The Viability of Panpsychism

Chris Bradford

Welcome to our afternoon session of the conference. That was a great morning. I’m excited about the afternoon. I’m Chris Bradford. I’m the Vice President of the MTA, and I’ll get to be our first speaker for this afternoon session. And I’ll be talking about the viability of panpsychism.

Chris Bradford

A few years ago, I attended a conference at which a speaker claimed that no one could reasonably believe that they are a brain in a vat. And to illustrate his point, he asked audience members who believed they were a brain in a vat to raise their hands. Now, my contrarian friend next to me Lincoln Cannon raised his hand, much to the dismay of the speaker, who was somewhat flustered. Now I don’t think Lincoln really believes that he’s a brain in a vat. He was just making a point of his disagreement that such a thing was unthinkable.

Chris Bradford

Now I’m confident that there is something that truly is unthinkable. So would members of this audience who think they do not have mental experiences please raise their hands? Now, of course, this is a contradiction. We cannot deny that we have thoughts and subjective experience. The very act of denying requires mental experiences. Now, some might want to claim that such things are illusory, but again, the very concept of illusion itself requires mental experience and consciousness.

Chris Bradford

Now consciousness may be too specific a term for the purposes of this paper, but mental experience is fundamental to our understanding of the universe. To deny mental experience is to deny that we can understand. Mental experience is the thing we are most certain about. In fact, to be certain is to have mental experience.

Chris Bradford

In his book Mind and Cosmos, Thomas Nagel asks a critical question: How can we understand the world in such a way as to explain this fundamental phenomenon of mind? Upon which all scientific endeavor rests. Now, for the pursuit of science, presupposes that the universe is thinkable. It’s intelligible. A theory that fails to explain mind cannot be complete.

Chris Bradford

Nagel notes that, beginning with Descartes and the introduction of substance dualism, the mental has been systematically excluded from modern physical science. Now this has provided great explanatory benefits in our understanding of many fundamental features of the world. But it has resulted in a common world view in which mind is somehow ancillary. It’s supervenient on the more fundamental. physical aspects of the world.

Chris Bradford

The substance dualist is at a loss to explain how the mind could play any role in a universe in which physical causes explain everything. In such a worldview, the mental is either accidental, which is apiphenomenalism, which James Carroll critiqued well a couple of years ago at one of our conferences. Or it’s miraculous, caused by God from moment to moment, which is a position known as occasionalism, or set up by God in advance to seem as if the mental and the physical interact. And this was Leibniz’s view, which is called parallelism.

Chris Bradford

And further, as we delve into neurobiology and better understand the workings of the brain, we’re discovering that what we typically consider mental properties are strongly correlated to physical structure. For example, a man convicted of pedophilia complained of headaches while in prison. Upon examination, doctors determined that he had a brain tumor. And when the tumor was removed, his inclination disappeared. Sometime after he had served his prison term, this inclination to pedophilia started to return, and he discovered that the tumor had begun to recur.

Chris Bradford

V. S. Ramachandran and others have pioneered substantial research in neurobiological explanations for mental phenomena. And substance dualism cannot provide a good explanation for these kinds of findings.

Chris Bradford

Now, there have been essentially three kinds of responses to the problems of dualism. They all rely on substance monism, that is, the denial that the mental and the physical are different substances.

Chris Bradford

The first one is materialism or physicalism. Broadly speaking, physicalism is the claim that all existence is physical in nature, although the term physical is somewhat vague. Galen Strawson, a well-known philosopher now at the University of Texas at Austin, claims that the predominant strain of physicalism denies the reality of the mental. And he cites Daniel Dennett as an example, and he calls this. physicsalism, essentially the idea that current physics is capable of describing all of reality. Now I agree with him that this is really an incoherent position. This is again the denial that we have mental experiences.

Chris Bradford

Quoting from his book, Strawson’s Real Materialism and Other Essays, this is because experience is itself the fundamental given natural fact. Its existence is evident and provably non-illusory. It is provably non-illusory because its seeming to exist, which very few deny, is a sufficient condition of its actually existing. Experience is in fact the only concrete natural phenomenon that we know for certain to exist.

Chris Bradford

A second approach is immaterialism. Or the idea that matter is illusory and only the mental exists. Max Planck, famous physicist in 1944, said As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much, there is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration, and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind with a capital M. This mind is the matrix of all matter Now, this idea has much in common with occasionalism, the idea that this mind, essentially God, brings about all matter and all we observe about it.

Chris Bradford

The third approach is emergentism. And emergentism proposes that mental states emerge from physical states in much the same way that novel physical properties emerge from physical states. The classic analogy is the properties exhibited by water, surface tension, fluidity, expansion upon freezing, etc. , that are not Properties of hydrogen and oxygen on their own, but arise only when hydrogen and oxygen are combined in particular ways.

