Why Science Still Isn't Explaining Consciousness Yet
or Panpsychism is Getting Beyond a Joke
As a frequent follower of consciousness research, a field that seems to draw scientists and philosophers from all over with it’s siren-like call, I’m intrigued to see the current trend for the 16th century notion of Panpsychism. Highly recognised neuroscientists, writing peer-reviewed articles or posting on Twitter, try to get their heads around the idea that consciousness is relatively ubiquitous and that even rocks and thermostats perhaps possess some level of it.
I’m not much impressed. Though I do take a certain infant-like pleasure in witnessing so many esteemed materialists, once so arrogant about how they would soon unravel consciousness, now apparently scrabbling around in the dirt like something out of the Middle Ages.
I want to break down one fundamental barrier that materialist science is running up against here, in this, its ongoing mission to figure out how everything works.
Here goes…
The brain (or some higher level process) creates two constructs - “Observer” and “World.” These two inter-related constructs comprise our daily moment-by-moment awareness (consciousness).
To be clear, Observer is the notion of a limited experiencing self, a subject of experience, that has personal identity.
What scientists are doing is using Observer, armed with empiricism and rationalism, to investigate World, to try and correlate World to the brain. Despite making clear progress for many decades, since around 2010 they have come to a huge impasse. Hence the fall-back and reinvestigation of previously ridiculed ideas such as Panpsychism.
A big part of the problem is that scientists are assuming that Observer is axiomatic, that’s to say a priori real, that it is not just a construct being created by the brain (or some higher level process).
Observer is indeed robust. It is extremely resilient and also highly defended, for it has been forged algorithmically by evolution to be just that. But it is not real. It is just a construct. It is this assumption of Observer’s absolute solidity that is causing many of the issues.
In analogy, it is rather as though scientists have been reading Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” unaware that, actually, it should be accompanied by a Part 2 - “The Observer Delusion.” For it is one thing to pay lip service to a selfless reality, which some in this field admittedly do. But if you really want answers, you must be willing to put your own conceptual skin in the game.
Scientists need to challenge the reality of Observer, on a personal level as well as in out-facing theorising, to stand some chance of making real progress explaining consciousness. This is however problematic because many areas of science are reliant on Observer being solid to have validity.
If Observer is considered as being not secure, science in many ways is relegated to a much lesser significance in the grand scheme of things. It becomes simply a handy way to make useful changes to our world - build bridges, craft medicines, fly to the moon and so on.
Its status as a means to understand things like life or consciousness is inevitably lowered, for it no longer has concepts like empiricism or rationality to propound as giving it absolute authority. It will be driven to compete, on a level playing field, with mysticism, mythology and superstition as a means of working out just what on earth is going on around here.
But I would love science, and scientists, to rise to the challenge. I do not know the truth about consciousness. But I am becoming aware of just how childish I have become, in drawing amusement from the latest depths to which research consciousness has descended to. I must grow up. I’d love to see science do the same.
I think that your way of dividing it up between the Observer and the World is OK, but it's just one way of describing what's going on. What the brain is doing is very complex, and I don't really think it admits of simple explanations. But, with that said, your description is perhaps as good as many others I've read, such as Global Workspace Theory or what have you. All of these ways of describing it can be true to a certain extent at the same time, even if they look like different descriptions.
But the way you write, it seems like you feel you've got The Answer and everyone else is deluded. I'm not sure this attitude is justified. For one thing, your description doesn't seem to me to do very much work towards explaining consciousness, and for another, I don't think everyone else deserves such scorn even if mistakes are being made.
In denying Observer, I take you to be making something like a Buddhist or Humean point that the self is not real. This is OK by me, to a point. I don't think there's any robust essential self or ghost in the machine, but I think you can interpret the information processing being performed by the brain as something of a self, in which case the self exists insofar as the brain processes information. If you're saying that there is no sharp delineation between the self and its environment, then that's also OK by me.
It doesn't seem to me that science assumes that an essential self exists, or that there is a sharp delineation between the self and the environment, so I'm not sure what you mean when you say that science takes Observer as axiomatic. Can you give an example? Sure, some individual scientists may make questionable assumptions from time to time, but science as a discipline tends not to make metaphysical claims like these. Science perhaps assumes that we can consider certain phenomena from certain observer perspectives (perhaps most easily illustrated by the reference frames we talk about in relativity), but I wouldn't take any of this kind of stuff to be implying that essential selves exist.
I guess overall my problem with your post is that it doesn't seem actionable. If I were a neuroscientist or cognitive scientist or philosopher of mind I wouldn't know how to interpret your advice or what you would have me do differently. OK, Observer is a construct. Now what?