2a. The meta-problem.
2b. The six theories.
Sec. 3. Two problems facing naturalized type-C theories, SDA, Stoljar's Ignorance Hypothesis, and Transformational Emergence.
3a. Naturalism and the Ignorance Hypothesis.
3b. Transformational Emergence.
3c. The SDA and type-XC theories.
4. Unification, poiesis, and symmetry.
4a. Unificationist Neo-Naturalism.
4b. Revelatory dynamics.
4c. Noether's Theorem.
Sec. 5. Neo-naturalizing information and Pragmatic Neutral Monism.
5a. Common Origin Pragmatic-Neutral Monism.
5b. Neo-naturalizing information.
Sec. 6. Three physical examples that can make a philosophical difference.
6a. Self-measurement, circumventing the SDA.
6b. Chronos and Kiros.
6c. Holographic possibility.
Unlike physicalism, naturalism is not a thesis but a loose collection of ontological and methodological commitments that might best be described as a cherished “coat of arms” portraying a scientist slaying a supernatural dragon. At the same time, here is Melnyk (
The obvious outward sign of this difference in practice is the greatly increased probability that a philosophical journal article or book will discuss or cite the findings of some kind of empirical investigation, usually a science, but sometimes a branch of history. The difference itself is the (partial) so-called naturalization of many branches of philosophy (p. 79).
Born out of opposition to claims of the supernatural, naturalism today is mostly associated with a rejection of a priori analytic attempts to restrict the scope of the sciences and a strict adherence to the causal closure of the physical, rejecting realist approaches to mathematical and normative concepts and epiphenomenal approaches to consciousness. Ontological naturalism rejects spatiotemporal effects that lack spatiotemporal causes (Papineau,
The inevitable march of physics toward background-independent physical theories
The realm of the non-mental, which is how the domain of physicalism is usually construed, contains a remarkable variety of ontological and theoretical features, and that variety must be respected rather than lumped into the catchall category of physicalism (p. 6).
According to Papineau (p. 6), the driving motivation for ontological naturalism is the need to explain how different kinds of things can make a causal difference to the spatiotemporal world. Ontological naturalism's unconditional embrace of spatiotemporal causal closure leaves it with two unsatisfactory choices—either consciousness unfolds in space and time like ordinary physical entities, which entails all the problems faced by physicalism, or else it is somehow “external” to space and time, facing the problems entailed by dualism [see Papineau on Interactionist Dualism; (Papineau,
Methodologically, I will argue that a topic-neutral solution to the (weak) meta- problem of consciousness
Among the possible advantages of naturalist theories of mind over their physicalist counterparts are the following:
They are more flexible; all the theories of mind in Chalmers' A–F classification have at one time or another appeared in naturalized versions (section Chalmers's A–F Classification of Major Theories of Mind). They admit what I call “conciliatory” modes of explanation (section Transformational Emergence). They are not as metaphysically committed. They view science as reality's way of revealing itself to us (or to itself), cherishing instances in which empirical/synthetic discoveries trump long-held a priori intuitions (section Revelatory Dynamics). They are better suited to incorporate the kind of recent physics threatening to undermine physicalism (Schneider, They are in a better position than physicalism to circumvent Kriegel's Principle of Empirical Equivalence (Kriegel,
As examples of Naturalism's suspicion of the ability of a priori analysis to determine the scope and limitations of the sciences (from the outside, so to speak), consider Heisenberg's uncertainty relations and Gödel's incompleteness theorem. The first results from the maturation of classical mechanics to the point of establishing some of its own scope and limitations by discovering quantum mechanical indeterminacy (Plotnitsky,
The “neo” in Neo-Naturalism is used in different ways and can refer to a reconfiguration of naturalism that accounts for scientific facts unknown to the naturalists of old. Examples would be quantum mechanical facts like entanglement and a more holistic naturalism such as Bohm's Implicate Order, the reliance of Ladyman and Ross's “naturalized metaphysics” on the vague ontological nature of the constituents of reality as portrayed by modern physics (the goal of “Everything must go” (Ladyman et al.,
The “Neo” can also refer to responses to naturalism that reject the uncritical reliance of naturalism on traditional metaphysical dogma. Here one can think of McDowell's “unquestioned” second nature (McDowell,
The demand for continuity has, over large tracts of science, proved itself to possess true prophetic powers. We ought therefore ourselves sincerely to try every possible mode of conceiving the dawn of consciousness so that it may not appear equivalent to the irruption into the universe of a new nature, non-existent until then.
