Electrons don’t think
backreaction.blogspot.com
backreaction.blogspot.com
The crux of the argument seems to be here, and is simply a fallacious equivalency of free will/agency and consciousness. Two different philosophical issues that may have a unifying explanation, but not for now.
Besides, panpsychism seems to almost be tautological in its assertions: if we accept materialism, and we accept consciousness exists in some creatures, then where else would consciousness be "realized" in aggregate except distributed amongst the actual matter of the brain, down reductivly to sub-atomic particles? That doesn't mean it's a fully formalized robust theory, but the concepts underlying it are sound.
Rather, a given iron atom is one of the atoms that make up a given 747, so it absolutely is (and here's where the tautology comes in) part of the distributed material that makes up the plane. Without such atoms there would be no plane. The same is being said here except with consciousness, no more.
So consciousness is more unpackable and less ambiguous?
And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness", with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.
> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here
This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an intuition for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.
I don't doubt philosophers without education in the fundamentals of physics can and often do come to conclusions that are naive and hopelessly incompatible with physical evidence or models that have stood the test of time for centuries. Especially quantum mechanics is a widely misunderstood and misapplied subject. But it goes both ways, it is quite arrogant to think you can disprove an entire subject in a field of study that isn't your own with such simple reasoning.
It is true that electrons don't have a lot of internal state and can be completely described with a few quantum numbers. But my first reaction wouldn't be to conclude that panpsychism is obvious nonsense (not that I'm a fan either, I'm have no problem confessing my ignorance on the subject), but to see if someone more qualified in the topic had written something about it.
The whole problem is that consciousness as a concept is poorly defined. I do not think the people the believe inanimate objects have "consciousness" believe consciousness necessitates thought, or even internal state.
It just seems awkward as a result.
But thinking really simplified science is enough to completely dismiss other serious thinkers is why scientists get called closed minded: to use their parlance, this rant isn’t even wrong.
In any event, what exactly is simplified to the point of being wrong? That more internal states effects cross sections?
Even if you hold the dualist position there’s nothing here to disagree with.
Sadly she didn’t address a question that’s interested me since reading Feynman’s QED: how do electrons “decide” how to scatter?
Edit: I’m going to bookmark this to use as a virtually perfect example of not even wrong.
When physicists use dabble with philosophy, run.
Even philosophers (like Dave Chalmers) can't explain their thinking in detail in podcasts or popular articles. They just put some ideas there but it does not represent the analytical thinking well.
"Just when one is about to judge Liebniz as having the strangest mind of anyone who ever lived, one remembers Newton and his lifelong obsession with alchemy and his strenuous efforts to predict the exact date of the End of the World by ransacking the Book of Revelations for encrypted clues"[1]
[0]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/
[1]: http://faculty.cord.edu/andersod/Stephenson-Metaphysics.pdf
Consciousness and thought are also separate things. The seeing of the colour red or touching a rough surface are experiences, though neither could be described as thoughts.
I realize that seems like a completely bananas question to ask. But any theory of consciousness seems to get into absurd territory very quickly. The only proof we have that consciousness even exists is that each of us (or me, anyway, who knows what you guys are) vehemently professes to experience it. Other than that, all we seem to find is complex web of deterministic reactions.
So what if the question is wrong? When we parse "I think therefore I am", we look at "am" as the insight, but it seems to me the "I" is left undefined.
edit: I'm sorry, I jumped the gun on this a bit, you were saying it doesn't arise. But nevertheless, I'm left uncomfortable declaring something exists that we can not actually perceive from the outside.
It's all well and good saying that consciousness is incompatible with evidence, but I for one perceive a great deal of consciousness. How do "scientists" address this conflict with perception? Simple: they don't.
(FWIW, I don't think elementary particles can think).
Where's the hurricane in a drop of water?
I've never seen trolling on such a high level before.
This article is beyond nonsense. The author seems to define panpsychism as the idea that a "conscious" particle would somehow affect the number of particles produced in a collision. Where she gets that definition from, I can't even begin to fathom.
Panpsychism isn't "crazy shit" we "tried long ago" and we haven't "moved on". There's currently zero solid scientific evidence for any theory of consciousness, and the idea of panpsychism -- that consciousness is grounded in the physical universe rather than being an emergent property or being something supernatural -- is just as valid as any other right now. Who knows, maybe it's something like gravity that's indetectable at the atomic scale but shows up under very particular configurations at larger scales.