Chris Bradford

Now there are two flavors of emergence, strong or brute or radical emergence. And in strong emergence, these novel properties exhibited by the higher level order are not explainable In terms of the properties of the lower level order. Now, this is not the case with water. The properties of the fluid can be explained in terms of the properties of the constituent atoms. And this is the second type, which is called weak emergence. which suggests that, as in the case of water, emergent properties can fully be explained in terms of the properties of the underlying structures.

Chris Bradford

So are there good reasons to prefer one of these over another? So I’ve already discussed the flaws of the physicsalism described by Strassen. The major problem with both immaterialism and strong emergence is that there is a premature abandoning of the quest for understanding by resorting to the supernatural, something that is not explainable, even in theory. Now, it may well be that there are brute facts about the world that we cannot break down further in order to understand more fully. But to the extent that we can pursue such ends, we gain the advantage of additional explanatory power. Imagine if we answered every scientific question with God did it Or that’s just the way the world is, well, we would not be satisfied with our understanding.

Chris Bradford

Now, with regard specifically to the difference between strong emergence and weak emergence, Nagel points out that the reductive approaches That is, the attempt to explain phenomena in terms of constituent parts that require fewer assumptions tend to be fruitful and have greater explanatory power than the essentially mysterious assertion of brute emergence.

Chris Bradford

Now, additionally, Mormons have a commitment to some kind of monism. Doctrine in Covenants 131, that Adam Miller quoted this morning: there’s no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes. We cannot see it, but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter. Even if we suppose there are two kinds of matter, finer spirit matter and coarser physical matter, in some important sense, it is all matter.

Chris Bradford

The Catholic theologian Stephen Webb, in his recent book, Mormon Christianity: What Non-Mormon Christians Can Learn from the Latter-day Saints. Claims that this commitment to materialism is the greatest strength of Mormon thought and makes Mormonism more compatible with the discoveries of modern science than most other religions. In fact, I would suggest that this compatibility between a scientific worldview and Mormon cosmology is one of the primary reasons the MTA exists.

Chris Bradford

Now Galen Strauss, and I referred to him earlier, published a very influential paper titled Realistic Monism: Why Physicalism Entails Panpsychism. And he relies on the rejection of substance dualism and argues strongly for the incoherence of brute emergence, to conclude, quote. Given that everything concrete is physical, and that everything physical is constituted out of physical ultimates, and that experience is a part of concrete reality. Panpsychism seems the only reasonable position, more than just an inference to the best explanation. Continuing the quote, So now I can say that physicalism, i. e. real physicalism, entails Pan-experientialism or panpsychism. All physical stuff is energy in one form or another, and all energy, I trow, is an experience-involving phenomenon. This sounded crazy to me for a long time. This is still Strassen speaking. But I am quite used to it now that I know that there is no alternative short of substance dualism, a view for which there has never been any good argument.

Chris Bradford

Panpsychism, once the common view among quote-unquote animistic peoples, is regaining the ground that it lost in 19th century philosophy. Now thus far I’ve focused on the philosophical arguments around panpsychism. But is it compatible with physics, with what we know about the physical world?

Chris Bradford

Now before I want to I go there, I want to acknowledge that Strawson says this idea may sound crazy. I mean do elementary particles experience the world like you and I do? I myself rejected panpsychism for some time because I couldn’t fathom how a subatomic particle could support a rich consciousness like I experience, at least relatively rich. However, I’ve learned that almost no versions of panpsychism propose such a rich mental experience for elementary particles. Rather, panpsychist theories acknowledge varying degrees. Of mental experience, even to the point that we would not recognize the experiential properties of elements as similar to our own. And David Chalmers calls this. Pan-proto-psychism. Strassen calls it micro-psychism. There is something analogous to our own experience in the fundamental nature of matter. from which our experience can arise, in theory explainable in terms of the more fundamental, proto-experiential properties of matter, spirit or physical matter.

Chris Bradford

So what might proto-psychism look like? And here I want to turn to physics. The mathematicians Simon Cochin and John Conway, who is most well known for Conway’s game of life, Published the free will theorem a few years ago, demonstrating that if we assume that people have some limited free will Given some basic premises, some of which are derived from quantum mechanics, the result is that elementary particles also must have some limited free will. Now Conway gave six one hour lectures to explain this theorem, and since my time is slightly more limited, I’ll attempt to give a very brief overview. The full lectures are available at the link on the slide, which will be available after this conference.

Chris Bradford

Now, Cohen and Conway’s thought experiment is basically this. Arrange two entangled particles in space-like separation and have two independent researchers measure the spin of the particles. What we know about quantum mechanics and relativity proves that the entire past history of the universe is insufficient to explain the correlated behavior the researchers will observe. In addition, randomness can be mathematically excluded. The result is that the particles are semi-free, and we’ll talk about that a little more, to respond to the measurements of the researchers.