On this account PGS is a pragmatic Neo-Naturalist who believes that understanding metabolic “molecular storms” and Reafference Compensation
In this paper I will try to construct a neo-naturalist theory of mind that combines PGS's continuity with, among other things, Ladyman and Ross's Principle of Naturalist Closure (PNC) (p. 10, 37), necessarily relating new useful metaphysical hypothesis to fundamental physics and demanding a maximal overlap of physics with metaphysics, and Melnyk's emphasis on establishing cross-theoretical a posteriori identities (Melnyk,
The neo-naturalism that I will promote is:
Neo-Nominalist—Committed to spatiotemporal existence except when accounting for emergent spacetime. “Pre-Socratic”—Physics as immanent poietic revealing. Empirical—Deeply suspicious of a priori analytic attempts to limit the sciences (Quine). Patient—Takes a diachronic approach to the sciences, holding that sufficiently mature sciences determine their scope and limitations from the inside, so to speak. Conciliatory—Embraces the unexplained and even the unexplainable when shown to “carve nature at the joints” (Lewis, Strategic—Separates the problem of consciousness into the scientific problem of providing a full physical explanation, a formidable project indeed, and the meta- philosophical one of letting physics explain our anti-physicalist intuitions.
According to Chalmers (
Importantly, the meta-problem is not just a problem for illusionists. It is a problem for everybody. The problem of explaining our judgments about consciousness arises if consciousness is an illusion, and it also arises if consciousness is perfectly real. Furthermore, even a non-illusionist can reasonably hope both that there will be a solution to the meta-problem and that this solution will help us with the hard problem (Chalmers,
Neo-naturalism is not as much anti-theoretical as meta-theoretical, deeply suspicious of the immutability of philosophical questions and instead asks the same questions but as products of beings like us in a world like ours (as a form of behavior) and asking how they came to be in the first place, in the best tradition not only of Dewey and Peter Godfrey-Smith but also of work on AI that generate problem reports. It is interesting to note that the theme of “questioning the question” brings together the meta-problem of consciousness, naturalism, and the postmodern critique of traditional metaphysics based on the “unquestioned privilege of the question” (Derrida in “Of Spirit,”
Although the meta-problem is strictly speaking an easy problem, it is closely tied to the hard problem. We can reasonably hope that a solution to the meta-problem will shed significant light on the hard problem. A particularly strong line holds that a solution to the meta-problem will solve or dissolve the hard problem. A weaker line holds that it will not remove the hard problem, but it will constrain the form of a solution (Chalmers,
While it is interesting to consider the prospects of the naturalization of all the theories in Chalmers's classification, A–F, of major theories of mind (2010) in conjunction with their prospects of solving the meta-problem of consciousness, I will only do so for a version of type-C theories that I consider a preferable naturalization candidate and briefly present the alternative theories.
