As concerns philosophy of mind, for every theist, there are one hundred materialists in the present-day philosophical community. Theism, purportedly has many problems, but it does do a nice job explaining the seemingly qualitative difference between subjective experience (that is, mind) and the perceived (and purportedly) mind-independent world. I will return to theism at the end.
Among materialists, for every eliminative materialist (as concerns mind) there are five pure property dualists. For every property dualist, there are ten Russellian monists of one stripe or another and a like number of panpsychists. These last two categories often overlap with some versions of Russellian monism (sometimes called dual-aspect monism) becoming panpsychism at larger scales. There are also monisms that do not become panpsychism, and panpsychisms that do not rest on monisms. While materialist philosophers (the materialism often amounting to little more than stipulation) of these various philosophies of mind talk to one another about the differences in their theories (each intended to overcome specific problems seen in their competitors), none of them ever mention their over-arching issues, problems that all of these various theories have in common. This essay is the result of my attempts to discuss these common problems with several of these philosophers all of which have been met with stony silence.
Each of these materialist approaches to mind is supposed to solve the “problem of mind” without reference to a Deity who would, should he exist, obviously have the power to create both the physical universe and mind within it. The starting point for all materialist solutions is the physical universe which must (again often coming down to stipulation) be the only source of everything else and the physical is founded on “causal closure”. This fundamental principle comes down to the idea there is only physics in the universe and all the physics that now exists came from physics and nothing else. There is another axiom and a few corollaries to the causal closure principle. The other axiom is that physics (besides being produced by only physics) itself produces only [more] physics. The corollaries are (1) nothing of physical mechanism is purposeful, or “there is no teleology in physics”, and (2) there is reciprocity in physical mechanism. A cause is always in someway changed by its effect. Physics recognizes two sorts of causes in the universe: macro-physical determinism, and micro-physical indeterminism. Both types of cause fully comply with causal closure, axioms and corollaries.
The central problem addressed in all of these theories of mind (except eliminative materialism) is that consciousness, in particular human mind (though applies also to the higher animals), does not appear on its surface to be material at all. Yet mind does very much appear to be a cause productive of physical effects; the manipulation of some associated individual body. If mind emerges purely from physics, is nonmaterial in some sense, and a cause in the physical, then the causal closure principle as it stands is false. One or both of the axioms cannot be true.
ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
Eliminative materialism is the only PoM that does not entail some change to causal closure. Indeed, it does not suffer from any metaphysical origin issue (there being nothing needing any metaphysical ground), nor any problem with property specification or interaction, one or more of which, as we will see, plague every other theory including theism. The problem with eliminative materialism is that it achieves all of this by denying consciousness exists. It saves all of causal closure by claiming that consciousness does not belong in the list of real phenomena (ontology) filling our universe, making itself prima facia absurd! It is to overcome this absurdity (and at the same time avoid supposing an existential intentional source of mind) that all the other PoMs were invented!
PROPERTY DUALISM and EPIPHENOMENALISM
Property Dualism is almost always a basis of the other theories except for theism and even here there are sensible interpretations that are largely property-dualistic and not Cartesian substance or Thomistic hylomorphic dualism. Both monisms and panpsychism, at least in many of their interpretations, come out to mind of our sort being a not-material phenomenon having certain properties emerging from brains. In pure property dualism, there is nothing other than the physics and biology of brains involved, that is causally closed physics as understood by most physicists. Yet in this view, the second axiom of physics, that physics produces only physics is seemingly violated. In one special case, the case of brains, physics produces something that while yet supervening on physical properties displays novel properties, a seemingly nonmaterial subjectivity, and with this the power to cause physics, to cause a physical change in the brain that results in the uncontroversially physical control of a body. This breaks the first causal closure axiom, and amounts to proposing a third kind of cause in the universe, mental-cause.
As with all of these theories there are variations. Some property dualists avoid proposing a third cause with a variation called epiphenomenalism. Here the idea is that consciousness, our subjective, seems real enough from within it, but as concerns the external world, its powers are purely illusory. Brains do produce consciousness, but consciousness does not “cause physics” (Sean Carroll “The Big Picture” 2016). Epiphenomenalism, however, while preserving the first causal closure axiom doesn’t save the second.
Pure property dualism doesn’t suffer from any particular metaphysical or property specification problem. Since mind comes only from brains there is no need for further metaphysical grounding and since only these brain-based minds are at all mental there is nothing to discriminate or specify as concerns the mental properties of anything other than brain-minds. Property dualism does have an “interaction problem”. As noted above causal closure is violated in at least one (epiphenomenalism), and often two directions. The problem how mind interacts with physics (even if only for physics to manifest it) is not resolved.
How exactly does the new dualistic entity emerge from pure physics (we have found no other example of such an emergence), and how, by what means exactly, in its bi-directional variation, does it “cause physics” in turn? No one can say. Henry Stapp’s Quantum Zeno Effect is an interesting speculation (mind can partly-constrain wave function collapse in special micro-structures of the brain). QZE only pushes the problem up one level. It is a suggestion regarding what mind does to brains, not how it accomplishes this feat.
RUSSELLIAN MONISM and PANPSYCHISM
Both Russellian monisms (of various sorts) and panpsychism (also of various sorts) are, conceptually, advanced to suggest solutions to this mystery in pure property dualism. How does ordinary physics under causal closure come to have the extraordinary ability to produce something nonphysical and how does that entity come to have causal effect on the manifestly physical brain? Maybe physics isn’t as purely physical as physicists think. Maybe all they can detect and measure is the physical, but physical law has psychic or proto-psychic (I use these terms interchangeably throughout) qualities built into it? Whenever we measure the physical, we are measuring combined physical and proto-psychic qualities.
