Panpsychism and the Combination Problem
I just finished the book "Galileo's Error" by Phillip Goff (a Panpsychist) and, having discovered an entirely new way of thinking about reality, my mind is now aflame with thoughts that I want to share and discussions that I want to have. I am not really creating this thread to discuss the merits of Panpsychism as a whole. For the time being, I am satisfied with it being a coherent theory of reality and that is enough for my present purposes. I am quite willing to accept that consciousness is the intrinsic aspect of matter; I find this both plausible and coherent. What I want to discuss is the problem of complex minds, or how the incredibly simple forms of conscious experience exhibited by fundamental particles collectively form the rich, complex forms of conscious experience within human minds/nervous systems.
There are two possibilities that I will discuss here: IIT (Information Integration Theory) and Constitutive Panpsychism. IIT posits that consciousness naturally rises to the highest level of complexity, or of integrated information. Basically, a fundamental particle represents a fundamental, rudimentary form of experience. It is its own entity. If it becomes a part of a single celled organism, however, then that particle ceases to be conscious in its own right and becomes subsumed into the greater network of integrated information, or consciousness, of the organism. If that single celled organism, say a neuron, is incorporated into a larger network of single celled organisms (for example, a nervous system), then those individual cells cease to be conscious in their own right and become subsumed into the consciousness of the whole multicellular entity. Basically, a + b = c. Two parts come together and cease to be what they were, instead forming something entirely new.
Constitutive Panpsychism, on the other hand, seems to posit that the fundamental particles do not lose their individuality while at the same time combining to form new levels of conscious experience. Constitutive Panpsychism (if I understand it correctly) holds that each neuron is its own loci of subjective experience, and that they combine to form a new loci and a, more complex, form of experience without giving up their individual “minds”. Basically, a + b = ab.
In my view, IIT appears to be the more logical choice, as it seeks to solve the problem of complex consciousness through a fundamental law of nature that requires no further explanation. The simpler solution is generally the better solution. However, in my opinion IIT falls apart when we try to understand what separates one system of information from another, among other things.
Are organisms fundamentally separate from their environment? Organisms survive by engaging in an almost constant exchange of information with their surroundings. I am equating matter with information because, according to Panpsychism, they are essentially identical (if we understand that any conscious experience involves both a knower [the subject] and the known [the object/information]). Organisms take in information in the form of oxygen, food and water and emit information in the form of waste and heat. Just as a nucleus cannot exist without the cellular whole, an organism cannot exist without its ecosystem. Where does the flow of information end? I do not believe that you will find any sort of “closed” information network in all of nature.
Therefore the highest level of integrated information should theoretically be the universe itself. According to IIT, we should not be conscious beings ourselves at all, it is only the cosmos that should possess awareness! This, however, is obviously not the case. Therefore IIT cannot by itself be a coherent explanation for the existence of complex minds.
I think that part of the issue is that we see the mind as a unified entity (c) and not as a combination of various knowledges/experiences (ab). If we look at fundamental particles as units of information/experience, we could compare them to pixels on a screen. The fact that they can combine to form a cohesive and coherent image does not then negate their individual existences. When we look at an image on a monitor, we are not immediately aware of the individual existences of the pixels. As a matter of fact, we may not even be capable of seeing the individual pixels and the whole image at once. Yet both exist. I will touch more on this later.
Another issue, I believe, is that we have not yet fully appreciated what it means to say that consciousness is the intrinsic nature of matter. What’s so exciting to me about this is that this implies that physical properties are not different from mental properties. Emergent physical properties, like the emergent properties of water, must therefore be emergent mental properties as well. Water is composed of two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom. Taken as a whole, a water molecule has physical properties (such as cohesion and adhesion) that the individual atoms do not. If Panpsychism is true, then that means water molecules possess aspects of conscious experience not held by the individual atoms. This wouldn’t make any sense unless water molecules possess a consciousness apart from the individual atoms, which would seem to be in line with IIT. However, the individual atoms within a water molecule still exist. The emergent properties of a water molecule do not “cancel out” the properties of hydrogen or oxygen, and so we cannot really say that either hydrogen or oxygen ceases to exist in a water molecule.