Type-A Materialism. Eliminative Materialism and Illusionism that reject the existence of both ontological and epistemological explanatory gaps (holding both that consciousness is not made up of something non-physical and that there is no explanatory gap separating conceptual and phenomenal concepts) and considered by Dennett and Frankish, respectively, as the only viable naturalistic theory of consciousness, can be linked to Quine's “replacement naturalism” aiming to replace traditional epistemology with empirical psychology, Gilbert Ryle's scientifically austere behaviorism, and Dawking's emphasis on “natural” evolution, all respectable naturalistic strategies. When it comes to the meta-problem, both would probably point to the fact that by producing a topic-neutral solution to the meta-problem, the eliminativist has nothing more to explain, while consciousness realists must still explain the relationship between the meta-process and the more problematic phenomenal process, because if the meta-process is enough to explain behavioral/physical problem reports
Type-B Materialism. Papineau (
Type-C Materialism. Of these six types of theories of mind, only one, type-C materialism, attributes Levine's Explanatory Gap to current ignorance of experience-relevant physical facts, the other five depending on a priori analytic attempts to determine the scope and limitations of physical novelty from without, so to speak. This makes type-C theories ideally suited to benefit from empirical discoveries and naturalization. However, naturalizing type-C theories faces two major obstacles; they are notoriously unstable (see SDA
Type-D Dualism. In his 1966 “The Conscious Mind,” Chalmers advances a form of Naturalistic Dualism, naturalistic because he believes mental states are caused by physical systems like brains and are related to them nomically through psycho-physical laws and dualist because he believes mental states are not reducible to physical ones. However, not only is Naturalistic Dualism ill-suited to handle the meta-problem, it also makes prohibitive metaphysical commitments, contradicting both the spirit and letter of naturalism.
Type-E Interactive Dualism is hard to naturalize (Papineau,
Type-F theories holding that the categorical base of the microphysical properties is phenomenal or proto-phenomenal not only make unreasonably strong metaphysical commitments but also attempt to limit the sciences from “without” by holding that even a mature physics at the limit of its theoretical validity will fail to establish the existence of non-relational/intrinsic and non-structural elements in its midst. Searle's Biological Naturalism holds that it is possible to have an epistemologically objective theory of an ontologically subjective domain. When it comes to the meta-problem of consciousness, type-F theories seem to fail to explain problem reports.
As we have stated above, the naturalization of type-C theories must overcome both Chalmers's Structure and Dynamics Argument (SDA) and Stoljar's objection. Most type-C theories are based on currently unknown physical truths, and the best-worked-out such theory is probably Daniel Stoljar's Epistemic View. Central to this view is his Ignorance Hypothesis, holding that we are ignorant of experience-relevant physical truths, knowledge of which would be enough to explain away the conceivability argument. The naturalistic theory of mind presented here embraces Stoljar's separation of the “problem of consciousness” into two separate problems, the formidable project of providing a full constitutive and causal explanation of consciousness (beginning with the Big Bang), and the philosophical problem of explaining away the anti-physicalist intuition giving rise to arguments like Chalmers' “conceivability argument.” However, a more positive conception of the Epistemic View is not easy to come by, and according to McGinn and Russell our ignorance is of facts that are quite different than any we are familiar with, which makes it difficult to find the kind of relevant historic case studies on which Stoljar's argument depends:
Stoljar is here placing strong demands on the content of our ignorance. It must be such that if only we knew the relevant non-experiential facts, this would render zombies inconceivable. However, it is not clear that any non-experiential facts could play this role. By their nature, non-experiential facts would seem to be third-personal, objective, and non-perspectival, while experiential facts are first- personal, subjective, and perspectival. It is hard to see how knowledge of the former could automatically render the absence of the latter inconceivable (Papineau,
However, this is exactly what I will attempt to do here. While on their face Stoljar's Epistemic View and type-C theories seem ripe for naturalization, the Ignorance Hypothesis is problematic nevertheless. To quote Stoljar (
According to Stoljar, naturalism follows Wittgenstein here by rejecting the Ignorance Hypothesis. Appealing to truths that are “off the table” in the midst of philosophizing threatens to explain too much and restricting oneself to “on the table” facts only explains too little. It is here one can appeal to Transformational Emergence (TE) (Guay and Sartenaer,
Naturalism has always suffered from a certain tension between its commitment to the principle of continuity and the emergence of radical novelty. Transformational Emergence is a way of balancing both commitments.
If S(t1) = S1, TE consists of a dependence clause and a novelty clause, (depd) S2 is the product of a spatiotemporally continuous process going from S1 (for example causal, and possibly fully deterministic). In particular, the “realm” R to which S1 and S2 commonly belong (e.g., the physical realm) is closed, to the effect that nothing outside of R participates in S1 bringing about S2.