When brains come along, they produce mind as we know it because these psychic qualities somehow sum up in brains in a way that expresses them in what we experience as subjective consciousness. Supposedly this avoids violating causal closure because what physics calls causal closure already has the psychic built into it. Brains evoking minds are merely the culminating expression of these qualities.
This is, in essence, the core of both the monisms and panpsychism. One-way or another, either at the micro-level or the universe taken as a totality, psychic-potentials in the form of something positive attached to physics, add up to consciousness as we know it when brains come along. These qualities have to be positive. If they are merely potentials, possibilities, then they are no different from all other phenomena presently in the universe including galaxies, stars, life, and so on. All of them were obviously possible, made that way by the conditions of the Big Bang and the cosmological settings.
Yet while monisms or panpsychisms seem to resolve one issue, and not even that very well as we will see, they raise more than one of their own. Where do they come from? How is it “psychic-properties” pervade physics (or cosmology)? What is their origin? Physics, cosmology, itself has the quantum vacuum. There is all this material stuff and process in the universe because the quantum vacuum is unstable and the macroscopic universe, the Big Bang, is the result (see “A Universe From Nothing” Lawrence Krauss 2012). Importantly, the resulting galaxies, stars, planets, and all cosmological evolution at least up to the appearance of life, fall out of our physical equations given the measured cosmological settings. Getting all this requires no extra-influence, no psychic-qualities. Significantly, there are no extra [psychic] terms in the mathematical equations describing any of this.
Monists and panpsychists say the proto-psychic properties are brute, built-in to physics at the micro (monism) or cosmological (panpsychism) scale and what we measure as such in physical measurements already includes the proto-psychic properties. Yet, no psychic-placeholders are needed to represent physical phenomena in our equations. For cosmology, the properties of the big bang, including the values of the cosmological settings, are sufficient to ground (make possible), all of physical reality as we find it, including life. Life’s origin perhaps presents a special problem, but not a topic I will address here (See “Answering Five Questions: The Relation between Science and Religion”). Only mind seems to need something more. Something more that is than the possibilities inherent in pure physics. Other than this, the psychic properties, at any other level, are explanatorily redundant.
Another problem raised by panpsychism and Russellian monism are the properties of the proto-psychic. We can say something about what “psychic qualities” are for our own minds. They are the substance of our experience, our “what is it like to be” and include qualia and intentionality (our free capacity to direct our attention) among other properties. Yet except for a negative characterization “it isn’t that”, none can say anything positive about what these micro or cosmological psychic properties actually are. They are not consciousness. So what are they? Nor can anyone answer the related question: what do these psychic qualities do exactly to physics? How would physics be different if they weren’t there?
The retort here is that these qualities are what they are such that when material organization becomes dynamic and complex enough, subjectivity, mind, emerges. This is after all the reason these speculations exist. But if these psychic properties have no effect on physics until complex brains evolve, this solution becomes ad hoc. If brains are utterly contingent (as pure physics has to claim) then they might not have ever evolved. That being the case, psychic properties in the micro physical or cosmological would have had no purpose what-so-ever, more explanatory redundancy.
On the other hand, perhaps the psychic qualities we cannot describe do something long before life and brains come about. What? They would act in such a way as to push physical evolution towards strengthening the likelihood of otherwise contingent evolution to produce life and eventually brains! If this is the case, then to be clear, teleology, purpose, is put back into physics, the purpose, in this case, of evolving minds! Now we are face-to-face with some purposeful mind behind all of this, or we must accept that, purely by accident, there is attached to physics that which cannot be detected, comes from nowhere (the Quantum Vacuum doesn’t help here), and happens by sheer chance to push cosmological and biological evolution towards mind.
All of this though begs again the question of the mechanism of this influence. A self-respecting chemist will scoff at the notion that any process, even one as finely tuned as a living being or a brain does anything, on the purely physical level, but satisfy the physical equations. Any influence the psychic has would have to be invisible to what pure physical theory addresses perfectly well, for example selecting mutation X over the equally likely mutation Y. Since no such influence can be detected, we face again, although the devoted will object, a manifestly nonphysical phenomenon (except by stipulation that it must be physical because there is nothing else) that has some effect in (and on) the physical. We have, in short, an “interaction problem!”
In short, philosophers put up a placeholder that supposedly explains the capacity of the material world (at the micro or cosmological level) to invoke consciousness from brains, but can say nothing positive about this placeholder. They cannot say how it happens to exist or where it comes from. They cannot describe any of its properties, they cannot say how it manages to work, how it interacts with physics. On top of all this the theoretical edifice must either add teleology back into physics and cosmology or it is explanatorily redundant until brains happen, contingently, to arrive on the scene!
THEISM
Theism is the notion that some minded and purposeful entity, God, exists and has the power to spawn the physical universe by some mechanism (perhaps the big bang), and purposefully direct its evolution towards life and mind. Under theism, there must be a purpose to otherwise purposeless physical mechanism. Since God is purportedly infinite (eternal) and uncaused-cause (unique in the universe [of which the physical is but a part] having no prior-cause), postulating him puts a stop to infinite-recursion of causes.
Theism has an inverse counterpart to Eliminative Materialism, Berkeley-ian style “pure idealism”. The idea is that nothing is real except mind, our individual mental arenas. What “appears to mind” as the external world from the inanimate to other persons, even our own bodies, is put into our minds by God. This idea is not as prima facea absurd as eliminative materialism. It accepts mind, at least my own mind (idealism can drift towards the solipsistic), as obvious and since God is infinite he has the capacity to do exactly what idealism claims he does.