Physically speaking, a water molecule is neither one nor three, but both at the same time. This seems like a contradiction, which would be logically and philosophically impossible, but it is not. It is simply a limitation of ordinary human language. However, if a water molecule is both a single physical entity (one molecule) and three entities (two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom), then in the light of Panpsychism we must also be able to say that it is both one mind (the molecular mind) and also three minds (the atomic minds) at once. Any statement that is true for physical matter must also be true for consciousness, since they are fundamentally identical.
Looking at the universe as being composed of units of information (each fundamental particle being composed of both the knower, or the subject, and the known, or the object/information), we see that complex knowledges are formed on the basis of simpler knowledges that never actually cease to exist. Take the equation 1 + 1 = 2. This is complex knowledge. 1 + 1 = 2 has an emergent meaning that does not exist in any single numeral or symbol within the equation. However, each numeral and symbol within the equation retains its essential, distinct nature apart from that emergent meaning.
Further, if the physical universe is identical to consciousness, then we may take our cue on the origins of complex forms of consciousness from the origins of complex forms of matter, and this would support combination theory. A river is not identical to a water molecule and a water molecule is not identical to the individual atoms that compose it- but none of these things “cancels out” any of the others. If we can speak of “emergent” forms of matter which do not cancel out their constituents, why can we not do the same for forms of consciousness given the mutual identity of mind and matter?
The biggest stumbling block to the acceptance of Constitutive Panpsychism, as far as I can tell, is our understanding of our own consciousness, which seems to be unified and not composed of separate parts. Yet we need not see our consciousness in such a way. Buddhism, for example, has long maintained that what we feel is a unified “soul” or “self” is actually a process of interaction between various components (or skandhas) such as forms, sensations, perceptions, mental formations and self-consciousness. Each of these components can be broken down into further components, and in the end we find that the human personality is just a dynamic system of interactions without a unified self. Other cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians, believed in multiple distinct components to the soul (the Ba, the Ka, the Akh etc. for example) that coexisted within a single individual. Medieval European authors often characterized the mind as containing competing psychic forces at odds with one another (such as love and hate, to name an obvious pair).
If we were to study our own minds, we would find that any moment of experience is really a manifold set of experiences that are both integrated and distinct. I see my keyboard and hear the sound of myself typing in the same single instant, but I do not confuse my sense of sight with my sense of sound. Our experience is emergent and holistic while at the same time containing discrete aspects that do not lose their distinct identities. This is no different from the physical properties of a water molecule or the information contained in the equation 1 +1 = 2.
In “Galileo’s Error”, the combination problem is stated as such (not verbatim): if five people are in a room and each thought of a single world, no one individual among them would be aware of the whole sentence. That is not strictly true, however. They would be aware of a single sentence as soon as they spoke to one another, or shared information. This is exactly what happens between the neurons in our brains. If enough people get together and form a new system of integrated information, through intimate and regular communication, is a new “overmind” formed? It is possible we would never know, because our consciousnesses would remain our own even as they became aspects of an even larger mind. This is precisely how ancient animists thought, however, when they spoke of the genii of a city or a town.
What about the system of integrated information that subsumes all other systems within it: the cosmos? Could that be a form of even more complex consciousness? Entirely possible, though once again, we would not inherently be privy to such information as even in a conscious cosmos our own individual minds would remain intact.
All in all, I do not think we need to resort to IIT to understand complex minds, and I do not think IIT is the simplest solution for the origin of complex minds. Complex minds form when simpler minds interact and share information. Where are those simpler minds? Available and ready for observation in any given moment of our own subjective experiences, if we can analyze the “pixels” which make up our own images of reality.