And yet: (novd) S2 exhibits new entities, properties, or powers that do not exist in S1, and that are furthermore forbidden to exist in S1 according to the laws {L
By embracing the “impossible which is there nevertheless” (Plotnitsky,
The second problem facing type-C theories is the theoretical instability problem and the SDA (Chalmers, A physical description is structural/dynamic. Structural descriptions can only yield other structural descriptions. Consciousness is not structural.
Therefore, physical description, even at the limit of its theoretical validity, fails to apprehend consciousness. The SDA is especially damaging to type-C theories because of their reliance on the prospects of currently unknown physics and can be used to show (Alter,
By structure/dynamic, Chalmers refers to the familiar dynamic equations of physics, where a structural description is defined as a Ramsey sentence whose O-terms are spatiotemporal, mathematical, and nomic. Stoljar (
Realist solutions to the (weak) meta-problem of consciousness that constrain the hard problem are not easy to come by, and both the meta-process and the phenomenal process are likely to be strange, as parsimony suggests it is unlikely that two highly correlated strange phenomena will be explained by two unrelated strange and rare mechanisms. Therefore, a topic-neutral mechanism that explains the meta-problem but not the full-blown hard problem can nevertheless provide the “end of the string” that could unravel the hard problem. Again, if a realist is compelled to accept the validity of some meta-process while insisting it is independent of the phenomenal process, then she might as well embrace eliminativism.
To solve both the type-C instability problem and the meta-problem of consciousness, it is enough to embrace Chalmers's “Intermediate Notion Type-C Theory,” (Chalmers,
One might hold that there is some intermediate notion X, such that truths about X hold in virtue of structural-dynamic descriptions, and truths about consciousness hold in virtue of X. But as in the case of type-A materialism, either X is functionally analyzable (in the broad sense), in which case the second step fails, or X is not functionally analyzable, in which case the first step fails.
Here I think that Chalmers is too pessimistic for several reasons. First, type- XC theories seem ideally suited to relate the meta-process to the phenomenal process while avoiding unnecessary metaphysical commitments like Russellian Monism's commitment to “phenomenal stuffing” (Armstrong,
If type-C theories hold that Mary, the color-blind scientist, will be able to experience red when she knows enough about the physical facts, type-XC theories hold that long before that Mary will know enough to understand why she cannot experience red before exiting her room, perhaps by discovering a limiting theory. Another way of thinking of type-XC theories is as a search for a single mechanism that has a meta-process aspect and a phenomenal aspect in which a structural meta-process necessitates a non-structural phenomenal process.
As stated in section Naturalism and Neo-Naturalism, the version of unificationist naturalism that I have in mind combines elements of Kitcher's (
A classic reference favoring naturalistic unification is Oppenheim and Putnam's “The Unity of Science as a Working Hypothesis” (Oppenheim and Putnam,
Oppenheim and Putnam intended to articulate an idea of science as a reductive unity of concepts and laws to those of the most elementary elements. They also defended it as an empirical hypothesis—not an a priori ideal, project or precondition—about science. Moreover, they claimed that its evolution manifested a trend in that unified direction out of the smallest entities and lowest levels of aggregation (Cat,
Oppenheim and Putnam's empirical approach to unificationist naturalism can be supplemented by Don Ross, James Ladyman, and David Spurrett (RLS)'s “Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized” (Ladyman et al.,
RLS's project is unificationist since they aim to “defend a radically naturalistic metaphysics. By this we mean a metaphysics that is motivated exclusively by attempts to unify hypotheses and theories that are taken seriously by contemporary science.” RLS's naturalized metaphysics is clear about its rejection of philosophical a priori attempts to limit the scope of the sciences: “…science respects no domain restrictions and will admit no epistemological rivals (such as natural theology or purely speculative metaphysics).” RLS also implicitly suggest that the SDA that so threatens type-C materialism should not be taken too seriously: “…no hypothesis that the approximately consensual current scientific picture declares to be beyond our capacity to investigate should be taken seriously.”