I don't know who this author is, but based on this post she comes across as anything but scientific.
The article is credited to Sabine Hossenfelder, who according to [0] is "an author and theoretical physicist who researches quantum gravity. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Analog Systems for Gravity Duals group. She is the author of Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology".
She's also clueless about philosophy and metaphysics - which is unfortunately not that unusual among contemporary scientists.
And I don't mean philosophy in the sense of being able to debate the fine points of anything much - but in the sense of having the breadth of conceptual education to understand what's required of genuinely a rational and consistent argument, and what's actually an irrational and irrelevant appeal to authority, as this "argument" is.
This isn't particularly about panpsychism or consciousness. It's that the quality of the argument being presented is so poor.
She's drawing an identity between a taxonomy of observed behaviour and independent consciousness, and saying that any entities that can be fitted into a taxonomy can be conscious.
Which is "not even wrong."
You could just as well argue that electrons are conscious because they can read our minds while we do experiments and are trolling us by creating some made-up rules they've invented which happen to look like quantum theory.
Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational arguments.
Is this the underlying misunderstanding?
One can argue similarly to give a possible explanation for anything. It's not a question of whether it could be this way but rather what seems to be the most plausible explanation. The argument you gave above (I know it's not one you are seriously purporting) seems much less likely to be correct than the one Sabine gave.
My reading of Sabine's argument is that we get the random behavior from particle collisions you expect if quantum mechanics is correct and thus electrons aren't conscious. The particles follow randomness and not what one would think would occur if there was consciousness/free will involved. Yes, she seems to make the connection between the two concepts.
I don't know if Sabine is correct but I certainly don't think
Both make as much sense, and both are equally unhelpful as rational arguments.
So there does seem to be quite a bit of evidence for consciousness being emergent. If consciousness were anything other than what neurons do, you'd have to show how information gets transferred back and forth between neurons and the other thing.
I don't see how philosophy that's not grappling with the findings of neuroscience can be relevant?
because there isn't a consciousness test, philosophers are trying to point the science in the right direction, in terms of what are legitimate possibilities or what theories may not be sufficient explanations. in other words, they are grappling with the very question you asked, ie, "show how information gets transferred back and forth...".
I suppose there are alternative definitions but if they're not focused on somehow explaining peoples' behavior I don't think they're much use.
I'm saying that whatever they are, they must cause the external behaviors we associate with consciousness. (And furthermore, the theory must explain things like the effects of brain damage, surgery, the effects of drugs, hormones, how children's minds develop, evolution, and so on.) These are just the requirements for any scientific model of how minds work.
in the case of a robot, you can explain how it senses whats going on around it, learns things, and takes actions.
but is the robot conscious? is it ok to kill it? think about why it might be ok to kill the robot and not a person. because the difference between them is that the person feels; the person is conscious. it is the consciousness (what's left after all the other explanations) that is precisely the mystery that we seek to explain but have no idea how to do scientifically. that puts it into the domain of philosophy, but that doesn't mean it's not "much use". it's not much use yet, it will be some day. most of what we consider science now began in the past as philosophy. astronomy, physics, medicine, etc..
Or maybe there is no natural way to do it and it will just muddy the issue further? That would be interesting to know too.
The sort of thing I'm thinking of is Oliver Sack's writing about various mental disorders. A theory of mind needs to explain how thinking can be degraded in specific ways when certain parts of the brain are damaged. Not to mention mental development in children, the effects of old age, of being tired or distracted, of hormones, of various drugs, our similarities with other animals, cognitive illusions, and so on. These place a lot of constraints on what consciousness could be.
Quantum mechanics is very clear in that the possible states of a particle determine a lot of things, including the probability you have of spotting one after a collision. And if you try to ignore QM, there are not much that you can change without violating the second law of thermodynamics either.
Is it? That's the problem. We don't know.
Author is Sabine Hossenfelder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabine_Hossenfelder
The problem with the physicist's approach is that the philosopher controls the goalposts (the language) and moves them to increasingly absurd distances, usually leading to desperation.
> Where she gets that definition from, I can't even begin to fathom.