Idealism is even less popular than eliminative materialism because God is needed to make it work. But it has other problems. For example, why should this mind of ours find, what amounts to a simulated mind-independent world, so complicated? It is one thing for God to put a virtual tree outside my virtual window, but as I further explore the tree I discover incredible complications. Not only the tree’s cells their macroscopic (deterministic) intricacies, but all the rest down to quarks and the Schrödinger wave equation. Doesn’t all of this amount to God deluding us about what seems to be a reality independent of mind even if recognized only from within it? For these reasons the preponderance of evidence favors a genuine, mind-independent, world whose properties we discover through application of mind.
A good God would not be in the business of deluding us. If there seems to be a mind-independent world, and if, with mind we appear capable of grasping its intricacies, then evidential experience suggests the mind-independent world is real. At least at middle size scales (roughly dust motes to mountains) there is a remarkable correspondence between the world and its representation in mind.
Besides idealism there are two well-known theistic PoMs, Cartesian-style substance dualism and Thomistic (Aquinas) hylomorphism, the first being much better known than the second. I do not believe either is satisfactory. Hylomorphism is vague about what exactly is formed, or what mind is a form of or in. Cartesian substance dualism has never given enough credit to brains. For Descartes, mind, being immaterial, should in theory be able to float free of any particular instantiation. Why is mind associated always and only with brains?
My own view is closely related to materialistic property dualism adding a catalyst that evokes the nonmaterial mind from the activity of brains. The catalyst (Cosmic Mind, perhaps a poor choice of names) is not mind as such and combining the two (brains and catalyst) is required. For more on this and how it differs from Cartesian dualism see “From What Comes Mind”. My interest here is how theism in general compares with the materialistic theories as concerns their metaphysical issues: origins, teleology, psychic qualities, and the interaction problem.
Regarding origins, brains are physical and come up an evolutionary chain. The catalyst comes, in one-way or another by some direct of indirect route, from God as does the physical universe within which evolution occurs. God, being eternal-uncaused-omnipotent, has no particular metaphysical problems of his own granting his existence for the sake of argument. The question “from whence comes God?” is answered. God comes from God.
The relation between the teleological and causal closure, a problem for panpsychism and Russellian monisms is also solved. Causal closure in physics is true. Mechanisms in the physical are well and truly purposeless. At the same time God has, seemingly, a purpose for purposeless physical mechanism. Universe physical outcomes, governed by the conditions of the big bang and the cosmological settings, do not merely allow for life and later mind, but were intended, deliberately, to deliver them over time. Even if Cosmic Mind has no teleological role before the appearance of brains (I do not assert this to be true, but my argument does not hang on its truth) it is not redundant (as are proto-psychic properties with no teleological impact) because the eventual appearance of brains is not, under a theistic view, contingent.
The description or properties problem, acute for panpsychism and the various monisms, is not an issue for theism because there are no proto-psychic qualities to describe! Stars, rocks, and thermostats have no proto-psychic qualities, nor does the physical universe as a [physical] totality. The equations of physics need no proto-psychic term because there are none to apply. Nothing is psychic until brains evolve and then the interaction between Cosmic Mind and brains evokes subjective consciousness. Notice that this not only includes animal brains, but supports exactly the hierarchy of consciousness that we find on Earth. Lower-order brains have lower-order consciousness. There is something it is like to be a bat, and something less to be a lizard, and less still a fish, and so on. Cosmic mind, uniform throughout the universe, invokes mind only to that level the underlying brain makes possible.
This then brings us to the interaction problem. Theism does little better here than panpsychism, Russellian monism, or for that matter both two-way property dualism and one-way epiphenomenalism. Every PoM apart from eliminative materialism suffers from the same interaction problem! Even so, theism does a little better than the others. Nobody can say how any of these theories (their implied ontologies) work to evoke mind from brains, but theists can say, at least, there is someone who knows the trick. Further we have no reason to suppose that this trick of God’s is comprehensible to the minds invoked by it.
It does no-good for the Russellian monists or panpsychists to argue that they have no interaction problem because the claimed “proto-psychic” properties are built-in to physics and so physical by stipulation. This move is part of the whole point of these theories but it is disingenuous, merely pushing the lump to another part of the rug. The proto-psychic presumably has some impact on what would happen in the physical. Physics would presumably come out differently in its absence. Without being able to say what this impact is, how physics differs thanks to these properties, and merely stipulating that they are physical without distinguishing them from a physics without them, makes them explanatorily redundant.
Of the three problems, metaphysical ground, property specification, and interaction, theism resolves two and makes sense of our epistemic incapacity to resolve the third — God’s powers are beyond our ken. The gap between mind and the doings of the physical brain is intrinsic to the nonmaterial character of mind and the causally closed qualities of physics. Mind cannot be directly probed from the third person perspective, and from the first person, its own origin is phenomenally transparent.
Theism gives something additional that all the various alternative solutions never address directly, free will! Free will is the elephant in the consciousness room (see “All Will is Free”). Pure property dualism can only scratch its head about its appearance, its power, seemingly automatically embedded in mind. Panpsychism and the monisms do accommodate its possibility, but offer no clue as concerns its origin or mechanism. Theism grounds free will. A free intentionality is possible and exists because a free intentionality with the relevant power put it there, the integral facet of our subjective experience (a truth ironically recognized by atheistic Schopenhauer). It turns out there is a point to everything after all (see “Why Free Will”)
Meanwhile, the PoM consequences of theism fit experience. Why does the evolution of mind in the universe seem to be something more than purely contingent? The intuition is true, mind was intended. Why is mind alone, within a teleology-free physical mechanism, purposeful (intentional)? Because the source of both mind and physics is intentional, minded. Why does consciousness appear nonmaterial from its own viewpoint and invisible from the viewpoint third parties? Because the catalyst (Cosmic Mind) is not material, but in mind of the biological type, the nonmaterial is grounded in all three of the “fundamental joints” in reality (see “Prolegomena to a Future Theology” and “Why ‘One Size Fits All’ Ontologies Never Work”).
