The Rise of Panpsychism | Reality and Consciousness | Waking Cosmos

hey everyone welcome back to waking cosmos Adrian here back for another episode talking about consciousness reality and life's place in the universe today's episode focuses specifically on the concept of pan psychism which as you may know is the philosophical position that mind or consciousness is an essential part of reality we've definitely talked about this a few times on waking cosmos in quite a general way but today's episode is really going to focus specifically on why it is that philosophers as well as scientists and other experts are starting to take pan psychism more and more seriously so today I'm going to talk about what I think is the main argument that is generating support for this view and from there we'll explore two different theories of consciousness in neuroscience both of which have drawn a lot of attention in recent years for different reasons and both of which are a form of pan sank isn't for this episode I'm going to be reading from the second chapter of my book origins of consciousness but fear not if you haven't listened to the first chapter which was a couple of episodes back now I think this chapter very much stands alone which is not an accident so there's no real need to go back and listen to that episode unless you really want to very quickly before we begin I want to say a brief thank you to my supporters on patreon this podcast the videos that I make the conversations that I'm putting out there all of it is funded by patrons so I'm extremely grateful to those of you who are helping me to follow this dream and helping me to actually make use of my philosophy degree which is a power as difficult as you might think so I really appreciate your support and I'm gradually getting closer to my goal of sustainability so thank you to those of you who are supporting my work it means a lot if you're not already a patreon but you think that what I'm doing is worth a dollar or two a month the link to my patreon is in the description and of course patrons get early access to every episode some really interesting conversations coming up in the next few weeks with some great guests next time I'll be joined by Mike Johnson from the qualia Research Institute talking about the search for a science of consciousness I'm really looking forward to that episode so I hope you stick around but now without further delay let's jump into the fascinating topic of pants on kazoo chapter two the inner landscape could a new philosophical framework find a place for consciousness without upsetting the elegant simplicity of monism a world of just one type of stuff philosophical inquiry into the enduring question of consciousness has drawn some surprising conclusions among which is the conviction of several prominent thinkers that our search for an understanding of consciousness may also lead us to a new understanding of reality the view that consciousness is a fundamental aspects of the world is by no means new in some form it has been a perspective of almost every human culture recorded to exist on this planet in fact it may be fair to say that the prevailing modern Western scientific view that we live in a reality the void of consciousness is an exception there are now signs that attitudes in Western science and philosophy are beginning to shift toward considering an intrinsic place for mind or awareness in the natural order furthermore this shift is taking place at the highest levels of academia in recent decades a resurgence of philosophers have begun to argue that an essentially mental quality is fundamental to reality while seemingly radical it is in fact a perspective with a rich history in Western philosophy known as Pan psychism in the 17th century Pan psychism was defended by such philosophical luminaries as Baruch Spinoza and Godfried well how both influential thinkers of the Enlightenment in the 19th century pan psychism was a respectable theory supported by both philosophers and several prominent early psychologists among them was the father of modern psychology William James the development of these ideas was curtailed when the philosophical movement of logical positivism rose to dominance in the first half of the 20th century and thinkers became increasingly concerned that philosophy serve primarily as an analytical tool for objective science a consequence was that all introspective and intuitive knowledge became marginalized and any significance of subjectivity was squeezed out of the picture in the same period a similar development was occurring in psychology with the rise of behaviorism with hopes of achieving the status of the hard sciences psychologists directed the powerful objectivity of empiricism to human behavior with great ambition psychologists considered that every datum of the mind could be understood by reduction to environmental inputs and behavioral outputs for decades even mentioning consciousness raised eyebrows today however a widening recognition of the hard problem of consciousness has seen Pan psychism return as a mainstream theory and a resurgence of thinkers now argue that only within such a view can we hope to resolve the otherwise miraculous emergence of mind out of the physical universe but what does it mean to say consciousness is fundamental what does it mean to say that anything is fundamental space-time mass and charge are all considered by physicists to be fundamental features of nature governed by fundamental laws they are called fundamental because they cannot be defined by anything more basic historically the Advancement of has led to the addition of new fundamentals and with them the expansion of our scientific picture of the world one example is electric charge when