u/Terrible_Shop_3359

Emergence Critique of Materialism/Physicalism

People are pretty much split between physicalism and non-physicalism. I think this argument below is very helpful for generating discussion to get to understand how we understand the nature of qualia in consciousness and also the way in which it comes about.

What is Physicalism?
Physicalism is a position in the theory of mind, stating that subjective experience is reducible to physical things. It is an emergent phenomena to specific physical systems such as the brain. The experience is directly tied to materiality, with some physical phenomena directly causing or being linked to subjective phenomena.

Qualia: the first-person, subjective experience
This can be the redness of the red, or the pokiness of being poked, the spirit of motivation, the sound of your internal monologue
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The Argument
Physicalism tends to say qualia is emergent from certain processes. But how can that be the case when emergent things can only be assigned to orders of concept? Qualia is the foundation and conditional to our concepts, not the higher ordered concept.

Take the emergence of temperature of a gas for example. All the discrete particles each have their own translational kinetic energy as they bounce around, but we uniform all of their qualities into a single quality by taking the average. We conceptualize a oneness to the gas.

However, qualia is the lowest building blocks to our concepts. You cannot think of something without finding feeling through or being felt towards it.

Here is the argument syllogistically:

P1. All emergent properties are concept-dependent.

P2. Qualia is not concept-dependent.

C. Therefore, qualia is not an emergent property.

This is a valid modus tollens; please point out a premise you disagree with to isolate the discussion. I believe that qualia is not emergent, but is fundamental to all physical interactions itself.

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u/Terrible_Shop_3359 — 10 hours ago
🔥 Hot ▲ 76 r/consciousness

Why is everyone ripping on Panpsychism?

I was a materialist/physicalist before reflecting on the hard problem of consciousness. But after, I begun to lean towards panpsychism.

Introduction to the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Physicalism, and Panpsychism.

The hard problem, popularized by David Chalmers, questions, "Why and how do physical systems give rise to first-person subjective experiences (qualia)?" The vast majority of philosophers adopting the physicalist position admit that the hard problem is a challenge to be taken seriously.

According to physicalism, the brain is a material mechanism that follows physics; so why would this qualia be there in the first place? Isn't the material the only thing interactive? How come qualia is believed to come from just centralized nervous systems and not other systems?

Our best assumed principle to work from is that qualia is always tied to some change in structure of the brain's material. When you experience redness, there is motion happening in the cone cells, neural signals, and visual cortex. You cannot have this experience phenomena without this physical phenomena, and you cannot have this physical phenomena without this experience phenomena. However, under physicalism, the qualia itself is conceptually unimportant for the function of the brain. If we remove the qualia from the equation, the model expects the motion of the brain to still carry out and make the sounds associated with, "Yes of course I'm conscious dude why did you ask me that?" But we expect that P-zombies are actually impossible, therefore qualia must be metaphysically necessary even though it does not play an interactive role in the model.

Panpsychism is by no means a complete answer to the hard problem, but it does give some explanation. It states that qualia is fundamental to all things in degrees. It's just that some centralized nervous systems have the complexity necessary for the degrees of reflecting on the experiences. No, this doesn't mean a calculator is "conscious"; it just means that there exists some level of disconnected experience that we cannot possibly imagine. Experience is metaphysically tied to all material things.

Reducing qualia to just material and physics doesn’t make any sense to me. At what point in this ambiguous "complexity” do I suddenly gain this non-interactive experience? My thoughts and sensations are the only thing real to me. It’s not just atomic forces in this arbitrary structure that emerge any qualia. If computers don’t have it because it’s unnecessary for their function, then how is the brain any different? How could you identify a difference in the mechanism between computers and brains that gives a sufficient explanation for why brains are expected to have it but not computers? We don’t even understand the nature of qualia in the first place to make that case. It’s just an unexplainable phenomenon. All we are able to test is introducing stimuli to people and asking, “Did you remember feeling anything?”

Though, I do believe that consciousness requires a sensitive centralized system frequently interacting back and forth with itself. In the unimaginably enormous universe, I find myself here on this planet with this kind of system (a brain of an intelligent regarded animal) because it's a high amplitude of a continuation of cohesively formed thoughts.

Please leave a comment about your thoughts. If you read any books or papers that offer a different approach to the hard problem, then I would love to take a look into them.

Edit: I want to clear up some confusions I see in the comments.

  1. Qualia, consciousness, and ego should not be equivocated. When I use the term consciousness, I'm referring to a specific emergent property of a continuation of cohesively formed experiences. Yes, this definition is mysterious and arbitrary; but any definition of consciousness is. Then the ego, sense of self, is then emergent from consciousness.
  2. Panpsychism DOES NOT make any claims about consciousness being possible without brains, neither does it talk about awareness or the ego. Just take my interpretation: first person-subjective experiences are exhibited in all physical interactions.

Why Panpsychism?

When we study the brain in neurology, the predictions of physicalism are always correct. In physicalism, every qualia must be accompanied by some physical interaction in the brain, however, not all physical interactions are accompanied by qualia. For example, the qualia of redness must be tied to interactions in the cone cells and visual cortex, but a Venus flytrap closing its leaf or a chemical reaction is not tied to any qualia. Since the qualia and physical interaction connection only seem to go one way, this seems to indicate epiphenomenalism: physical brain events cause qualia, but qualia has no causal influence on physical behavior. It follows that qualia is a useless by-product, and P-zombies are functional if you just erase the qualias being caused. Although, the physicalist is not entirely committed to this position and can use arguments to get out of it.

Since the physicalist believes that qualia is completely devoid in some interactions, it means that at some point in the evolutionary path all the way from the first replicators to humans today, there must have been the first living organism to exhibit the first qualia. Remember, the qualia itself is non-interactive; only its respective physical process is interactive. Since we know that natural selection only selects phenotype traits advantageous for physical changes, it means that it wouldn't aim specifically for this non-interactive qualia; it only gets dragged along because qualia happens with those traits.

Now, the above is not an argument of, "ridiculous = incorrect." It's merely an implication I'm pointing out in the physicalist position. People tend to discredit panpsychism because the implications are intuitively ridiculous. However, this shouldn't mean we should throw away the theory. In my opinion, the implications from physicalism are even more ridiculous.

Magnitudes of qualia are heavily associated with neuron firing rate; more feeling, more neurons firing at once. When someone is overstimulated, they have a high neuron firing rate at the moment. According to evolutionary biology, nervous systems did not develop from a single neuron to more neurons. Over each generation, the entire nervous system slowly evolved already from primitive, secretory epithelial cells into the neurons we see in jellyfish today. If the primitive sensatory system did experience qualia, then it still means that when we go back into the lineage, we expect a cut off where an ancestor did not have any qualia according to physicalism. Here, the hypothesis that neurons are only capable of qualia is absurd and heavily epiphenomenalist. It assumes that as the primitive sensitory changed into a slightly different one, this is where the first offspring exhibited the first qualia even though the input, processing, and outputs were nearly identical from its parents. In other words, its parents were zombies, but they weren’t even though they acted the same.

Now, we have according to physicalism, 
There was a first ancestor that experienced the first qualia. That ancestor’s ancestors had a stimuli processing and response system almost identical to it. The mechanism in the offspring associated with the qualia operates with nearly identical tasks as its zombie parents. Not only has the physicalist agreed to zombies being conceivably possible, not only has the physicalist agreed that zombies are theoretically possible, but the physicalist has agreed that there was a cut off where its distant ancestors were zombies. This is one of the reasons why I'm skeptical of physicalism.

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u/Terrible_Shop_3359 — 4 days ago