I could go on and others of my papers explore some of this from different perspectives. The point here is that Theism answers questions and resolves ontological and epistemic mysteries much better than do any of the non-theistic PoMs. In fact, these theories leave everything out! Their only reason for existence is to reject theistic explanations. There cannot be a God, so what then supports mind? Is it mysterious proto-psychic properties that have no discernible origin or metaphysical ground that we can find or even speculate about, no properties we can say anything about, and suffer from the interaction problem they were stipulated to avoid?
Of course philosophy must be free to speculate about experiential phenomena from any perspective whether theistic or atheistic. My problem with the atheists in PoM is not that they advocate for their ideas, but in my extensive reading not a single one acknowledges any of the fundamental problems I have here raised.
What happens if the proto-psychic is subtracted from physics? Materialists can say only that, while the cosmos would look much the same, mind would never appear. Even if brains evolved, the creatures animated by them would be David Chalmers’ P-Zombies! By contrast, if God were subtracted from the universe, there wouldn’t be any universe at all, but rather nothing. This outcome is philosophically advantageous. It is this common origin of both mind and physics that grounds the metaphysical possibility of their interaction. No, we cannot fathom the interaction mechanism, but under materialist PoMs even the possibility of the proto-psychic is left unexplained.
In the end there is no stable position in the philosophy of mind between eliminative materialism and theism. Eliminative materialism is stable because it claims there is nothing what-so-ever to explain. Theism is stable because it self-grounding (God comes from God) and because it has the resources to do the job (explain why the universe is the way it is including mind and free will), even if the matter of how exactly that job gets done remains forever beyond our pay grade.
Ruminations 
Subjectivity talk hides the truth:
Subjectivity language refers to language about one’s state of being from a mind-related standpoint. Things like experiences, emotions, feelings, thoughts, understanding, desires, wants, concepts, intuitions, sensations, self, perceptions, thinking, imagination, memories, beliefs, dreams, etc. The function of this subset of our language is an evolutionary one. It exists to hide the immensely complex myriad of relationships with the biological, chemical, and physical reality of human states of being. The species wouldn’t be here if language could only work in conveying human states of being by first requiring the user to measure every particle, atom, molecule, and cell which makes up their body and then lay out the relationships in perfect crystaline detail to another to convey something technically more precise and accurate than saying “I see the color red”. The savings in processing time and energy with using subjectivity language over objectivity language with human states of being played a vital role in maximizing the survival of the species as a whole with a trade-off of accuracy and precision over human states of being. That is, subjectivity language conveys user interface like information about human states of being to maximize survival of the species. Survival comes first before analytical precision and accuracy evolutionary wise.
The limitations of armchair introspection:
Before delving into the limitations of armchair introspection about consciousness, it is important to note that talking, writing, listening, and reading are all “extrospective” activities. They are ways of looking outward for others and not inward of one’s self while they are happening. Therefore, you cannot dismiss the proceeding arguments about introspection on the grounds of any performative contradictions being made in the act of writing or speaking them.
Take the statement, “I analyze my consciousness”. This can give off some notion that there is an external subject, the ‘I’, which is doing the analyzing of a consciousness. If there was such an external subject separate of the consciousness doing this analysis then the analysis would have to be non-conscious. A non-conscious analysis is obviously absurd.
Now you might counter that there is a mutual understanding of what “I analyze my consciousness” means which is sufficient for the ontological claim that there actually is a separate self doing the analysis of it’s own consciousness. Mutual understandings of the language used is not automatic evidence for the referred to things actually being real. We can see this when one person states that you are a philosophical zombie. The mutual understanding of this does not follow to it actually being the case in reality. The same could be said of the statement “I analyze my consciousness”.
Someone could counter that while there is no external vantage point of inspection for consciousness there could still be something within consciousness, called the spectator, which views the stream of consciousness within the mind. The problem here has been pointed out by Professor Daniel Dennett but I will restate it here. If this Cartesian theater where everything about consciousness comes together for the spectator inside of consciousness were the case then we have to ask, “Does this spectator also have their own conscious mind?”. If you respond with the separation between the spectator and the stream of consciousness being false then there is no distinction for viewing the stream of consciousness. If you respond that the spectator doesn’t have their own conscious mind then you would be arguing for a mindless spectator viewing the stream of consciousness which is nonsensical. What is mindless viewing supposed to be here? If you argue that they do have a conscious mind then we would have to ask if this nested spectator’s conscious mind also had it’s own nested spectator and so on. We cannot consciously complete an infinite vicious cycle of nested spectators within conscious minds viewing their respective theaters of their streams of consciousness. That means at some point within this finite cycle there would have to be a mindless spectator within the nested spectators of conscious minds. If that is the case then each resulting spectator back to the first order spectator in the cycle collapses into being mindless. Therefore, there is no spectator consciously viewing the stream of consciousness.
This then follows to asking whether if “My consciousness” as a proposition even makes sense. If there is a separate possessor of consciousness and the possessed as consciousness then the possessor would have to be non-conscious. This obviously is absurd and doesn’t make any sense. If there is no separation between the possessor and possessed in this proposition then self-ownership of consciousness cannot exist. No nested spectator within consciousness or self outside consciousness means there is no possessor within or outside of consciousness to possess that consciousness.
The self, person, or spectator then only exists as a linguistic construct. It helps to distinguish complex human organisms within social settings in order to achieve various outcomes and goals.