in the 18th century it was discovered that the existing Newtonian framework could not explain electromagnetic phenomena it became apparent that additional laws were required out of these developments the property of charge emerged as a new fundamental might a similar expansion of science be required to explain consciousness does a proto experiential quality exist fundamentally to physics governed by its own fundamental laws the challenge for pants like his theories is to explain how this intrinsic mind like quality combines or perhaps fragments to give rise to experiencing subjects like us philosophers disagree about exactly how to resolve this issue which is known as the combination problem pan psychism also faces another daunting challenge it needs to explain why something like mentality ought to be found at the foundations of nature in the first place a fully realized pants psychism would not only explain how Minds like ours develop and organize this mental aspects of the universe it would offer compelling reasons for why physics requires it and it's lawful relationship to observable phenomena we will familiarize ourselves with a philosophical argument which captures some of the primary intuitions behind the growing support for parent psyche ISM in science and philosophy it is known as the intrinsic nature argument despite his recent popularity elements of this view can be traced to Titans of early 20th century philosophy including Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington the modern form of this argument begins by taking account of the rich structural description of the world made available through empirical scientific observation it then however raises a concern about the limitation of this approach in capturing the quote intrinsic nature of things in other words what things are in themselves science as we typically conduct it is an essentially third-person Enterprise it tells us a great deal about the structural form and tendencies of things and yet has no means of penetrating to the essential nature of matter or physical processes as they exist in themselves objective science does a very good job of telling us what things and processes might do and how they might behave but not what they actually are consider for example what science tells us about an electron an electron has mass loosely speaking things with the mass attract each other the electron also has a negative charge meaning also very generally that it repels other negatively charged particles whilst also attracting positively charged ones the descriptions that physics offers about the electron are exclusively behavioral which is to say that they describe only its causal structure in fact everything that science tells us about the world ultimately falls into this single relational category the underlying nature of the electron and indeed of all reality is mysteriously impenetrable by objective science as Russell famously pointed out quote we know nothing about the intrinsic quality of physical events end quote in the same vein the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead described the intrinsic nature of the world as quote the mysterious reality in the background intrinsically unknowable and quote in spite of his absence from our scientific description of the world the existence of an intrinsic nature within which all things are grounded seems to be necessary for a quita count of reality our advancing knowledge of the causal and relational structure of nature has permitted us to make powerful predictions and to build impressively detailed models of nature it has elected planes computers lasers and cell phones and yet in an important respect the underlying nature of reality remains persistently illusive to Sciences objective approach in a particular sense the problem of the intrinsic nature of the world is analogous to the hard problem of consciousness we know that it's there and yet it resists all attempts to capture it through objective means today a growing number of philosophers believe that the intrinsic qualities which underline physical processes must be characteristically mental or phenomenal but why is that surely the difficulty in grasping realities intrinsic nature ought to evoke no more than agnosticism about what this intrinsic nature actually is the reason is that in a reflection of our own minds reveals one thing concretely about conscious experience that it is an intrinsic nature all other objects of knowledge are relational phenomena everything we know about them is behavioral consciousness on the other hand we know about directly and without inference it is in this respect a reality in itself intriguingly consciousness is also the only intrinsic nature that we know of all other apparent candidates on closer inspection fall into the same behavioral and relational category the French philosopher Te'o de Chardin argued that while objective observation successfully grasps the world without only consciousness or sensation can capture the world within the intrinsic nature of things what Tailored called interior 'ti cannot be fully described without recognizing it's essential subjective quality today a growing number of philosophers are taking a similar view that an intrinsic grounding interior OT of matter is a perfect candidate for the otherwise mysterious interior 'ti of our minds not only does it provide a possible solution to the hard problem of consciousness it grounds the physical world in reality while at the same time submitting the necessary vital content to underpin nature's causal structure could it be that the intrinsic nature of the world is inherently opaque to objective science for the same reason that our consciousness is that it embodies an essentially