RLS's neo-naturalized metaphysics distances itself from the cozy relationship between traditional naturalism and metaphysics and supplements the principle of causal closure threatened by new scientific conceptions of time with its PNC or “Principle of Naturalistic Closure”:
Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time
The PNC is useful to neo-naturalist theories of mind that appeal to fundamental physics and is commensurate with RLS's commitment to a maximal overlap between naturalized metaphysics and fundamental physics. It is also unificationist and poietic. However, RLS's commitment to a purely relational base conflicts with Newman's Paradox (Goff,
If a metaphysical question can be put into the “What is ?” form (e.g., “What is causation?”), then in principle it can be answered by assembling empirical evidence for the relevant a posteriori identity claim. And the same approach can be used to address the question of how to unify the sciences, since, at least on my view, unification is achieved by discovering cross-scientific a posteriori identity claims (Melnyk,
The advantage vantage of the PNC is that it tries to account for novelty, perhaps motivated by the belief that the path of a “joint carving” unificationist naturalism is littered with novelty.
This is a good place to sketch some of the connections between ontological and methodological unification on the one hand and the kind of poietic take on the sciences advanced by this paper. Cat on Oppenheimer and Putnam naturalism states:
In an important sense, the evolution of science recapitulates, in the reverse [my emphasis], the evolution of matter, from aggregates of elementary particles to the formation of complex organisms and species (we find a similar assumption in Weinberg's downward arrow of explanation). Unity, then, is manifested not just in mereological form, but also diachronically, genealogically or historically (Cat,
I find this quote to be closely related to the pre-Socratic dictum, “The first to appear is the last to be revealed,” mentioned by Heidegger in
A “pre-Socratic” neo-naturalism views science as a poietic source of novelty that is revealed by instances of unification, as can be seen from historic examples. The counter-intuitive novelty that “sprang out” of Faraday and Maxwell's unification of electricity and magnetism was the realization that light is electromagnetic waves, just as the unification of Maxwell's equations with classical mechanics (the Galilean transformation) resulted in the highly counter-intuitive special relativity, and unifying QM with special relativity resulted in the Dirac equation and the highly counterintuitive negative energy states and antimatter. The same can be said about Newton's discovery of “action at a distance” and many more such examples that support the claim that unification is poietic.
A naturalism that wishes to account for all of these instances of unificationist revelatory dynamics must acknowledge the centrality of symmetry and invariance transformations to physics, mathematics, and cognition. The single most important tool in which physicists use symmetry principles to generate physical novelty, especially novel conserved quantities, is
Noether's Theorem relates conservation laws to symmetries of space, time, and internal symmetries.
Because of the central role of conservation laws, Noether's Theorem may be one of the most strategic programs of deductive reasoning in all of physics. In some sense it surely takes us along the way toward the foundation of physics (Neuenschwander,
The theorem furnishes profound connections between the fundamental constituents of reality and symmetry by combining the calculus of variations and QM with Lie groups. More importantly for our purpose, the unification program based on this theorem attributes the differences between elementary constituents of matter to the action of “broken symmetry” mechanisms, prior to which the differences were indiscernible.
If consciousness is physical, we need to explain why it appears to be so different from ordinary physical constituents. A realist assuming that consciousness is composed of some strange state of matter can ask whether symmetry principles in general and Noether's Theorem in particular can help us get a handle on that difference. Failure to do so would strengthen the conclusion that even if consciousness is a fundamentally “broadly physical” constituent of reality, it is fundamentally different than the rest of the unified constituents.