It is better instead, to view consciousness through a second and first order. A spectator, self, or homunculus in Dennett’s cartesian theater argument warrants a question of whether the viewer has it’s own conscious mind while consciousness does not warrant or need it’s own conscious mind inside of itself to map over objects to then become aware of them. Consciousness is consciousness of something without having it’s own nested conscious mind within it. First order consciousness maps over color, sound, shape, distance of physical objects and their motions, sensations from touch, taste, and smell. Second order consciousness maps over previous instances of first order consciousness and second order consciousness. This second order must occur after the fact of when first order consciousness occurs. There couldn’t be an infinite series of orders of consciousness because consciousness cannot complete an infinite series of orders. It also isn’t necessary to create a third order category because second order consciousness could map over a previous instance of second order consciousness. But is this process with second order consciousness producing models of first order consciousness and previous states of second order consciousness actually accurate with how second order or first order consciousness operated?
Non-recurrence:
There are four general possibilities for the path of conscious states. A conscious state will simply be defined as the conglomeration of anything and everything occurring for consciousness at a given time and place. A state changes whenever the content changes.
A) A frozen state of consciousness (conscious state 1 → conscious state 1 → conscious state 1…)
B) Circular states of consciousness (conscious state 1 → conscious state 2 → conscious state 3 → conscious state 1 → conscious state 2 → conscious state 3 → conscious state 1…)
C) Recurrent states of consciousness (conscious state 1 → conscious state 2 → conscious state 3 → conscious state 1 → conscious state 4 → conscious state 5 → conscious state 6 → conscious state 1…)
D) Non-recurrent states of consciousness (conscious state 1 → conscious state 2 → conscious state 3 → conscious state 4 → conscious state 5 → conscious state 6…)
The problem with A is that it would imply an inability to have change within consciousness. Change is necessary to even write or speak different words through space and time so we can conclude that A is not the case. The problem with B is the problems that come with circular logic. If consciousness were circular then the argument you’d have to make that your consciousness was circular would also have to be circular. If the argument was not circular then that would be evidence that your consciousness is not following a circular path. Next is possibility C. The first problem with C is that in order for a returning state to happen everything about the proceeding states would have to be erased. Even a memory that could be recalled about conscious states 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 above could not exist for a true return to state 1. Take the film Edge of Tomorrow starring Tom Cruise. My point is that if the soldier Cage really did go back on that day then he wouldn’t have had any of the experiences in memory before going back at the start of that day fighting aliens. It would have been a very repetitive movie if even his consciousness reset with the rest of his universe. His memories of the experiences of past attempts play a crucial role in different outcomes in his part of the universe. The second problem with C being the case is an implication from the second law of thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics is a fundamental principle in physics that describes the behavior of thermal energy in a closed system, like the universe. There are different formulations of the second law, but one common way to express it is in terms of entropy.
Entropy is a measure of the disorder or randomness in a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that in any energy transfer or transformation, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state, resulting in an increase in entropy. Now, let’s connect this to the concept of information. In a sense, information can be viewed as a kind of order. When we talk about the information content of a system, we often refer to how organized or structured the system is. The second law implies that, on average, the entropy of a closed system tends to increase over time.
As entropy increases, the system becomes more disordered and less structured. In the context of information, this means that the amount of order or organization in the system decreases. If you imagine information as a kind of structured arrangement of elements, the increase in entropy implies a transition from a more ordered state to a more disordered state.
This idea has been popularized as the “arrow of time” – the notion that there is a preferred direction in time in which systems tend to evolved from a state of lower entropy (more order) to a state of higher entropy (less order). It’s important to note that while individual parts of a system can experience fluctuations, the overall trend for a closed system is towards increased entropy.
In summary, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that, over time, the universe tends to move from more ordered and structured states to more disordered and random states, which can be interpreted as a transition from a state of higher information content to lower information content.
If sense perceptions are part of consciousness and the arrow of time of the universe is always pointing forward through continuously original changes to it’s informational structure by the increase of entropy then a returning state of consciousness is impossible. And even if this arrow of time somehow pointed backward, a reversal of the second law of thermodynamics, there wouldn’t be consciousness of a returned state due to the first problem pointed out for possibility C. Possibility C is either impossible or a meaningless event to consciousness.
This leaves us with only option D left, non-recurrent states of consciousness. If states are continuously original then the previous states and future states are not identical to the present state (a lack of a perfectly accurate frame of reference for what’s currently happening for consciousness). Option D also means that present states and future states are not identical to past states (distortion with perceptions of past conscious states). Lastly, option D means that past states and present states are not identical to future states (conscious thinking and imagination cannot foresee its own advance). This also implies that there is no such thing as a conscious act of looking inward. There is only forward change of consciousness. If that’s the case, then it would imply that consciousness is complex but not deep. That is, it would be misleading to take a state of consciousness in time and space and think that there is more differentiated phenomneological stuff within it by engaging in armchair reductionism about it. In reality, it is actually differentiated phenomenological stuff about it after the fact.
A potential counter could be that there can be conscious imagination at time-1 of raising my arm and then the raising of the arm at time-2 fits what was consciously imagined, therefore the claim that conscious imagination and thinking cannot foresee its own advance is false. There is a difference between conscious imagination for raising your arm in the future and conscious imagination of your future conscious imagination. It is the latter where this limitation applies. The acts of predicting future imagination and thinking states are in fact descriptions of the present state of consciousness. Everything about these predictions consciousness wise have to exist presently in order to be talking about them presently with someone else. Couple this limitation with possibility D and whatever is giving rise to new states of consciousness is something other than that consciousness. One thing to point out here is that while there must be at least some unpredictable content for future states of consciousness that doesn’t mean that a future state is completely original in it’s content from present and past states. If the interplay between what is original and what is not matters for whatever consciousness can be identified as in the future then future states are always completely original in that sense. This non-recurrence argument also couldn’t imply maximal randomness for consciousness or else the rules of language could not exist. There is repeated reliance on individual rules for a language along with individual words in conversation, but if that conversation holds more than just those individual rules and words focused upon as a topic then the conversation follows a trajectory of non-repeating patterns of language uses. Order and predictability must be present for randomness, unpredictability, and chaos to be recognizable, but these arguments are there to show that there is a limit of predictability about the trajectory of conscious states.