subjective quality it was this reasoning that led Eddington to write quote all through the physical world runs that unknown content which must surely be the stuff of our consciousness unquote as we saw in the first chapter Jackson's famous thought experiment with Mary the color scientist suggested that experiences are of a categorically different kind of thing to the brain processes we associate with them explaining the intrinsic qualities of experience seems to call for an expansion of our standard picture of nature and according to the intrinsic nature argument described above physics seems to call for just this sort of expansion in order to be complete the discussion of pants sarcasm and intrinsic views of consciousness moves far beyond any initial concerns that may spring to mind about chairs or rocks having minds complex Minds require the right complex arrangements and processes the chairs and rocks are aggregates without any center of integration generally speaking the emerging view is that the physical processes of reality have interior topologies as well as the external ones captured by our side instruments and that when organized within the appropriate structures this interior quality of nature constitutes the rich inner mental life that beings like us experience essentially the inner nature of the mind is the inner nature of the world or could another way the mantle is the physical viewed from within in philosophy recent years have seen notable contributions in support of this view from David Chalmers Thomas Nagel Greg Rosenberg Galen Strawson Freya Matthews Isabel stanga's Turin Alta Philip Goff Michael Lockwood Eugene Nagasawa William Seger David's cabina Ken Wilber and many others in fact is fair to say that in academic philosophy pan psychism is experiencing a new flowering Thomas Nagel also captured these intuitions in his 2012 book mind and cosmos where he writes quote we ourselves are large-scale complex instances of something both objectively physical from outside and subjectively mental from inside perhaps the basis of this identity pervades the world unquote as we will now explore recent years have also seen deeper views of consciousness gain unprecedented attention in neuroscience foundations of information philosophers and neuroscientists have long recognized the unity of the mind while it is subject to a vast amount of information our conscious experience is always unified we cannot for example fragment our experience by ignoring one side of the visual field or by apprehending a shape without also seeing its color certainly we could block one eye or even impair the area of the brain associated with visual processing and yet our experience whatever its contents is always a single unbroken unity so how do all of these processes become the subject of a unified experience an entity this was the question driving neuroscientist Giulio Tononi tuned only reasoned that at their most elemental the contents of consciousness are informational and from this starting point I began to question exactly what it is about the brain's particular informational organization the permits our unified experience of consciousness he began investigating types of organization that can sustain complex centers of high information he eventually discovered that centers with high degrees of integration have specific qualities not found in other kinds of networked integrated systems with a large number of bits have a mathematical synergy the result of which is that any single state serves as a reduction from a large number of other possible states as an example Tony asks us to consider a light-sensitive photodiode like those found in a digital camera a very simple diode might respond to just two states light or dark we could present our diode with any number of different images and yet regardless of the pictures content the diode can respond by assuming just one of two possible States is it light or is it dark now imagine yourself looking at the same image we immediately recognize that the image before us depicts the Sun breaking through clouds over a San Francisco skyline for us perceiving this image results in a reduction from a near infinity of possible states of conscious experience not an image of the Andromeda galaxy not a childhood picture of your mother not cells dividing in a petri dish and so on because of the vast number of possible states we are capable of recognizing each one is highly informative in the same way every conscious experience that is distinguishable from others is powerfully informative because of their vast number of possible states how a hugely complex and integrated brains permit us to have the comparatively huge capacity for conscious experience where turn only leaves behind other mainstream theories of consciousness is in his recognition that the property of consciousness is irreducible and fundamental Fortin oniy at its very basis the concept of information carries with it an intrinsic subjective quality more on this shortly the total informational integration of a system can be calculated by a relatively simple mathematical principle that Tononi calls Phi Phi describes the total number of possible integrated states that a system can assume calculating Phi for the photodiode is trivially easy and yet for more complex systems like brains the value of Phi quickly explodes beyond our ability to calculate tuned only reasoned that a high value of Phi within centers of our brain could be what permits the unified experience of consciousness that each of us has he calls his model integrated information theory or IIT an important aspect of this theory is that it holds consciousness to be substrate independent in other words consciousness does not depend on brains or biology