That is literally what Chalmers says about it, that it 's a fundamental property (quantity) in the universe:
More likely, we will take experience itself as a fundamental feature of the world, alongside mass, charge, and space-time. If we take experience as fundamental, then we can go about the business of constructing a theory of experience
> There's currently zero solid scientific evidence for any theory of consciousness
There is a lot of solid evidence about how to manipulate consciousness (in various definitions), how to predict it or suppress it.
She doesn't claim that panpsychism was tried a long time ago. She claims that
Now, look, I know that physicists have a reputation of being narrow-minded. But the reason we have this reputation is that we tried the crazy shit long ago and just found it doesn’t work.
She's saying physicists today have a reputation for narrow-mindedness because of their reaction to having tried out crazy shit in the past. Her definition of panpsychism is
I recently discovered panpsychism. That’s the idea that all matter – animate or inanimate – is conscious, we just happen to be somewhat more conscious than carrots.
She furthermore claims that electrons can't have consciousness and gives an argument for why. The author does not define panpsychism as the idea that a conscious particle would somehow affect the number of particles produced in a collision. I don't see how you could have concluded this from what she wrote. Her reason for discounting panpsychism is that
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Since the particles have quantum properties, anything that can happen will happen. If a particle exists in many variants, you’ll produce them all – regardless of whether or not you can distinguish them. The result is that you see more of them than the standard model predicts.
Now, if you want a particle to be conscious, your minimum expectation should be that the particle can change. It’s hard to have an inner life with only one thought. But if electrons could have thoughts, we’d long have seen this in particle collisions because it would change the number of particles produced in collisions.
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I think you have badly misinterpreted what was written. I make no claims on panpsychism since this is the first time I've heard the word. I do know that Sabine is a physicist and knows physics quite well. You could have seen this by clicking the "About" link on her blog.
to paraphrase the author, "if a physicist starts talking about consciousness, run?"
If these few numbers really are all the information that an electron (for instance) contains, then where is the informational content of consciousness located, assuming that panpsychism claims that electrons possess a certain small amount of consciousness? This is how I interpreted her sentence on consciousness implying the ability to change; not as meaning the ability to decide, but as meaning the ability to carry extra information by being in different states. I think this seems like a reasonable objection and I'm interested in how panpsychists might respond.
> According to the definition of consciousness that is dominant in contemporary analytic philosophy, something is conscious just in case there is something that it’s like to be it; that is to say, if it has some kind of experience, no matter how basic. Humans have incredibly rich and complex experience, horses less so, mice less so again. Standardly the panexperientialist holds that this diminishing of the complexity of experience continues down through plants, and through to the basic constituents of reality, perhaps electrons and quarks. If the notion of “having experience” is flexible enough, then the view that an electron has experience—of some extremely basic kind—would seem to be coherent (of course we must distinguish the question of whether it is coherent from the question of whether it is plausible; the latter will depend on the strength of the arguments discussed below).
If electrons are conscious, then they must experiment some kind of change that is related to the consciousness. One possibility is that they are conscious but they don't change at all, but then why don't just say that they are not conscious, because it would be totally equivalent. Another possibility is that the consciousness of the electrons is just following the usual laws of physics, but also it would be equivalent to have non conscious electrons. So, the interesting case is when the consciousness of the electron can affect the electron somehow. So the electron must have at least two secret states (or more) and the conscious experience must make the electron change between these states.
The rules of Quantum Mechanics for collisions say that when a particle has many states, then in the debris after the collision you must consider all of them. When the state doesn't affect the forces involved in the collisions it's simple because you multiply by the number of states. For example, quarks have 3 colors, so the probability of getting a quark after a collision is 3 times bigger than the expected probability in a universe where color doesn't exist. [The actual calculations are more complicated, because you can't multiply some probabilities of the fake colorless universe by 3 and expect that the total sum of all the probabilities is still one. And you must also sometimes consider interference too. There are many technical details here, but the idea is that somewhere in the calculations you must put some 3 here and there, or the result will be wrong.]
Electrons don't have color, but they have spin. An electron can have spin "up" or "down". If there are no strong magnetic fields, the 2 version of the electron are equivalent. So in the calculations you must put a few 2 here and there to get the correct result. [If there is a strong magnetic field, or the electron is moving too fast, or you consider the weak force the two versions are not equivalent, but for the sake of simplicity let's assume boring electrons.] [The quarks have spin too, so in the calculation you must put a 3 in some places and a 2 in other places, and there are a few more details that it's better to forget to simplify the discussion.]