Not only do symmetry principles underlie physics and mathematics, they are also deeply implicated in their mysterious and “unreasonable” connections and seem ideally suited to apply to the
Invariance transformations and symmetry are not just central to cognition and what we call persistence conditions, but even to modern attempts to naturalize phenomenology (Varela et al.,
…a Form of Imaginative Variation by Which You Attempt to Reduce a Phenomenon into its Necessary Essences. This is Done by Theoretically Changing Different Elements (While Mentally Observing Whether or not the Phenomenon Changes) of a Practical Object to Learn Which Characteristics are Necessary for it to be it Without Being Something else? (Wikipedia contributors,
Noether's Theorem provides a neutral monism (NM) with a twist. The four standard varieties of NM are ones where the base is phenomenal, physical, both, or neither (Stubenberg,
The philosophical framework best suited to benefit from modern conceptions of symmetry is “common-origin neutral,” and in the next section I will present such a framework, relate it to (weak) type-C theories, and consider information as the neutral base.
Detractors of NM charge that it harbors two explanatory gaps, that of constructing the phenomenal from something that is not phenomenal (the protophenomenal gap) and that of constructing the physical from something that is not physical (the protophysical gap), and is therefore worse off than both physicalism and panpsychism. However, this charge fails when the protophenomenal gap is deeper than the protophysical gap, because bridging the protophysical gap improves the prospects of bridging the protophenomenal gap by identifying the base. This suggests an approach that I term Pragmatic NM (PNM) to bridging the protophenomenal gap that first looks to physics for possible base candidates to be subsequently evaluated for protophenomenal properties. One way to combine PNM with XC-type theories is to associate the first structural stage X with the restoration of a broken temporal symmetry, and the second stage, in which truths about consciousness hold in virtue of X, with the breaking of such symmetry. As stated above, one can think of X in XC-type theories as a mechanism that has two aspects, a structural one that is enough to solve the meta problem and a non-structural aspect, perhaps an inaccessible “radical interiority” (Plotnitsky,
Another way to combine PNM with XC-type theories is to identify the neutral base with the intermediate notion X so that truths about X are discovered by physics and hold in virtue of structural-dynamic descriptions, while truths about consciousness hold in virtue of X; however, the challenge is still to establish some kind of necessary connection between the two sets of truths. PNM's solution to the meta-problem of consciousness is that despite the lack of an ontological gap, consciousness cannot be grounded in ordinary physical constituents unless these are cashed back into the neutral base by undergoing symmetry restoration; presumably such mechanisms are special enough to account for our anti-physicalist intuition but not too special to be instantiated in physical systems like brains.
It seems as though a naturalized neutral monism that takes modern science seriously must consider information a serious base candidate.
Another way in which modern physics pressures naturalism into a radical reconfiguration worthy of the prefix
Underlying both unificationist naturalism and information-based spacetime is the concept of “difference.” As stated above, in modern physics the way to apprehend the difference between two physical constituents like a fermion and a boson is to discover a symmetry operation that transforms the one into the other (Livio,
Bits are abstract differences, and using these abstract differences to construct time may seem unnatural; abstract differences just seem too impoverished to yield time and phenomenality. However, one can argue that “difference” is more fundamental than time, because while there is no good reason to rule out possible worlds with time* that functions like time yet differs from our time, it is hard to conceive of a possible world with a difference* that functions like difference yet is
I will end by using both TE and the Parsimony Conjecture to motivate the consideration of three possible modern physical mechanisms based on self-measurement, prototemporal symmetry breaking, and Maldacena's holographic principle (Maldacena,
In section Two problems Facing Naturalized Type-C Theories, SDA, Stoljar's Epistemic View, and Transformational Emergence we mentioned the Parsimony Conjecture available to consciousness realists and relevant to the meta-problem. Two properties of consciousness feeding anti-physicalist intuitions are its inaccessibility to physical measuring devices and its peculiar and unmediated self-access. Both properties are not only very strange but highly correlated and therefore likely to result from a single mechanism, since otherwise we would have two highly correlated strange properties that are generated by completely different strange mechanisms. This suggests a naturalist strategy that attempts to bridge the protophenomenal gap by discovering physical mechanisms that satisfy the parsimony conjecture on the one hand and that can be shown to constitute a physical correlate of consciousness on the other.