What is also hidden:
We should take the evolutionary hiding function with subjectivity talk to consciousness itself. It is obvious enough that the consciousnesses involved with writing and reading this text can produce models of itself in the armchair. However, it wouldn’t be advantageous toward the survival of the species for consciousness to be able to accurately produce models of itself which involve trillions of relationships from particles, to atoms, to molecules, to cells, to tissues, to organs like the brain, to consciousness through armchair introspection. Even when considering the state of technology today, we still do not have a single tool of measurement which neatly measures all of these levels of detail for every part of the body all at once. We certainly do not have a unified and complete theory of how all of it works together even when considering the boons of the collective intelligence of peer review, experimentation, theorizing, and debate. Given these enormous costs of measurement and communication to this theory it should be obvious enough that evolution’s tendency of working on the cheap to cut costs would produce a consciousness from a human body which hides the relationships and complexity of that body to consciousness. Consciousness then is a user-interface for a complex human organism to help more quickly respond to changes in the environment to maximize survival for the species as a whole. This speed of reaction comes at the cost of increased inaccuracy and imprecision over how that consciousness actually operates and how it physically exists. To better see the time and energy saving points of using consciousness to react to the environment, take note on the amount of time it would take to reason through only several different mind-related phenomena in order to find your way to the kitchen to grab something to eat as opposed to having to focus on trillions upon trillions of different object-related things at the particle, atomic, molecular, and cellular level in order to find your way to the kitchen for something to eat. Consciousness with it’s evolutionary hiding function must be taken seriously in order to survive, but that doesn’t follow to having to take consciousness as a literal separate entity from the body.
Even from the standpoint of a brain in a body it makes sense that there must be a series of brain processings which are not being processed themselves by another brain in a body. If there were then that would lead to an infinite vicious cycle of brains in bodies processing brains in bodies which would require an infinite amount of energy. Evolution by natural selection tends not to take such routes. Therefore, there are neural firing patterns in the brain which themselves do not have external brains in bodies that process their existence as further neural firing patterns. It is hidden from brain activity that it operates and exists as brain activity. This is further evidenced by the milliseconds of time it takes for light to bounce off of a CT, MRI, or PET scan to be processed by measuer brain states. This implies that it is impossible to visually see the measurer brain states. What is seen are measured brain states in the very recent past.
Coupling the philosophical chaos argument prior to this point, consciousness then could be viewed as a non-recurrent chaotic process of consciousness-1 being capable of producing consciousness-2 models of consciousness-1. These models are there to maximize survival for the species as a whole by decreasing accuracy and precision over what consciousness-1 consists of and how it operates to save time and energy. There is no external vantage point in the armchair to this process to verify and correct these inaccuracies as well. There is no internal spectator viewing the differences between these states of consciousness through time. The act of a current state of consciousness mapping over a previous state of consciousness must give a distorted representation of what the mapped over state of consciousness actually consisted of due to the implications of non-recurrent states. It is important to note that this argument is not saying that consciousness as a whole is an illusion in the sense that consciousness-1 or consciousness-2 models don’t exist at all. It’s saying that what consciousness-1 produces as consciousness-2 models of itself that rely solely on the armchair introspective method are not identical to consciousness-1.
Mind to Body, Body to Mind:
If you were to ask the question in such an armchair by yourself or among friends, “Is there a mind-body connection?” and begin such an investigation with consciousness and subjectivity language first before trying to find the connections to the body then such an investigation must end in failure. It must end in failure because the tools with which were used are there to hide both the complexity of the body and the vast myriad of relationships between that body and consciousness. This evolutionary function of consciousness-2 models produced from consciousness-1 coupled with subjectivity language hiding the biological complexity and relationships therefrom for consciousness is what gives us the intuitive sense that the mind and body are two separate things. We will call this the mind to body method of investigation. The body to mind investigation would then start with observations of the brain with various experimental studies being done on it to arrive at reports given from the experimented on humans. The mind to body investigation method would not be reliable to further verify of falsify the truth of the body-mind connections established from the body to mind investigation method. That is, the correct identifications made with biology will never be intuitively obvious to consciousness starting from the armchair with subjectivity language. Ergo, with the mind to body method of investigation the mind is irreducible to the body due to an evolutionary hiding function. The body to mind method of investigation can never be further verified or falsified with the mind to body method of investigation. It is also of note that the body to mind method of investigation must involve a sufficient complexity of facts and relationships to warrant a survival need for an evolutionary hiding function being at play for consciousness.
Now you might counter that there is nothing about what is said so far that implies that the relationships being hidden are simply a vast series of identity relationships between the body and mind. Once you take the law of conservation of energy into account the only kinds of relationships which wouldn’t end up violating that law are materialistic relationships throughout for the conscious mind and body.
Ergo, consciousness can simultaneously
A) Be real
B) Hold an evolutionary hiding function which hides from consciousness how that consciousness physically exists in the universe.This has been mistaken and misattributed by philosophers as the evidence for the variations of dualism with the mind and body.
&
C) Be physical brain processes.
If B) holds to maintain the truth of A) and C) simultaneously then the philosophical zombie problem dissolves into a non-issue. This conscious brained body isn’t sure where it’s philosophy of mind fits exactly in this note’s categories of PoMs, but would be interested in reading a response! Perhaps it is an eliminative materialist PoM that is not fully eliminative and leaves a little breathing room for consciousness to really exist?