per se in fact IIT predicts that any integrated system will have a value of Phi and thus some degree of consciousness in this respect IIT aspires to go beyond explaining the correlates of consciousness to propose a deep ontological claim about reality that information wherever it is found in nature there also exists a proto mental aspect Phi is all around us in all sorts of things all networks of any kind contain integrated information and thus a value of Phi greater than zero even if vanishingly small according to IIT every living cell every electronic circuit even a proton consisting of just three elementary particles possesses something albeit but a glimmer of awareness to Nonis theory dan is a form of pants.i Kison this surprising application of IIIT has not turned off leading academics since he first published an early formulation of IIT in 2008 Tony's theory has steadily gained mainstream interest with popular articles appearing in Scientific American The New York Times and New Scientist Christophe who spent 15 years working alongside Francis Crick on the neurobiological correlates of consciousness is considered by many to be the world's leading expert in this field today Kok focuses on IIT which he openly recognizes as a form of pan psychism quote tonie's Theory offers a scientific constructive predictive and mathematically precise form of pan psychism for the 21st century it is a gigantic step in the final resolution of the ancient mind-body problem unquote IIT also has a distinct advantage over many of the competing theories of consciousness today because it is a mathematical theory it has the benefit of being able to make testable predictions in a series of experiments Tononi and his colleagues used transcranial magnetic stimulation to send a ripple of electrical activity through the cortex of sleeping participants the researchers recorded the length of time that this ripple of activity reverberated through the cortex as a measure of his integration consistent with the predictions of IIT the researchers discovered that ripples of activity sustained for significantly longer when individuals were dreaming than during stages of dreamless sleep when the brain was conscious in the act of dreaming the cortex had a significantly higher degree of integration IIT also predicts degrees of neuronal integration of centers of the brain associated with conscious for example why the cortex is so central to consciousness in humans even though it has far fewer neurons than the cerebellum which can actually be removed with only minor disruption to consciousness the reason IIT holds is that the neurons of the cerebellum are significantly less integrated than those of the cortex which is precisely what we find when examining the neural structure of the cerebellum many more neurons than the cortex yet much less integration between them Tononi envisages that technologies developed to measure neuronal integration will help determine such pressing questions as whether consciousness exists in unresponsive patients and the full affective 'ti of anesthetics as we shall now see the theory may also shed new light on a further enigma in neuroscience in cases of individuals suffering from severe epilepsy an operation is sometimes carried out that splits the corpus callosum the bridge of neural fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain fragmenting the brain in this way prevents the electrical storms of epilepsy passing from one hemisphere to the other a surprising result of this operation has been reports of two minds associated with the same brain potentially exhibiting very different personalities and desiring very different things why this happens is an unsolved mystery in neuroscience and yet to Nonis theory anticipates this outcome this is because an integrated Center divided in the correct manner will create two integrated centers to informational entities where only one existed before tony's theory right or wrong carried the idea into modern neuroscience that consciousness is an intrinsic feature of the world which can be formalized and understood such intrinsic views point to a radical new understanding of minds as extensions of the evolving interior dimension of the universe Christophe Kok has all so confronted this strange implication tentatively offering that the universe itself is mysteriously driven toward the evolution of consciousness in his 2012 book consciousness confessions of a romantic reductionist he writes quote I do believe that the laws of physics overwhelmingly favored the emergence of consciousness the universe is a work in progress such a belief evokes Jeremias from many biologists and philosophers but the evidence from cosmology biology and history is compelling unquote we'll return to some of the evidence he's referring to in chapter 10 when we traced the intrinsic consciousness movement through cosmology for now we'll stay a little longer with this concept of information taking our first tentative steps into the mysterious world of the quantum it from bit in quantum entanglement a particle in one location can affect another even though the two are otherwise separated in space and time predicted by quantum theory the reality of such strange non-local relationships has now been experimentally demonstrated many times under laboratory conditions in such experiments choosing to measure one particle actually defines the properties of its twin in principle this will occur even if particles are billions of light-years apart when it was first discovered quantum interconnectedness radically challenged Sciences deeply held assumptions about the world it implied that in a mysterious way all reality is deeply holistic quantum physics seems to tell us that at its most