As stated in section SDA and Type-XC Theories, type-C theories' appeal to the richness of physics makes them especially susceptible to Chalmers's SDA, which holds that since physical description is structural/dynamic, and since structural/dynamic descriptions can only produce other such descriptions, physics is not rich enough to describe consciousness since it is not structural. The naturalized type-C theory that I am considering here circumvents the SDA in different ways. The SDA takes structural descriptions to be spatiotemporal and mathematical, while the theories considered here are neither spatiotemporal nor symplectic, as, after all, the restoration of broken symmetry results in a lack of structure. However, ontological naturalism relies on physical measuring devices, and the argument against type-C theories can be recast thus:
Something is physical if it can register on a physical measuring device expressible in mks units (meter, kilogram, second). Consciousness is not measurable by measuring devices nor expressible in mks. Conclusion: consciousness is not physical.
One way out for a physicalist is to note that the brain is a physical device that measures/registers instances of consciousness, and thereby conclude that consciousness is physical after all. If the brain makes measurements on itself, there are three possibilities: either the whole brain measures itself, or some subsystem A performs measurement on another subsystem B, or else some subsystem A performs measurement on itself. If A measures B, then external devices could measure B. Since it is unlikely that the whole brain measures itself, what is left is A measuring itself and so on. At some point we need a genuine intrinsically reflexive self-measurement
While the first example was meant as a neo-naturalist theory of mind that circumvents the SDA, the next two examples appeal to modern physical conceptions of spacetime.
Neo-naturalist theories of mind in which time is constructed from aggregates of entangled, pre-geometric, and prototemporal
Considering an emergent time, we can define prototemporal properties similarly to the way Chalmers defines “protophenomenal” properties such that a prototemporal property:
Is not temporal. Is non-structural. Necessitates the temporal in the right context.
One way to bridge the prototemporal gap is by having the prototemporal phase/state undergo symmetry breaking, producing our familiar ordered, linear, and chronological Lorenzian time. The ancient Greeks called this time “Chronos,” but they had another word for the experience of the passage of time, Kiros.
From Descartes to Kant to Quinton (
On this analysis, the hard problem is hard because explaining consciousness requires more than explaining behavioral functions. Even after we have explained all the behavioral functions that we like, there may still remain a further question: why is all this functioning accompanied by conscious experience? When a system is set up to perform those functions, from the objective point of view, why is there something it is like to be the system, from the subjective point of view? (Chalmers,
Again we have an example of a two-stage XC-Materialism or a mechanism with a structural aspect that is enough to serve as a meta-process (explaining problem reports) but that also is implied to harbor a non/structural aspect that could both serve as X in the XC and the phenomenal process necessitated by the meta-process.
The third and final example of the way in which the “new physics” can make a philosophical difference involves the
After including additional curled-up dimensions as required by string theory, Maldacena convincingly argued that the physics witnessed by an observer living within this universe (an observer in the soup) could be completely described in terms of physics taking place on the universe's boundary (physics on the surface of the soup can) (Greene,
Greene goes on to add that (Greene,
All this is related to the canonical question regarding the fate of information inside black holes. For example, Hawking et al. (
After centuries of thought we still can only portray space and time as the most familiar of strangers. They unabashedly wend their way through our lives, but adroitly conceal their fundamental makeup from the very perceptions they so fully inform and influence (Greene,
Nothing has proven as contrary to common sense as space and time, and to quote Greene again:
Over the last century, we've become intimately acquainted with some previously hidden features of space and time through Einstein's two theories of relativity and through quantum mechanics. The slowing of time, the relativity of simultaneity, alternative slicing of spacetime, gravity as the warping and bending of space and time, the probabilistic nature of reality and long range quantum entanglement were not on the list of things that even the best of 19th century physicists would have expected to find just around the corner. And yet there they were (Greene,
Does spacetime have more surprises in store? Can those surprises be strange enough to shed some light on the physics of consciousness? Here I have tried to explore some alternatives that were strange enough to make a philosophical difference but not so strange as to be unphysical. While all this may sound a bit far out, the point I wish to make is that a neo-naturalism that trades its spatiotemporal causal closure for an information-based approach and that attempts to account for novel scientific conceptions of spacetime has new philosophically relevant moves at its disposal, and that the crisis of ontological naturalism presents us with fascinating opportunities.