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Luke! Thanks for the extensive comment. It is live. Took a while… I’m away from home at the moment. There is a lot to unpack there. I agree with much at a tactical level but must disagree with overall conclusion. But I will have to get back to you when I return home… One thing if you are into reading me is look for my essay “why personality”. Sorry I am in an environment where I can’t send you a link…
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I felt like it would be worth commenting here given your background in PoM. I will check it out when I get the chance!
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I noticed some mentions of Searle in various blog posts here from you. I will post this in anticipation of a Searlean counter to an illusionist theme in my long post above. If you weren’t going to counter with this then please disregard this comment.
Illusionism about consciousness, from my experience reading various thinkers, comes in two general forms so far. Illusionism as in consciousness doesn’t really exist at all and illusionism as in consciousness having a tendency to produce false theoretical appearances of the reality of consciousness (Consciousness exists but it wasn’t what it first appeared as). I am the latter. I also think the former is absurd.
That being said, Searle tries to counter that the bifurcation of appearance and reality with consciousness is nonsense. The appearance is the reality, hence it is impossible to set up an illusionist situation in the sense that I presented above.
The problem with this Searlean counter is that if you look to the collective, including one’s philosophy of mind in relation to interacting with other thinkers, it becomes obvious that the consciousnesses for thinkers on philosophy of mind are producing lots of different and almost always conflicting theoretical appearances for the reality of consciousness. If we are to take the laws of logic seriously then they can’t all simultaneously be correct theoretical appearances for the reality of consciousness within the same universe. The panpsychist’s theoretical appearance toward the reality of consciousness cannot be simultaneously correct with the eliminative materialist’s theoretical appearance toward the reality of consciousness in the same universe. Not only is the appearance of the reality of consciousness fallible, it is prone to fallacy. The explanation for why we observe this can best be understood for the evolutionary survival mechanism involved with a hiding function for consciousness. At best, only one variation of all of these philosophies with their armchair theoretical appearances toward the reality of consciousness is correct. The rest are false theoretical appearances. Given this, it becomes obvious to me looking at the collective as well as my history of being corrected in philosophy of mind with various people I have debated with that the latter kind of illusionism is not only possible, it appears to be evidenced by the ongoing debates with conflicting philosophies of mind.
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Hopefully my comment went through. This is my first time signing up for word-press and commenting on it for a blog! XD
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Thank you for your comments. I admire Searle. Like him, I am a realist where perception is concerned (though my metaphysical reasons are entirely different), and I appreciate his honesty concerning “free will,” which, he admits, should be impossible. Yet, he says, nothing in the entirety of human experience (individually and historically) makes sense without presupposing it! Of course, I have the answer (:-)). If physicalism were true, free will would be impossible. But free will is real, and therefore, physicalism isn’t true.
In case you haven’t noticed, I am a theist, so I can be a “substance dualist,” although I take great pains (in more than one of my essays) to explain that my substance dualism is neither Cartesian nor Thomistic.
I agree with you (consciousness-1 vs consciousness-2) that you can never have subsequent identical brain states. Even if you could carefully arrange to have some identical experience to one you had in the past, you also have memory of the event which you didn’t have in the past… I also agree our theories of consciousness are [mostly] mutually exclusive, and no theory can possibly capture experience precisely. Why? Because we can only express theories in language which has evolved (historically) along with those experiences. Language evolves (changes) slowly and tries to capture what can be shared, while phenomenal experience changes moment by moment and can only be experienced in the first person.
My best articulation of all this is in WHY PERSONALITY, but at least this time I can send you a link: https://ruminations.blog/2016/05/24/why-personality/ but once I have a “theory of God” (here’s another link: https://ruminations.blog/2017/11/25/prolegomena-to-a-future-theology/ ) I can ground both a theory of mind (response to a field), and a pattern (not a homunculus) present in amalgam with the human mind that provides what Swinburne called “epistemological distance” that gives us our self-[recursive]-consciousness. It also gives us a special relationship to time—a singularity never changes in relation to everything else (about the mind amalgam and the external world) that undergoes constant change.
What is my evidence that only humans have this amalgam? First, abstract language. Animals communicate, some with complex languages, but none express abstractions. Why? Because what the amalgam provides—recursive consciousness—engenders the need for abstract language to express that experience. I do not see this so much as a “hiding” tho. Yes one effect of abstraction is hiding details, but where phenomenal consciousness is concerned, no linguistic refinement can capture every detail because the experience is entirely first-person while the point of language is 3rd person communication. If merely by telling you “I feel XYZ pain” I could make you feel XYZ pain, my phenomenal experience would be 3rd-person accessible!
Second art. No other animal makes art, but humans have been making it since the Paleolithic. We can teach apes to paint, but they never develop art spontaneously in the wild. Third, religion. I speak here of every level, from primitive superstitions about natural forces—worship of nature sprites, magic, propitiating sacrifices, and so forth—to modern monotheisms. Animals do not exhibit any such behavior.
I think though that apart from understanding my position, and me yours, we can never agree because having a God and three-way fundamental division of reality (spirit, mind, matter-energy, see second link above) I can combine the phenomenal and metaphysical in ways that are not permitted given a singular (matter-energy) metaphysics.
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“Thank you for your comments. I admire Searle. Like him, I am a realist where perception is concerned (though my metaphysical reasons are entirely different), and I appreciate his honesty concerning “free will,” which, he admits, should be impossible. Yet, he says, nothing in the entirety of human experience (individually and historically) makes sense without presupposing it! Of course, I have the answer (:-)). If physicalism were true, free will would be impossible. But free will is real, and therefore, physicalism isn’t true.”