So... if the electrons have some additional hidden states, then by the rules of quantum mechanics you must remember to consider the secret states. In the simple case it's just a multiplication. In more complicated cases, perhaps the altered state of the electron is more heavy and the calculation is more complicated. The author says that since we haven't seen this secret state in a high energy particle accelerator, it unbelievable that it may be relevant inside your brain that. Other possibility is that the hidden state is different of the other quantum states and doesn't appear in the calculations, but I think that this possibility is too magical.
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As a simplified version, be can consider the Pauli exclusion principle that says that in any orbital you can have up to 2 electrons. It's the same number 2 of the other paragraph. You can put in the orbital one electron with spin "up" and one electron with spin "down", and with a few simplifications both electrons are equivalent. The interesting part is that this rule was discovered experimentally, but later it was deduced from the rules of quantum mechanics. So instead of a complicated calculation [that I only can do partially, and I don't remember the details now, so I need a week or two to find the books and look at the details] ... so instead of a complicated calculation you can count how many electrons you can put in an orbital. This is very easy, you get some hot Lithium vapor in a vacuum tube and some sparks, and you can measure the energy of the third electron. In the experiment you get the first two electrons in the lower orbital, and the third electron in the next orbital. All the Chemistry is based on these kind of facts, so the Pauli exclusion principle is very well proven experimentally.
And the problem is that in the Pauli exclusion principle you get a 2, that is due to the spin. You don't have room for secret states that may be affected by the conscious experience of the electron.
So I think this is where the disagreement happens. You are following the laws of physics, but I wouldn't say that you're not conscious. Notably, we're talking about "consciousness" and not "free will", which is what I think you're actually arguing against for the electron.
If you extend the definition of conscious for humans (whatever it means) to an extended definition that includes electrons, and the extended definition of conscious electron is "they just follow the (current) laws of physics", then the extended definition is meaningless. Everything is conscious in it's own way, and this doesn't give a cue about what human consciousness is.
For a similar fuzzy defined term, let's pick "alive". Humans are alive (when they are not dead). Electrons are not alive. There is an arbitrary threshold in the middle, but the current guess is that there is no magical part in being alive. From electrons to humans, we all follow the laws of Physics.
You can redefine alive, so an electron is alive by following the (current) laws of Physics. But now being alive is a meaningless term, because everything is alive in its own way.
If we agree that "alive" simply arises from ever more complicated chemical processes, and that we've specified an arbitrary line somewhere to give the term meaning, then that's fine. But it no longer makes sense to ask questions like "why are we alive?" or "at what point does something go from being just chemistry to being alive?". Because these answers are implicit in the definition itself. Yes, "alive" still has meaning but these questions don't have meaningful answers.
Now in the case of "consciousness", I think that it might be much the same way. I think we've overloaded and conflated the term with different concepts which gives rise to resistance. Let's call the supposed fundamental property "experience" instead, and say that this is what the electron has. Then your "human consciousness" becomes what arises from that "experience" property overlayed onto your body as a chemical system.
And this might seem useless, but I think it's not. The main mystery, which is "how am I here experiencing this?" Is answered by: this "experience", which seems so special to us and we assume we're the only ones that have it, is just the default of everything in the universe, and the subjective part of it is in the systems where the particular experience manifests. So with this view, the question: "what gives me consciousness but not an ant?" Reduces to the same arbitrary distinction like we've said for being "alive": it's just your arbitrary definition of it, and these questions might not have any deeper answers. And I think this perspective is counterintuitive for a lot of people and that's what leads to the intense belief that the questions must have meaningful answers, because we think we're the only stuff in the universe with "experience".
For me, once I get a sense for what goes into that "experience", of being there and feeling like something inside my head, I don't have much mystery in the other stuff. For instance, I'm not concerned about equating "consciousness" to: "I think therefore I am" that's just my "experience" overlayed onto the circuitry of my brain. And I find that I disagree with Descartes. "I am" even if I can't "think", I just wouldn't be able to self-reflect about it, and those are different things.
1. Electrons are matter.
2. Electrons don't have consciousness. (according to her argument)
3. Therefore the belief that all matter has consciousness is wrong.
Note that an argument can be logically sound while having a false conclusion. This happens if one of the premises are wrong. In this case it would be her conclusion that electrons can't have consciousness.
Consciousness at such small scale is simply not possible. Our theories don't allow it.