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
1The seeming lack of any necessary connections between certain aspects of phenomenal facts and physical facts.
2Arguing that the real possibility of an unconscious being physically or behaviorally indistinguishable from us, i.e., zombies, undermines physicalism.
3Theories that do not unfold in preexisting spacetime.
4Think of designing AI that evolves to the point where it claims to be conscious or embraces dualism while lacking consciousness.
5Because concentrating on the meta-problem of consciousness can preserve both their neutrality and their reliance on empirical input.
6Gödel achieved this breakthrough by managing to have numbers refer to themselves.
7An unintended consequence of the need of embedded systems with a low signal-to-noise ratio to filter out the noise generated by the systems themselves. To do so, biological systems evolved self-models, thus providing a topic-neutral explanation of primitive subjectivity. The “first to appear” proto-subject is the “last to be revealed” to the subject's search for understanding. This is reminiscent of the pre-Socratic “ascent by descent” but also of Putnam's “Unification in reverse.” More on that in section Unification, Poiesis, and Symmetry.
8A typical topic-neutral explanation would attempt to show that computers with the right architecture, say a self-referential one, are likely to display symptoms typical of those caused by the meta-problem
9In Derrida's critique of Heidegger's logocentric claim that “questioning is the piety of thought.”
10Another legitimate strategy attempting to provide a topic-neutral solution to the meta-problem of consciousness that does not fit well in Chalmers's A–F spectrum is Uriah Kriegel's self-representational theory of consciousness, which attributes our illusion of the non-functionalizability of consciousness to resonant firing interactions between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the sensory cortex (McClelland,
11Think of a solution to the meta-problem as showing that evolving embedded robots devoid of consciousness are eventually compelled to make such reports, say, because of evolving self- representational software.
12At most a Gettier case of true but unjustified belief.
13Chalmers' Structure and Dynamics argument; see section The SDA and Type-XC Theories.
14Even if one tries to overcome charges of epiphenomenalism by holding that the microphysical properties are properties of their phenomenal or proto-phenomenal categorical base, the problem of how reports about consciousness are actually caused by the categorical base above and beyond its relational dispositions is not clear.
15The sqrt(−1) is a forbidden combination of sqrt and −1 that made possible complex analysis, including important aspects of quantum mechanics, and provided access to vast novel conceptual spaces. However, TE is also relevant to Gould's “punctuated equilibrium” and the crucial dependence of 1st order phase transitions on statistically rare intermediate structures.
16True for an ideal reasoner but not for Laplace's demon.
17Symplectic invariance refers to the invariance of the equations of motion to spatio-temporal translations. Conservation of energy and momentum depend on the homogeneity of time and space, respectively. Strong fluctuations in the spatiotemporal manifold make it impossible to conserve the structure of a system's equations of motion during its evolution. See Canonical Invariance (Landau and Lifshitz,
18For Leibniz, symmetry is a way in which indiscernible differences illuminate discernible ones.
19For example, see David Albert's
20I define “prototemporal” similarly to Chalmers' definition of “protophenomenal.” A proto(spatio)temporal property is one that is not (spatio)temporal or structural and is such that it necessarily yields (spatio)temporality when arranged properly.
21(This is
22Emanuel Levinas said that “consciousness of time is the time of consciousness.” (Drabinski,
23Perhaps in the same way that photosynthesis is an example of biomimesis where biological systems reach a theoretical physical limit (energy conversion efficiency), brains reach some information-theoretic limit resulting in the formation of physical singularities and CTCs.
24Because if you can solve one such problem you can solve all such problems.
25Holding that spacetime is substantive and that everything is constructed from it (topological particles).
26Compare that to more elaborate models of cutting space in two, as in Ramssdonk (