fundamental level nature stores information non locally while this came as a shock to the physics community entanglement is now an accepted part of the Canon of modern physics and over the past 50 years physicists have progressively moved toward the view that quantum info rather than matter and energy is what makes up the true foundations of physics this understanding was pioneered by the physicist John Wheeler who captured the emerging perspective in his famous aphorism it from bit the philosopher David Chalmers has commented that this movement toward an informational physics is a promising Avenue to also discovering a fundamental theory of consciousness several philosophers have pointed out that under scrutiny the concept of information appears to unfold the concept of meaning and so might be more fully understood as having a subjective as well as an objective poll information wrote Chalmers is a natural candidate to also play a role in a fundamental theory of consciousness we are led to a conception of the world on which information is truly fundamental and on which it has two basic aspects corresponding to the physical and the phenomenal or mental features of the world unquote could it be that information is the nexus between mind and matter containing intrinsic aspects of both might a richer conception of information which recognizes both it's essentially objective and subjective aspects be what physicist Wolfgang Pauli predicted when he wrote quote it is my personal opinion that in the science of the future reality will be neither psychic nor physical but somehow both and somehow neither end quote information is usually formalized as representing either yes or no 1 or 0 in the quantum we must acknowledge to the existence of a third state yes and no 1 and 0 the ability of quantum information to exist in this superposition of multiple states at the same time is what makes quantum computers such an exciting prospect quantum computing could potentially make processing time's virtually instantaneous so could quantum states employed by the brain help us to understand it's extraordinary cognitive capacities its seemingly instantaneous processing speeds and perhaps even playing an important role in consciousness the idea that biological functions of any kind let alone brains make use of quantum processes has long been highly controversial inciting the scorn of physicists and biologists alike recently however new evidence has seen attitudes begin to shift quantum life the cells that comprise our bodies seem to operate in their own world of activity and interaction life appears at least superficially to sit on top of the classical order of nature but to what extent though is it meaningful that life exists in the larger context of a fundamentally interconnected reality are the processes of life detached from realities holistic underpinnings or treater form has life adapted ways of taking advantage of it just a short time ago the notion of life employing quantum states was met with disbelief in academia quantum effects have long been viewed as partitioned from the classical world reliant on very stable and very cold conditions this view was directly challenged in 1999 when researchers at the University of California published a groundbreaking study revealing that photosynthesis an essential process for life on Earth was made possible only by cells ability to marshal quantum processes the team of researchers led by chemist Graham Fleming discovered that photons converted into usable energy by the cell were maintained in quantum superposition with the photon simultaneously sampling all possible paths through the cell before finally settling on the most direct route it was directly due to this employment of superposition that allowed for the extraordinary efficiency of photosynthesis which had until then been an enduring mystery in biology as attitudes subsequently began shifting toward the possibility of quantum processes in biological life other studies began finding them elsewhere the inner compass of migrating birds is sensitive to the electromagnetic field of the planet however instead of consuming shards of magnetic metals inside their beaks as it previously been widely believed Birds ability to navigate the planet was shown to be influenced by radio waves this interference unanticipated by the even prevailing magnetic big theory provided the telltale signs the quantum processes were involved the true cause of bird sensitivity to true north the leading theory today is that entangled electrons phasing across the bird's retina are aligned by the electromagnetic field of Earth another study revealed that the sense of smell common to many species was simply too sensitive to be explained by the dominant thinking in which passing molecules connect like Lego to molecular receptor sites fruit flies were found to be able to distinguish between hydrogen and deuterium even though their atomic structures are chemically identical the only difference is a quantum one a single extra Neutron in the nucleus of the deuterium atom the conclusion once again was that this sense relied on the employment of quantum states it now seems likely that scientists will continue to identify quantum states in ever more biological processes in an article for Nature in 2011 the chemists and popular science writer Philip ball reflected that an entirely new understanding of biology beckons to us in the quantum so what about the mind with quantum processes now our growingly accepted part of life's repertoire it seems at least possible that brains the most complex objects in the known universe might also employ them as several physicists have pointed out consciousness seems to carry qualities not unlike those we see in the