When talking about the will, we need to ask “free from what exactly?”. If the brain ends up being a mathematically chaotic system (which there is emerging evidence that it is) then that means you could treat brain states as if they were on the trajectory within the strange attractor model. The past determines where you are at now and the complexity of what you are physically made up of now determines the entire phenomenal show of going through what you will end up doing next. However, every stage of this process would be at least a little original and therefore a little free from prior states in terms of content for a given state. The ability of going through the phenomenal motions of deciding would also be free of other people’s predictions and controls to a notable extent as well, especially from those you are currently interacting with due to the observer effect of trying to tell you what my prediction is of what you will do next. I think this kind of freedom from prediction and control of others makes the will free in all the ways that matter.
Lastly, the unpredictability inherit of future states brings forth the unexpected for unique and finite meanings that exist for those new states. If this wasn’t there then the alternative would be perfect prediction of all states from now until death. That is, you would at a physiological and experiential level experience everything you will experience until your death at the moment of prediction. Living life at that point would then become redundant, repetitive, and meaningless. Continued meaning and purpose to living requires, at least in part, on unpredictable content popping up for experience and physiology to react to. From an epistemically based use of probability, I still have to treat you as making decisions in everyday life as well. The imperfections of measurement lead to having to use some form of probabilistic thinking with differing outcomes being more or less likely with my anticipations of what you will do next after a certain behavior is made toward you.
I know I went off a bit there about my thoughts on the will, but I am of the persuasion that asking and answering what the ability of making decisions is free of actually defines what free will actually is. I believe in a chaotic will given what I described above.
“I also agree our theories of consciousness are [mostly] mutually exclusive, and no theory can possibly capture experience precisely. Why? Because we can only express theories in language which has evolved (historically) along with those experiences. Language evolves (changes) slowly and tries to capture what can be shared, while phenomenal experience changes moment by moment and can only be experienced in the first person.”
The expression of theories involves both consciousness and language. If phenomenal experience changes moment by moment and that is involved with the meanings of language uses then wouldn’t that imply that meanings of language uses change just as quickly as phenomenal experience? If they don’t change at the same rate then we’d have to think something absurd like the meanings derived from our language uses do not keep up with our phenomenal experiences. And where would meaning of language uses exist at that point if not within phenomenal experiences? Given that, for all intensive purposes the end point of using language keeps up with phenomenal experience.
Also, there is a way to test what my argument claims about subjectivity talk hiding the biological truth. You could have a neuroscientist and neuroendocrinologist scan the brain and measure the hormone levels of person A as they spoke to person B. The neuroscientist and neuroendocrinologist then ask person A or B what measurements they had gained as person A and B spoke to each other. Next to no one would be able to say exactly what those measurements were. At best, if person A or B were a scientist they could give educated ranges of what was measured.
I also don’t see how a slower evolution of the kinds of spoken words available to be spoken within the physical medium for conversation would be sufficient to explain all the exclusivity. For example, given how at odds some of the theories of mind are at with each other like panpsychism versus hard eliminative materialism it looks obvious that both kinds of thinkers have very different theoretical appearances of the reality of consciousness. You might could point out language as the source of differentiation of theories for philosophies of mind that are very similar but not exactly the same though? Given the cases of greater conflict between philosophies of mind that still looks like reliable evidence that there are theoretical appearances of the reality of consciousness which are at odds with each other and can’t all be simultaneously correct within the same universe. In other words, a kind of illusionism being at play right in front of our noses.
“What is my evidence that only humans have this amalgam? First, abstract language. Animals communicate, some with complex languages, but none express abstractions. Why? Because what the amalgam provides—recursive consciousness—engenders the need for abstract language to express that experience. I do not see this so much as a “hiding” tho. Yes one effect of abstraction is hiding details, but where phenomenal consciousness is concerned, no linguistic refinement can capture every detail because the experience is entirely first-person while the point of language is 3rd person communication. If merely by telling you “I feel XYZ pain” I could make you feel XYZ pain, my phenomenal experience would be 3rd-person accessible!”
This point about the inability of transferring pain through language actually adds to my evolutionary hiding function argument for the first person I think.
The first person isn’t accessible to others through language. The subjectivity language also hides what is going on at a physiological level to others when used exclusively in language uses. You can’t have an infinite chain of brains in bodies physiologically processing other brains in bodies, therefore brain activity does not physiologically detect it’s own existence as brain activity. When introspection is attempted the immense particle, atomic, molecular, cellular, and internal body parts like organs and the nervous system are hidden from it. Otherwise introspection by first processing all of these things would be so slow and inefficient that we wouldn’t have made it this far as a species if introspection could only work after perfectly processing these levels of the physical world. When I introspect I do not see a gosh darn thing about what activity may or may not be going on in the prefrontal cortex. The laws of physics along with the processing time of vision makes it to where even with the tools of measurement within a lab to scan my own brain I will never see the current measurer brain state. These hiding functions are a crucial part of how a first person physical conscious state could be existing. The mind to body method of investigation would always have to end in failure due to evolution by natural selection having selected for what saves time and energy by decreasing accuracy and precision for how that species internally operates. That is, a mind which holds a hiding function of where and how it physically exists when introspective methods are used. Moreover, even with explanations stemming from a body to mind method of investigation that could end up being correct still would seem wrong if the experimented on jumped over to the mind to body method of investigation to further verify or falsify what was argued.
I will have to read further on the further points you brought up in your response. Thanks for the conversation!
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Great way of framing the problem(s)! Thank you for sharing.
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Hi Tri.. Thanks. Seem to keep hitting on the same subjects. Trying to keep it interesting.. This one inspired by a discussion with a panpsychist on Twitter
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