Chris Bradford

Now, this theorem relies on two premises derived from quantum mechanics. The first they’ve called spin, and this relies on a 1967 proof by Cochin, one of the co-authors of this proof, and a collaborator named Ernst Specker, and this is called the Cochenspecker paradox. Particles have a feature known in quantum mechanics as spin that can be measured on any axis of the particle in any direction. And quantum mechanics predicts, and it’s been experimentally verified, that spin measured in three mutually perpendicular directions in our three-dimensional space, right? Will always result in values of negative 1, 0, and 1. So to simplify the math, the values are squared, resulting in two ones and a 0. And what Cochin and Specker showed. Is that there is no set of values that can be pre-assigned to a particle to satisfy this rule, and we’ll show this for a minute

Chris Bradford

So this first picture represents just a subset. This is 33 possible axes that could be measured for a given particle. So suppose we start. Looking at the right-hand side of this cube, the green dot in the middle. Suppose we start with measuring that axis and we get a zero. Now, what we know from that is that in order to satisfy this rule, any two other two perpendicular axes. To that one must return a value of one. So we can fill those in, and those would be like those red ones sort of in the middle going across the top and the front of the cube. And then from those, we can then derive any perpendicular axes to those must be a zero, and we can proceed around the axes. Just from taking our first result and walking around what must be the case. But we run into a paradox. This contradiction, this yellow point on the right-hand side of the cube. Which previously in the previous picture had to be a one. Now, as we go around and we look at all of the axes and we have to satisfy these conditions, it has to be a zero. And of course, it can’t be both a one and a zero. There is no compossible set of values that will satisfy the requirement of quantum mechanics.

Chris Bradford

So this means one of two things. Either A, the measurements are not history independent. They depend on the history of the measurements actually made on the particle. So, when you measure the spin, then it changes everything about the actual spin of the particle, like in real time, right? Or B. The particle doesn’t have a value for spin until it’s measured, and at that point it decides what answer it’s going to give. And so the remainder of this thought experiment serves to eliminate the first of those possibilities, that is, that you’re actually changing the history of the particle.

Chris Bradford

And this is because they’re taking two entangled particles. And they are separating them so that there’s no way that information can pass between the two, and yet you’re going to get the same results each time. And so you cannot be that you’re measuring this particle over here. And consequently, this particle over here is actually changing because there’s no way to get information back and forth. Now, there’s a lot of mathematics behind this. Conway does a very good job of talking about this. I’m going to skip over a little bit more of the details of this article, but that gives you the sense.

Chris Bradford

So what they’ve proven then mathematically, they expressed the possible results of all the possible measurements that could be taken mathematically. They included the shared history of these entangled particles, everything before they were separated. And their unique histories, and they prove mathematically that the history of these particles, everything in the universe within these particles’ light cones, can be shown not to determine the outcome of the measurements. The values can’t be predetermined. We’ve seen that because of the Cochin-Specker paradox. The values can’t be predetermined, and they can’t be influencing each other based on the history. Of what you’re measuring, the particles are actually deciding how to respond to the measurements in response to the free choices of the researchers

Chris Bradford

Now this is clearly a very limited idea of free will, or the idea that a particle can respond to a measurement with a value of zero or one. But it may give us some way of thinking about what proto psychism might mean. Concepts and perception, sensory experience, emotions, thought, these are fundamental. Everything that matters about human life. Requires the mind. And the most plausible explanation for the existence of experience is that it is built into the nature of the universe.

Chris Bradford

Now, what are some of the potential consequences of panpsychism? One of them is that perhaps mental states could arise from all kinds of matter. That is, it’s not necessarily restricted to the particular type of matter that we consist of being carbon-based life forms, because reductionism goes all the way down, right? Carbon and silicon and all the other elements, they’re all composed of the same kinds of elementary building blocks. Which must have some proto-experiential properties that can give rise to mind, and perhaps they could give rise to mind in other accretions.

Chris Bradford

Second, what we experience may be proto-mental from another perspective. So much as we might call the mental experience of a goldfish Proto-mental, there may be some higher order intelligence that would look at our mental experience and call it proto-mental from its perspective.

Chris Bradford

There also may be ethical consequences. How do we view the world? I mean, think about, we already have questions about how we treat apes, dolphins, pigs. Plants, the earth. In fact, panpsychism may form a basis for all ethics and morality. If we deny the mental or the conscious, then there’s no foundation for morality.

Chris Bradford

And finally, and perhaps most uniquely transhumanist, we claim that biological evolution is being superseded by technological evolution guided by human thought. Ray Kurzweil, when asked by Bill Gates if he believes God exists, responded that he believes God does not exist yet. and speaks of a future universe infused with intelligence and spirit that would be, in essence, God. The new God argument recognizes that if God will exist in the future, it is highly improbable that God does not exist now. We live in a universe infused with intelligence. And to quote the doctrine in covenants, intelligence cleaveth unto intelligence. So that intelligence can be augmented to fill the universe with God and gods. Thank you.