quantum might quantum entanglement in the brain explain the mysterious unbroken unity of consciousness the so called binding problem as a physicist Verna Heisenberg reminds us quote the same organizing forces that have shaped nature in all of her forms are also responsible for the structure of our mind unquote before these modern advances in quantum biology in 1996 the physicist Roger Penrose collaborated with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff to propose a theory of consciousness which relied on the existence of quantum processes occurring in the brain their theory called orchestrated objective reduction also known as ork Oh are not only made the controversial claim that quantum processes are not irrelevant to life it was also a form of pan psychism the theory was developed from hammer offs initial observation that the scaffolding like filaments present in all cells known as microtubules seemed to have the precise structure necessary for them to act like tiny quantum computers they argued that these quantum effects as well as permitting the coherent unity of the mind the event of their collapse from a state of superposition is the fundamental basis of consciousness in the universe while the two scientists continued to stand by their theory few academics took it seriously this was largely due to the widespread incredulity at the time that quantum processes could be maintained in the warm and wet environment of the brain without quickly being destroyed by decoherence it wasn't until 2013 that the contentious issue of the microtubules could sustain quantum effects was apparently resolved researchers at Japan's National Institute for material science led by molecular biologist and physicist Anja ban Banda apart Patti hi discovered that it was indeed possible to evoke quantum effects within microtubules furthermore these quantum states were also shown to sustain within the precise threshold of time required by Penrose and Hameroff theory if quantum processes are involved in the workings of our minds then they could potentially exhibit some of the strange and counterintuitive properties associated with quantum systems one thing does seem evident quantum mechanics alone cannot explain consciousness it remains necessary to explain why any particular physical process quantum or otherwise should be accompanied by subjective experience at some future time quantum processes may well be shown to explain how different areas of the brain cohere in a unified experience or the Lightning processing speeds of cognition and recall and yet understanding why this quantum unity of processes gives rise to an inner subjectivity REE encounters the hard problem of consciousness only now with the addition of these strange quantum effects quantum theory may indeed be necessary for a complete understanding of our minds and yet the hard problem of consciousness remains indeed Penrose and Hameroff agree with this diagnosis which is why their theory holds the consciousness is fundamental whether or not Penrose and Hameroff theory is correct if consciousness really does have its roots in a deeper order of reality a reasonable prediction is that our minds could be subject to the same non-local principles that govern the quantum level of reality if so our minds may not be quite as confined to our brains as we've tended to think in addition to the holistic underpinnings of reality physicists have also been forced to contend with another profound enigma of the heart of the quantum and many physicists including the founders of quantum theory have argued that confronting this enigma will be necessary to unlock the mystery of consciousness in the next chapter we will enter deeper into the strange world of quantum physics where a century-old debate still rages over the role of observers all right well I hope you enjoyed that you're still here so that's a positive sign if you want to talk about the subjects in this episode and talk more about pan psychism feel free to jump into the comment section or if you have any feedback let me know what you're enjoying and what you're not enjoying and if you haven't already please give this episode a like subscribe to stay up-to-date with future episodes if you tend to listen on YouTube you can click on the little bell symbol next to the subscribe button and then you'll get a notification every time an episode comes out instead of it potentially just getting lost in your feet if you're enjoying these open-minded conversations about consciousness and reality you can support me and what I do through patreon which is linked in the description thank you next time on waking cosmos I'm having a conversation with the brilliant Mike Johnson from the qualia Research Institute who has some absolutely fascinating ideas about consciousness ethics artificial intelligence as well as some of the unexpected places that consciousness might exist in the universe including black holes so I'm really looking forward to that conversation Mike is a really interesting guy and I'm excited to introduce you to them that's about it from me I hope you have a beautiful day thank you

Channel: metaRising

Views: 20,011

Rating: 4.8874173 out of 5

Keywords: consciousness, panpsychism, Alfred north whitehead, david Chalmers, Galen strawson, Thomas Nagel, idealism, philosophy, mind, roger penrose, Stuart Hameroff, quantum biology, Integrated information theory, Christof Koch, Giulio Tononi, intrinsic nature, philip goff, Science of consciousness, podcast, audiobook, metaphysics, panexperientialism, Waking Cosmos, Adrian David Nelson, orch or, quantum mind, quantum, observer effect, entanglement

Id: LiGFpECBLCk

Length: 42min 3sec (2523 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 24 2018